[GTALUG] processor progress sure has slowed down

D. Hugh Redelmeier hugh at mimosa.com
Fri Jan 6 20:31:57 EST 2017


I got an ad from NCIX for systems with Intel's new Kaby Lake processors.  
Here's the headline:

	UP TO
	[LARGER FONT] 28% BETTER PERFORMANCE* [/LARGER FONT]
	versus a 3-year-old-desktop

The footnote shows that a i7-7700K processor system was being compared 
with a i7-4770K.  Some of the improvement would be in DDR4 vs DDR3 and so 
on.  OS and video card were the same.  The power requirement of the CPU 
went up slightly.

You'd normally expect a 7xxx processor to be compared with a 6xxx 
procecessor, but they've reached back an extra two generations to show 
even a modest 28% improvement.

There are useful features added to the processors since the Haswell 
generation.  Like a working TSX-NI: Haswell had it, with bugs, so Intel 
suppressed it with a microcode update.  Not completely fair since the K 
models never had it.

Intel has put a lot of extra transistors into on-chip video, something 
useful at least sometimes.  Perhaps this shows where Intel feels it needs 
to compete -- AMD has a better on-chip GPU but an uncompetitive CPU.  One 
can only hope that AMD's Zen/Ryzen lives up to AMD's talk.


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