Thursday, January 21st 2021
"Nehalem" Lead Architect Rejoins Intel to Work on New High-Performance Architecture
The original "Nehalem" CPU microarchitecture from 2008 was pivotal to Intel, as it laid the foundation for Intel's mainline server and client x86 processors for the following 12-odd years. Glenn Hinton, the lead architect behind "Nehalem," announced that he is rejoining Intel after 3 years of retirement, to work on a new high-performance CPU project. Hinton states that his decision to rejoin Intel out of his retirement was influenced by Pat Gelsinger joining the company as its new CEO. Jim Keller, a CPU architecture lead behind several commercially-successful architectures, recently left Intel after a brief stint leading an undisclosed CPU core project. Keller later took up the mantle of CEO at hardware start-up Tenstorrent.
Pat Gelsinger leading Intel is expected to have a big impact on its return to technological leadership in its core businesses, as highlighted in Gelsinger's recent comments on the need for Intel to be better than Apple (which he referred to as "that lifestyle company") at making CPUs, in reference to Apple's new M1 chip taking the ultraportable notebook industry by storm. The other front Intel faces stiff competition from, is AMD, which has achieved IPC parity with Intel, and is beating it on energy-efficiency, taking advantage of the 7 nm silicon fabrication process.
Sources:
bizude (Reddit), Dylan Martin (Twitter)
Pat Gelsinger leading Intel is expected to have a big impact on its return to technological leadership in its core businesses, as highlighted in Gelsinger's recent comments on the need for Intel to be better than Apple (which he referred to as "that lifestyle company") at making CPUs, in reference to Apple's new M1 chip taking the ultraportable notebook industry by storm. The other front Intel faces stiff competition from, is AMD, which has achieved IPC parity with Intel, and is beating it on energy-efficiency, taking advantage of the 7 nm silicon fabrication process.
46 Comments on "Nehalem" Lead Architect Rejoins Intel to Work on New High-Performance Architecture
Just buy HDET and be quiet. For 10 years people like you have been mewling about the integrated graphcis like its some massive boat anchor.
PS
Also, almost forget, you may encounter troubles with driver support much earlier with IGPU.
reject it all you want, but DIY market is very small segment of Intel CPU business, in fact AMD is the one that Unable to integrate a iGPU on non G series chip that's why they having hard time getting to SI despite having performance advantages, in sense AMD only able to put 8 core with Vega at maximum, while losing PCiE 4.0 despite having node advantages while Intel able to put 10 core + iGPU which is a big selling point for SI
As for the other "stealing RAM bandwidth" comment when it's not connected to a video output...lmao
As to space, it does take up a quantifiable amount of space, but not any more than the SA does on desktop. Look at Tiger Lake if you want to see what "takes up space" looks like. As to the why, like I said, the ringbus on the 10900K vs the 9900K speaks for itself. Ringbus is considerably faster and lower latency than IF, but it doesn't scale nearly as well, which is why Intel uses two different interconnects for its mainstream and server/HEDT. IF is much more similar to the mesh bus that Intel has on its HCC/XCC parts. IF suffers on latency, so AMD [rather successfully] compensates with massive L3 on its desktop CPUs.
Mesh and IF would be even closer in performance if AMD didn't rely on chiplets.
- A massive overhaul of the vector engine
- One additional execution port
- Significantly larger OoO window, better branch prediction and uop cache.
- Significantly higher int MUL/DIV performance (Sunny Cove)
- Significantly higher memory address calculation (Sunny Cove)
I certanily think Intel could have brought more, but there have been major changes since Nehalem. Sandy Bridge and Ice Lake(Sunny Cove) are the biggest improvements relatively speaking. Both Skylake-X and Ice Lake featured major cache overhauls. Nearly all of Intel's current problems are tied to their manufacturing problems. Ice Lake has been ready for years, and Sapphire Rapids is complete with just the final touches left. Both of these are good architectural improvements, and we could have gotten them two years earlier if their 10nm project hadn't derailed this badly. Their manufacturing department and the corresponding management must wake up.
Their architectural department is not the problem.
Honestly I doubt this personnel change is going to change anything, and if it does, it will take at least five years before we see the results. This is probably just about finding a good person to lead until they find a successor, don't read too much into these things. Good engineering makes good products, not "rockstars".
[USER=150226]efikkan[/USER]
Every year we see new roadmaps and it's either server or mobile CPUs, or abandoned for next gen solution.How time need to go on market this better products which will designed from mister "Nehalem"? 5-6 years looks at minimum to implement. 2026-2027 2nm or below with the very last lithography ever. So much work and spent money for one last series traditional kind CPU's? Has no out of labs experience with other kinds manufacturing for organic computers or with computers on the single atomic level controls.
Good luck to him and hopefully he'll do what most hope for Intel's future.
[USER=82332]theoneandonlymrk[/USER]
web.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/100217.htmlpatents.justia.com/inventor/glenn-j-hinton
He is very capable, but if he start something from scratch, we need to wait at least 5 years.
I'm not sure what you think a Coffee Lake or Comet Lake die actually looks like. It occupies less than 1/3 the space under the heatspreader and it's anything but square, but that doesn't mean you can just add shit to the silicon. You can't just tack on more L3 or L4 cache - that's not how layout works, not on Intel and not on AMD.
And obviously, the power draw and the interconnect are pretty good reasons already why it won't/can't be done just because it looks possible. Comet Lake weighed down the bus to the point where Zen 3 is actually lower core-core latency.
There are only two dies in Comet Lake. A 6-core die that's more or less a carryover, and a 10-core die. Making a new die that won't ever sell outside of a small subset of "gamers" is in no way profitable, especially since that 10C die already probably is less useful to Intel's business than the 6C.
www.anandtech.com/show/15405/intel-cuts-xeon-prices
There were also some 6-core plans for Kaby Lake back in the days, but those were probably scrapped early on.
Lynnfield was a quad core 45 nm CPU with a die size of 296 mm2 (no iGPU). Skylake was a quad core 14 nm CPU with a die size of 122 mm2 (with an iGPU). There was basically no price difference between those CPUs. We were paying the same amount of money for quad cores for about 8 years (and way more if we wanted to overclock them).
An octa core Coffee Lake CPU had a die size of 174 mm2, but the cheapest model was way over 300 $. Rocket Lake should be very similar to this. 14 nm is probably the most mature process in history, the yields they are getting on these small dies must be crazy high. But the only thing that matters is performance relative to the competition. That is the main factor on which prices are based.
AMD did a similar thing with Zen 3. They are the fastest CPUs on the market, which is why they are much more expensive than Zen 2 (even almost twice as much, considering the price reduction of older models).
EDIT.
The i7-8700 (6C/12T) was 303 $. The i7-10600 is bascially the exact same CPU, two years later at 213 $. And the i7-10400F also uses the same die, at just 157 $. Same process, same die size, half the price.
The die size might even be higher, if it uses an 8- or 10-core die with some cores disabled, I cannot find any info on that.
The i7-10400F is an insanely good CPU for 60 Hz gaming (and not terrible at 120 Hz either). One of the best ever. Pair it with a cheap Z board and DDR4-3200 and you are golden.