This is significant because as structure sizes become smaller, the restrictions on possible layouts (so called DRCs, design rule constraints) become ever stricter. For example, you can't just place wires wherever you want; you have to take into account the relationship to other wires. With stricter rules, the end result may be that the effective scaling achieved is worse than what the structure size suggests, because the rules force a lower density of transitors.

So what are Intel hiding? Are they far ahead of the competition in terms of DRCs and don't want others to know how much, or are they struggling (like apparently everybody else) and want to hide a less-than-ideal effective scaling? Obviously, your guess is as good as mine, but it's certainly fascinating to watch the competition as Moore's law is coming to an end.

I'm sure other companies like AMD can figure out the transistor count without consulting the Intel press release. If Intel isn't publishing a figure like total transistor count, it's for marketing purposes. All indicators point to the fact that Intel is struggling at the 14mm process.

I've been thinking about this lately, and between the jihad against lead (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_pest) and these machines storing the BIOS etc. in flash memory, I'm beginning to doubt it.

The 486 was produced in a 1um (1000nm) to 600nm process and runs on 5V+/-5% (4.75-5.25, a 250mV range), with an absolute maximum of 6.5V.

The 14nm Skylake has a core voltage of ~1V, tolerance of a few tens of mV, and an absolute maximum of 1.52V.

Electromigration will likely become a significant source of IC failures in the future.

Example: I recently built a Linux video transcoding machine to reencode H.264 BluRay movies to smaller H.264 files [1]. A $110 AMD FX-8300 is able to reencode an average BluRay movie around 47-50 fps, while you would need to spend more than twice that amount of money to match this performance with Intel (the performance of the FX-8300 at this tasks falls between a $200 Intel i5-4590 and a $250 Xeon E3-1231 v3).

[1] Using: avconv -i input.mkv -threads auto -s hd720 -c:v libx264 -c:a libmp3lame -sn -b:v 1400k -b:a 128k -ac 2 output.mkv

Power is not always the only cost. I work in an industry where you pay per core for software license fees far in excess of the cost of power. There, perf/core is what matters.

I would imagine the same is true for e.g. server response latency when that latency correlates to user experience and thus growth/popularity of your service. People might not notice a few ms, but 100ms vs 300ms is definitely visible.

I think the real value is new things like TSX/HLE.

(And if you say "thin client, distcc, big build farm", then you just need the latest CPUs in the build farm instead.)

Of course this is as much an argument for a real module system in C/C++ as anything else...

(And, I completely agree that TSX and other architectural stuff is totally awesome, too. Perhaps that'll drive adoption more than incremental perf, but I'm just arguing perf is still often really important.)

Through all this time though, I haven't noticed a massive overall performance boost in a long time. If all I wanted to do was browse the web and read email I'd probably still be using my Core 2 Duo MBP from forever ago. The speed boosts have been piecemeal, one generation improves one thing, the next something else. This is different from Ye Olden Days, I can remember upgrading from a 386 to a Pentium II to a Pentium 4 and each upgrade was so dramatic that it completely redefined what I could do with my computer. The last real performance jump I can remember was the Core Duo upgrade that brought real multicore.

I do kinda miss my beloved old SPARCstation though. Makes me wonder what computing looks like in the alternative dimension where SPARC or one of the other architectures had taken over the PC market like Intel ultimately did.

I think the biggest visible change recently though, at least as a software engineer, is the continuously lowering cost, increasing availability of, memory. I can literally store an entire project in memory and not have to worry about any network or disk bottleneck.

For example, my work machine has an i7, 8GB of RAM, and an SSD. I can cap IO and RAM, but I am yet to see the i7 max out, heck even over half the cores. I guess what I am saying is: Is CPU really a bottleneck most people encounter day to day anymore?

Not really. Per core CPUs have become slower and slower. It become about throughput and not raw per op speed a long time ago. Using that measure you'll want to install a Core Duo in your machine.

What you're seeing here is beginning of the end of Moore's Law. Dennard scaling is dead and that will limit performance going forward.

The implications are huge for the computer industry. As Bob Colwell liked to say - imagine if Moore's law ended in the year 2000. We'd never have smartphones.

I would assume he means "non-mobile". I.e. things not ARM.

Among other things, discrete GPUs blow integrated GPUs out of the water, and the time-to-obsolescence of a GPU isn't anywhere near that of a CPU. It also makes sense from a cooling perspective - it's a whole lot easier to cool two chips in separate areas than one larger chip, generally speaking.

Where it matters is mobile. Even if you have a dedicated graphics processor, it makes sense to have integrated and then to have it auto-switch as needed. This saves on electrical power, reduces heat, and may extend the life of your mobile devices (since heat is damaging).

Ultimately if your want to force-on dedicated 24/7 then normally you CAN, but integrated simply gives you more options if you wish to extend the battery life of your device significantly.

The desktop form factor is declining significantly in popularity in the mainstream market in favor of laptops and mobile devices. The reason is obvious: laptops and mobiles are portable, and the average user (and even many pro users) do not need that much power in their local device.

It's still very popular in the gamer and professional workstation market, and likely will be for a long time. It's just hard to cram the processing power that gamers, hard-core developers, CAD and simulation users, etc. need into something as small as a laptop without creating what's comically referred to as a "ball burner" or "weenie roaster." I'm sure there's a female equivalent expression but it's even less polite. :P

Intel has many-core options for these machines, but they tend to lag a little behind. If you have deeper pockets and really want power you can always put a high-end GPU in a server board with 2-4 Xeons and put it in a tower case. Now you have a data center node with a 4K monitor on it.

Gaming is a niche market mostly for younger ages (people with "game rigs" drops rapidly after a certain age) and most hard-core developers use laptops -- the laptops you see in each and every dev conference are their main boxes, with or without external monitors.

As for CAD and simulation that's too niche to even mention. Of course some people will always have a need for a more powerful form factor. But if CAD users are part of the counter-argument for "it's not dying", then it very much is.

http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C216/X9S...

http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C220/X10...

They didn't make such a class of boards in the '8' generation.

Not dead yet!

The reason why typical GPUS have high power consumption is because they are generally designed for the desktop market where they can.

But you can have low-power discrete GPUs also.

For that matter, there is no reason why you cannot have a low-power discrete GPU, and a high-power discrete GPU.

And again, it's a whole lot easier to dissipate heat being produced in multiple places than all in one hotspot.

And anyway, people who need more power know the difference between discrete and integrated chips.

I think this is about pushing the overall baseline experience of users up.

Intel has had a lot of problems shrinking the die size recently, so it must be cheaper to just give every processor a GPU that isn't used, than to produce several different dies.

I guess it's just because for most end user needs, the integrated GPU's are becoming powerful enough.

And also generally they come out a while after the equivalents with integrated graphics.

So let's see. Xeons are what I want now. Except for absurd prices. And that they aren't available. And that they don't overclock. And... And...

As I said, I wish there was something that was actually vaguely what I wanted (a desktop processor that's <=4 cores, and focused on single-core CPU performance). The Xeon isn't it.

Also:

> if you're concerned about tdp, you're probably not going to be overclocking anyways.

In a desktop overclocking is a large chunk of the reason why one would be concerned about TDP!

What do you think about i3-4370 ? It seems this processor has very good single-thread performance and is quite affordable as well.

It has the advantage of being very quiet and lower power consumption. I did briefly try an Nvidia card while getting 3 monitors working which was far too noisy (whiny).

Of course, it'll still be a rare and power hungry configuration, so it's not like I'll suddenly be using a Macbook, but it's a nice progression.

Please don't :). New iGPUs may be catching up to old dGPUs, but meanwhile new dGPUs are just skyrocketing in power far beyond them.

I made this chart to easily see relative performance of most common notebook GPUs:

http://alteredqualia.com/texts/notebooks/nvidia-gpus.png

Or if you are interested in both desktop and notebook GPUs relative performances:

http://alteredqualia.com/tools/gpus/

What Intel does is great for rising minimal specs you can expect in notebook graphics, but you can do much better than that, even cheap modern dGPUs wipe out the best iGPUs. You can extrapolate Skylake Iris Pro from Intel marketing claims vs older Iris Pros, it's going to be better but not Earth-shatteringly better.

And this gap is just going to get wider in 2016, with HBM2 and 16 nm node sizes finally coming to GPUs (both to Nvidia with Pascal and AMD with Arctic Islands).

So if you're at 1/4 peak performance, you're still running a smooth game albeit not quite at full detail.

If you're at 1/16 peak performance... things aren't looking too good by the time you get your game smooth.

If you are game developer / graphics programmer / game player / designer / photo or video editor / VR enthusiast / anybody who cares about graphics, I would advise to get at least GTX 960M (if you have budget or size constrains, this should get you roughly to PS4/Xbox One levels, so relatively safe for this gen), but preferably GTX 970M (best price/power and you can still get slim notebook).

GTX 970M will get you about average GPU performance overall, including desktops (these days I get ~50-percentile rank in 3dmark firestrike with my GTX 970M notebook, so average GPU in September 2015 is at least as fast or faster, at least for that cohort of people).

So? When did the idea behind developing games got to have the most eye-candy to take advantage of new dGPUs?

A decent CPU and adequate graphics is usually all I need in a laptop while traveling, but it would be nice to be able to plug in a more beefy GPU at home to play games and drive more monitors at higher resolutions.

I don't expect it to be cheap; but even if the chassis is a few hundred dollars, if you can reuse them for three generations of GPU and laptop, it's probably worth it.

http://images.anandtech.com/doci/9331/TB19_575px.png http://www.anandtech.com/show/9331/intel-announces-thunderbo...

even this GPU would make for a great value proposition in a midrange macbook pro

Additionally, Skylake brings DDR4 memory, Thunderbolt 3.0 (Thunderbolt over USB), and better performance/battery life. There's also possible wireless charging support, and the Skylake integrated GPU possibly has double the speed of the Haswell Iris chips.

- The ability to run external 5K monitors.

Since I usually keep a laptop for at least four years, it would be unwise for me to now buy a laptop that can't do both of those technologies which I really want to have.

Which USB devices do you use with your laptop?

Regarding 5k displays, currently I'm still not ready to buy even a 4k version, mostly because I'm waiting for higher frequencies (via G-Sync or FreeSync, both of which require a discrete card, and it's not at all clear if those will be supported in the next MBP). 5k monitors currently cost 4 times as much as 4k. Really hard to justify buying one anytime soon.

If Apple does not release Skylake MBP in October, I would recommend buying the current one, rather than suffering the horrible resolution of MBA for another 6 months.

Of course it also allows real DRM, where a remote server can verify you're running unmodified code.

But how does the key management work?

My personal interest is the continuing quest for a machine strong enough to develop, but not warm my hands at all. Macbooks are insanely hot (how can Apple even pretend to be about quality with those designs??), X250 ThinkPads is "alright" if I aggressively throttle the processor. Seems like the perf improvements are effectively dead so maybe we'll see cool laptops. Though OEMs seem to screw up as much as possible so who knows...

I think thats's the scariest part. 16 years ago people strongly oppposed the processor serial number in the P3( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10106870 ), something that seems almost harmless compared to what (anti-user) "security" features are in today's hardware. It's not only DRM, but no doubt other ways of taking control away from the user will be found for it.

With performance not being all that much better, I'm personally going to stay on older, "more free" hardware for a while.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/09/intel-announces-a-bee...

Can someone enlighten me? What does the chipset and CPU have to do with the power supply method? I'm assuming they're not including an RF power antenna on-die, so is this just code for "we got peak power consumption below the threshold practical with today's wireless power transmission devices"?

Am I missing something?

That's a long way to catch up with ARM SOC, right?