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Why Intel focus on power consumption rather than performance ?

Enterprise24

Enterprise24

Joined
Sep 9, 2013
Messages
552 (0.13/day)
System Specs
System Name Can I run it
Processor AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D @ 2200Mhz FCLK (The rest is still tuning)
Motherboard Gigabyte B650E Aorus Master
Cooling Thermaltake TH420 V2 White
Memory KLEVV CRAS V RGB DDR5 48GB (2x24GB)7200 MT/s 34-44-44-84 @ 8000 MT/s 36-49-46-76 1.52V VDD/1.4V VDDQ
Video Card(s) ASUS Strix RTX 4090 LC OC with two more T30 @ +100mv +150Mhz core +1963Mhz mem (~3045Mhz core)
Storage 990 Pro 4TB (Game) Transcend 220S 1TB (Win) WD 250GB (Linux) Galax 120GB (OC test) Seagate HDD 4TB
Display(s) Samsung Odyssey OLED G9 49" 5120x1440 240Hz calibrated by X-Rite i1 Display Pro Plus
Case Coolermaster HAF 700 White with 9x Phanteks T30
Audio Device(s) Q Acoustics M20 HD speakers with Q Acoustics QB12 subwoofer
Power Supply Thermaltake PF3 1200W 80+ Platinum
Mouse Logitech G Pro Wireless
Keyboard Logitech G913 (GL Linear)
VR HMD Logitech G923 with Logitech Driving Force Shifter
Software Windows 11, Ubuntu 24.10
As everyone know since Ivy Bridge desktop CPU are focus on reduce power usage and gain little performance each year.
Some games still need huge singlethread performance such as
- Totalwar Series especially Rome II
- SC2
- The Sims 3 all expansion with tons of furniture in house (crazy CPU bottleneck like 3DMark06)
- Skyrim with many Mods
Broadwell will continue reduce power consumption by 30% , I would expect ~6% IPC improvement like Haswell.
The next tock is Skylake which is major improve (DDR4 , PCIE 4.0 , Sata Express) but on the CPU side I hope to see 20-30% IPC increase over Haswell.

Currently my 3770K @ 5Ghz still very bottleneck in Rome II and Sims 3
In Rome II (patch 4) VGA usage is 60% when units are fighting.
In Sims 3 when I play simple house it is very smooth FPS 200+ but when play very large mansion or castle with 1000+ furnitures FPS drop to 10-30 sometime game freeze for 3-5 second.

I hope Intel will not abandon desktop performance and just concentrate on power consumption for mobile devices.
 
Intel can't be faulted for developers making single threaded games. Multithreading for the people etc. And remember gamers are a pretty small potion of the market, and power optimizations is good PR etc etc.
 
Enterprise24 said:
As everyone know since Ivy Bridge desktop CPU are focus on reduce power usage and gain little performance each year.
Some games still need huge singlethread performance such as
- Totalwar Series especially Rome II
- SC2
- The Sims 3 all expansion with tons of furniture in house (crazy CPU bottleneck like 3DMark06)
- Skyrim with many Mods
Click to expand...
All these titles would benefit most from more memory, not more CPU power. They are all 32-bit meaning they're limited to 4 GiB of virtual memory...

But that is besides the point. You want to know why performance is stalled and the answer is AMD. AMD isn't putting pressure on Intel to out faster products for less cost so Intel simply doesn't (except in the workstation and server markets). Less performance generally means better power consumption and, more importantly, less heat. If AMD threatened Intel, they would release products with higher power requirements but they haven't since 2006.
 
FordGT90Concept said:
All these titles would benefit most from more memory, not more CPU power. They are all 32-bit meaning they're limited to 4 GiB of virtual memory...

But that is besides the point. You want to know why performance is stalled and the answer is AMD. AMD isn't putting pressure on Intel to out faster products for less cost so Intel simply doesn't (except in the workstation and server markets). Less performance generally means better power consumption and, more importantly, less heat. If AMD threatened Intel, they would release products with higher power requirements but they haven't since 2006.
Click to expand...

It's also becuase you don't need the power anymore. The majority of the market is still well served by Core 2/AMD equivalent CPU's.
 
Athlon Thunderbird threaten P4 is funny lol.
 
Yes all of these are poorly optimize.
Rome II bottleneck by 1 thread load 80-100% all time , other 7 thread 40-50%.
Other game can use mostly 2 thread.
 
FordGT90Concept said:
You want to know why performance is stalled and the answer is AMD. AMD isn't putting pressure on Intel to out faster products for less cost so Intel simply doesn't (except in the workstation and server markets). Less performance generally means better power consumption and, more importantly, less heat. If AMD threatened Intel, they would release products with higher power requirements but they haven't since 2006.
Click to expand...

Exactly. Couple that with an exhorbitantly expensive £800 Titan graphics card and enthusiasts are getting royally shortchanged. :shadedshu
 
Frick said:
It's also becuase you don't need the power anymore. The majority of the market is still well served by Core 2/AMD equivalent CPU's.
Click to expand...

True that, my core 2 and 4850 still serve me extremely well. Whilst i want to upgrade my performance gives me no real need yet.
 
Enterprise24 said:
As everyone know since Ivy Bridge desktop CPU are focus on reduce power usage and gain little performance each year.
Some games still need huge singlethread performance such as
- Totalwar Series especially Rome II
- SC2
- The Sims 3 all expansion with tons of furniture in house (crazy CPU bottleneck like 3DMark06)
- Skyrim with many Mods
Broadwell will continue reduce power consumption by 30% , I would expect ~6% IPC improvement like Haswell.
The next tock is Skylake which is major improve (DDR4 , PCIE 4.0 , Sata Express) but on the CPU side I hope to see 20-30% IPC increase over Haswell.

Currently my 3770K @ 5Ghz still very bottleneck in Rome II and Sims 3
In Rome II (patch 4) VGA usage is 60% when units are fighting.
In Sims 3 when I play simple house it is very smooth FPS 200+ but when play very large mansion or castle with 1000+ furnitures FPS drop to 10-30 sometime game freeze for 3-5 second.

I hope Intel will not abandon desktop performance and just concentrate on power consumption for mobile devices.
Click to expand...

your CPU isn't bottleneck.. I can play Sims 3 on a T4200.. but I can cleary say that sims 3 is not optimized..

Rome II, if I remember well, it is not optimized as it could be..

SC2, I can play without any lag on my 2500k + HD6950 (before). Remember that some games aren't well coded, like single thread... A well coded game with use CPU power, yes but will not bottleneck on an recent CPU..

And Why Intel is focusing on power consumption? Before we actually have enough horsepower and that mobile chip are coming with nice performance/watt.. You can still game or do what ya want with an Nehalem chip, which is 5 years old (which i7 920 has seen the day on November 17th)
 
qubit said:
Exactly. Couple that with an exhorbitantly expensive £800 Titan graphics card and enthusiasts are getting royally shortchanged. :shadedshu
Click to expand...

Those kind of cards have always been very expensive, and high end CPU's are cheaper now than they used to be.
 
Laptops like the macbook pro that need power saving with the i7 brand name.
 
Intel is already the fastest on desktops at the moment, and they will never compromise their high-end segment (servers, etc) with "fast enough" desktop/enthusiast products if they are not forced to by their competition (AMD). Qualcomm is on the move big time, so Intel tries to shift their resources and focus on areas where they need to gain marketshare and/or become competitive (to secure laptops at least I guess).
 
Haswell serves the mobile market well with it's low power consumption. It's a quickly growing market.
 
IMHO:
Al Gore, and the Anthropogenic Global Warming hysteria. I really believe that Intel, AMD and Nvidia looked at the political climate across the globe and made the choice to regulate themselves before politicians did. Can't say that I blame them.
But, do we really want 150 watt CPU's, and 300+ watt GPU's?
Also, has there really been any (real) advances since the Z68 chipset?
 
thebluebumblebee said:
IMHO:
Al Gore, and the Anthropogenic Global Warming hysteria. I really believe that Intel, AMD and Nvidia looked at the political climate across the globe and made the choice to regulate themselves before politicians did.
Click to expand...

If you take a look at server costs you will know that power easily accounts for more than 50% of the total bill, very often much more.
 
ste2425 said:
True that, my core 2 and 4850 still serve me extremely well. Whilst i want to upgrade my performance gives me no real need yet.
Click to expand...

I have two rigs to compare:

Core2 E8600 / HD 5870
IB 3750k / HD7870

Both on Win7 x64

Truthfully, unless you get into framerates in games, I don't notice a huge difference in general tasks, even booting. The IB machine is definitely snappier in some cases.
 
Sasqui said:
I have two rigs to compare:

Core2 E8600 / HD 5870
IB 3750k / HD7870

Both on Win7 x64

Truthfully, unless you get into framerates in games, I don't notice a huge difference in general tasks, even booting. The IB machine is definitely snappier in some cases.
Click to expand...

Today CPU for general task is too powerful.
I still remember my Celeron Coppermine with 256MB RAM is very slow just to open web browser. :D
 
This has nothing to do with the CPU's or AMD or any of that crap. This is all about poor game development that doesn't use all the resources that CPU's of today have to offer. Mainly multi threaded/cores etc are not been used to the full potential to increase performance in some games. Your complaining at 5GHz? what do you think of someone running at stock then??? AMD is NOT the problem when it comes to decreased in performance from intel, the IPC race is over years ago its all about moar cores/threads. Look at games that do make use of multi core CPU's like Crysis 3 and see the difference between an AMD and Intel CPU and the performance is about the same, so its not the CPU's fault that the game runs slow, its the developers of the games that need to code there games better to make use of all the CPU's power of today, period!!
 
Frick said:
Those kind of cards have always been very expensive, and high end CPU's are cheaper now than they used to be.
Click to expand...
Thing is nvidia managed to double the price of their top end cards. It's literally GTX 580 at £400 and GTX Titan at £800. Don't tell me that big GPU eats up all the price difference! :)

Melvis said:
This has nothing to do with the CPU's or AMD or any of that crap. This is all about poor game development that doesn't use all the resources that CPU's of today have to offer. Mainly multi threaded/cores etc are not been used to the full potential to increase performance in some games. Your complaining at 5GHz? what do you think of someone running at stock then??? AMD is NOT the problem when it comes to decreased in performance from intel, the IPC race is over years ago its all about moar cores/threads. Look at games that do make use of multi core CPU's like Crysis 3 and see the difference between an AMD and Intel CPU and the performance is about the same, so its not the CPU's fault that the game runs slow, its the developers of the games that need to code there games better to make use of all the CPU's power of today, period!!
Click to expand...

I disagree, the instruction throughput (IPC x clockrate) is the key performance metric of any CPU. Adding more cores simply multiplies that performance, somewhat imperfectly as scaling is never linear.

Unfortunately, it's plain old physics that put us where we are today, with faster clocked CPUs running really hot and consuming tons of power (this cost goes up much faster than linearly, which is why we've hit a wall). Adding more cores is a way to increase performance while keeping power and heat to manageable levels. Imagine if we had 20GHz CPUs today!

Therefore, the fact that Intel CPUs have a better IPC than AMD ones is the key to their performance advantage, even if one or two benchmarks show them fairly even with multiprocessing loads. If this wasn't the case, then you wouldn't see AMD CPUs priced so much lower than their Intel competition.

The way for the buyer to look at it is to just get the CPU that gets the best framerates in your games, never mind how it does it or if the games are poorly coded or not. The power used and especially heat output may or may not be a factor in the decision, depending on what the user wants.

The above is all one really notices when buying a product. The internal workings of that product are simply a matter of interest for enthusiasts like us. What do you care if some theoretical CPU soundly beat the competition with a 1-bit data bus and a terahertz clock?

Looking at it any other way just looks like an AMD apologist for having slower processors, to me.
 
qubit said:
Thing is nvidia managed to double the price of their top end cards. It's literally GTX 580 at £400 and GTX Titan at £800. Don't tell me that big GPU eats up all the price difference! :)



I disagree, the instruction throughput (IPC x clockrate) is the key performance metric of any CPU. Adding more cores simply multiplies that performance, somewhat imperfectly as scaling is never linear.

Unfortunately, it's plain old physics that put us where we are today, with faster clocked CPUs running really hot and consuming tons of power (this cost goes up much faster than linearly, which is why we've hit a wall). Adding more cores is a way to increase performance while keeping power and heat to manageable levels. Imagine if we had 20GHz CPUs today!

Therefore, the fact that Intel CPUs have a better IPC than AMD ones is the key to their performance advantage, even if one or two benchmarks show them fairly even with multiprocessing loads. If this wasn't the case, then you wouldn't see AMD CPUs priced so much lower than their Intel competition.

The way for the buyer to look at it is to just get the CPU that gets the best framerates in your games, never mind how it does it or if the games are poorly coded or not. The power used and especially heat output may or may not be a factor in the decision, depending on what the user wants.

The above is all one really notices when buying a product. The internal workings of that product are simply a matter of interest for enthusiasts like us. What do you care if some theoretical CPU soundly beat the competition with a 1-bit data bus and a terahertz clock?

Looking at it any other way just looks like an AMD apologist for having slower processors, to me.
Click to expand...

You put up some realy good points and i agree with most of it but IPC race is OVER!! not 100% over but its come to a crawl...where clock speed increases and more cores/threads is the only way to increase performance from last gen CPU's Its just how the future is goin to be. IPC will always be increased over the years but nothing like it has been in the past like the core 2/1366/Athlon 64 days, it just wont happen again anytime soon, that's just how it is, period!

So the only way NOW to get the most out of what we have got and what BOTH company's are going towards (more cores/clock speeds) is to make the software WORK with it. Ive been saying this for yrs, its not the CPU's that are behind its the software.

This has nothing to do with me having a "slower" CPU and to be honest the 8350 is a dam fast CPU smashing my i7 940 out of the water and soon will be tested against my new i7 970 once i get home from This USA trip.

When i bought this CPU i looked to the future not NOW if you dont look into the future then your already behind and I could see that the new consoles are going multi cored therefore will be carried over to the PC. SO this made me decide to go with the 8core as the future is going multi core not just in programs but games also. Only the future will prove me wrong or right but with some of the modern games out now im looking pretty good so far :)
 
qubit said:
Thing is nvidia managed to double the price of their top end cards. It's literally GTX 580 at £400 and GTX Titan at £800. Don't tell me that big GPU eats up all the price difference! :)
Click to expand...

IMO the Titan shouldn't be compared to "normal" cards (even if it's just a superficial market thing). GTX 580 = GTX 680 or 780 if anything. The normal cards have varied in price between generations, now they're up again.
 
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