What will happen when Intel brings core counts greater than four to mainstream?

[squirrel dog]

In the year 2525, if man is still alive now cpu's have 1000 cores,that aint no jive
If woman can survive, they may find
In the year 3535


Ain't gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lie
Everything you think, do and say
Is in the pill you took today is 2000 more cores too much you say


In the year 4545
You ain't gonna need your teeth, won't need your eyes
You won't find a thing to chew
Nobody's gonna look at you you got 5000 cores , what you gonna do


In the year 5555
Your arms hangin' limp at your sides
Your legs got nothin' to do
Some machine's doin' that for you with round 10000 cores


In the year 6565
Ain't gonna need no husband, won't need no wife
You'll pick your son, pick your daughter too
From the bottom of a long glass tube,along with 27,000 cores


In the year 7510
If God's a-coming, He oughta make it by then
Maybe He'll look around Himself and say
"Guess it's time for the Judgement Day"as he installs 115,556 cores


In the year 8510
God is gonna shake His mighty head
He'll either say, "I'm pleased where man has been"
Or tear it down, and start again , using 1 biilion cores


In the year 9595
I'm kinda wonderin' if man is gonna be alive
He's taken everything this old earth can give
And he ain't put back nothing but core after core


Now it's been ten thousand years, man has cried a billion tears
For what, he never knew, now man's reign is through
But through eternal night, the twinkling of starlight
So very far away, maybe it's only yesterday,and he is left with a core 2 duo running windows 10,000

 

[TheELF]

We're back to the chicken and egg argument. SW developers will not spend the extra effort needed to produce highly parallelized SW until 8+ cores are mainstream

SW developers did spend the extra effort needed to produce highly parallelized SW decades ago...
It is called embarrassingly parallel,as previously stated, also distributed computing.

For "mainstream" ,games and software in general has started to be multithreaded since the days of the first halo and even earlier,long before even the dual core came along,threads do allow the cpu to deal with something else instead of waiting for something to finish but it has nothing to do with scaling.

Anything else devs will have to spend huge amounts of resources for minimal benefits so of course this will never happen.

 

[biostud]

Why would they?

If you really need more CPU power you get a HEDT.
I can't really see what mainstream desktop computing would benefit from more cores.

 

[ultimatebob]

Intel should kill all dual cores and set:

- Base i5 quad for $100 ish

- Base i7 hexa for $200 ish

- Base i9 octa for $300 ish

And split those further according to clock speed and cache. I'd expect a dual core in a phone not a desktop anymore. Also have the base models split one with no iGPU one with iGPU. Make everything overclockable. That would kill off AMD in 48hrs.

I don't think that most people really need the horsepower of even a Core i5 to look at Facebook and watch cat videos. I'd probably keep the Core i3 line around $80 for budget users.

An 8 core "Core i9" processor is something we need, though!

 

[Fjodor2001]

Why would they?

If you really need more CPU power you get a HEDT.
I can't really see what mainstream desktop computing would benefit from more cores.

What you're saying is that basically mainstream desktops are already fast enough, so the manufacturers might as well stop trying to improve their performance. The customers that need a faster computer can get a HEDT CPU instead.

 

[Phynaz]

FX CPUs are 4 Module 8 threads, not 8 core.

AMD doesn't agree with you.
http://www.amd.com/en-us/products/processors/desktop/fx

 

[biostud]

What you're saying is that basically mainstream desktops are already fast enough, so the manufacturers might as well stop trying to improve their performance. The customers that need a faster computer can get a HEDT CPU instead.

Not that they should stop improving, but atm I can't see what kind of software that requires more CPU power in the form of more cores. Improving single core performance is always welcome though.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Yep. Twice the cache will do much better than twice the cores.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Yep. Twice the cache will do much better than twice the cores.

I disagree. AMD's 2-module FM2+ chips, without L3 cache, are often faster than their 2-module counterparts, that have massive L3.

Intel has built so much "intelligence" into their cache hierarchy, that I don't see much more cache doing much good... unless you increase core counts as well.

 

[ShintaiDK]

I disagree. AMD's 2-module FM2+ chips, without L3 cache, are often faster than their 2-module counterparts, that have massive L3.

Intel has built so much "intelligence" into their cache hierarchy, that I don't see much more cache doing much good... unless you increase core counts as well.

AMDs cache system is entirely different. Not to mention AMD isnt exactly cache experts. So its completely pointless to use as a compare.

Try look on the 15 and 20MB versions of Haswell contra 6 and 8MB.

 

[Fjodor2001]

Not that they should stop improving, but atm I can't see what kind of software that requires more CPU power in the form of more cores. Improving single core performance is always welcome though.

And we're back to the chicken and egg discussion...

 

[Fjodor2001]

AMD doesn't agree with you.
http://www.amd.com/en-us/products/processors/desktop/fx

And do you agree with AMD?

 

[cbn]

Twice the cache will do much better than twice the cores.

According to this this test done by madshrimps, cache can help sometimes:

 

[biostud]

And we're back to the chicken and egg discussion...

True, but there's hardly any mainstream software that uses more than two cores. (Encoding/decoding excepted). I'm all for gazillion cores CPU's, I just don't really see what they should be used for in a mainstream computer.

 

[cbn]

And we're back to the chicken and egg discussion...

Yes, I think programmers will target the most commonly available hardware which is dual core with and without hyperthreading and quad cores without hyperthreading.

Still it is amazing that we do see some games that scale to eight threads. (Example: AMD FX processors in games like BF 4 64 player)

And here are some results from Tom's hardware:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/piledriver-k10-cpu-overclocking,3584-19.html

Notice FX-6350 (3.9Ghz/4.2 Ghz, 8MB L3 cache) doing better than FX-4350 (4.2Ghz/4.3 Ghz, 8MB L3 cache) even back in 2013.

 

[Fjodor2001]

True, but there's hardly any mainstream software that uses more than two cores. (Encoding/decoding excepted). I'm all for gazillion cores CPU's, I just don't really see what they should be used for in a mainstream computer.

So are you questioning whether there is use for more performance in mainstream computers? Otherwise the purpose of more cores would be just that, to provide more performance.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Still it is amazing that we do see some games that scale to eight threads. (Example: AMD FX processors in games like BF 4 64 player)

BF4 requires you to play against 64 other players for multithreading to be that useful. Aka concurrent users. And only because the FX CPUs are so snail slow. When you look on Intel CPUs the benefit is a lot more minimalistic.

That problem was solved ages ago.

 

[jason166]

I really dislike this argument that consumers can't benefit from parallel processing so why have it... We won't see development shops investing time and money unless there is a point, so that means hardware comes first, then software...

It's only going to get easier to develop for parallelism as time goes on, and higher level abstractions become more mature.

So you're you're back to questioning whether it is possible to write parallelized SW?

As a SW developer I can tell you it is, and the incentive for doing so increases drastically with the average number of cores available among mainstream users.

 

[TheELF]

I really dislike this argument that consumers can't benefit from parallel processing so why have it...

That's not the point,the point is that cores are expensive,well good ones at least,so are you willing to pay way more money just to have faster rendering?
Companies certainly are not willing to give away more cores for the same amount of money.

So there are two ways for a customer(or company) to choose from, cheap cores and a lot of them or expensive cores but fewer of them.

On the former the only thing that is going to run really fast is distributed computing,on the latter everything is going to run faster except of distributed computing, if the former has enough cores.

 

[TheELF]

We won't see development shops investing time and money unless there is a point, so that means hardware comes first, then software...

It's only going to get easier to develop for parallelism as time goes on, and higher level abstractions become more mature.

That's besides the point...
A developer would make a name for itself* in the business by producing this kind of code you are wishing for,it would not run any worse on low core count cpus and there are enough sites out there that benchmark high core count cpus so people would know immediately.
Anyone that would produce code like this would become the next Steve Jobs and become filthy rich.

The hardware is here,it does not need to be mainstream.



* look at crytek, the only reason people know them is because they put out a game that was impossible to play at the time

 

[Phynaz]

And do you agree with AMD?

Sure. You don't?

If AMD CPUs weren't 8 cores and AMD was advertising them as such you can bet that many law firms would be stumbling over each other to get the lawsuits filed.

 

[VirtualLarry]

That's not the point,the point is that cores are expensive,well good ones at least,so are you willing to pay way more money just to have faster rendering?
Companies certainly are not willing to give away more cores for the same amount of money.

Yes and no. The R&D cost for the first core, is astronomical, compared to the mfg cost of simply "cloning" cores, and creating a design, say, going from 4 cores to 6-8 cores. Sure, there's some validation, and mfg yields aren't going to be as good as with a 4 core CPU, but the costs to add additional cores to an existing design aren't extreme.

Intel did just that with the Core2 generation, they came out with a 6-core (server) CPU. I think that the name started with "D", perhaps someone else remembers and can fill in more info.

 

[MongGrel]

Well I'm using one of their 6 core ones all ready, but I guess you mean the newer ones.

 

[cbn]

BF4 requires you to play against 64 other players for multithreading to be that useful. Aka concurrent users. And only because the FX CPUs are so snail slow. When you look on Intel CPUs the benefit is a lot more minimalistic.

i7 4770K (115 avg FPS, 92 min FPS) scales well in that game compared to i5 4670K (95 avg FPS, 72 min FPS). Likewise the i7 2600K (98 avg. FPS, 74 min FPS) does well against i5 2500K (86 avg. FPS, 62 min FPS). In a nutshell, hyperthreading worked well in this benchmark.

Moving on to AMD processors, FX-9590 (112 avg FPS, 90 min FPS) just about matches i7 4770K's (115 avg FPS, 92 min FPS). Likewise FX-8350 (97 avg FPS,75 min FPS) just about matches i7-2600K's (98 avg. FPS, 74 min FPS). So AMD is able to make up for its lack of single thread by having more cores.

Now looking at the i7 3970X, it does have the best FPS (128 avg FPS, 99 min FPS). Tough to say what is happening here though. Some of the hyperthreading is not getting used according to GameGPU:

Overall, I'm thinking the gameplay (or more accurately the benchmarked gameplay) is geared towards making the most out of the highest end of mainstream (Intel 4C/8T or AMD 8C/8T).

Maybe if we had 6C/12T or 8C/16T as the highest end of mainstream DICE could increase the player count from 64 to 96 or 128?

 

[cbn]

Companies certainly are not willing to give away more cores for the same amount of money.

The price of Intel hexcores is already dropping (example: i7 5820K @ $389 which is the first Intel hexcore to drop below $400).

And then we have to consider at least these three four things in addition to the projected natural price drop:

1.) Memory bandwidth becoming cheaper. Even one stick of DDR4 3200 (25.6 GB/s) shouldn't have much trouble running six fast Intel cores.

2.) So many low power devices in families these days means potential for greater utility out of a hypothetical 6C/12T or 8C/16T for server (or more likely a central 6C/12T or 8C/16T desktop that would also be used as a server)

3.) Alternative Operating systems (besides Apple) that will challenge MS in the traditional space. I'm thinking this will probably affect MS one user per license in some way.

4.) Intel Broadwell octocore (with dual channel DDR4, 28 PCIe 3.0 lanes, 12MB L3 cache, two 10 GbE LAN, four usb 3.0) exists today with a classic mainstream die size of 160mm2.