Recent content by Fiery

I don't think so.

Yes, that's one of the new features of the latest AIDA64 release. https://www.aida64.com/support/renewal

It's coming next year. Actually, we've had to revamp the UI to pave the way for unlocking dark mode. The previous UI had multiple elements that couldn't "turn dark" properly.

Z390 may (and should) be able to support Ice Lake based desktop processors, but the roadmap indicates that a 8-core Coffee Lake-S (desktop) part will come first.

That (no AVX support across all cores) would simplify everything immensely, but then the big cores wouldn't be Ice Lake, but only crippled Ice Lake or "Ice Lake Lite". Intel would need to trash most of their ISA-related efforts that they've done since cca. 2007. I also personally cannot see...

Yes, of course. I'm only arguing, or trying to point the spotlight on the fact that this issue (different ISA cores in the same system) raises such a challenge that cannot be mitigated by the OS alone. You cannot patch only Windows to solve the issue. It will either work smoothly because...

Well, if Ryzen had one CCX with AVX support and another CCX in the same CPU package with no AVX support, that whole thing would've gone down a whole differently :) Big.LITTLE is not a huge issue on its own, since Windows already supports big.LITTLE processors since Windows 8.1. But previous...

You cannot expect existing software to be modified to work properly on big.LITTLE systems. It should work out of the box, and with minimal performance impact. Of course, as I've mentioned up there, there're possible workarounds to make sure existing software works with no AVX support, and...

How could the OS scheduler know which thread of which process uses (at the moment or is planning to use in the future) a certain x86 ISA extension? When a process starts a thread, it cannot and wouldn't notify the OS scheduler about its plans.

It's not quite as simple, unless Intel opts for clustered switching. And even still, what if a process with optional AVX support starts up at the small cores, detects the presence of AVX on the small cores (it will be "unsupported" there), and skips using its AVX codepath. While on another case...

One potential issue about pairing up a set of Ice Lake "big" cores and a set of Tremont "little" cores is the ISA difference. Ice Lake supports AVX1, AVX2 and AVX-512, while Tremont supports none of those. If a process starts a thread that uses AVX, and the OS scheduler pushes the thread from...

Not any public sources for sure ;)

Not from the beginning. Intel planned to do a complete refresh, Cannon Lake for desktop (-S), mobile (-H), ultrabook (-U) and tablet (-Y), but due to manufacturing difficulties they scrapped everything but the -U and -Y variants. And even the -U version is now on the verge of being cancelled...

Cannon Lake is not planned for the desktop at all, simply because currently Intel's 10nm process fares worse than the 2nd refresh of their 14nm process. So it would actually be an insane move for them to switch to 10nm right now. On the other hand, the 14nm process they use for Coffee Lake...

Yes, really. And even if it is the "same" AM4 socket, they can extend its capabilities at a platform change (e.g. going from X370 to X470, or from X470 to a future X570, etc) by retaining the backward compatibility of the socket. With X470 they can shift it up to for example 110W, and with X570...