[GTALUG] Win 11 requirements may be windfall for cheapskate Linux users

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Dave Collier-Brown via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

| However, recent AMD architecture changes have caused a large step
| upwards in number of hardware threads: my production Intels have either
| 10 or 18, and my two test AMDs have 512 and 1024. And they draw less
| current.

AMD's Thread-Ripper and Epyc have a lot of cores.  (I don't know how
to value hyperthreads, but Intel and AMD kind of match.)

How many processor sockets do your Intel and AMD systems have?  I'd
guess that the Intel has fewer sockets than the AMD, but it might not
be so.

Each socket generates a lot of heat.  Perhaps 200+w in servers.

Each socket might provide additional memory bandwidth.

As time has passed since Haswell, density of chips has gone up. My
i7-4770 has "22 nm lithography".  Current chips from AMD use TSMC's
7nm process which might be five times as dense as the Intel's 22nm.

Reasoning: not everything scales; Intel 10nm is about like TSMC 7nm;
(22/10) ^ 2 isn't far off 5.

So current processors ought to be five times as powerful in some way.
That way is mostly core count.  I imagine lots of cleverness improves
things too, but the Haswell generation was already fairly clever.

The i7-4770 has 4 cores and each had 2 hyperthreads.
Scale-by-5 and you get 20 cores.

Threadripper 3990x has 64 cores but it is way more expensive and
throws of a lot more heat (84w vs 280w).

Perhaps a better comparison would be with Ryzen 7 5700G.  Like the i7,
it has an integrated GPU.  It is rated at 65w.  It has 8 cores,
similar clock frequencies ("max boost clock" is higher), better
instructions/clock (IPC), better iGPU.  Currently the price is roughly
twice what the i7 would have cost (we live in strange times).

Xeon prices have historically been very high.  AMD's server parts have
cut like a knife through that market.

Summary: a Haswell system's book value has amortized down to almost
nothing and yet it still works well for most desktop users.  Why
upgrade?  Perhaps lots of little things:
- NVMe support
- USB improvements since USB 3.0
- DDR4 instead of DDR3
- Win 11 likes newer systems
- a few security things that users likely don't understand
- AVX 512
- PCI 4
- improvements in gaming performance -- every little bit counts

(You can get Dell XPS desktops with 10th and 11th gen Intel Core
processors quite cheaply off of Kijiji at the moment.  People bought
them for the video card, ripped that out, and are selling the rest of
the system.  If I actually needed a new desktop right now, that's what
I might buy.)

| This doesn't have as much effect on small machines, but it does greatly
| improve price-performance. Expect to see a step-function upwards in
| performance and some price improvements as the bottleneck shifts away
| from chip price toward capacity per watt.

Yeah.  Desktops are not improved much; big server systems much more so.

I keep expecting killer ARM servers.  Very slow to arrive.

But then I (and perhaps you) thought Sun's Niagara was a killer system
too.