Intel Core i7 "Rocket Lake" Chips to be 8-core/12-thread?

[Gungar]

Only 16 thread maximum is very bad for the user.
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.

between a 8 cores that has 30% IPC more per core vs a 16 cores. The choice is VERY quickly made : better cores>>>>more cores, it's a no brainer.

 

[Tomgang]

If this is true. What are Intel thinking.

Still 14nm, 8 core and 12 threads, going back to max 8 cores from 10 while amd has 16 cores.

If this continues like this. I am just about to lose fate in Intel. Don't be surprised if my next pc will be powered by Zen 3.

 

[ARF]

If this is true. What are Intel thinking.

Still 14nm, 8 core and 12 threads, going back to max 8 cores from 10 while amd has 16 cores.

If this continues like this. I am just about to lose fate in Intel. Don't be surprised if my next pc will be powered by Zen 3.

Intel doesn't want its CPUs to be judged just on benchmarks, but also broader benefits

Intel doesn't want its CPUs to be judged just on benchmarks, but also broader benefits

Tiger Lake is still on target, too, CEO assures us

www.techradar.com

Intel: don't worry about CPU benchmarks because of coronavirus
In order words: AMD is kicking our ass, so (please) don't look at benchmarks.

Intel: don't worry about CPU benchmarks because of coronavirus

In order words: AMD is kicking our ass, so (please) don't look at benchmarks.

www.tweaktown.com

 

[efikkan]

Your Windows will feel better with as many as possible physical cores because it offloads the constant switching of processes over less cores.
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.

That's only true providing that the workload scales "perfectly" that way, which most non-server workloads do not.
E.g. for gaming, all the cores in the world will not help you if you don't have cores which are fast enough, and many slow cores will certainly stutter more than fewer faster cores.

between a 8 cores that has 30% IPC more per core vs a 16 cores. The choice is VERY quickly made : better cores>>>>more cores, it's a no brainer.

Yeah, with a few exceptions, faster cores is always preferred. Faster cores will give you more performance in nearly all applications, and a more responsive machine. More cores will help certain applications.

 

[ARF]

That's only true providing that the workload scales "perfectly" that way, which most non-server workloads do not.
E.g. for gaming, all the cores in the world will not help you if you don't have cores which are fast enough, and many slow cores will certainly stutter more than fewer faster cores.


Yeah, with a few exceptions, faster cores is always preferred. Faster cores will give you more performance in nearly all applications, and a more responsive machine. More cores will help certain applications.

By "workload" you mean a single application that occupies all the threads.
I meant all the running apps, processes, threads and handles to be distributed evenly between the cores, without competing for resources:

 

[Ashtr1x]

Again DMI3.0 ? I don't want to believe this, it's utter nonsense to have their final RKL chip on another DMI3.0 bus AGAIN. B550 has a damn 4.0 link from CPU just like Z490 and the latter is too expensive because of gaming performance that Intel has right now over AMD for 1080P and 1440P to an extent. And perhaps OC and high speed DDR4. But with X570 AMD has Chipset 4.0 link. With Z590 again old DMI is pathetic. If that's true then investing in 14nm power hungry POS like this is like burning your wallet. I really wish AMD Ryzen 4000 to beat Intel in gaming and stronger IMC too so that many can buy and get 4.0 full chipset and maximum I/O, hopefully a fanless chipset X670 is in works too.

Alder Lake having Big-Little garbage in a Desktop and this is having some wierd abominated design like HT disabled it's outright garbage.

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

This looks like there are 4 cores with HT and 4 cores without HT, (8)+4. It could mean a great many things. Hyper-threading is notoriously ineffecient when it comes to power consumption and hardware-disabling the HT on could be a good way of keeping power down.

Yeh for Intel, it's not sounding good if they have to do this to get near renioure's efficiency, not good for 10nm either if the big cores are 14nm still.


O oh, so now Intel is innovating by bringing back the quad just now with a mobile soc glued on top for free

Great.

 

[Caring1]

between a 8 cores that has 30% IPC more per core vs a 16 cores. The choice is VERY quickly made : better cores>>>>more cores, it's a no brainer.

Yes, more cores wins.
Because 8 cores with a 30% better IPC will never equal or better a 16 core. No brainer really.

 

[InVasMani]

I can see them doing alright if they are priced reasonably enough relative to what AMD has to offer. I'm certainly not going to even consider paying more for a less feature packed platform and CPU pairing though that runs less efficiently and louder on top of it. Price per dollar will matter here for certain. I don't see it outweighing AMD's next refresh on Ryzen though in any case. I just don't see that happening with Intel refreshing 14nm yet again even if they do manage to pair it with their crippled 10nm and some how squeeze a bit more performance for dollar. I mean Intel manages to surprise me in the meanwhile fine, but I'll be waiting on Zen 3 personally.

 

[watzupken]

That’s the Intel we know that will find all possible ways to gimp products in order to segregate it to a very granular level. I wonder how much will they charge for that extra 4 threads.

between a 8 cores that has 30% IPC more per core vs a 16 cores. The choice is VERY quickly made : better cores>>>>more cores, it's a no brainer.

That depends on the workload. It’s true that faster cores is better. But in workload that favours more cores, an 8 core chip is unlikely to be better than 12 or 16 cores. Moreover, this should be compared against Zen 3, and not Zen 2. So the IPC uplift may not be enough to fend off AMD’s Zen 3 if you consider that Zen 2 is already generally faster than Comet Lake clock for cook.

 

[R0H1T]

Probably a left pinky, having said that with the pandemic (human) lives are cheap so who knows!

between a 8 cores that has 30% IPC more per core vs a 16 cores. The choice is VERY quickly made : better cores>>>>more cores, it's a no brainer.

30% more IPC as compared to what? And no as others have said more cores is better unless you're just into measuring IPC!

 

[watzupken]

30% more IPC as compared to what? And no as others have said more cores is better unless you're just into measuring IPC!

I believe 30% IPC improvement over the existing Skylake architecture.

 

[efikkan]

Interestingly, Alder Lake support is now added to GCC. This support may be preliminary, but for now it lacks AVX512 among many other features.
Rocket Lake is not a specific target, so I assume it will share the ISA level with either icelake-client or tigerlake.

That depends on the workload. It’s true that faster cores is better. But in workload that favours more cores, an 8 core chip is unlikely to be better than 12 or 16 cores.

Yes, it's highly workload dependent. Near perfect scalability on 16 cores and beyond is mostly limited to larger "batch jobs", like encoding, Blender rendering etc. The worst scalability is achieved in heavily synchronized and latency sensitive applications like games, and we will not see good scalability here because of the overhead of synchronizing too many threads. And then we have applications which are somewhere in the middle, like Photoshop and Premiere, which benefits from more cores up to a point, but benefits even more from faster cores. So the right choice comes down to what the computer will be used for, but far more real world applications will benefit from faster cores than more cores.

 

[AusWolf]

I guess Intel realised that giving a little bit more with every generation gets boring quickly. So with the next generation, we're getting a little bit less.

 

[watzupken]

I guess Intel realised that giving a little bit more with every generation gets boring quickly. So with the next generation, we're getting a little bit less.

I don't think Intel have a choice here. Rocket Lake was never meant to be 14nm in the first place. Having to port it back to 14nm means something has got to give, and in this case, the number of CPU cores. Now with only 6 and 8 core chips which they need to segregate between i5, i7 and i9, and remain competitive vs AMD's lineup, they are forced to enable HT for these 3 series. However if they remove HT from i7, the performance hit may result in it being slower than i5. So they probably come up with a creative way to give the i7 an advantage over the i5, i.e. matching the threads, while still giving you 2 extra cores. But what I feel is that it kind of makes the i9 (8c/16t) chip a poor option considering that Intel may likely charge you another 100 bucks just to have that extra 4 threads.