[WCCF] Intel Skylake 2015 Platform Details Revealed

[CHADBOGA]

Intel's timeliness on CPU delivery has been terrible in recent years.

Put me down as another one who thinks this 2015 platform will be coming out in 2016.

 

[frozentundra123456]

Personally I think Intel should produce a mainstream hex core and would much rather see them spending the power and transistor budgets on the CPU instead of steadily devoting more to the igp. On the other hand, it is not like you can just add 2 or 4 more cores without increasing tdp and/or lowering clock speed. I do think stubbornly sticking to quads could well come back to bite them at some point, especially since they appear to have pretty much maxed out clockspeed and IPC on their current architecture.

It will be interesting to see how the quad i5s perform in some of the new apparently core hungry games like watchdogs, compared to i7 and hex cores.

 

[Fjodor2001]

Unfortunately the article does not reveal much details that can help estimate how much the CPU performance will increase with Skylake. I wonder if we're going to see yet another ~8% general CPU performance increase compared to Broadwell (except for some specific use cases). Is there anything indicating otherwise?

 

[Maxima1]

There's no competitor because there's a tiny tiny market for it. There simply isn't a strong demand for more than 4 cores or 4c/8 threads for the vast majority of consumer uses.

AMD fell behind. It wasn't because the market was tiny. Edit: Funny how many people get suckered into buying those expensive mobile dual core Core i7's.

Enough with the demand thing. There's a ton of people who buy expensive gaming laptops when you could easily create a faster thunderbolt-like standard that can hook up to an external gpu. But it's obvious why that wouldn't happen.

 

[Homeles]

PCIe 4.0 is already coming? Wow, that's quick...

It'll be years before that's even needed. If Nvidia weren't so picky about SLI, we could see that be taken advantage of PCIe 4.0 16x slots running at 4x speeds while still being able to drive most GPUs. Easy 4-way mGPU on the mainstream platform!

It's a little frustrating that every time a new PCIe standard is mentioned, there's always a comment about how it's not necessary.

GPUs aren't the only AIBs in existence.

 

[witeken]

More than about 4 cores doesn't make a lot of sense for mainstream products.

 

[NTMBK]

More than about 4 cores doesn't make a lot of sense for mainstream products.

It certainly doesn't make sense for laptop APUs- and that's all today's "mainstream" line is, overclocked laptop SKUs. I just hope the "enthusiast" line will pick up the slack, and start offering us 6-core CPUs for the same price as a 4-core-and-unused-GPU APU.

 

[witeken]

Unfortunately the article does not reveal much details that can help estimate how much the CPU performance will increase with Skylake. I wonder if we're going to see yet another ~8% general CPU performance increase compared to Broadwell (except for some specific use cases). Is there anything indicating otherwise?

Some people say that Intel's Haifa team is building Skylake, and they were responsible for some nice products. Extrapolation is a commonly used technique for speculation. Add some hype into the mix, and people will expect a lot of good things from Skylake .

 

[Fjodor2001]

More than about 4 cores doesn't make a lot of sense for mainstream products.

It makes even less sense to beef up the iGPU further on mainstream CPUs that are not used for gaming anyway. Wasted silicon.

 

[Fjodor2001]

It certainly doesn't make sense for laptop APUs- and that's all today's "mainstream" line is, overclocked laptop SKUs. I just hope the "enthusiast" line will pick up the slack, and start offering us 6-core CPUs for the same price as a 4-core-and-unused-GPU APU.

Yeah, reasonably priced 6 and 8 core enthusiast line CPUs would be nice. I'm hoping they'll price Haswell-E at a level where enthusiasts will actually buy it, and that can open up for games & other SW to start using more threads. XBONE & PS4 is already leading that trend, but an enthusiast 6/8 core desktop CPU could speed up the process even further.

 

[witeken]

It makes even less sense to beef up the iGPU further on mainstream CPUs that are not used for gaming anyway. Wasted silicon.

Don't worry about Intel's margins. They like high margins as much as you are worried about them wasting silicon.

In all seriousness, I think it's a good thing that Intel's focusing on higher gaming performance, since GFLOPS requirements for gaming will continually get higher too, so Intel catching up to make GPUs obsolete for casual gamers is a good thing.

 

[Maxima1]

More than about 4 cores doesn't make a lot of sense for mainstream products.

And yet there are octacore smartphones. You guys are a riot.

It makes even less sense to beef up the iGPU further on mainstream CPUs that are not used for gaming anyway. Wasted silicon.

What? I've thought different. There's a bunch of expensive i5 and i7 laptops with lousy Intel or AMD/nvidia graphics. Then I sometimes read a thread of someone complaining that their son can't play a game on it.

 

[Fjodor2001]

What? I've thought different. There's a bunch of expensive i5 and i7 laptops with lousy Intel or AMD/nvidia graphics. Then I sometimes read a thread of someone complaining that their son can't play a game on it.

I'm primarily talking about desktop CPUs. If you intend to game on them, get a discrete GFX-card. If you belong to the farmville-crowd, current iGPUs do fine anyway.

So better spend the silicon on increased CPU core count instead.

 

[witeken]

And yet there are octacore smartphones. You guys are a riot.

That doesn't change anything. In my opinion, anything in a phone above 2 cores is simply bullshit.

 

[rtsurfer]

That doesn't change anything. In my opinion, anything in a phone above 2 cores is simply bullshit.

Don't use your phone much, do you.?

 

[Headfoot]

Recall that DirectX12 has two components: driver interfacing OS-level API which will see improvements in efficiency a-la-Mantle for all the architectures listed on the Wikipedia link above. But remember there is the second half: the typical additional Direct3D extensions which require new hardware support.

This is completely congruous with current DirectX strategy, with DirectX10 and on you choose your hardware feature level D3D_9, D3D_10,10.1, D3D_11,11.1.11.2 etc. On Windows 8 and up you will be using DirectX11.2 but you may be limited to hardware features from DirectX 10 if you're using an old 8800GT for example.

So the new Intel IGP will certainly use driver level DirectX12 and the improvements that brings. What remains uncertain is whether it will also have Hardware level DirectX12 features. In my opinion, it is very likely it will have those as Intel is taking graphics very seriously and their support (on paper at least) for the latest DirectX has been very good recently.

See also: http://techreport.com/news/26210/directx-12-will-also-add-new-features-for-next-gen-gpus

 

[erunion]

Don't use your phone much, do you.?

Or maybe he has a dual core iPhone 5s.

One needs to look no farther than the A7 to see why octocore phones are a marketing play.

 

[Maxima1]

Or maybe he has a dual core iPhone 5s.

One needs to look no farther than the A7 to see why octocore phones are a marketing play.

It's a different architecture. Besides, the next one is quad core. Why do you need a quad core in a phone if people keep arguing that quads and duals are fine for desktops even at Skylake?

 

[ShintaiDK]

Moar cores is still a sales factor on the smartphones. It serves no real purpose. And the only company not doing it is Apple.

 

[Fjodor2001]

Some people say that Intel's Haifa team is building Skylake, and they were responsible for some nice products.

So it takes a non-American design team to design nice CPUs for the American-based company Intel?

 

[Fjodor2001]

Moar cores is still a sales factor on the smartphones. It serves no real purpose. And the only company not doing it is Apple.

And Apple's share of the smartphone market is declining, in favor of the more-cores Android phones.

 

[MisterMac]

And Apple's share of the smartphone market is declining, in favor of the more-cores Android phones.

How'd that MOAR COARS salespitch go for bulldozer?


Different market, different rules.

 

[erunion]

It's a different architecture. Besides, the next one is quad core. Why do you need a quad core in a phone if people keep arguing that quads and duals are fine for desktops even at Skylake?

Of course its a different architecture, that's the point. It takes more than pointing out the obvious to refute my argument.

Multicore proponents like to show that quad A15s are better than Dual A15s, thus "more cores" is important. But that falls apart when the fastest SOC is dual core. Apple targeting their architecture towards maximum single threaded performance was the better choice.

Quad A8 is a rumor, and like most iPhone rumors, probably wrong.

 

[Fjodor2001]

How'd that MOAR COARS salespitch go for bulldozer?


Different market, different rules.

You mean the consumer has better use for more cores on a mobile phone than on a desktop PC?

 

[Maxima1]

Moar cores is still a sales factor on the smartphones. It serves no real purpose. And the only company not doing it is Apple.

How hard is it to multithread software? There's a guy (solely his work) on the Civ forums who was multithreading Civ 4.

Apple has a superior architecture, and their customers seem to care more about the brand. It's obvious why they didn't.

Intel is obvious too. They fended off AMD. There's no pressure in x86.

Apple targeting their architecture towards maximum single threaded performance was the better choice.

Their duals, quads, whatever cores would be superior just like Intel's vs. AMD's.