Source?There is a massive market for a 6 core mainstream chip - Intel would make a fortune. There's a whole section of the buying market that have had the same 4 core chip for years and are itching to upgrade only Intel haven't given them worth upgrading too. The IPC increase has just been too small.
Show them a 6 core chip and they'll all buy one - finally a substantial upgrade.
There is a massive market for a 6 core mainstream chip - Intel would make a fortune. There's a whole section of the buying market that have had the same 4 core chip for years and are itching to upgrade only Intel haven't given them worth upgrading too. The IPC increase has just been too small.
Show them a 6 core chip and they'll all buy one - finally a substantial upgrade.
There is a massive market for a 6 core mainstream chip - Intel would make a fortune. There's a whole section of the buying market that have had the same 4 core chip for years and are itching to upgrade only Intel haven't given them worth upgrading too. The IPC increase has just been too small.
Show them a 6 core chip and they'll all buy one - finally a substantial upgrade.
Vanilla ARM companies only do it because that is all they can do in their clone wars. Apple as you say doesn't, because they dont have to and can instead focus resources elsewhere where it matters.
Personally I rather see 15-20MB cache, EDRAM and PCH integration on LGA1151 rather than to see 6-8 cores. If simply not more IGP for the 99% crowd. More cores is pretty much the absolute last thing on the long wish list.
Here is what Anandtech says about it:
In short:
* It is common to have loads that are highly parallelized, utilizing many cores.
* big.LITTLE is a good design to make use of this, while providing optimal perf/watt across a wide performance range.
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Has also been discussed here:
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2445110
Well, apparently Intel is unwilling/unable to do much else either, as evidenced by the mediocre performance increases since Sandy Bridge.
More a statement on how slow these cores are. Its easy enough to make a browser spawn a 100 threads to load every single item. But if you got a fast CPU it is completely pointless and would rather give slower performance due to the thread handling.
For mobile, the choice seems to be obvious due to the power curve implications. In scenarios where we're not talking about having loads so small that it becomes not worthwhile to spend the energy to bring a secondary core out of its idle state, one could generalize that if one is able to spread the load over multiple CPUs, it will always preferable and more efficient to do so.
Apple shows the way in ARM land.
Apple certainly has impressive ARM CPU cores. But that does not contradict what the AT article says. The best combination would of course be to have Apple CPU cores, but more of them, and in a big.LITTLE configuration.
The computational scientist within me gets so upset when so many people say we don't need more cores.
Yes, because 6-8 cores on the mainstream platform would make sales explode in a billion number replacement of obsolete 2-4 core PCs.
Come on Shintai, I know you will defend Intel to the last stand, but you know I did not say that. I would simply think that they might like to have the best product available, even if it might shrink their precious margins 0.001% to actually make a mainstream hex core for the high end market. Personally, I think that market could be a few percent, but I have no more data to back that up than you have to document your "average joe" and 99%.
Intel is becoming more and more like Microsoft, trying to force the consumers to buy what they(the company) thinks they should have instead of what the consumer wants (see Win RT, Win 8, and continual new "features" in MS office that do nothing but annoy users). With Intel it is 1500.00 ultrabooks with middling performance, and replacing ULV lower end laptop cpus with freaking atom. Fortunately, consumer demand and outrage (and competition from Apple/ARM) finally forced MS to bring out a user friendly OS again. Hopefully that will happen to intel as well. If there was not so much hype from the AMD fans already, I would start rooting for Zen to humiliate intel and perhaps force them to bring out a mainstream hex core that was actually, you know, on a cutting edge platform, architecture, and process node.
I think you have this wrong.
Intel builds what its customers want to buy. The reason Intel dedicates the chip area that it does to integrated graphics is, frankly, because that's what its high-volume PC customers such as Lenovo, Apple, HP, etc. want to buy.
If these OEMs were screaming at Intel to put out 6-8 core processors sans iGPU on its mainstream platforms because that's what their customers wanted, then you would see Intel delivering just that.
Intel makes money when it delivers value to its customers, plain and simple.
The reason that Intel hasn't to date released a hex-core mainstream chip isn't because of its "precious margins" or even "lack of competition." It's because its customers -- weighing all available factors -- didn't think that such processors would be the best use of Intel's engineering resources/die area at the time.
I think you have this wrong.
Intel builds what its customers want to buy. The reason Intel dedicates the chip area that it does to integrated graphics is, frankly, because that's what its high-volume PC customers such as Lenovo, Apple, HP, etc. want to buy.
If these OEMs were screaming at Intel to put out 6-8 core processors sans iGPU on its mainstream platforms because that's what their customers wanted, then you would see Intel delivering just that.
Intel makes money when it delivers value to its customers, plain and simple.
The reason that Intel hasn't to date released a hex-core mainstream chip isn't because of its "precious margins" or even "lack of competition." It's because its customers -- weighing all available factors -- didn't think that such processors would be the best use of Intel's engineering resources/die area at the time.
Long battery life? lol They keep lowering the battery size. They don't give you what you want. You have to buy something like an XPS 15 to get a large battery.Some people simply prefer light/thin mobile devices with long battery life over raw horsepower, wheter we like it or not.
I understand what you are saying, but all I am trying to say is a company that continually only tries to maximize profit and satisfy the mainstream customer is in danger of becoming simply mediocre.
This is pretty much the charter of the world's most successful technology company: Apple.