Category: Intel

Intel Core i9

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Intel recently announced a new family of processors for enthusiasts, the Core X-series, and it’s anchored by the company’s first 18-core CPU, the i9-7980XE.

 

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Priced at $1,999, the 7980XE is clearly not a chip you’ll see in an average desktop. Instead, it’s more of a statement from Intel. It beats out AMD’s 16-core Threadripper CPU, which was slated to be that company’s most powerful consumer processor for 2017. And it gives Intel yet another way to satisfy the demands of power-hungry users who might want to do things like play games in 4K while broadcasting them in HD over Twitch. And, as if its massive core count wasn’t enough, the i9-7980XE is also the first Intel consumer chip that packs in over a teraflop’s worth of computing power.

 

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If 18 cores are overkill for you, Intel also has other Core i9 Extreme Edition chips in 10-, 12-, 14- and 16-core variants. Perhaps the best news for hardware geeks: The 10 Core i9-7900X will retail for $999, a significant discount from last year’s version.

All of the i9 chips feature base clock speeds of 3.3GHz, reaching up to 4.3GHz dual-core speeds with Turbo Boost 2.0 and 4.5GHz with Turbo Boost 3.0 a new version of Turbo Boost which Intel has upgraded. The company points out that while the additional cores on the Core X models will improve multitasking performance, the addition of technologies like Turbo Boost Max 3.0 ensures that each core is also able to achieve improved performance. (Intel claims that the Core X series reaches 10 percent faster multithread performance over the previous generation and 15 percent faster single thread.)

 

 

(via Engadget, The Verge)

 

Machine Learning Speeds Up

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Cloudera and Intel are jointly speeding up Machine Learning, with the help of Intel’s new Math Kernel. Benchmarks demonstrate the combined offering can advance machine learning performance over large data sets in less time and with less hardware.  This helps organizations accelerate their investments in next generation predictive analytics.

Cloudera is the leader in Apache Spark development, training, and services. Apache Spark is advancing the art of machine learning on distributed systems with familiar tools that deliver at impressive scale. By joining forces, Cloudera and Intel are furthering a joint mission of excellence in big data management in the pursuit of better outcomes by making machine learning smarter and easier to implement.

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Predictive Maintenance

By combining Spark, Intel MKL libraries, and Intel’s optimized CPU architecture machine learning workloads can scale quickly. As machine learning solutions get access to more data they can provide better accuracy in delivering predictive maintenance, recommendation engines, proactive health care and monitoring, and risk and fraud detection.

“There’s a growing urgency to implement richer machine learning models to explore and solve the most pressing business problems and to impact society in a more meaningful way,” said Amr Awadallah, chief technical officer of Cloudera. “Already among our user base, machine learning is an increasingly common practice. In fact, in a recent adoption survey over 30% of respondents indicated they are leveraging Spark for machine learning.

 

(via – Technative.io)

Intel’s 1st 10-Core Desktop CPU

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Intel announced a new family of high-end desktop processors code-named Broadwell-E which packs 10 Broadwell CPU cores. This 10-cores are marketed as a part of the Core i7 6950x. The previous generation Haswell-E had 8 cores.

The prior-generation Haswell-E processor family was formed on a single chip: the eight-core Haswell-EP server processor. In its full configuration, it was sold as the $999 Core i7 5960X, with six-core variants made out of cut-down versions of that same chip.

That die measured in at 356 square millimeters in Intel’s 22-nanometer manufacturing process.

 

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The 10-core Broadwell-E chip is simply the full 10-core Broadwell-EP server chip relabeled and repurposed as a high-end desktop processor. The eight-core model, as well as the two six-core models, are also fashioned out of this same processor.

The size of the die is approximately 246 square millimeters, or approximately 69% the size of the Haswell-E die that it replaces.

Intel claims that it’s twice as fast as the quad-core i7-6700k and 35% faster than the previous gen core i7-5960k. Editing 4k video will be 65% faster than the same quad-core chip and 25% faster than previous gen i7 processor. Gaming is 25 percent faster than the 5960X when it comes to gaming in 4K while encoding and broadcasting a 1080p Twitch stream.

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Intel has indicated in the past that the wafer cost increase, or effectively the cost per area of silicon, was approximately 30% in going from 22-nanometer to 14-nanometer. This means that all else equal, 246 square millimeters of 14-nanometer silicon should cost about the same as approximately 320 square millimeters of 22-nanometer silicon.

Right off the bat, it would seem that the 10-core Broadwell-E is actually cheaper to manufacture relative to the eight-core Haswell-E.

However, it’s important to note that Intel saw a decline in the gross profit margins of its data center business as a result of 14-nanometer yields relative to 22-nanometer yields.

  1. Broadwell-E: 246 square millimeter die, the defect density of 0.2 defects/square centimeter, $9,100 wafer cost.
  2. Haswell-E: 356 square millimeter die, the defect density of 0.1 defects/square centimeter, $7,000 wafer cost.

For the Broadwell-E part, under the above assumptions, 139 of the 223 dies that come off the wafer are good. For the Haswell-E part, of the 153 dies on the wafer, 109 come out good.

Based on this analysis, the raw die cost of the 14-nanometer part should be around $83. The cost of the 22-nanometer part under these assumptions works out to around $64.

The new Extreme Edition of i7 processors will also be available in an 8-core version (the i7-6900K for $1,089) and 6-core variants (the $617 i7-6850K and the $434 i7-6800K). Naturally, they’re completely unlocked, so you can overclock them to your heart’s content. All of the new chips also support DDR4-2400 RAM, a slight bump in speeds from the previous-gen processors. Intel is charging around $1,750 for the 6950X, compared to around $1,000 for the 5960X.

 

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(sources: Engadget, Fool)