If you watch a video while writing a document in word, that's trivially parrallelizable.
That's a great point. At any point in time there are already dozens of processes running, of which only a fraction are tied to a GUI. Even GUI apps are currently resorting to launching multiple processes. For example, Firefox announced last year their new site isolation security architecture where they load each site as an independent process.
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/05/introducing-firefox-new-si...
Also, here's a link to a recent HN discussion on Firefox's recent announcement.
https://security.googleblog.com/2018/07/mitigating-spectre-w...
(Or it should - browsers are not always very good about this but the tools are there, they just don’t want to pay licensing fees to use them.)
I always cringe a bit when people insist they need 6 cores “so they can have discord and Spotify open while they game”. People don’t generally have a very good intuitive sense of just how little cpu time it takes to run those (a lot of times the “at the desktop” measurements are not even with the processor clocked up, it’s running in the lowest active power state), and there is almost always a little cpu headroom due to non-perfect game scaling. Context switching is cheap, your OS is running thousands of threads at any given time, but people don’t have a good intuitive sense of the overhead of context switching either.
Playing a video and writing a document is something that can be trivially done on a core2duo era processor, or the modern equivalent of a low-end dual-core nuc with e-cores (atom cores) like a J4005. You don’t even need performance cores for that.
The tradeoff Intel is making is that some tasks need performance cores because they can’t really be parallelized all that well, and embarrassingly parallel stuff is more efficient to implement with lots of smaller cores. In principle this is also more power efficient, like big.LITTLE in phones, but Intel actually seems to have fairly poor power scaling - they are space efficient but not all that power efficient. This is also partially due to the fact that the little cores share a core voltage with the big cores - the big cores need higher voltage to clock up and that kills efficiency on the little cores. At that point you may as well clock the little cores up too since they have to share the voltage anyway, and that’s an inefficient way to run them.
As Agner Fog mentions, the AVX-512 is also present in silicon yet disabled, which hugely blows up core size for almost no benefit (it’s dark silicon which does have some minor thermal benefits). Alder Lake is in many ways not that well-designed at a high level, but it is magnificently fast on those performance cores and the e-cores would be very nice if they weren’t conjoined awkwardly to the p-cores. Gracemont-based server and atom chips are going to be nifty when they finally arrive.
Apple is still way ahead with Icestorm though - those cores are absolutely absurdly tiny for the performance they give. They are 0.5mm2 each iirc, even considering the node shrink that is teeny-tiny, they are half as many transistors as a Zen3 core and almost the same performance (meaning much higher IPC) or something along those lines. Firestorm is neat but Icestorm didn’t get nearly the attention and it is really insanely fast for how few transistors it uses.
Playing a video and editing a document, sure. But change that to being on a video call and having a few moderately intensive web apps open (say Gmail, Google Docs and some kind of project management software) and your average dual core processor from a few years ago is going to start to struggle.
I do ALL my work on a t25 which is just about 5 years old now. This includes daily calls with dozens of video participants (ms teams and WebEx mostly) while I have chrome and Firefox open with multiple tabs including outlook and Gmail and slack, couple of MS words, couple of PowerPoints, Visio, etc. That's a dual core processor from more than couple of years ago and it's nowhere near capacity with that workload.
It does have lots of ram and Ethernet to residential Fibe 1gbps. But CPU just hasn't been an issue and I plan to work on this another 5 years
The real question is, are you one of the video participants too? Or are you just watching others but not sending any video of your own?
Heck I've run full PeopleSoft multi vm setups on my ancient t420 back in the day. A little CPU really goes a longer way than people realize.
I’m just using Nehalem and Conroe as a touchstone that people understand in terms of cpu performance. That is what you get in general cpu performance, but it’s also got better media support and crypto acceleration and so on, so it’s more usable today. Actually a closer look at the numbers puts it just below Sandy Bridge i5 actually.
AMD cpu users (non-apu) and RX 6500/6400 owners obviously need to look elsewhere however. NVIDIA’s 1030 chips are ancient pascal based crap but AMD dropping encoder support on a chip designed during the pandemic era of work-from-home is a bit tone-deaf.
(Yes, 6500 and 6400 were designed during the pandemic, the architecture took longer to develop but 6500 wasn’t the lead ship in its architecture, and taping out a new chip configuration takes much less time than designing a whole architecture from scratch… AMD definitely knew it would be used as a desktop chip too. It was a deliberate space-saving move in the face of their wafer shortages, not something they got blindsided by.)
My 2015 MacBook Pro with Broadwell i5 would indeed work "fine" for videoconferencing (in my case Google Meet), but it would also use most of a CPU core to do it. Which is fine if that's all you're doing. But if I wanted to share my screen and work on something else while doing so then it could quite quickly get to the point where I needed to start shutting down other programs, and even then it could cause lag when typing in less well-implemented apps.
My new MacBook with M1 Pro cpu it still uses most of a cpu core for videoconferencing, but it's a single E core and I have 9 others cores. Videoconferencing now makes zero difference to system responsiveness.
Most people won't need 8 cores, but I reckon the average office worker in 2022 would benefit from 4.
It browses the web perfectly fine, plays YouTube, and runs VS code, all that the same time. The only website I've notice it struggles on is Google maps, but Google maps has a 2D mode than runs great.
It did actually surprise me how well it runs and now I've been using it as my main machine for a few weeks.
I mean, they're not wrong. I have Discord sitting open at the login screen and it's burning 10% of a core. Run a few Electron apps and your core2duo suddenly becomes a core1uno.
> Playing a video and writing a document
Using what? VLC + notepad, or Chrome + YouTube + Google Docs? There's a huge difference.
Discord gets a core, Spotify gets a core, Chrome with a few webapps open gets a few cores. That leaves 1 or 2 for a game if you're lucky. God forbid you also try to stream to Twitch. I'll cut the rant short here. You're right though; you should cringe if they insist on 6 cores, instead of 8 or more.
Bloated software is the problem. The worst part is that efficient alternatives exist (Discord -> Ripcord, Spotify -> spotify-tui) but they're against ToS and can get you banned from both services. From what I hear Discord is a lot more likely to ban you. I've not heard of any Spotify bans. But as a user, even if you know the problem, your only choices are to risk an account ban, or buy an "overpowered" CPU to run your chat client.
EDIT: Am I wrong? If you're skeptical, go find a Core 2 Duo and try watching a YouTube video while you're in a Discord call, and let me know how it goes. Those are the kinds of apps people use these days, like it or not. Don't shoot the messenger.
That is what I said about “people look at the measurement at the desktop and freak out about single-digit utilization without even realizing their processor is sitting in the lowest frequency state”.
Is your processor even boosting all its cores when that 10% measurement is taken? In my experience usually it is not. Maybe different for Zen2/Zen3 but cpu measurement gets very complicated in general for those architectures since it can move between boost states so fast - it can boost so agilely that you can end up with garbage numbers because it’s moving between boost states faster than the task manager can enumerate the threads. It can move between boost states between the time you take the frequency measurement and the time you start enumerating the cpu load. This was a whole thing a couple years ago when people started looking at Zen2 and it turns out most third-party tools can’t handle this and only Ryzen Master gives you an accurate picture of what it’s doing.
In general it is such a small amount of cpu that it’s not worth caring about.
Also, typically while you game you’d have the overlay up and not the actual UI and that’s even faster - showing the login screen is likely slower than actually in game.
Load up a game and the cpu will be loaded up harder and will stay boosted and then take your measurement of discord.
People who are casually making observations about how intensive discord are never do that, it’s just “I see it using 6% at the desktop” [with the processor in the idle state rendering a full ui instead of just the overlay].
You're right that I'm probably not benchmarking rigorously enough. But people don't care about any of this stuff. They care about "my FPS gets lower when Discord is open, pls fix". And they don't want to micromanage CPU usage either. Make sure you minimize Discord after starting the call, make sure you close that gmail tab during the game then open it back up when you're done so you don't miss notifications? No thanks. I'd rather just pay for a few more cores.
I guess what triggered me is you saying you cringe at the end users. They don't deserve that. They just want the stuff they buy to work reliably. And if they need a bunch of extra headroom for that to happen, well, that's just the sorry state of the industry. If you must cringe at someone, direct your cringe at developers.
I posted this comment here because I also appreciate your name.
Even then it’s not like they’re paying per unit. All of the patent pools and licenses I know of have a cap and AMD, Intel, Nvidia, etc are easily already there.
Can you blame browser makers for this? When was the last time you saw someone pay for a browser? Pre-2005 Opera?
Chrome is free and youtube notoriously doesn't make a profit (unless this changed in 2021).
Their money comes mostly from search.
If those two tasks aren't themselves multithreaded (which they arn't if you're doing them in your browser) then you need at most 3 cores.
All the other background processes in your browser and OS are not using any significant CPU time, and can all comfortably share a fraction of a single core.
I have ADHD and I'm capable of doing work while focussing entirely on two tasks, often I'm looking at one screen where I'm writing code while reading an article on another screen.
Sometimes I feel like "reality" is too slow and I've already figured out the code for the unit test (or whatever I'm working on) in my head and I'm impatiently waiting for my hands to catch up while filling in a boilerplate template. I often focus on two things at once because the main work I'm doing isn't stimulating enough.
A lot of people question how I'm able to do this without making constant mistakes, but before I started on my medication my brain and the world around me was so incredibly noisy. Not necessarily sound, it's just that everything around me was a distraction. When I'm taking my medication, the distractions don't exist and there's almost so little happening that I find it unsettling.
I don't really know how to describe it properly so this probably made little sense. Just imagine you have a really angry baby screaming at you 24/7, it would probably effect your work? Now the baby is suddenly being quiet and you're able to work really effectively, but you got so good at coping with the baby distracting you that now you have all this spare CPU time in your brain which used to be devoted to denoising.
I was worried at the start I would end up on 70mg, but it just seemed to work from day one onwards.
Do you get the reduced appetite? I basically don't eat from 11am until 8pm most days, which has worked quite well for weight loss. I wasn't super heavy (18st, now 14.5st) but I had put on quite a lot during COVID.
As an example: Mirtazapine is an antidepressant used to treat major depressive disorder, but that doesn't mean you can give it to an otherwise emotionally healthy person and it'll give the same effect delta to them.
If you put a crutch on a healthy leg, it doesn't suddenly become a better leg.
My medication allows me to experience the world without crippling anxiety and constant distraction, it just so happens that 30 years living with those issues means that a large portion of my attention and time was devoted to dealing with them.
So, yes, my ADHD medication is performance enhancing, but that's an incredibly reductive way to look at it. That doesn't mean that anyone can take it and perform better, in fact studies of studies have found that the results of stimulative medication for people without ADHD (such as those who are using it to try and improve cognition during studying) can be similarly triggered by placebo effects:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3489818/
As it remains unclear whether stimulant medication has the same effect on healthy individuals as for those with ADHD, it is possible that many reported effects of prescription stimulants in healthy individuals may stem from placebo effects. Looby and Earleywine (2011) examined whether placebo effects influence reports of subjective mood and cognitive performance among college students who endorsed several risk factors for prescription stimulant misuse (e.g., low grade point average, fraternity/sorority involvement, binge drinking). Interestingly, participants believed that they had better ability to focus and persevere, particularly for a sustained amount of time, when they expected to receive MPH (Looby and Earleywine 2011). This is similar to circumstances in which participants may engage in nonmedical-stimulant use to study or cram for extended hours. On the other hand, when experimental participants did not expect to receive MPH, their attention appeared disrupted resulting in inconsistent reaction times throughout the CPT.
If my medication is performance enhancing, then literally any antidepressant, antianxiety, anticoagulant, anti-inflammatory, antihistamine, antibiotic, etc., is also performance enhancing by the same thought. What we need to consider is the baseline it lifts you from and the place it takes you to.
It's probably worth mentioning that I'm in the UK, not the USA, where access to stimulant medication is a _lot_ stricter and it can be very difficult to get a diagnosis of ADHD. I had to go through several hour long sessions with specialised psychiatrists to receive the diagnosis after spending years being tested for other conditions like Mixed-Anxiety Disorder.
An excerpt from my remission notice is here showing the clinically recognised reduction in symptoms, it mentions that the decision was based on both subjective and objective justifications: https://i.imgur.com/RJQCAs6.png
The diagnostic screening questions for the ASRS1.1 are here showing the areas where I subjectively improved: https://add.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/adhd-questionnair...
On a side-note, your comment came across very harshly. It's very easy to make a short, pointed statement like that about a topic you aren't very familiar with, but you should consider how informed your statements actually are - if they're backed in data or long term subjective beliefs. Sometimes, brevity imparts a lot of information in few words, sometimes it just comes across as rude.
Apple's strategy with their in house chips has always involved optimizing for performance and power draw, and not so much for die area. They throw execution hardware at the problem and run the clocks slower for power efficiency.
For instance, going back to the 2012 A5x:
>the A5X is approximately 2x the size of NVIDIA's Tegra 3, and even larger than a dual-core Sandy Bridge desktop CPU
While it's technically possible for Apple to have ramped up CPU clocks in pursuit of higher performance, Apple has traditionally been very conservative on CPU clock frequency. Higher clocks require higher voltages (especially on the same process node), which result in an exponential increase in power consumption.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/5688/apple-ipad-2012-review/1...
Caring less about die area makes sense when you are selling the whole widget and not just the chip itself.
If this works that way in practice is anyone's guess though.
It's clear that we need something in between regular quad core CPUs, and GPUs connected through PCIe. Some kind of parallel compute unit should be standard in pretty much all CPUs (or SoCs) eventually.
So, an iGPU accessing unified RAM?
Denverton is actually a very interesting platform for the wattage - that’s 16 Goldmont cores in a 32W package (despite being 14nm!) with full RDIMM support and QuickAssist acceleration. And as mentioned there is a new atom-based server platform with newer cores (I think they’re not the Gracemont but actually the next iteration?) coming in the next year or two.
https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/cores/denverton
If you want something with a lower core count now, look for something with a J3405, J5005, or Tremont-based processor. Intel has some NUCs with those chips and there are also itx-form factor motherboards from other companies like Asrock and gigabyte.
Actually a lot of the 2-bay synology NASs come with those chips, I believe it’s the ones ending in J. They have fairly nice video encode/decode support for their price bracket which makes them nice for plex/etc.
1. It has roughly the IPC of Skylake. 2. It’s the first Atom with AVX2. Even in 2021 Intel released brand new Atom cores without AVX2, which was introduced with Haswell (Haswell New Instructions). And in most tests, merely enabling AVX2 will yield 10% higher performance. That’s why Clear Linux has higher performance as they’re all tuned for Skylake. That’s also the reason why Red Hat couldn’t target x86-64-v3 with AVX2 for their new releases.
All previous Atom cores are slower than you imply:
Tremont (Atom 4th gen) has the IPC of Sandy Bridge. Goldmont (Atom 3rd gen) has the IPC of Core. It’s not exceeding Core like you imply. And Atom first gen is dog slow. It is like running a Pentium II/III CPU or a first generation Raspberry Pi. I find them an unsuccessful attempt of Intel of trying to create a mobile chip. In essence they just brought back a Pentium era chip.
This new Atom is fantastic though.
There is obviously a dearth of actual practical benchmarks of real tasks apart from STH and a few others, but if you look at Passmark or other generic benchmarks, like I said, it’s certainly faster than core2quad enthusiast desktop, which is completely reasonable and even impressive given its power budget. Actually in Passmark it’s even faster than a full Nehalem Core i7 with SMT, it actually works out just a bit under a Sandy Bridge i5 of similar clock - so I was a bit conservative there. And Passmark corroborates my “3104 is about 50% faster” guesstimate.
(UserBenchmark’s actual measurements - not the speed rating - is likely more accurate than Passmark but I know I’ll get my head bitten off for it!)
https://www.servethehome.com/intel-pentium-silver-j5005-benc...
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-Pentium-Silver-J5...
(Do remember that Intel progress through that era wasn’t really as bad as people say… I’ve seen people say “5% a generation” and the only generation close to that low was Broadwell. Skylake is a ton faster than Sandy Bridge clock for clock, and J5005 still does fall a bit below Sandy Bridge. There’s your two generations of progress since Goldmont - Atom went from below Sandy Bridge to matching Skylake during the Tremont/Gracemont generations.)
The commentary UserBenchmark provides is terrible and the “effective speed” composite rating is terrible. The actual int/fp benchmarks are perfectly fine and actually tend to be more reflective of actual benchmarks like spec than Passmark has been, in my experience. Passmark does sometimes have oddities, UserBenchmark hasn’t.
But bandwagoners can’t accept that, they just see “UserBenchmark” and their vision goes red and they shake as they struggle to type out “nobody should EVER use UserBenchmark”. I do apologize for being colorful but that’s how it is.
Like I said, there’s a reason I didn’t link it, no matter what you say, there’s a significant number of people who just can’t act mature enough to handle separating the data from the editorial positions.
It would be nice if we had good Spec2017 benchmarks for everything. I would prefer that. If you want broad comparisons of completely obscure hardware “what does this ultra-budget Xeon Bronze look like against this atom vs a desktop processor from 2007” the options are limited. You have Passmark, you have UserBenchmark, and you have Geekbench. And people still lose their shit over Geekbench too.
Even Passmark has only seen that xeon a total of 14 times.
The situation is even worse for GPUs where UserBenchmark is the only reasonably broad benchmark database available for truly ancient stuff that 3Dmark won’t run on. What if you want to compare a GTX 9800 to a Vega 7 and a Intel HD 605? It’s UserBenchmark or nothing. It sucks but it is what it is, and people need to just grow up. Including the owner of UserBenchmark. But the effective speed is just a composite benchmark and he’s never actually tampered the underlying int/fp benchmarks.
Phoronix is also not particularly good and has some serious methodological problems too. But nobody else does linux benchmarks apart from STH and Phoronix, and Phoronix pumps them out like crazy and just survives on volume even if his testing is kinda shit. Look at his “Linux games” test and he’s mixing multiple resolutions into a single result set, including the same game multiple times, etc, and then pulling out averages, everything is framerates and not frametimes (meaning, averages and not minimums), etc. From what I’ve heard his application testing isn’t any better but I don’t remember specifics.
Just goes to show: you can be scum and put out good data, and you can be a pillar of the community and put out bad data. Reddit tone police don’t change that.
There is a awful lot of incredibly useful data in the world that came from people who are extremely disagreeable on a personal level - or much, much worse.
Kind of like the "Vista debacle", I think Atoms were just unsuited to running Windows 7. Maybe I'm too forgiving or forgetful, but I used that netbook for many years, and it wasn't that slow with Linux. (7 was pretty sluggish, though)
...I do remember intensely disliking the introduction of early gnome 3, while running Fedora on that netbook. Not kind to the integrated graphics :-)
In that form factor, and costing what it did, I was massively impressed.
Lxde is great though and sure id believe that. I ran lxde on a single-core Phenom low power thing and with a SSD it was marginally usable even with that complete shit hardware.
I actually would not be surprised if, at the extreme low-end like the V140 or the Atom netbooks, that a SSD actually produced measurable increases in CPU performance. Not only do you have iowait which generally doesn't count as "idle" time according to linux (and probably windows) cpu utilization metrics, but even if you account for iowait, swapping off for another task while you iowait likely does have a performance hit in terms of caches that are no longer hot and so on, so performance is likely diminished when you come back to it too. And with no SMT, and only a single thread, context switching does become comparatively much more expensive in that fashion.
1st gen Atoms with the chipset (945?) that was bigger and hotter than the processors was kind of amusing.
That Intel can't help itself from making confusing product names is pretty inexcusable. If a 'Pentium' is an Atom or not makes a big difference in what the specifications mean, and it's not clear to regular people that a dual-core mainstream Intel is about performance equal to a quad-core Atom (assuming similar age chips).
Laptop makers love to combine atom CPUs with amazingly slow spinning hard drives, and they're usually pretty small too. Windows 10 performance on a spinning drive is trash, and it's even worse when it's a low rpm laptop drive. Doesn't help that they're often as little ram as possible and soldered down (although even with 8GB ram, Windows 10 will flog a spinning drive just sitting at the desktop; who knows what it's doing).
It would be interesting to see a 4p+24e or 6p+16e setup for parallelized loads though. Not sure there's currently a need for that on the desktop though.
That's pretty neat, but I'm thinking about, say, a 60W-95W package that would make sense in a normal desktop.
How many E-cores could you fit in such a package? For highly-parallel workloads, would it stomp all over anything else on the market? (I'd guess yes)
[1] https://www.servethehome.com/intel-sierra-forest-the-e-core-...
What people need to realize is that a P cores takes around 4 times the die area/transistors of an E core, and use probably 3 to 4 times the power of an E core, but performance is only around double that of an E core. So with the same area, you get of the 8P+8E you can get 10P cores, not 12, and the question is if a 10P (rather than a 16P or even 12P) core Alder Lake is better than a 8P+8E. (Btw, these ratios are pretty similar as those for the Firestorm/Icestorm cores in Apple's M1.)
If your workload is very parallelizable you get more bang from your silicon and Watts with E cores than with P cores. If you have only embarrassingly paralleled workloads, you're probably better off with 32E cores than with a 8P cores.