I'm waiting for them to somehow redefine speed, like they redefined production geometries. How fast is it? It's Intel 7.

You laugh, but AMD did that in the mid-2000's with the Athlon XP series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Athlon_XP_processo... The numbers used to match their clock speed (ex. Athlon 1000 was 1000 MHz), but that changed with the XP models (ex. Athlon XP 2400+ was 2000 MHz).

IPC is a thing - clockspeed optimized architectures like Alpha and the Pentium 4 just didn't get as much done per cycle or had much harsher penalties when the pipeline stalled, even though they ticked faster.

Comparing the whole system against an actual task is the only way to really measure - everything else, including the clockspeed, is marketing.

Certainly, the last two decades prove that raw metrics win advertising because the complicated world of benchmarks just don't sway many people.

The commonly used benchmarks are often pretty useless or irrelevant. Coming up with useful benchmarks is very hard and a pretty tragic thing about the supposedly irrelevant independent CPU benchmarking of the past 20 years is that CPUs are specifically designed to perform well at the silly benchmarks that are popular as well as at real world workloads where I think CPU manufacturers will have their own suites of more carefully designed more realistic more relevant benchmarks.

My claim is that (1) results on irrelevant benchmarks like SPEC do matter for CPU sales (probably not for big tech companies that operate their own datacentres – they’ll likely do their own testing – but likely for many ‘savvy’ consumers and also for companies that want to market their computers as having fast CPUs) and (2) the complicated world of benchmarks is handled very poorly by the people who tend to evaluate CPUs with them and publish their results.

Bribing companies to avoid selling your competitor's product doesn't hurt, either.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc.....

Bad benchmarks sunk AMD after Bulldozer, then years later they paid tens of millions in a false advertising lawsuit

There was an expression floating around for this naming scheme, but I can't remember what it was and don't find any good search results either for my candidates. "Processor/Pentium equivalent rating"?

Edit: found it - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_Rating

This actually caused some problems with some Maxis/EA games at the time (like Sim City 4 or The Sims 2), because those games automatically tuned certain settings (mostly graphics settings, but somewhat annoyingly in The Sims also things like the maximum number of sims on one lot) depending on the power of your computer – mostly as measured by GPU model, amount of system and video RAM and CPU clock speed.

The problem was that the CPU clock speed levels categorising your system as high/mid/low performance were quite obviously based on Pentium 4 clock speeds, even though at the time AMD actually had a market share of around 40 – 50 % for desktop computers. This meant that everybody with an AMD processor would find his/her performance and graphics settings mysteriously restricted. People using the first generations of Intel's own Core i-processors had similar problems if they were still playing those games a few years later.

The saving grace was that at least things weren't totally hard-coded – things were controlled by a rules file in a plain text-based format, and so it was comparatively easy to just change the expected clock speed levels to something more reasonable for a non-Pentium 4 processor.

This was also useful because the GPU detection had its own share of problems down the line – I still occasionally play Sim City 4, and for some reason or other on my current system the game doesn't correctly detect the amount of video RAM I have and therefore resorts to extremely restrictive fallback settings unless I manually override it, and AMD recycling graphics card model numbers also caused some confusion that had to be manually fixed.

Cyrix 5x86 PR100. Or Cyrix 6x86 PR266

And Apple started it with their Megahertz Myth campaign.

I was a kid back then and we had mac labs at school, and those things were always slow or hanging. Maybe because they were imacs? During the second coming of Jobs era, Macs never really blew me away performance wise until the intel transition.

In my experience school computers have always managed to give a terrible impression - our school had Windows PCs and compared to my Mac at home they seemed terrible.

Intel just did that to conform to what the rest of the industry (namely TSMC) had already been doing. NM hasn't meant nanometers for a decade.

The numbers were always complete bullshit this is like complaining about a shop calling a cake tasty.

Nanometers has been a meaningless measurement for a long time now, ever since it stopped referring to the actual size of the transistors.

I hope Intel can keep up, actual competition has been so great. It does feel like they are really struggling with their process issues though.

I think we're going to see major shakeups over the next ~10 years from both companies. Old models of design are quickly reaching their limits. Heterogeneous cores and multi-die designs are just the start. It's an exciting time!

reaching the performance limit would be a blessing in disguise

Factoring in say 10x-100x repetition code for for error correction, existing silicon tech is already damn near to the launder limit. General purpose CPU and GPU architecture has some data flow logistics it could optimize, but ASICs are pretty much at the performance limit already.

It just seems like they are struggling as a company.

Please have some sympathy for the pathetic workers who have to work overtime to keep up because management failed to keep progress for the new and exciting.

Sometimes this competition thing is a distraction. Like now there is an emergency meeting for the three year roadmap to shrink to 1 year and with less innovation than they planned it to have, and the actual three year roadmap becomes 5 years because of wasted energy for short term gains.

Thats how business works. If people dont want to work at intel because of this thats ok too. Its the society we created and its worked out really well in the CPU industry for 50+ years now.

I know that is how some businesses work. But workers have more sight. Some would pander for the philosophy of Apple, don't compete just innovate. And sometimes they get that opportunity.

But other times when competing, long visions lose. And so do the workers who have them. This is detrimental.

I am not ever working for something like this I hope, but I do see others work in this way. And sometimes they are gifted yet unable to make that gift work.

Sounds ripe for a union

that 6ghz intel chip will probably use at least 300W too (12900ks uses 274W)

that's actually a feature since you don't need to have a space heater anymore. checkmate

You won't need to worry about the heat, since you can just reuse some of the liquid nitrogen that's cooling the chip to allow it to hit 6ghz in the first place.

Sure does... also the Intel announcement is on the same date that AMD releases their new chips.

Intel was always good at marketing. Performance (buck for buck) on the other hand ...

That was exactly my thought. It's just a bit sad to watch Intel fail so badly here. I was a big Intel fan for a long time.

Raptor lake engineering samples are already in the hands of people benchmarking them if you know where to look

The pendulum swings yet again. I remember in the 2000s when AMD and ATI were the best buys.

I'd recommend waiting for unbiased reviews of actual products, taking into consideration price, performance, and power usage before determining the "best buy" of the upcoming generation of products.

Though I hope the pendulum is swinging enough to keep driving the improvements. My current desktop CPU is absolute overkill while sipping relatively little power during my light usage.

drum roll please

To be honest, I'm disappointed by the new Ryzen 7000 series power consumption, enough so that I'll be sticking with my 5000 series CPUs for as long as I can. Not everyone wants their PC to double as a space heater.

Ryzen 7000 has better performance per watt though. If you don't want a space heater you might be better served to get a Ryzen 7000 and limit the TDP to whatever you're comfortable with.

It'll be faster than a Ryzen 5000 drawing the same amount of power: according to AMD the Ryzen 7000 will be "up to 49 percent"[1] faster at the same power draw.

[1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/918007/amd-launches-ryzen-70...

Precisely which reviews have you seen for Ryzen 7000 that paint it as a space heater?

The official announcement indicated significantly better power efficiency. AMD claims that if you limit both to a 65W TDP, you'll see 74% better performance on the new generation, but that even at full TDP, the efficiency will be higher.

However, I am waiting on the actual reviews... not making multi-year decisions based off of limited, pre-release information. If it is more efficient, then vowing to stick with an older, less efficient product just because it has a lower TDP number on the box doesn't make any sense. Efficiency is the only thing that matters when seeking to avoid a space heater, since the less efficient product will generate more heat for a given amount of work. All of these processors will clock down when idle

Not the person you asked but I poked around to see what I could find. Seems like a bunch of random sites all taking about some leaker. I could find nothing concrete to support them running hot.

https://www.google.com/search?q=ryzen+7000+running+hot&rlz=1...

That’s a lot of articles claiming the processors will “run” at 95C, but… what is that even supposed to mean? The processor temperature depends entirely on the cooling solution being used. Those leaks don’t seem to be very grounded in reality. Maybe they meant the junction temperature or the automatic throttling temperature, but those certainly weren’t the implication.

But, all of this is still irrelevant to efficiency. Running at 230W for 1 second to complete a task would generate less heat / use less electricity than running at 150W for 2 seconds to complete the same task.

Psychologically it's going to be hard for most people to underclock something they spent hundreds of dollars on.

Underclocking isn’t necessary for it to be more efficient, if AMD is to be believed. A higher peak power does not mean generating more heat / using more electricity to perform a given task, as long as the task can be completed proportionally faster.

But, efficiency is often a curve, and you can supposedly get crazy efficiency by limiting the TDP of Ryzen 7000, so it is an option for those who prize efficiency above maximum performance, and it would still represent an improvement over a Ryzen 5000 at the same TDP. As I said, though, we’ll need to see actual reviews.