Friday, July 10th 2020
Intel Core i7 "Rocket Lake" Chips to be 8-core/12-thread?
It's been rumored for some time now, that the 14 nm "Rocket Lake-S" silicon has no more than 8 CPU cores, giving Intel's product managers some segmentation headaches between the Core i7 and Core i9 brand extensions. The current 10th Gen Core i9 chips are 10-core/20-thread, and Core i7 8-core/16-thread. The 10th Gen Core i5 chips are 6-core/12-thread, and this won't change with the 11th Gen "Rocket Lake." What will change, however, are the core-counts of the Core i7 and Core i9 processors, according to a leaked roadmap slide scored by VideoCardz.
With no more than 8 "Cypress Cove" cores on the "Rocket Lake-S" silicon, the 11th Gen Core i9 will be 8-core/16-thread. The 11th Gen Core i7, however, will be 8-core/12-thread. We don't know how this would work out, but Intel dropped hints toward it with the current 10th Gen Core "Comet Lake," whereby end-users have the ability to toggle HyperThreading (HTT) on a per-core basis. Older generations of Intel processors only allowed a global toggle of HTT. This would mean 4 out of 8 cores on the Core i7 "Rocket Lake-S" will have HTT permanently disabled. We predict that two of these will likely be the processor's favored cores, capable of sustaining the highest boost clocks under the Turbo Boost Max 3.0 algorithm, to which the OS thread scheduler will send the maximum traffic. The roadmap slide also suggests that Intel could standardize the vPro feature-set to its unlocked "K" processors with the 11th Gen.
Source:
VideoCardz
With no more than 8 "Cypress Cove" cores on the "Rocket Lake-S" silicon, the 11th Gen Core i9 will be 8-core/16-thread. The 11th Gen Core i7, however, will be 8-core/12-thread. We don't know how this would work out, but Intel dropped hints toward it with the current 10th Gen Core "Comet Lake," whereby end-users have the ability to toggle HyperThreading (HTT) on a per-core basis. Older generations of Intel processors only allowed a global toggle of HTT. This would mean 4 out of 8 cores on the Core i7 "Rocket Lake-S" will have HTT permanently disabled. We predict that two of these will likely be the processor's favored cores, capable of sustaining the highest boost clocks under the Turbo Boost Max 3.0 algorithm, to which the OS thread scheduler will send the maximum traffic. The roadmap slide also suggests that Intel could standardize the vPro feature-set to its unlocked "K" processors with the 11th Gen.
39 Comments on Intel Core i7 "Rocket Lake" Chips to be 8-core/12-thread?
I like the idea of a CPU and OS that are more 'priority' aware than curent AMD/Intel offerings and Windows 10. In an ideal world user actions/operations are never fighting the system/background processes for resources. Not as extreme as BIG.little but certainly an OS/CPU that knows when other threads are waiting on information from one or two key threads, to isolate those threads to the fastest dedicated cores and not have them compete for resources.
Seems obvious, and we're slowly getting there with both Windows and CPUs. Hell, perhaps there's more merit to the BIG.little designs in performance desktops, coupled with not just tiered CPU cores but also tiered RAM and tiered storage.
There is no indication that a 14nm Intel CPU with only 8 cores no matter the IPC improvement will be able to compete with the 32-thread Zen 3 and even higher Zen 4.
Probably just artificial product segmentation dictated by the marketing.
Ryzen 7 4800U with SMT on scores 25% higher than Ryzen 7 4700U the same 8 cores but without SMT.
If Rocket Lake only goes to 8 cores, I would prefer it to be branded as "i7", and the "i9" branding to be kept for HEDT. Ice Lake-X will easily cover >8 cores. Putting Ice Lake-X/SP dies on LGA 1200 would also be possible, but I don't like the idea, as it would push the power requirements even higher.
More interesting to me is the slide note that RKL is dumping SGX. That pretty much amounts to an admission of defeat on Intel's part regarding that attempt at security.
Finally the CPU gets 20 PCIe lanes, which brings it up to parity with Ryzen at least.
There's no way Zen 3 laptops with 32 threads are going to be 'mainstream' by the time Rocket Lake is replaced with Intel 12th-Gen. You might see some boutiques cram a desktop Zen3 CPU into a laptop because there is always at least one vendor pushing the envelope, but mainstream laptops aren't going to go beyond 8 cores in 2021 in my opinion and I suspect we'll see a lot of 8-16 thread stuff in the 15-25W TDP range covering 90%+ of the market.If you were on 1st-gen Ryzen you'd know that unbalanced core configurations like this are actually just a workaround to improve the mess that is the "Windows 10 scheduler".
Since then, the Windows10 scheduler has improved but core-parking and SMT/HT isolation for preferred cores is still better than letting Windows guess (poorly) at what process should run on each core - provided, that is - that you have cores/threads in abundance. I wouldn't be doing this on a quad-core, that's for sure!
I'll just come out and say it: this is anti-consumer.It's 12 threads and 8 cores. Four cores are not accepting an extra thread.I hope so, but I doubt it. I see why Intel is doing it (see above) even if I don't approve.
BIG.little has never taken off in the PC space because the power consumption difference between the two is negligible when you consider how much performance you're giving up at the top end for it. The little processor is seen as a waste of transistors when it could run just one of the BIG cores at the appropriate clock to compensate.
I suspect operating system schedulers will just do the second threads last.
Still, the idea of defaulting to a mix of HT and non-HT cores is interesting and does seem to be the direction intel is moving in....
-_-_-_- <---higher peaks
_-_-_-_ <---lower peaks
_--_--_--_ <---high sustained peaks
__-__-__-__ <---lower sustained peaks, but could use that to peak higher briefly
I really hope we stick to 8/16 for sometime and see some really big leaps on the cores architecture.
The core count race sounds good for marketing until you realize that it's useless for 90% of your steam library.
I do encourage progressively bigger thread counts on the HEDT space though since in that kind of workload/usage it makes sense, but this conversation isn't about that market so it's irrelevant ;)
IMHO, this is just Intel doing more fine-grained binning. That's it, they're just trying to maximize resources.
8/12 = 9 Core
with 4 threads capable of 100% load, and 8 threads limited to 62.5% when CPU is fullly loaded.
that could be very promising for DX11 titles that use only 1 thread for the DX11 or some other similar scenario.
8/16 = 10 Core
It's better to have 12 cores 24 threads loaded at 50%, than to have 6 cores 12 threads loaded to 100%, thus constant risk of micro-stuttering.
But if we had the ability to choose, then a new architecture would win every day for the vast majority of games.
What are the chances of a game being bottle-necked by 12 threads vs low frequency/IPC? ( Both are unlikely scenarios but we're talking paper performance now)
The market is starving for a leap in IPC.
In recent years the average pc has gotten a 100% or even 200% boost in core counts.
When was the last time we saw a consistent two digit % in clock for clock performance? The answer sums it.