CPU Architect from Intel does an AMA on Reddit. Few interesting excerpts.

[ShintaiDK]

Well, how many phones is sold using Medfield?

You wondered why Medfield is not selling at all when Anand shows you browser graphs telling its very fast?

Is the rest of the worlds specialist stupid?

Who says Medfield aint selling?

 

[ShintaiDK]

Not forgetting you are competing with Samsung who make 500m smartphones who will never buy intel.

Thats simply wrong. Samsungs smartphone division uses what they want. You would find that alot of Samsungs smartphones dont use Samsung CPUs.

 

[Haserath]

Haswell was supposed to be 7x graphics performance over Sandy, wasn't it? I wonder where that went.

At this point it's looking to be lucky to get half that.

And I was really hoping for some IGP gaming with Haswell...

 

[ShintaiDK]

Haswell was supposed to be 7x graphics performance over Sandy, wasn't it? I wonder where that went.

At this point it's looking to be lucky to get half that.

And I was really hoping for some IGP gaming with Haswell...

Never seen or heard that claim anywhere before you posted it. Got anything to back that up? Or was it just made up?

 

[Keysplayr]

The gen after Haswell is supposed to be a bigger leap in Graphics performance. Haswell is only a small improvement over Ivy, according to this architect.

 

[ShintaiDK]

The gen after Haswell is supposed to be a bigger leap in Graphics performance. Haswell is only a small improvement over Ivy, according to this architect.

Maybe better shown as a generation list:

 

[Charles Kozierok]

Never seen or heard that claim anywhere before you posted it. Got anything to back that up? Or was it just made up?

The guy who did the AMA responded to several questions about graphics performance by saying "wait for Broadwell" -- but without any details.

 

[ShintaiDK]

The guy who did the AMA responded to several questions about graphics performance by saying "wait for Broadwell" -- but without any details.

How is that related to this?

Haswell was supposed to be 7x graphics performance over Sandy, wasn't it? I wonder where that went.

At this point it's looking to be lucky to get half that.

And I was really hoping for some IGP gaming with Haswell...

 

[AtenRa]

Haswell over Ivy with GT3 has a lot o performance gain but with a huge die size and higher power consumption. Broadwell will be a 14nm so they will have more room to gain more performance.

As for the ARM and mobile, problem for Intel is that by 2015, ARM manufactures will have 20nm or even 14nm finfets and although Intel may have a higher performance ATOM CPU core, their iGPUs will still be one or two generations behind the competition.

I would keep a close eye to NV and AMD for their SoCs than Intel at that time.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Haswell over Ivy with GT3 has a lot o performance gain but with a huge die size and higher power consumption. Broadwell will be a 14nm so they will have more room to gain more performance.

It wont be huge. If you think GT3 is huge, what is Trinity and FX then? Gigantic?

As for the ARM and mobile, problem for Intel is that by 2015, ARM manufactures will have 20nm or even 14nm finfets and although Intel may have a higher performance ATOM CPU core, their iGPUs will still be one or two generations behind the competition.

I would keep a close eye to NV and AMD for their SoCs than Intel at that time.

They will have 20nm A53/A57 vs 14nm Airmont. And you gonna be lucky if your AMD is still alive at that timeframe.

 

[AtenRa]

It wont be huge. If you think GT3 is huge, what is Trinity and FX then? Gigantic?

Huge in comparison to Ivys iGPU. It has more than double the EUs(40 vs 16) at the same 22nm. The iGPU would be almost the same(or bigger) size as the CPU cores (Like Trinity).

They will have 20nm A53/A57 vs 14nm Airmont. And you gonna be lucky if your AMD is still alive at that timeframe.

They will have 14XM FinFets at GloFo and AMD will be better than ever before with a huge APU/iGPU lead in x86 SoCs.

 

[dguy6789]

Krait based on A9 and it not in the league of A15.
Samsung has a straigt A9 quadcore design and competes "very favorably with the very new Krait". Krait is overhyped for a 28nm SoC.

Krait is an A15 competitor. It mops the floor with A9. Not to mention that from all of the current benchmarks out there, while A15 has a minor performance lead over Krait, Krait has a massive, massive, massive performance per watt advantage over A15.

 

[Charles Kozierok]

How is that related to this?

Haserath seemed to be reacting to the AMA guy, who was downplaying graphics improvements with Haswell compared to Broadwell.

 

[blackened23]

Haswell was supposed to be 7x graphics performance over Sandy, wasn't it? I wonder where that went.

At this point it's looking to be lucky to get half that.

And I was really hoping for some IGP gaming with Haswell...

I also have never heard this claim. Haswell is reported to have 3x iGPU performance over the HD4000, which is pretty impressive IMO. On top of this, Haswell will be much more efficient than ever the IB.

Anyway, IGPs have never been tailored for gaming, ever, so if you're expecting discrete level performance you will be disappointed. The IGP is fine for what most users are using it for..

 

[ShintaiDK]

Huge in comparison to Ivys iGPU. It has more than double the EUs(40 vs 16) at the same 22nm. The iGPU would be almost the same(or bigger) size as the CPU cores (Like Trinity).



They will have 14XM FinFets at GloFo and AMD will be better than ever before with a huge APU/iGPU lead in x86 SoCs.

You sure know how to make a joke.

 

[AtenRa]

You sure know how to make a joke.

The big laugh will start with Temash in x86 SoCs, and wait three months for NVs Tegra 4 to be released. Intel better spend another Billion in R&D for iGPUs because in 2014-15 they will be for a big surprise as things are going now.

 

[Arachnotronic]

Intel claimed it was Haswell that was supposed to be the big guns in GPU.

Haswell will be twice as fast in its GT3 incarnation over Ivy Bridge. The implication is that the company will keep really hammering away there. What's your point?

Dominate the mobile market in 2015? LOL

You do know that it was only just recently that TI was the #1 apps processor vendor, right?

They cant make a decent GPU but apparently they can predict the future.

If you read the entire Q&A (which I did), the employee notes that graphics only really became a focus in 2010. Look at the improvement from Westmere's on-package GPU to Ivy Bridge's GPU today. Haswell will be a huge jump as well.

Let me guess...you're one of those guys that just hates Intel because it's cool to do so. Maybe I'm the only one who appreciates what they're doing for the industry *shrug*

 

[Arachnotronic]

They will have 14XM FinFets at GloFo and AMD will be better than ever before with a huge APU/iGPU lead in x86 SoCs.

Could you kindly tell me where I can buy a product based on GloFo's 28nm process? Or how about the 20nm process?

I will leave this here to illustrate the sheer absurdity of GloFo's claims:
http://www.behardware.com/medias/photos_news/00/27/IMG0027366.gif

Also, let's not forget this quote from the CFO of AMD

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/other/...s_Technologies_for_Longer_Period_of_Time.html

“It is getting tougher and tougher to get to new nodes. 28nm might be with us a little longer than people [think]. [It will be a while] before they jump into 20nm node or 16nm or 14nm,” said Devinder Kumar, the corporate controller and the interim chief financial officer, at Raymond James IT supply chain conference.

 

[Arachnotronic]

The gen after Haswell is supposed to be a bigger leap in Graphics performance. Haswell is only a small improvement over Ivy, according to this architect.

Haswell is the same architecture as in Ivy Bridge, but with just many more units. I watched the IDF demo of Haswell's performance v.s. Ivy Bridge -- the delta is INSANE. So while Haswell's IGP will be much faster than what we've seen in Ivy Bridge (especially the versions with 128MB of DDR3 on package), I'm assuming the architect was talking about fundamental architectural improvements and not just adding more units.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Haswell is the same architecture as in Ivy Bridge, but with just many more units. I watched the IDF demo of Haswell's performance v.s. Ivy Bridge -- the delta is INSANE. So while Haswell's IGP will be much faster than what we've seen in Ivy Bridge (especially the versions with 128MB of DDR3 on package), I'm assuming the architect was talking about fundamental architectural improvements and not just adding more units.

There aint any versions with 128MB of DDR3 on package. Also only the GT3 got "insanely more units".

It will first be with Skylake in 2015 and DDR4 we gonna see the next real IGP jump. Broadwell might have the GPU power, but the bandwidth needed will be with DDR4.

 

[Exophase]

Krait is an A15 competitor. It mops the floor with A9. Not to mention that from all of the current benchmarks out there, while A15 has a minor performance lead over Krait, Krait has a massive, massive, massive performance per watt advantage over A15.

What are you looking at when drawing that conclusion?

Chromebook is not a good choice for a variety of reasons, for instance being paired with high frequency DDR3L instead of more moderately clocked LPDDR2. You can look at some articles on THG to get an idea of how much power this can use. The OS is also not really tuned the same way, and there are probably other hardware decisions that impact this, including those favoring price over efficiency.

Besides, you can't really extrapolate perf/W by going from higher performance to lower performance because the curves are very non-linear. You should lower the clock of the higher performing part until you normalize performance then compare power consumption.

Personally I think right now the best perf/W ARM part is Apple's Swift.

 

[Fjodor2001]

Haswell is reported to have 3x iGPU performance over the HD4000

Are you talking about GT3? Any source indicating that it will be 3x the HD4000 performance?

On top of this, Haswell will be much more efficient than ever the IB.

In what regard, and by how much?

 

[Fjodor2001]

It will first be with Skylake in 2015 and DDR4 we gonna see the next real IGP jump. Broadwell might have the GPU power, but the bandwidth needed will be with DDR4.

What if they add fast on-die RAM dedicated to the iGPU in Broadwell?

 

[ShintaiDK]

What if they add fast on-die RAM dedicated to the iGPU in Broadwell?

What if they didnt?

 

[Arachnotronic]

There aint any versions with 128MB of DDR3 on package. Also only the GT3 got "insanely more units".

According to Anandtech and Semiaccurate (although this source is not that credible), there will be a version of Haswell with on-package DDR3. Do you have any sources to the contrary? It'd be much appreciated!