back to article Intel stuffs extra cores into latest mobile Series U Core i5 and i7 chips

Intel has wheeled out its 8th Generation Core processors, a refresh of its Core i5 and i7 chips, and their base specs wouldn’t look out of place in a desktop PC circa 2012. Cutting through the verbiage in this morning's announcement from Chipzilla, we learn that the mobile-focused 8th Generation Core i7 processors (the i7- …

  1. RachelG

    That would be good. My Haswell (OK, 2013) desktop is still the fastest computer I have, and I don't want to buy any more desktops. But a laptop that can even match it and still be reasonably carryable would be awfully nice for the next company hardware refresh ;-)

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      ... But a laptop that can even match it and still be reasonably carryable ...

      It won't, except possibly for brief intervals.

      In order to keep the package as thin as possible, Intel's mobile CPUs do not include a heat-spreader (the clue is in the datasheet, which specifies the maximum Tjunction, rather than Tcase for non-mobile CPUs). This makes mobile CPUs rather prone to overheating, which triggers throttling to prevent the CPU from melting itself. Combine it with the sub-optimal cooling designs (which keep getting worse as laptops get thinner and thinner), and you'll be lucky if the CPU can sustain a single increment above the base frequency for any length of time. These CPUs are designed to remain idle for most of their life.

      Of course, if you have a desktop/server replacement laptop, which uses a proper high-duty cycle CPU and a well-designed cooler (see e.g. the Eurocom's range), the story is different - but so is the weight, the battery life, and the price.

    2. The Man Who Fell To Earth Silver badge
      WTF?

      OK, I'll bite

      My long-in-the-tooth Lenovo Thinkpad E531 laptop contains a quad-core i7-3632QM @ 2.20GHz w/2 threads per core.

      How are these "new" chips better?

      1. Dave 126 Silver badge

        Re: OK, I'll bite

        @AC

        What you say it technically correct, but you miss the point. If the OP's computer is fast enough for his workloads, a new laptop (and do bear in mind the article was about tablet class chips) will be fine, and likely faster than most desktops from 2013.

        At least the OP noticed that the article was not about normal laptop CPUs, but about the ultra low power versions for ultrabooks and tablets.

        @The Man Who Fell

        What you get with newer Intel chips is power efficiency. You can choose a new machine that will either be lighter than your Thinkpad or last longer between charges (which, if you can leave the power adapter at home, means the same). Additionally, the Intel graphics are not the joke they used to be, so if you don't need a discrete GPU then you'll see improvements there, too.

      2. P0l0nium

        Re: OK, I'll bite

        How are these "new" chips better?

        Well .....

        -They deliver more instructions per clock.

        -They use less energy per task,

        -They will live in a 15W power envelope.

        -You get 8MB L3 Cache.

        -They can access faster memory.

        -They have a much better IGP.

        Apart from that , no difference at all really, ;-)

  2. Graham Cunningham

    "Up to..."

    There should be a law against quoting "Up to.." without also quoting "Down to..."

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "Up to..."

      I work in this area (processor performance), but not for Intel. The joke here is that every performance question has the answer "It depends.".

    2. Captain Scarlet
      Mushroom

      Re: "Up to..."

      Burn the "Up to" advertising BS.

      People seem to think the speed the router/modem states is what you will get and is clearly what advertisers are pointing to.

  3. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
    FAIL

    Intel giveth and taketh

    So these fancy new chips don't have LPDDR4 support and only 2 memory channels making the max RAM still languishing at 16Gb.

    1. Sandtitz Silver badge
      FAIL

      Re: Intel giveth and taketh @Mr Davies

      "So these fancy new chips don't have LPDDR4 support and only 2 memory channels making the max RAM still languishing at 16Gb."

      The maximum RAM for these mobile CPU's is 32GB, not "16Gb" (sic).

      Some will want more memory than that in their laptop. They have an option to fork out for a mobile Xeon (max 64GB + ECC) or a "mobile" DTR (128GB+?) or just wait a bit and see if AMD can come up with something usable now that they are back in the business.

  4. Tubz Silver badge

    Funny now that AMD have kicked Intel in the teeth with Ryzen, that they can now come out with all these new souped up processors, not that I'm sating Intel have been sitting on them while ripping off people with underperforming and expensive chips for the last decade?

  5. Mage Silver badge

    Clock Rate, Batteries and Heat.

    "surprised to see clock rate nerfed in comparison with the previous iteration of these mobe chips"

    Maybe the batteries where too big or too short run time, or heat was an issue.

    At least not crippled to 2G RAM like the 64bit Atoms (all or just most in tablets/netbooks).

    Are these for laptops or tablets?

    1. Dave 126 Silver badge

      Re: Clock Rate, Batteries and Heat.

      > Are these for laptops or tablets?

      Either/or. The U range is ultra low power, usually less than 20W, so any machine where lightness or long battery life is required but ARM isn't suitable. The presence of a keyboard is irrelevant for some workloads.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Intel stagnated

    AMD Ryzen IPC is only 10% slower than Intel. That is great, considering that Intel Core architecture is in it's 8th generation. The Core architecture is old and mature. Ryzen is a radically new design and we can expect the coming generations to make large strides in performance.

    Intel's cpu performance boost always comes from A) adding more cores B) bumping up 100-200 MHz C) adding a new esoteric instruction that is only used for number crunching but not in normal usage. In fact, if you benchmark new cpu and the old, by keeping the same clock speed and limiting to one single core in normal desktop usage - the latest Intel CPU is only 0-3% faster. In some benchmarks it is even slower than the previous generation.

    Sergey Bubka, the worlds best pole vault athlete, received money each time he broke world record. So he increased the record 1 cm at a time. He could of course have jumped 20 cm higher at once, but then he would not have got as much money. So he did small increases to milk the cow.

    Intel cpus can be clocked really high - that is evident from all overclockers. It is normal to overclock Intel cpus very much without problems. This means that Intel could have increased the clock speed very much many years earlier. But then Intel would have hit the max limit and could not increase the performance for a new generation. Today Intel always increases 200 MHz for every new generation, so every new generation is ~5% faster than the previous. But remove the MHz increase, and the new generation is as slow as the previous generation. So Intel is milking the cow, increasing MHz just a little each time, instead of making a huge increase (which is possible, look at all the overclockers).

    The new coming 8700 Intel cpu is 51% faster than the current 7700 generation - but the new 8700 has 50% more cores. Use the same number of cores, and the new 8700 will be as slow as the current generation.

    Instead of keepon improving the old Core architecture, Intel should design a new architecture. The current Core architecture has hit its limit, that is evident as new cpus are not increasing performance. Today an old overclocked i7-2600 from year 2011 is competitive with the lastest Intel cpu. How innovative is that? Not much.

    This is also the reason AMD Ryzen can catch up with Intel easily. Because Intel sucks at designing cpus. There are not much improvement for each generation. Intel has stagnated and plateued for many years.

    OTOH, Nvidia keeps on innovating. Nvidia gpus are much faster each generation, and has not stagnated. That is why AMD Vega has a hard time competing with Nvidia. Because Nvidia are good at making GPUs, it is hard to catch up a market leader. Intel is doing a bad job, Intel should start from scratch instead of the same old - that is why AMD can eat into Intels cake. But AMD can not eat into Nvidias cake - Nvidia is a much better GPU designer than Intel is a CPU designer.

    Intels old Core architecture is a dead end and can not be improved more. Better start a new. Ryzen will be faster in a few generations.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Intel stagnated

      Excellent comment which should have all of us asking: Why isn't that topic headlined or built into tech reporting on CPU's?

      As pointed out those who OC have noticed how easy it can be to create rock stable performance increases with almost no expertise or effort. Sorry to those who take OC seriously but think back to OC in the 1980 and 1990s and the effort it took to get a stable increase in clock speed.

      In the past the industry was driven to compete and quick to adopt new methods, including new cooling methods. It was the end users who started putting heat sinks on CPU's and then GPU's, voltage regulators and chipsets and then started adding fans to heatsinks. When CPU manufactures started to include heatsinks they quickly become better than those most people could easily make in their home. And of course people claimed heat sinks were big and bulky, had no place on a printed circuit board and when fans were added they were considered loud and a maintenance issue but performance required heatsinks, then improved heatsinks.

      For many years now CPU manufacturers should have been shipping CPU's with liquid cooling units. That they haven't suggests to me that they are no longer competing to be the best, the best they can be. It seems clear that Intel and others are milking the cow for every drop before boosting the feed.

      The failure of capitalism occurs when companies see more profit in controlling and manipulating markets than competing with ever better products. Might be time to spread around the capitalism and open market so often suggested to those wanting to protect the jobs and interest of citizens and start investigating large companies for anti-competition activities.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Intel stagnated

        I agree. This material is worthy of an article here. I can write it, or a reporter here can publish it here. It should draw much attention in the entire industry.

        (Nitpick, SPARC has been (at least) doubling the performance every generation. So SPARC is not milking the cow like Intel, SPARC deliver. SPARC M8 is out soon, doubling the performance of SPARC M7 again - which is the worlds fastest cpu by a large margin today)

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