Coffee Lake Coming After Kaby Lake with 6 Cores

[Doogles]

People have been saying this every year and Intel will never do it.

What not even in 2025

 

[h4rm0ny]

You're both reading too literally into my point.

The simple situation is it's a 4-pair design, rather than 8 'standalone', resulting in 8 weak cores with high clockspeed and very good parallelism. And cannot be compared to 8 Intel cores in terms of performance equivalence.

That's all I was saying.

You can call them eight cores that are weaker than eight Intel cores, sure. Just that it's still an eight-core CPU. I thought you were hearkening back to when they were released and people tried to make out they weren't "real" cores because the person had never heard of a CPU without an integrated FPU.

Sure, a current eight-core Intel will beat out an FX-8350, but then to get eight Intel cores you have to look at chips like an i7-5960X which is over £900 to the FX-8350's £140. And depending on what you're doing (e.g. games) isn't going to make much difference.

EDIT: If we're getting into this, we should consider hyperthreading. If I were to use your own terminology but in reverse, I guess you cqn consider Intel's cores to be maybe 1.5 "cores", depending on workload. Assuming hyperthreading is turned on.

 

[DragonQ]

So what software these days actually utilises FPUs more heavily than integer calculations?

 

[h4rm0ny]

So what software these days actually utilises FPUs more heavily than integer calculations?

As a general rule, stuff that has to deal with the "real world" to a high degree of precision. E.g. weather modelling. Also experimental mathematics (or what I like to call "giving up and throwing numbers at the wall until something sticks"). Some sorts of graphics rendering, I think. It's not that it's useless or not needed - far from it. I don't want to oversell this as redundant. It's just that you don't need it for running an OS, editing documents or playing nearly any common game. I.e. a lot of most people's work only needs a small amount of FP calculation easily handleable by a single shared FPU between two cores.

 

[jigger]

You're both reading too literally into my point.

The simple situation is it's a 4-pair design, rather than 8 'standalone', resulting in 8 weak cores with high clockspeed and very good parallelism. And cannot be compared to 8 Intel cores in terms of performance equivalence.

That's all I was saying.

I don't think anyone is under any illusion that 8 Broadwell-e cores will offer more performance than 8 Bulldozer cores. If you pay 10x the price then you get more performance, who would have thought

I've been very tempted to go with an FX8 a few times, because AMD are just so far ahead of Intel on performance per pound.