Less impressed with processor performance increases than graphics

[epsilon84]

Dbl post nvm

 

[AMDisTheBEST]

Are you an engineer by chance? Because I am and I can tell you that Intel is innovating, just in different areas such as performance per watt. Intel knows the PC market is dying and is focusing on power consumption for mobile use.

I’m not saying competition doesn’t help. I’m saying that there is no evidence that Intel released higher core count CPUs because of Ryzen. The only conclusion one can make is that Intel moved up Coffee Lake’s release by a couple of months. Intel has had 6+ cores on their roadmap for years but AMd fans want to ignore that fact.

Yeah, let’s talk about Intel “getting caught with its pants down” with the Athlon 64 release whereas AMD has been utterly destroyed over the past decade by Intel. Where was AMD’s alleged innovation then? AMD got fat, lazy, and arrogant and wasn’t innovating at all and hasn’t for a decade until Ryzen. Your assertion that they innovate more is laughable - let’s not forget that unlike with the Athlon 64, AMD is still behind in performance. Even with your so called “lack of innovation” for years, Intel STILL holds the performance crown. And this is coming from someone who owns 2 Ryzen systems and who owned Athlon XP and Athlon 64 systems.

You seem to ignore the fact that AMD came up with the 86-64 instruction set before anyone else just like how Apple came up with their x64 for arm before anyone else.

Now, please explain to me Mr. Engineer, how the heck is intel gonna keep ramping up clock speed after hitting 7nm??? 7nm is schedule to hit the market by 2020. Tell me how is intel gonna just up the clock speed when zen+ hit the shelve?

Also, you are right intel has more than 4 core CPU’s on their road maps for years. Just be prepare to shell out $1700 for those extream editions or $1000 for a 6 cores.

 

[Qasar]

quote : Are you an engineer by chance? Because I am and I can tell you that Intel is innovating, just in different areas such as performance per watt. Intel knows the PC market is dying and is focusing on power consumption for mobile use.

yea sure you are.. and i am and engineer too ... just like all the other people on these forms, and any other forums that say the same things... bottom line.. saying you are something... is meaningless because, IT CANT BE PROVEN, because i dont know you in person... so no. i DONT believe you are engineer..

quote : I’m not saying competition doesn’t help. I’m saying that there is no evidence that Intel released higher core count CPUs because of Ryzen. The only conclusion one can make is that Intel moved up Coffee Lake’s release by a couple of months. Intel has had 6+ cores on their roadmap for years but AMd fans want to ignore that fact.

ok Mr engineer.. amd has had more then 4 cores on the desktop for a few years BEFORE ryzen.. and guess what.. they were based on bulldozer, which wasnt competitive with intel in performance, so intel KEPT us at 4 cores on the main stream for years.. then Zen aka ryzen comes out and is competitive.. THEN all of a sudden intel " pushes" their CFL cpus up a few months to compete, you STILL want to argue that ryzen isnt at least PART of the reason why intel finally got off their duff and gave the main stream market more then quad core ??? they MAY have had 4+ cores on their road map for years, as you put it.. but refused to release them for the mainstream market.. cause they HAD NO REASON to... just like intel fans want to ignore THIS fact.. lack of competition means intel has had NO reason to give is more cores...


quote : Yeah, let’s talk about Intel “getting caught with its pants down” with the Athlon 64 release whereas AMD has been utterly destroyed over the past decade by Intel. Where was AMD’s alleged innovation then? AMD got fat, lazy, and arrogant and wasn’t innovating at all and hasn’t for a decade until Ryzen. Your assertion that they innovate more is laughable - let’s not forget that unlike with the Athlon 64, AMD is still behind in performance. Even with your so called “lack of innovation” for years, Intel STILL holds the performance crown. And this is coming from someone who owns 2 Ryzen systems and who owned Athlon XP and Athlon 64 systems.

and the SAME CAN BE SAID ABOUT INTEL the last few years as well !!! amd tried something with bulldozer.. and it didnt work.. JUST LIKE intel did with nehalem i think it i was.. which is why the athlon 64 caught them with their pants down... amd did the on die memory controller.. intel FOLLOWED, amd did the 64 bit extentions... intel FOLLOWED... what did intel come up with alone those lines ??

 

[esquared]

Ok folks. The level of snark has exceeded the boundaries that promote fruitful discussion.

Dial it back or I will, at the minimum, lock the thread.


esquared
Anandtech Forum Director

 

[Ranulf]

A few months ago I remarked that I was amazed that integrated graphics are now much faster then my several year old (and admittedly low end) dedicated graphics card.

For the most part that has not been my experience over the past ten or so years. It depends on what the card/chip is doing. Integrated gpus have definately gotten better but for gaming especially, I'll take the older dgpu even many low end cards over igpus. If my 7 year old i5-450m 2.4ghz based laptop had a decent gpu in it, it would still be viable for more than just basic web surfing (slowly). An ssd would help things a lot but is a pointless upgrade as this laptop has had video issues for 2+ years now with anything regarding video playback, especially streaming.

 

[IntelUser2000]

I'll take the older dgpu even many low end cards over igpus. If my 7 year old i5-450m 2.4ghz based laptop had a decent gpu in it, it would still be viable for more than just basic web surfing (slowly). An ssd would help things a lot but is a pointless upgrade as this laptop has had video issues for 2+ years now with anything regarding video playback, especially streaming.

That has to do lot with video codec acceleration. Older dGPUs don't support it either.

Also, while the first Core generation has improved iGPUs a lot, they were still in the phase where enough people found it lacking for non-3D uses. 2nd Gen Core Sandy Bridge generation fixed it a lot, and it took 4th Gen to say its decent for all uses other than intensive gaming. The 6th Gen Core iGPUs actually took leadership in terms of DX12 support ahead of all other GPUs.

Regarding the whole AMD/Intel thing: The perf/watt stagnation wouldn't have been pushed by increased competition from AMD. That's more of a fundamental limit. What they could have done is given increased cores earlier. Considering the issues they had with Skylake-X, and needing intermediary chipset like the Z370 to run Coffeelake, I think its a definite yes that AMD being much more competitive led to Intel needing to rush release more core chips.

What I do not believe AMD was the sole reason for bringing out the 4+ core chips. They must have had it in plan at some point, they just had to accelerate. AMD doing well wasn't a reason for Intel messing up their process either. Original plans had full 10nm Cannonlake release by late last year. Intel likes to screw up when AMD does well, and vice versa. Why can't they do smooth releases like ARM vendors?

 

[IndyColtsFan]

You seem to ignore the fact that AMD came up with the 86-64 instruction set before anyone else just like how Apple came up with their x64 for arm before anyone else.

So? Do you also think AMD had the first 64-bit CPU too? Intel had ia64, originally announced in 1994 well before AMD64. The market chose AMD64 instead. Congrats? Intel's plan was to gradually move the market away from x86 and had that happened, we might have much, much better performance without being shackled to all the legacy stuff. So I suppose we can thank AMD for keeping us in x86 hell.

Now, please explain to me Mr. Engineer, how the heck is intel gonna keep ramping up clock speed after hitting 7nm??? 7nm is schedule to hit the market by 2020. Tell me how is intel gonna just up the clock speed when zen+ hit the shelve?

Intel has ramped up clockspeeds with every successive generation. AMD can barely hit 4 GHz with Ryzen. I hit 5 Ghz on my 8700k with about 5 minutes of work.

Furthermore, do you think this 7nm "wall" issue is unique to Intel? I already explained this in my previous posts. And regardless of this, Intel doesn't have to clock to the moon - they only need to have more headroom than AMD, and they have a TON more now.

Also, you are right intel has more than 4 core CPU’s on their road maps for years. Just be prepare to shell out $1700 for those extream editions or $1000 for a 6 cores.

Cannonlake 8 core was to be a mainstream CPU and in our hands about now. It was only cancelled due to 10 nm difficulties. For all the bluster of AMD fans about pricing, you'll notice the 8700k is selling like hotcakes ABOVE its original MSRP, as was the 8600k for quite some time. Tell me again about AMD's price pressure? I just checked the prices of the 7820k and 7900k on Amazon and they're still around their original retail prices. Again, where is AMD's price pressure?

 

[IndyColtsFan]

quote : Are you an engineer by chance? Because I am and I can tell you that Intel is innovating, just in different areas such as performance per watt. Intel knows the PC market is dying and is focusing on power consumption for mobile use.

yea sure you are.. and i am and engineer too ... just like all the other people on these forms, and any other forums that say the same things... bottom line.. saying you are something... is meaningless because, IT CANT BE PROVEN, because i dont know you in person... so no. i DONT believe you are engineer..

There is no reason to be rude. I don't care if you believe I'm an engineer or not. The fact is, I'm an EE and graduated from a top 10 program. Look at my post count - I've been around here forever and people here know I'm an engineer too. You'll find that it isn't exactly odd for engineers to post on AT - there are many of us here.

quote : I’m not saying competition doesn’t help. I’m saying that there is no evidence that Intel released higher core count CPUs because of Ryzen. The only conclusion one can make is that Intel moved up Coffee Lake’s release by a couple of months. Intel has had 6+ cores on their roadmap for years but AMd fans want to ignore that fact.

ok Mr engineer.. amd has had more then 4 cores on the desktop for a few years BEFORE ryzen.. and guess what.. they were based on bulldozer, which wasnt competitive with intel in performance, so intel KEPT us at 4 cores on the main stream for years.. then Zen aka ryzen comes out and is competitive..

You just made my point. Thanks! Why is it that AMD fans always think the impetus for performance increases is on Intel and completely ignore the fact that AMD could've increased performance too but yet, didn't? You guys completely ignore the advances Intel made in mobile performance. Again, WHY would Intel devote resources to desktop CPUs when mobile is the future?

THEN all of a sudden intel " pushes" their CFL cpus up a few months to compete, you STILL want to argue that ryzen isnt at least PART of the reason why intel finally got off their duff and gave the main stream market more then quad core ??? they MAY have had 4+ cores on their road map for years, as you put it.. but refused to release them for the mainstream market.. cause they HAD NO REASON to... just like intel fans want to ignore THIS fact.. lack of competition means intel has had NO reason to give is more cores...

Intel had Cannonlake 8 core on their mainstream roadmap for this time period years ago. The only reason we don't have them is because of issues with 10 nm. That is another inconvenient fact. Coffee Lake was only pushed up 2 or 3 months as a response to Ryzen. That's it - a whopping 2 or 3 month roadmap change to deal with a competitor. They really didn't even need to do that to be honest - the 7700K was more than enough to handle Ryzen in most commonly used applications up until what would've been CFL's original release date.

quote : Yeah, let’s talk about Intel “getting caught with its pants down” with the Athlon 64 release whereas AMD has been utterly destroyed over the past decade by Intel. Where was AMD’s alleged innovation then? AMD got fat, lazy, and arrogant and wasn’t innovating at all and hasn’t for a decade until Ryzen. Your assertion that they innovate more is laughable - let’s not forget that unlike with the Athlon 64, AMD is still behind in performance. Even with your so called “lack of innovation” for years, Intel STILL holds the performance crown. And this is coming from someone who owns 2 Ryzen systems and who owned Athlon XP and Athlon 64 systems.

and the SAME CAN BE SAID ABOUT INTEL the last few years as well !!! amd tried something with bulldozer.. and it didnt work.. JUST LIKE intel did with nehalem i think it i was.. which is why the athlon 64 caught them with their pants down... amd did the on die memory controller.. intel FOLLOWED, amd did the 64 bit extentions... intel FOLLOWED... what did intel come up with alone those lines ??

Again, why is it that we talk about Intel "getting caught with its pants down" when a competitor outperformed them, but when Intel quickly responds with Core2 and establishes a clear performance lead which has lasted until today, we don't applaud Intel for advancing the field but instead, start making excuses? "But...but..but...AMD did x, y, and z first!" Who cares? Intel did it right and had the hardware to prove it. You do know that AMD and Intel have a technology cross license in place, correct? You do know that AMD has used (legally) many of Intel's technologies due to this cross license, correct?

BTW, your terminology is completely wrong - Nehalem was the first generation of Core i and the successor to Core 2, by which time Intel already had a huge lead over AMD. Also, please learn to use the quote feature properly - I just stumbled on this post by chance, as I wasn't alerted it existed.

At any rate, I don't understand why people get so upset over computer processors and allow their product allegiances to blur their vision. I have 2 Ryzen systems. I am likely going to build a Threadripper box too. I also have 2 Intel desktops and 2 Intel servers and a few laptops. Why not just buy what is best for you and does what you need and be happy?

 

[scannall]

I really don't blame Intel for continuing to massage the Core architecture. It takes years of time, and billions of dollars to make a new architecture from scratch. And it may well turn out to be a flop. The CPU landscape is littered with far more flops than winners. Netburst. Itanium. Bulldozer. Atom. Everything from Via. Qualcomm has had several flops on the ARM side of things as well. So, with no competition from AMD why on Earth would Intel spend those resources on something when they already had such a huge lead anyway?

You don't do a new CPU from scratch unless you're backed into a corner, like AMD was. Ryzen is a compelling product, and will be in the next couple of computers I put together. But that doesn't mean I think Intel sucks, or is bad somehow. I'm just happy to see the CPU market starting to get interesting again. That's good for all of us.

 

[Cogman]

I look forward to learning how to program an FPGA on a CPU.

But we can almost get to zero idle power now. Intel is supposed to be adding the ability to set different clock speeds on different cores soon. Another step should be the ability to turn cores off independently. Add a HT Atom core, a la big.LITTLE, and you can turn off all the other cores at idle.

Hardware programming is in the stone ages compared to where software programming is now. In many ways it feels like HDLs were invented in the 70s and then forgotten. Perhaps FPGAs on CPUs will change all of that (that is, having much more common access might breed much more powerful solutions). I don't, however, look forward to going back to HDL programming. It was painful enough the first time . (Think, a bad version of C only everything is happening at the same time).

All that being said, I think HDLs would massively benefit from a functional programming language. Hardware is, by its physical nature, a bunch of concurrent events all happening at the same time. So a functional paradigm would make a lot of sense at that level.

The low power benefit is completely automatic. As in, while your CPU is waiting for memory to load from L1, it is using no power anywhere. What intel is doing may be able to bring the power consumption down significantly, but they can't shut power off and then turn it on again on every cycle. That is to say, while your CPU is waiting for a memory lookup, it would be consuming nanowatts of power (Ok, maybe milliwatts due to gate leakage). I can't imagine intel doing anything that is really in that range even with super aggressive power gating.

The problem really is that every cycle is a power burner in CPUs.

 

[AMDisTheBEST]

So? Do you also think AMD had the first 64-bit CPU too? Intel had ia64, originally announced in 1994 well before AMD64. The market chose AMD64 instead. Congrats? Intel's plan was to gradually move the market away from x86 and had that happened, we might have much, much better performance without being shackled to all the legacy stuff. So I suppose we can thank AMD for keeping us in x86 hell.



Intel has ramped up clockspeeds with every successive generation. AMD can barely hit 4 GHz with Ryzen. I hit 5 Ghz on my 8700k with about 5 minutes of work.

Furthermore, do you think this 7nm "wall" issue is unique to Intel? I already explained this in my previous posts. And regardless of this, Intel doesn't have to clock to the moon - they only need to have more headroom than AMD, and they have a TON more now.



Cannonlake 8 core was to be a mainstream CPU and in our hands about now. It was only cancelled due to 10 nm difficulties. For all the bluster of AMD fans about pricing, you'll notice the 8700k is selling like hotcakes ABOVE its original MSRP, as was the 8600k for quite some time. Tell me again about AMD's price pressure? I just checked the prices of the 7820k and 7900k on Amazon and they're still around their original retail prices. Again, where is AMD's price pressure?

Intel had once boasted their netburst chips would hit 10 ghz by 2010. Please tell me Mr.Enginner why we haven’t yet seen a 10 ghz pentium 4 capable of burning ones house down.

It is supply and demand that keeps these prices up. If you look for a brand new sandy bridged cpu, it is the same thing, intel doesn’t make it anymore so limited supplies. Why people would choose to pay such high price for them is something I roll my eyes at.






I have instructed people to stop with the snarky comments. You have continued it.
Stop.

esquared
Anandtech Forum Director

 

[Ken g6]

Intel had once boasted their netburst chips would hit 10 ghz by 2010. Please tell me Mr.Enginner why we haven’t yet seen a 10 ghz pentium 4 capable of burning ones house down.

Hey, they got close!

It is supply and demand that keeps these prices up.

It is also supply and demand that prevented the 10GHz Pentium 4. Too many people wanted small laptops, and then smartphones. Oh, and heat in data centers was always a problem too. There wasn't enough demand for Intel to make a dedicated process designed for very-fast, very-hot chips. So they just made one process for laptops, and cranked it as high as they could for desktops.

 

[dlerious]

Cannonlake 8 core was to be a mainstream CPU and in our hands about now. It was only cancelled due to 10 nm difficulties. For all the bluster of AMD fans about pricing, you'll notice the 8700k is selling like hotcakes ABOVE its original MSRP, as was the 8600k for quite some time. Tell me again about AMD's price pressure? I just checked the prices of the 7820k and 7900k on Amazon and they're still around their original retail prices. Again, where is AMD's price pressure?

How much did you pay for the previous 8-core (6900x) and 10-core (6950x) cpus? That's where the price pressure was.

 

[ninaholic37]

But we can almost get to zero idle power now. Intel is supposed to be adding the ability to set different clock speeds on different cores soon. Another step should be the ability to turn cores off independently. Add a HT Atom core, a la big.LITTLE, and you can turn off all the other cores at idle.

On my 2009 Core2Duo laptop, it frequently says Core 0: 2530MHz, Core 1: 800MHz, so I think different frequencies on different cores was possible for a while now?

I really don't blame Intel for continuing to massage the Core architecture. It takes years of time, and billions of dollars to make a new architecture from scratch. And it may well turn out to be a flop. The CPU landscape is littered with far more flops than winners. Netburst. Itanium. Bulldozer. Atom. Everything from Via. Qualcomm has had several flops on the ARM side of things as well. So, with no competition from AMD why on Earth would Intel spend those resources on something when they already had such a huge lead anyway?

I bought a netbook with Atom N270, Atom N570 and Atom N2600. I think they did what I wanted at the time. Not sure how much the newer ones compare, but have read a lot about how Bay Trail+ improved at lot. I am curious as to why you think it's a flop, and what stages where Atom was the biggest flop? Would you also consider Bobcat and other AMD small-core chips to be a flop? Are you talking more about in the phone or tablet sector or notebooks being a flop, or all around? What are your thoughts about Intel putting "Atom" into desktops and laptops over 10.1" since Bay Trail?

 

[IndyColtsFan]

Intel had once boasted their netburst chips would hit 10 ghz by 2010. Please tell me Mr.Enginner why we haven’t yet seen a 10 ghz pentium 4 capable of burning ones house down.

Because they made unrealistic promises, ran into technical issues, and revisited the PPro/PIII architecture as a basis for Core 2. I'm not an Intel fanboy - I buy what I think will suit my needs best and Intel deserves plenty of criticism for many things. There's a reason I didn't own a Pentium IV, and that's because I bought Athlon XP and then Athlon 64 (and Athlon 64 x2).

Additionally, as has been discussed many times, Intel started to move focus and resources to mobile because - surprise - that's where the money is! Do you guys not get that? Are you one of those guys who denies the PC market is shrinking and dying?

You keep missing the point, but I'm not surprised, hence your stupid PIV example above. I didn't say Intel had to release 10 Ghz CPUs to compete with AMD. All they have to do is bump the base frequencies a couple hundred Mhz here and there, maybe add some cache, and they'll likely stay ahead on the current architectures. They have PLENTY of headroom for this to happen and have for quite some time.

It is supply and demand that keeps these prices up. If you look for a brand new sandy bridged cpu, it is the same thing, intel doesn’t make it anymore so limited supplies. Why people would choose to pay such high price for them is something I roll my eyes at.

Of course it is supply and demand that keep the prices high on the 8700k - tell me something I don't know. The exact same thing happened with Skylake initially and eventually supply caught up, which it will here too. There are three points to take away from this:

1. We hear all of this talk from AMD fans about how they're forcing Intel to do this, or forcing Intel to do that. AMD has exerted exactly zero price pressure on Intel in the mainstream market. On the contrary, we've seen massive sales on AMD CPUs for months now. That's how I got my 1700x. We've seen no such action from Intel so far and likely won't.

2. If AMD had made such a huge dent in the CPU market, demand for the 8700k would be much lower.

3. Intel is selling every single 8700k CPU they make at the current prices. Intel's suggested MSRP is (IIRC) $360 for the 8700k and when supply catches up, that's what we'll pay. They're not going to cut prices to "compete" with AMD because they don't have to - the 8700k has the best ST performance on the market and up to 6 cores, AMD can't touch it. In some benches it was running with the 1700s and 1800s because it has massive overclocking headroom.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

How much did you pay for the previous 8-core (6900x) and 10-core (6950x) cpus? That's where the price pressure was.

I didn't pay anything for them because I didn't buy them. I wouldn't attribute current pricing on their 8 and 10 cores to AMD as much as I'd attribute the additional 14-18 core tiers. Intel eliminated one of the previous 6 core tiers from HEDT and moved a slightly cut down 8 core into that slot and moved the 10 core into the prior 8 core slot. The 12 core CPU had been rumored for awhile as the top tier. Obviously the 14-18 core CPUs were responses to AMD - Intel had them in their pocket as a contingency plan and pulled them out to use them, even though the 12 and maybe 14 core CPUs would've been enough.

 

[scannall]

On my 2009 Core2Duo laptop, it frequently says Core 0: 2530MHz, Core 1: 800MHz, so I think different frequencies on different cores was possible for a while now?


I bought a netbook with Atom N270, Atom N570 and Atom N2600. I think they did what I wanted at the time. Not sure how much the newer ones compare, but have read a lot about how Bay Trail+ improved at lot. I am curious as to why you think it's a flop, and what stages where Atom was the biggest flop? Would you also consider Bobcat and other AMD small-core chips to be a flop? Are you talking more about in the phone or tablet sector or notebooks being a flop, or all around? What are your thoughts about Intel putting "Atom" into desktops and laptops over 10.1" since Bay Trail?

They overly gimped it, to protect their higher cost parts. Limited ram capacity, underwhelming performance. It's just not a very good part overall.

 

[Charlie22911]

As others have stated, it really boils down to the type of problem CPUs and GPUs have been designed to solve. That’s really all there is to it.

Problems who’s solutions depend on previous steps in the problem solving process are not easily parallelized; CPUs see these workloads the most and don’t really benefit much from thread/core count.

Graphics workloads are almost purely parallel in nature, so performance scales with core count.
Smaller nodes mean more cores, which mean more performance for similar power.

It’s more nuanced than this of course, and a bit beyond me on a technical level. But it’s a close approximation.

 

[Burpo]

Intel is selling every single 8700k CPU they make at the current prices. Intel's suggested MSRP is (IIRC) $360 for the 8700k and when supply catches up, that's what we'll pay.

Jet has stock now & first time buyers get $20 off, making these right where they should be..

https://jet.com/product/Intel-Core-...W-BX80684I78/429e5302f00542f0b8c892af2ec3b7c9

 

[Insert_Nickname]

I bought a netbook with Atom N270, Atom N570 and Atom N2600. I think they did what I wanted at the time. Not sure how much the newer ones compare, but have read a lot about how Bay Trail+ improved at lot. I am curious as to why you think it's a flop, and what stages where Atom was the biggest flop? Would you also consider Bobcat and other AMD small-core chips to be a flop? Are you talking more about in the phone or tablet sector or notebooks being a flop, or all around? What are your thoughts about Intel putting "Atom" into desktops and laptops over 10.1" since Bay Trail?

Well, we're in agreement that Atom isn't a flop by any stretch of imagination. Like it or not, Atom and its descendents absolutely rule the budget market, especially since AMD abandoned Bobcat/Jaguar/Puma.

As to what I think about Atom cores, the new Apollo Lake ones are very decent. They're about equal in IPC and performance to first gen C2Ds*, which I find remarkable for a sub-10W SoC. I still consider AMDs Kabini/Carrizo-L superior because of the GCN-based IGP, but they do come with a cost to TDP.

*and come in quad core flavour too...

 

[frozentundra123456]

ryzen

 

[IntelUser2000]

On my 2009 Core2Duo laptop, it frequently says Core 0: 2530MHz, Core 1: 800MHz, so I think different frequencies on different cores was possible for a while now?

Nah, the Core 1 is just idle and running on the LFM frequency, which is the lowest.

They're about equal in IPC and performance to first gen C2Ds*

They aren't that good yet. The Gemini Lake platform based chips are probably on the level of Athlon 64-based cores. Gemini Lake platform chips are 20-30% better than Apollo Lake platform chips. That means Apollo Lake is equal to Athlon XP chips.

Keep in mind when I say equal to Athlon 64, I mean as in terms of general purpose architecture. Things like graphics, specialized cryptography acceleration, new ISA instructions, and doubled FPU throughput don't count.

 

[tential]

Nah, the Core 1 is just idle and running on the LFM frequency, which is the lowest.



They aren't that good yet. The Gemini Lake platform based chips are probably on the level of Athlon 64-based cores. Gemini Lake platform chips are 20-30% better than Apollo Lake platform chips. That means Apollo Lake is equal to Athlon XP chips.

Keep in mind when I say equal to Athlon 64, I mean as in terms of general purpose architecture. Things like graphics, specialized cryptography acceleration, new ISA instructions, and doubled FPU throughput don't count.

It's really annoying how strong the Core2Duo architecture is in comparison to the "Atom" level intel chip. I have been letting my Core2Duo system fall apart as there simply isn't a super duper cheap option to replace it.

Now that intel is upping their core counts all around though a budget quadcore may be a lot cheaper than before.

 

[Phynaz]

Jet has stock now & first time buyers get $20 off, making these right where they should be..

https://jet.com/product/Intel-Core-...W-BX80684I78/429e5302f00542f0b8c892af2ec3b7c9

If demand is so high that even Walmart can mark them up above retail then these things must be selling like nuts.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

They aren't that good yet. The Gemini Lake platform based chips are probably on the level of Athlon 64-based cores. Gemini Lake platform chips are 20-30% better than Apollo Lake platform chips. That means Apollo Lake is equal to Athlon XP chips.

I think you're thinking about the previous generation Bay Trail/Braswell Atoms. Apollo Lake adds a 3rd execution port, and is up to 30% faster then BT/BW. They're perhaps 5-10% slower at the same frequency then first gen C2Ds. Which is close enough when we're talking a full SoC including an IGP within a 6W TDP.

Gemini Lake is nothing more then AL with 2MB additional L2 cache.