Intel to Increase Cores-to-the-Dollar Across the Board with Cascade Lake-X?

[londiste]

Intel is definitely not ignoring AMD being a threat. They cannot do much with current chips and the prices are coming down to retain some degree of competitiveness.
It does not change the fact that there are areas where Intel Xeons are more competitive than simple core count and frequency comparison would suggest.

So is this 14#### or 10nm?

14nm.

 

[Kapone33]

I see that Intel has started their attempt to retake the opinion crown. I have no doubt that these chips will fly. As I have said before do not count out Intel, they have everything necessary to make a more viable CPU in the HEDT space. If they are faster than the current offerings on X299 then they will indeed be the bees knees. There is the fact though that right now there is almost no separation between Intel and AMD overall.

 

[Aquinus]

Ignoring? Hardly. AMD is doing well in sales, and is starting to become actually relevant again, ultimately Intel won't win in price to performance unless they pull another skylake like they did to FX - which isn't going to happen again likely, they still hold the pure performance without value part though in OS's outside of Linux.

Remember the part where I said:

Also, this kind of shift in the server market should scare Intel. That's where they make most of their money, not on HEDT parts.

Most servers are *nix, not Windows.

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

Ignoring? Hardly. AMD is doing well in sales, and is starting to become actually relevant again, ultimately Intel won't win in price to performance unless they pull another skylake like they did to FX - which isn't going to happen again likely, they still hold the pure performance without value part though in OS's outside of Linux.

You know, exept all the productivity benchmarks where AMD curb-stomps intel.

Let me fix that for you: "intel still holds the 1% gaming market and AVX 512 workloads for people with more money the brains". For the majority of production software and productivity applications, AMD has surpassed intel, in gaming they are nipping at the heels of the 9700k, and in the server market they are obliterating intel's performance per $ and absolute performance results; For HDET usres threadripper 2 is going to be a godsend, much as threadripper 1 was.

Intel is on the defensive, and is refusing to admit AMD is hammering them at every turn. It's Pentium 4 VS athlon 64 all over again.

 

[londiste]

AMD is hammering them at every turn.

Not quite at every turn.
- AVX512 is generally used by people with both brains and money. In most cases where money is not that big of a problem.
- Intel still holds enough of the gaming market. 9900K is a stupid desktop flagship thing. 9700K is above anything AMD can put out for gaming and it is now priced between 3700X and 3800X. 9600K is priced between 3600 and 3600X and does OK. 9400F is probably the biggest spoiler of the gaming market party for AMD.
- AMD still does not have good presence in mobile and Intel is now working with a limited set of 10nm CPUs there.

From this news bit it looks like Intel will bring Xeon prices down considerably. This may change some of these performance/$ calculations. It will not bring Intel back to markets where cores matter like cloud where compute power is sold per core. There are places where Intel was pretty competitive. SQL Servers and some compute aspects come to mind. There seems to be little public testing on how good Rome does in these areas.

Edit:
I mean, Intel is not stupid. They are playing to their strengths. Mobile is still Intel's by a large margin. Their problem on the desktop is primarily lack of HT that kills productivity performance but perhaps more importantly looks bad in reviews. I am willing to bet that their next generation will bring HT back. HDET is lost to Threadrippers. Xeons are so-so and Intel can play with prices until they get something new and worthwhile.

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

Not quite at every turn.
- AVX512 is generally used by people with both brains and money. In most cases where money is not that big of a problem.
- Intel still holds enough of the gaming market. 9900K is a stupid desktop flagship thing. 9700K is above anything AMD can put out for gaming and it is now priced between 3700X and 3800X. 9600K is priced between 3600 and 3600X and does OK. 9400F is probably the biggest spoiler of the gaming market party for AMD.
- AMD still does not have good presence in mobile and Intel is now working with a limited set of 10nm CPUs there.

From this news bit it looks like Intel will bring Xeon prices down considerably. This may change some of these performance/$ calculations. It will not bring Intel back to markets where cores matter like cloud where compute power is sold per core. There are places where Intel was pretty competitive. SQL Servers and some compute aspects come to mind. There seems to be little public testing on how good Rome does in these areas.

- people with both brains and money also recognize a large portion of the server and productivity market does NOT use AVX512, and thus does not benefit in any way from intel.
-9700k is a whopping 5-6 FPS faster then a 3700x in average FPS. Congratulations I guess? Both are well north of 60 FPS, hell both are ususally north of 90-100 FPS, and when they are not the two are usually quite close. intel can hardly justify their prices, hence why they have been cratering down to AMD pricing. 3600 is comparable to 9600kf in gaming, 9400f isnt spoiling a lot there, and the r5 3500 will fix that.
-Yes, AMD has little mobile presence, and likely wont until next gen ryzen mobile 7nm chips exist. That doesnt mean AMD is not a threat here.

If this price change will not breing intel back to the markets it lost, that seems like a pretty short sighted move, no? They are sacrificing profit margins for 0 gain, only to prevent AMD's further encroachmet into their position. That is the same strategy AMD tried with bulldozer, and it backfired spectacularly. SQL is sold per core (socket) for enterprice, and here AMD's rome is vastly superior to intel's XEON, until intel offers 64 core xeons for rome pricing. The cost saving rome represents is jaw dropping, and a price cut across the board from intel isnt going to come close to closing that gap.

 

[Vya Domus]

Then get a job, or buy AMD instead.

Yeah, it'll be fun seeing all those poor people buying the 800$ 3950X. Broke ass AMD fans.

Also, AVX 512 really is amazing. Or at least it has amazingly poor scaling most of the time :

The dangers of AVX-512 throttling: myth or reality?

Modern processors use many tricks to go faster. They are superscalar which means that they can execute many instructions at once. They are multicore, which means that each CPU is made of several baby processors that are partially independent. And they are vectorized, which means that they have...

lemire.me

On the dangers of Intel's frequency scaling

While I was writing the post comparing the new Qualcomm server chip, Centriq, to our current stock of Intel Skylake-based Xeons, I noticed a disturbing phenomena.

blog.cloudflare.com

Oh and Rome is equal or better most of the time with just AVX2 vs dual socket 28 core Xeons that use AVX 512 in the only market where this is somewhat more relevant. Though this is questionable, a lot of people recognize the limitations of AVX 512 and at this point in time, with the ever increasing number of cores, you'd be shooting yourself in the foot driving these things even more into a power wall with very wide SIMD.

 

[londiste]

- people with both brains and money also recognize a large portion of the server and productivity market does NOT use AVX512, and thus does not benefit in any way from intel.

I never said AVX512 is used by everyone. Everyone not using it is a straw man argument.

-9700k is a whopping 5-6 FPS faster then a 3700x in average FPS. Congratulations I guess? Both are well north of 60 FPS, hell both are ususally north of 90-100 FPS, and when they are not the two are usually quite close. intel can hardly justify their prices, hence why they have been cratering down to AMD pricing. 3600 is comparable to 9600kf in gaming, 9400f isnt spoiling a lot there, and the r5 3500 will fix that.

3600 is 200€, 9400F is 140€. Comparable is not a good place to be there. As I mentioned in the Ryzen 3500 news comments, 9400F seems to be a pain in the neck for AMD right now.

-Yes, AMD has little mobile presence, and likely wont until next gen ryzen mobile 7nm chips exist. That doesnt mean AMD is not a threat here.

Ryzen mobile 7nm is a year away. In mobile, there is a lot of related crap that needs to be figured out - chipsets, reference builds and a lot of related stuff. Check the recent coverage on what intel is doing with project Athena for example. There is a lot of technical environment-building involved.

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

I never said AVX512 is used by everyone. Everyone not using it is a straw man argument.

I never said AVX512 had no impact.

3600 is 200€, 9400F is 140€. Comparable is not a good place to be there.

The 9400F is noticeably slower then the 9600kf or 3600. It is hardly spoiling any AMD sales right now.

Ryzen mobile 7nm is a year away. In mobile, there is a lot of related crap that needs to be figured out - chipsets, reference builds and a lot of related stuff. Check the recent coverage on what intel is doing with project Athena for example. There is a lot of technical environment-building involved.

That, right there, is the definition of a strawman argument. No shit there is a lot of "related crap" to do. That applies to every mobile chip. Why bring that up in the conversation? Was there ever an argument that ryzen 7nm mobile wouldnt need this, and thus would immediately crush intel? No? Then that is a strawman argument.

Let's stick to what the original 7nm ryzen mobile comment meant: Ryzen mobile, as of right now, isnt competitive in pure power efficiency. It does offer better GPU performance. When the 7nm shrink comes (along with the move to zen 2), much of the remaining gap with intel will be closed, at which point ryzen mobile will likely begin to take some marketshare. This is another market Intel is confident they will not lose, despite that same argument applied to desktop CPUs 3 years ago. Intel's 10nm rollout is still not in full swing, and we have yet to see their full pwoer 15watt parts on 10nm, suggesting they are still having yeild issues. If Ryzen 7nm comes out before 10nm is available across the board for intel, intel will be at a serious disadvantage.

 

[londiste]

The 9400F is noticeably slower then the 9600kf or 3600. It is hardly spoiling any AMD sales right now.

AMD Ryzen 5 3600 Review

Ryzen 5 3600 is the most affordable Zen 2 processor in AMD's lineup. At just $200, it offers six cores and twelve threads, yielding a significant advantage in applications against the competition from Intel. Gaming performance is also improved nicely as it is around 10% higher than with previous...

www.techpowerup.com

9400F is 30% cheaper than 3600. Uses less power as well.

That applies to every mobile chip. Why bring that up in the conversation? Was there ever an argument that ryzen 7nm mobile wouldnt need this, and thus would immediately crush intel? No?

Did not mean that. The point was, that time is running out on this. Intel will not be stuck on 14nm forever and they have a pretty good environment built up and they continue working on that. Even more so right now because the possible performance progress on heavily power-limited laptops is quite limited, 7/10nm or not.

 

[efikkan]

For the first time ever we are starting to get competition in the HEDT segment, everyone should be happy about this. The next couple of years should get really exciting.

 

[Patriot]

For the first time ever we are starting to get competition in the HEDT segment, everyone should be happy about this. The next couple of years should get really exciting.

Yeah, I have been enjoying past couple of years immensely. Intel will probably stay competitive for DAW workloads with super high clocks but lose in almost everything else. It's also going to make their migration to 10nm+ harder and harder as they are having trouble hitting >4ghz single core boost on it... so the more they push clocks on 14nm++ the more they have to rely on ipc gains to shift away, which is why their current "10th gen" laptop line is a cluster F of 10nm and 14nm chips.

 

[Tomgang]

The slides leaked so far, has only said up to 18 cores, but makes sence with 28 cores as AMD can release threadripper with up to 64 cores.

But 28 cores om 14 nm. You know what that means, you need a chiller to cool that thing.

I will stick to My choise with ryzen 9 3950X. I dont need more than 16 cores.

 

[Kapone33]

The slides leaked so far, has only said up to 18 cores, but makes sence with 28 cores as AMD can release threadripper with up to 64 cores.

But 28 cores om 14 nm. You know what that means, you need a chiller to cool that thing.

I will stick to My choise with ryzen 9 3950X. I dont need more than 16 cores.

The boost clocks and base might be a little lower so you might only need a serious LN2 or a 920MM, 100mm thick radiator cooling system.

 

[Tomgang]

The boost clocks and base might be a little lower so you might only need a serious LN2 or a 920MM, 100mm thick radiator cooling system.

Ah No. To cool that thing you need a New clear powered chiller

 

[Kapone33]

Ah No. To cool that thing you need a New clear powered chiller

You do realize I was joking I don't believe that you can buy a 920MM rad.

 

[Tomgang]

You do realize I was joking I don't believe that you can buy a 920MM rad.

Yes i am aware and so was i as well.

 

[Kapone33]

Yes i am aware and so was i as well.

 

[efikkan]

Yeah, I have been enjoying past couple of years immensely. Intel will probably stay competitive for DAW workloads with super high clocks but lose in almost everything else. It's also going to make their migration to 10nm+ harder and harder as they are having trouble hitting >4ghz single core boost on it... so the more they push clocks on 14nm++ the more they have to rely on ipc gains to shift away, which is why their current "10th gen" laptop line is a cluster F of 10nm and 14nm chips.

It's expected that the upcoming nodes will achieve slightly lower clocks than current 14nm. But also remember that the current Intel 10nm products is still stuck at the first revision, and their revisions of 14nm changed a lot through the years. If Intel's 10nm+ is comparable to TSMC's "7nm" success, then Intel should be able achieve equal or better clocks than Zen 2.

Currently we see Intel struggle somewhat with multicore scaling, so when 10nm is refined they might actually achieve higher sustained multicore clocks. When it comes to ~5 GHz sustained turbo I'm more doubtful. But even if they achieve boost clocks at "just" ~4.5-4.6 GHz, the IPC gains of Sunny Cove should still outperform Coffee Lake boosting at ~5 GHz. I assume that Intel at some point will do core boosting more independently like AMD already does.

Additionally, all the delays of Ice Lake(Sunny Cove) means that Intel will launch two architectures with IPC gains in rapid succession. Ice Lake-SP will launch early 2020 and Sapphire Rapids-SP early 2021, wich hopefully a Ice Lake-X derived from that between there. In parallel with this, AMD plans Zen 3, 4…, so we should expect steady gains from both companies for the next ~3 years or so.

But going forward, IPC gains and SIMD will be they way to gain performance. More cores is good, but at some point there will be diminishing returns either way for synchronized tasks, which all will scale badly beyond ~16 cores or so anyway.

 

[svan71]

Then get a job, or buy AMD instead.

I have 2 and $500 for a 3900x is still expensive and worth it over intel.

 

[remixedcat]

 

[R-T-B]

I'd like to see the increased clocks OP is mentioning.

It's an expectation given the nodes past performance... not a fact, but a near certain liklihood.

 

[ratirt]

It's an expectation given the nodes past performance... not a fact, but a near certain liklihood.

True but it has been already said that node shrinks wont bring the boost in frequency any longer but instead the clocks will get lower. Which means, the focus on performance increase must be somewhere else like cores and their utilization.

 

[Aquinus]

View attachment 131159

As long as you're not complaining about the fact that we're finally seeing progress after quad-cores being the norm for over a decade.

 

[ypsylon]

World has turned upside down.

In previous years AMD manufactured PowerPoint presentations at frantic pace to show they still exist...

Now it's Intel turn!

Blues have nothing to respond, so they spew nonsensical propaganda.