Intel demonstrates 65W Broadwell-K at GDC

setter · 7 Mar 2015 at 10:45

Tonester0011 said:
On synthetic loads the DC chips hit as high if not higher loads than 4770k, though i would put that down to higher clocks and higher voltage to start with. However, on normal day to day i find the 4790k runs cooler than non lidded 4770ks, with the exception of my first chip (motherboard to blame though) which the default stock voltage was 1.36v lol.

The one i got from you (in sig) runs a bit cooler and clocks to 4.7 on slightly less voltage, same cooler and fans used on all three chips. Though theese days im running it at stock as it's plenty for gaming. Regarding vcore on DC, gigabyte boards in particular are notorious for very high overvolting on DC on early bios revisions. Asus too but to a much lesser extent.

Telecaster · 7 Mar 2015 at 11:18

flopper said:
Boring as intel wont have any more upgrade than incremental.
cpu isnt the variable for users anymore its gpu, dx12 and mantle.
I am waiting for AMD Zen as I wont buy Intel anymore as its no more speed for money. having to wait 4 generations for a worthy upgrade seems silly.

Wait wut? You actually WANT to spend money every 6 months like people do who constantly upgrade GPUs?

4 years (more even) out of a CPU makes them pretty good VFM IMO.

There's a difference between needing to spend money and wanting to spend money for the sake of it, personally I'd rather just upgrade every 4-5 years rather than spend good money every 6 months because things are out of date.

Dave2150 · 8 Mar 2015 at 12:28

Telecaster said:
Wait wut? You actually WANT to spend money every 6 months like people do who constantly upgrade GPUs?

4 years (more even) out of a CPU makes them pretty good VFM IMO.

There's a difference between needing to spend money and wanting to spend money for the sake of it, personally I'd rather just upgrade every 4-5 years rather than spend good money every 6 months because things are out of date.

I think it's more that some people remember how fun it was to see big improvements in CPU's every 6 months of so, many years ago.

It wasn't ultra expensive to keep up with PC hardware either - the CPU's/motherboard were quite modestly priced.

It's only since Conroe/Nehalem onwards that Intel have been able to sell their 'Extreme' CPU's, due to lack of compeition, for the prices they sell at now.

Part of the reason it's so important that AMD's Zen turns out to be a ************* monster, to create competition for Intel, which will completely change things if it were to happen.

james.miller · 8 Mar 2015 at 12:42

weren't the P4 extreme's > £600 at launch? i wouldnt call that modestly priced, lol.

Dave2150 · 8 Mar 2015 at 13:03

james.miller said:
weren't the P4 extreme's > £600 at launch? i wouldnt call that modestly priced, lol.

Can't remember their launch price - though it was true that the far cheaper AMD CPU's were very competitive with it, especially when overclocked

Completely different to the last 6 years, where the extreme edition x58, x79, x99's most expensive CPU's have also had far greater performance than any AMD CPU, not so much for gaming but for productivity etc.

Telecaster · 8 Mar 2015 at 14:51

Dave2150 said:
I think it's more that some people remember how fun it was to see big improvements in CPU's every 6 months of so, many years ago.

It wasn't ultra expensive to keep up with PC hardware either - the CPU's/motherboard were quite modestly priced.

It's only since Conroe/Nehalem onwards that Intel have been able to sell their 'Extreme' CPU's, due to lack of compeition, for the prices they sell at now.

Part of the reason it's so important that AMD's Zen turns out to be a ************* monster, to create competition for Intel, which will completely change things if it were to happen.

But the law of diminishing returns has to kick in at some point, you can't just have a linear rate of progression with technology, there will always be big leaps in performance early on to the point where future such big leaps become either impossible or results in something totally beyond the requirements of the task in hand.

I'm sure if they really really wanted to intel could push the boundaries and release something mega, but what would be the point? 4 core CPUs from 3-4 years ago are still more than enough for 95% of desktop consumers and besides, it seems the future demand is going to be mobile rather than desktop so why would they pour money into something they see as a stagnant market?

It's a tad naïve to think they'd design and manufacture products for enthusiasts, over products to take advantage of the increasing market sector where the profit is. They're a huge global business, not some bloke in a shed making things for a laugh for his mates.

Dave2150 · 8 Mar 2015 at 17:06

Telecaster said:
But the law of diminishing returns has to kick in at some point, you can't just have a linear rate of progression with technology, there will always be big leaps in performance early on to the point where future such big leaps become either impossible or results in something totally beyond the requirements of the task in hand.

I'm sure if they really really wanted to intel could push the boundaries and release something mega, but what would be the point? 4 core CPUs from 3-4 years ago are still more than enough for 95% of desktop consumers and besides, it seems the future demand is going to be mobile rather than desktop so why would they pour money into something they see as a stagnant market?

It's a tad naïve to think they'd design and manufacture products for enthusiasts, over products to take advantage of the increasing market sector where the profit is. They're a huge global business, not some bloke in a shed making things for a laugh for his mates.

It's naive of you to say the days of linear progression are over - it's more do with the the limitations of Silicon, plus the increased focus on mobile as you say.

Once Intel and the rest of the foundries move onto another material instead of silicon, such as Graphene or the other candidates out there, I believe we'll see another lengthy period where the boundaries are pushed quickly, such as we saw in previous years.

Also, if you believe there is no profit in producing desktop CPU's, you're wrong. Are you aware that Intel's profits from the desktop are still growing?

http://www.intc.com/financials.cfm

Full-Year 2014 Business Unit Trends
• PC Client Group revenue of $34.7 billion, up 4 percent from 2013.

Dave2150 · 9 Mar 2015 at 18:08

Hopefully we'll see some engineering samples leaked soon, I'm quite curious to see this 65W CPU performance compared to the 4790k

Telecaster · 9 Mar 2015 at 18:29

Dave2150 said:
Once Intel and the rest of the foundries move onto another material instead of silicon, such as Graphene or the other candidates out there, I believe we'll see another lengthy period where the boundaries are pushed quickly, such as we saw in previous years.

But is there consumer demand for this level of performance? Does your average cabbage need a Graphene CPU for Twitter/Facebook/Angry Birds?

Dave2150 · 9 Mar 2015 at 18:32

Telecaster said:
But is there consumer demand for this level of performance? Does your average cabbage need a Graphene CPU for Twitter/Facebook/Angry Birds?

If graphene or another type of substrate enable massive power savings, then yes they will

It's all about power per watt for mobile, tablet chips.

mikeo · 9 Mar 2015 at 22:02

Finally... something to start to maybe get a little excited about. I, like a fair few folks I suspect, have an itch to scratch and I'm not sure if I can wait for skylake. Even if I don't really need any more processing power at the moment.

Dave2150 · 10 Mar 2015 at 06:16

mikeo said:
Finally... something to start to maybe get a little excited about. I, like a fair few folks I suspect, have an itch to scratch and I'm not sure if I can wait for skylake. Even if I don't really need any more processing power at the moment.

Ye I can see many people buying into Broadwell, if it outperforms the 4790K by a good 5%-10% and overclocks well.

Worth noting that although Skylake comes out this year, that's only the locked version. Still no concrete date on the Skylake-K parts as of yet, so we may be looking into 2016 for those.

Perfect_Chaos · 10 Mar 2015 at 09:39

I'll be interested in the Broadwell-e chips, decided to go x99 as otherwise i'd be going back to 4 core. I'm sure Broadwell to Skylake won't be a large difference (noticably) anyway so it helps close the gap some.

NMBlack · 10 Mar 2015 at 10:13

I was about to pull the trigger on an i5 4690k/z97 upgrade to my Phenom 960T/880 computer, but now it looks like I might as well wait a bit for Broadwell....

Dave2150 · 10 Mar 2015 at 12:24

Perfect_Chaos said:
I'll be interested in the Broadwell-e chips, decided to go x99 as otherwise i'd be going back to 4 core. I'm sure Broadwell to Skylake won't be a large difference (noticably) anyway so it helps close the gap some.

Skylake has been rumoured a few too many times to be a 15-20% IPC improvement over Broadwell. It's been designed by the same Israeli team that brought us Sandy Bridge - so these rumours may actually be true.

mmj_uk · 10 Mar 2015 at 12:26

Telecaster said:
But is there consumer demand for this level of performance? Does your average cabbage need a Graphene CPU for Twitter/Facebook/Angry Birds?

People have been saying pretty much the same thing since the 90's "do you really need anything faster for word processing and email" etc and there's never been a shortage of demand.

Besides, if you look at Intel's CPU's they're either mobile parts (LGA115x) or server parts (LGA2011) so desktop consumers are probably secondary to them anyway, the server market will always want more performance just as the mobile market wants increased performance per watt.

DragonQ · 10 Mar 2015 at 12:32

mmj_uk said:
People have been saying pretty much the same thing since the 90's "do you really need anything faster for word processing and email" etc and there's never been a shortage of demand.

Whilst that is true, the market has changed completely now. The vast majority of people now would benefit far more from a new low-powered ARM chip in their tablet or phone than a 10% faster desktop CPU.

The major improvements in general desktop computing over the past few years have not come from raw CPU power. They've come from things like SSDs, USB 3.0, hardware video decoders, GPU rendering, reduced power/heat/noise output etc.

Perfect_Chaos · 10 Mar 2015 at 13:17

Dave2150 said:
Skylake has been rumoured a few too many times to be a 15-20% IPC improvement over Broadwell. It's been designed by the same Israeli team that brought us Sandy Bridge - so these rumours may actually be true.

So maybe 500-600mhz clock for clock boost at best, not going to make a large difference except a bit in benchmarks.

McGraw · 10 Mar 2015 at 13:25

If these aren't too expensive and I can get decent coin for my 4790k then I can see myself dabbling.

r22snapper · 10 Mar 2015 at 14:23

Perfect_Chaos said:
So maybe 500-600mhz clock for clock boost at best, not going to make a large difference except a bit in benchmarks.

Assuming it clocks to the same speed. What if the 20% IPC gain is true but it clocks 10% lower?