Question Intel had a 7 GHz CPU years ago

[igor_kavinski]

https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/wir8ay

213 mm2 die size, 150 Watts, 50 pipeline stages all for one core at >7 GHz.

I'm getting a strong feeling of lust for this CPU. 150W ain't that much. Imagine what this CPU could have been if it had been developed further, with modern branch predictors and huge caches.

 

[aigomorla]

Damn. I didn't profit much from my affair with Mr. Intel Itanium. It was a fun ISA, but it left me with similar feelings to most of my ex-boyfriends - vague wistfulness, combined with irritation.

Still better then Mrs. Apple, who leaves you utterly dependant, and impossible to fix without her consent, not to mention she costs way more then she is worth as she used to be Mrs. Intel wearing heavy makeup.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Damn. I didn't profit much from my affair with Mr. Intel Itanium.

You worked for HP? What do you do exactly? Enterprise software developer? Or Enterprise systems developer?

Anyway, I have to ask you because you clearly have a grasp on these technical things. Could AVX-512 ever be used to accelerate games? Does any version of Excel use AVX-512 (Online or offline)? Does any open source spreadsheet (like Libre Office) use AVX-512?

Have you dabbled in OpenCL? I know Libre Office can accelerate some tasks with OpenCL but I think it's limited to AMD APUs and GPUs. There really doesn't seem to be much research or a benchmark sheet comparing the performance of different vendors' GPUs.

What's the most fun you've had in your job? The hardware specs and software used in that instance?

 

[SarahKerrigan]

You worked for HP? What do you do exactly? Enterprise software developer? Or Enterprise systems developer?

Anyway, I have to ask you because you clearly have a grasp on these technical things. Could AVX-512 ever be used to accelerate games? Does any version of Excel use AVX-512 (Online or offline)? Does any open source spreadsheet (like Libre Office) use AVX-512?

Have you dabbled in OpenCL? I know Libre Office can accelerate some tasks with OpenCL but I think it's limited to AMD APUs and GPUs. There really doesn't seem to be much research or a benchmark sheet comparing the performance of different vendors' GPUs.

What's the most fun you've had in your job? The hardware specs and software used in that instance?

I did not work for HP. I most definitely did work with their products, a lot, and at a very low level.

At the risk of veering off-topic - sure, there are things in games that have enough DLP to benefit from wide vectorization, though I'm skeptical of SIMD as something to throw silicon area at. From where I sit, "comfy SIMD" - ie, rich features like good mask and permute support, integer rotate, etc - are more important than wide SIMD, and the needs of technical compute differ enough from the needs of "normal" consumer and even enterprise compute that trying to target one SIMD ISA at both seems dubious. I'm not sure where the state is of support for it in Excel, etc.

As for OpenCL, I've touched it, mostly on Xilinx FPGAs, which had some weird limitations that made it seem not terribly useful as a "generic" target for existing OpenCL kernels. It's possible their support has improved since.

 

[igor_kavinski]

At the risk of veering off-topic

Don't worry about that. I'm the OP. I hereby permit you to veer as far as your heart desires!

Are you doing anything with GPU compute? Do you think Intel's Alchemist iGPU could be used to offload some hefty and useful calculations from the CPU? What are the possibilities and projected performance gains?

Would you be kind enough to accept me as your Padawan, Master?