Kaby Lake processors: bor-ing !
 

Some of the hardware sites have been testing Intel's new desktop Kaby Lake processors for about a month now and the verdict looks, to me, to be: yaaaawwwwwwnnnn !
Intel has delayed 10 nm Cannonlake until second half 2017 so this is going to be Intel's offering for quite a while.
The only things I saw when an I7-7700K was tested were:
(1) Slightly faster base clock speeds. Some over clockers said they could get to 5.0 GHz fairly easily.
(2) Slightly better energy & heat numbers ( especially measured per clock ).
(3) The on chip graphics engine was improved.

IMHO, this provides a big opening foe AMD's Zen processors, if they don't mess it up.

As a long-time AMD user who has been seriously planning to "go over to the Dark Side", I can only say, "Hope springs eternal." I would love to see AMD pull something better out of its hat.

kladner, looks like you'll get your wish. AMD's upcoming Ryzen CPUs look like they'll be very competitive with Intel's top end CPUs.

AMD run benchmarks:
[url]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsLHypC50kE[/url]

[QUOTE=lavalamp;449343]kladner, looks like you'll get your wish. AMD's upcomgin Ryzen CPUs look like they'll be very competitive with Intel's top end CPUs.[/QUOTE]Performance is all very well but ... will it be cheaper? And will it use less power for the same throughput?

[QUOTE=lavalamp;449343]kladner, looks like you'll get your wish. AMD's upcomgin Ryzen CPUs look like they'll be very competitive with Intel's top end CPUs.[/QUOTE]
I agree. The information released this week sounds very good.
I believe that their AVX will still be ~half the speed of Intel's, however, it seems that they are likely to provide us with 8 core cpus to match intel's 4 at the same price range. As long as they can max memory bandwidth we are fine.
More than anything competition is what Intel needs. They have been very stagnent lately.

[QUOTE=retina;449344]will it be cheaper?[/QUOTE]Probably, and Intel will cut prices in response, though AMD will still likely be cheaper due to lower market share.

[QUOTE=retina;449344]And will it use less power for the same throughput?[/QUOTE]Yes, watch the video.

[QUOTE=henryzz;449345]it seems that they are likely to provide us with 8 core cpus to match intel's 4 at the same price range.[/QUOTE]Not sure why you think this, the 6900K they were comparing the new Ryzen CPU with is also an 8 core.

[QUOTE=lavalamp;449346]Not sure why you think this, the 6900K they were comparing the new Ryzen CPU with is also an 8 core.[/QUOTE]
I have read several articles about it. Maybe I have got that confused. I think that is more that it is 8 and 4 cores released first that gives me that impression. We will see. AMD has often undercut on price like that.

[QUOTE=henryzz;449345]More than anything competition is what Intel needs. They have been very stagnent lately.[/QUOTE]

They've been pretty stagnant for sure. But I thought this was more to do with fundamental physics than lack of competition. I guess we'll find out?

They seemed to start stagnating around Sandy Bridge, which was on a 32nm process. The latest Skylake and upcoming Kaby Lake CPUs are on a 14nm process.

However it seems that each core has a very similar performance, but that higher end i7 chips moved to 6, 8 and 10 cores. High end Xeons now have up to 22 cores! Standard quad cores haven't really seen much improvement because the basic architecture is the same, the cores are just smaller.

[QUOTE=CRGreathouse;449369]They've been pretty stagnant for sure. But I thought this was more to do with fundamental physics than lack of competition. I guess we'll find out?[/QUOTE]

Thinking (very) long term...

With Microsoft working on an x86 emulator for ARM, does this stagnation leave an opening for the ARM architecture? How suitable would it be for the stuff we do?

One other wacky idea: could "WebAssembly" at some point in the future turn into some kind of actual architecture implemented in hardware?

[QUOTE=lavalamp;449343]kladner, looks like you'll get your wish. AMD's upcoming Ryzen CPUs look like they'll be very competitive with Intel's top end CPUs.

AMD run benchmarks:
[URL]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsLHypC50kE[/URL][/QUOTE]
Thanks for the link!