Intel Launches Hybrid Processors: Uncompromised PC Experiences for Innovative Form-Factors

erek

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Excited? Opinion?

""Intel Core processors with Intel Hybrid Technology are the touchstone of Intel's vision for advancing the PC industry by taking an experience-based approach to designing silicon with a unique combination of architectures and IPs. Combined with Intel's deepened co-engineering with our partners, these processors unlock the potential for innovative device categories of the future," said Chris Walker, Intel corporate vice president and general manager of Mobile Client Platforms."

https://www.techpowerup.com/268337/...ed-pc-experiences-for-innovative-form-factors
 
https://www.anandtech.com/show/1584...fications-64-execution-units-up-to-30-ghz-7-w

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While the big.LITTLE approach is probably interesting for laptops, it's not to interesting (IMO) for desktop use.
However, taking interposers/IO dies to the next level with active interposers is definitely something interesting on a technical side.

I still think it should have come with at least 2 big cores.
 
I don't think its going to make a difference unless Windows/Linux/etc. is optimized to use this configuration. It's a great idea in theory, but in practice, I don't know how well it would work.
 
As simple in-order barrell SMT (as used in .LITTLE Atom) may be the more latent, yet more secure way
to keep pipes full and throughput up. We still need a few power-inefficient out-of-order and superscaler
cores for foreground tasks that are secured against sidechain by not supporting SMT. No reason to have
lots of "big." hot power-inefficient cores. Cause workloads that multi-thread well enough to span them
may be better chewed by a heap of less impressive cores optimzed for efficiency.

Hybrid benefits only matter when the OS can promote the right background threads to foregound cores.
Whats more the point missed here is that asymmetric thread management may now come to Windows.
Intel won't be the only beneficiary...
 
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While the big.LITTLE approach is probably interesting for laptops, it's not to interesting (IMO) for desktop use.
However, taking interposers/IO dies to the next level with active interposers is definitely something interesting on a technical side.

I still think it should have come with at least 2 big cores.


Specifically, they need two big cores because it looks like Intel has disabled HT on the big core (perhaps to keep thread count consistent with Atom?) That means peak performance will drop up to 20% (versus every Ice Lake processor currently shipping has HT enabled).

This is just an excuse for Intel to keep paying their interposer engineers, after they stopped using eDRAM for integrated graphics. With such low full-load core speeds, I don't expect performance faster than these Qualcomm chips.

The branding of this abortion a "Core i3/i5" is the worst part of this whole mess! They should have called it m3 and m5 instead.
 
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Specifically, they need two big cores because it looks like Intel has disabled HT on the big core (perhaps to keep thread count consistent with Atom?) That means peak performance will drop up to 20% (versus every Ice Lake processor currently shipping has HT enabled).

This is just an excuse for Intel to keep paying their interposer engineers, after they stopped using eDRAM for integrated graphics. With such low full-load core speeds, I don't expect performance faster than these Qualcomm chips.

The branding of this abortion a "Core i3/i5" is the worst part of this whole mess! They should have called it m3 and m5 instead.
They already dropped the m3 and m5 branding for Amber Lake, iirc.
 
So is this really an Atom processor paired with a Core processor?
 
I am somewhat interested in this chip, I would have to see how it actually performs but I can think of a number of edge cases where this could be an interesting little unit.
You know what? If they bring back the Netbook I'm fine with this.
I was thinking Chromebooks.... but same difference.
 
No, if it's not running Windows or Linux I'm out. Chromebooks suck for anything other than kid stuff.
 
No, if it's not running Windows or Linux I'm out. Chromebooks suck for anything other than kid stuff.

Supposedly the trick for Chromebooks is, among other things, remote desktop, where you have access to a machine with power. It seems kind of silly to me but some people swear by them. I notice mostly they do the kind of stuff journalists, do, though, which is easily done with web apps: office, email, slack, etc.
 
Supposedly the trick for Chromebooks is, among other things, remote desktop, where you have access to a machine with power. It seems kind of silly to me but some people swear by them. I notice mostly they do the kind of stuff journalists, do, though, which is easily done with web apps: office, email, slack, etc.
Citrix works seamlessly so things launch on the Chromebooks and looks like it’s running natively. And paired with Office365 and Googles enterprise management you have a cheap device that maintains full functionality that contains no sensitive or personal data with next to 0 maintenance requirements.

Have like 500 of them at this stage. May have to bring in another 50 or so in the next 3 months.
 
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Supposedly the trick for Chromebooks is, among other things, remote desktop, where you have access to a machine with power. It seems kind of silly to me but some people swear by them. I notice mostly they do the kind of stuff journalists, do, though, which is easily done with web apps: office, email, slack, etc.
Citrix works seamlessly so things launch on the Chromebooks and looks like it’s running natively. And paired with Office365 and Googles enterprise management you have a cheap device that maintains full functionality that contains no sensitive or personal data with next to 0 maintenance requirements.

But that's not what people who used Netbooks want. They want a light device with a real keyboard that gets good battery life, and can be used offline. And something cheap enough that if it gets destroyed or stolen, you're not worse off too much.

I *am* a journalist and I can tell you that a remote desktop or cloud computing environment is about the worst possible setup. You'd be better served with a film camera and a notebook.
 
But that's not what people who used Netbooks want. They want a light device with a real keyboard that gets good battery life, and can be used offline. And something cheap enough that if it gets destroyed or stolen, you're not worse off too much.

I *am* a journalist and I can tell you that a remote desktop or cloud computing environment is about the worst possible setup. You'd be better served with a film camera and a notebook.
With Citrix you just click a desktop icon and it launches, if you are using O365’s azure services you get pass through authentication so there is no additional login. It launches on the machine in a resizable app window and it behaves just like it would on a native windows PC. The Office 365 installs of Word sees your native desktop and my documents folders which paired with OneDrive’s backup sync function keeps things then paired back again. I have some users on Chromebooks who it took upwards of a month before they realized they weren’t on a Windows machine, they only realized when they got a new windows 10 home PC and they noticed the difference then.

That said as a journalist I’m sure you find a lot of locations where internet is not accessible and that sort of setup will eat a data plan in no time flat. So you need something lite with solid battery that functions completely offline from time to time. So this sort of setup would fail you at least 30% of the time which is unacceptable.
 
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No, if it's not running Windows or Linux I'm out. Chromebooks suck for anything other than kid stuff.
You can technically run Linux apps on Chromebooks, it's just not much fun.

This chip sounds interesting. I'd have to see what it can do, but the power savings seem pretty significant.
 
Citrix works seamlessly so things launch on the Chromebooks and looks like it’s running natively.

I didn't know that, but I'm not surprised.

That doesn't mean I'd actually want one, though, it just wouldn't fit my use case.
 
Yeah no kidding you want to save as much on the hardware possible when you're spending $150-$600 per license plus server licensing.

I wonder what the household cost to run a Shitrix server and four Chromebooks is. Bueller?
 
Yeah no kidding you want to save as much on the hardware possible when you're spending $150-$600 per license plus server licensing.

I wonder what the household cost to run a Shitrix server and four Chromebooks is. Bueller?
Not for home no, but have 500 or so in the schools, Citrix gets them Blender, the full Adobe suite, Visual Studio, Office, and Chief Architect. And with things going on now it was easy to push out Global Protect to the devices through device management which got them VPN access with SSO pass through. Super simple.
 
Eh, so you have 80 licenses for the paid software and the rest is free. That might mean that buying bottom-dollar hardware is cost-effective, but you're subsidized and don't have offline requirements.

These processors don't cater to your market. I think this is actually interesting stuff to come out of Intel for once in a decade.
 
Eh, so you have 80 licenses for the paid software and the rest is free. That might mean that buying bottom-dollar hardware is cost-effective, but you're subsidized and don't have offline requirements.

These processors don't cater to your market. I think this is actually interesting stuff to come out of Intel for once in a decade.
It’s the support hours that make it cost effective, most of the time a Citrix license for a software set is cheaper than a stand alone to the degree where the savings pays for Citrix so the licensing balances. Dealing with a small cluster of VM’s where every user is running as a guest with only app access and a collection of Chromebook’s that also only run as guest can be done by one person with only a few hours a week. Dealing with 500 windows machines and their subsequent issues takes a lot more man hours.
 
Specifically, they need two big cores because it looks like Intel has disabled HT on the big core (perhaps to keep thread count consistent with Atom?) That means peak performance will drop up to 20% (versus every Ice Lake processor currently shipping has HT enabled).

This is just an excuse for Intel to keep paying their interposer engineers, after they stopped using eDRAM for integrated graphics. With such low full-load core speeds, I don't expect performance faster than these Qualcomm chips.

The branding of this abortion a "Core i3/i5" is the worst part of this whole mess! They should have called it m3 and m5 instead.
Each Atom core has 4way threading. Atom stuffs the pipes in-order, round-robin. Which is secure because threads schedule in a dumb manner that doesn't reveal anything.
For the same but opposite reason: Hyperthreaded, speculative, out-of-order, superscalar, smart cooperative scheduling reveals way too much about another shared thread.
I am certain the decision to go big without HT was a security thing. Thread counts: 1 big vs 4x4 LITTLE are not even close to consistant, so much for that theory...
 
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If you want to take advantage of what this hardware can do, it's gotta be local.

And if you think it takes that many man-hours, you need to bone up on imaging machines.
 
Each Atom core has 4way threading. Atom stuffs the pipes in-order, roud-robin. Which is secure because threads schedule in a dumb manner that doesn't reveal anything.
For the same but opposite reason: Hyperthreaded, speculative, out-of-order, superscalar, smart cooperative scheduling reveals way too much about another shared thread.
I am 100% certain the decision to go big without HT was a security thing. Thread counts: 1 big vs 4x4 LITTLE are not consistant, so much for that theory...


What are you smoking, and did you bring enough for the rest of the class?

Anyone want to tell us why the rest of the Ice Lake lineup currently ships with Hyperthreding from the factory, while this is the first of the mixed -core lineup that does not.

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/codename/74979/ice-lake.html

Still waiting for that stroke of genius from someone here in the audience!! anyone, anyone?

And yet, no out-of-order Atom core has ever shipped with Hyperthreading, so obviously you cannot mix one with the other easily!

Still want to tell me that I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about, genius?
 
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I was certainly wrong about how the current generation of Atom stuffs the pipes:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15009/intels-new-atom-microarchitecture-the-tremont-core/2
There is no dumbing down the scheduler for security or other reason to be found here.
I've been drivelling about an obsolete Atom in-order 4way SMT core found in Xeon Phi...

As for the rest, I want whatever you are smoking. Why you can't easily mix out-of order
with SMT/HT is because the most straightforward ways of doing so invite sidechain city.
There was never throughput based need for out-of-order or speculative when you got
enough independant threads to keep the pipes busy. Its just that no single thread by
itself ever goes fast without out-of-order, specualtive, and every other trick that might
reveal something. How they secure that is PFM. When it works, and lately it hasn't...
 
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I was certainly wrong about how the current genration of Atom stuffs the pipes:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15009/intels-new-atom-microarchitecture-the-tremont-core/2
There is no dumbing down the scheduler for security or other reason to be found here.
I've been drivelling about an obsolete Atom in-order 4way SMT core found in Xeon Phi...

As for the rest, I want whatever you are smoking. Why you can't easily mix out-of order
with SMT/HT is because the most straightforward ways of doing so invite sidechain city.
There was never throughput based need for out-of-order or speculative when you got
enough independant threads to keep the pipes busy. Its just that no single thread by
itself ever goes fast without out-of-order, specualtive, and every other trick that might
reveal something.

Well soldier, we're only smoking 5-core Ganja here! None of that SMT horseshit!

I imagine after they introduced Windows for Qualcomm™ that they have uneven core scheduling already working in the kernel?
 
If there was no bias in the benchmark, Snapdragon seems faster than I would have expected.

Course, if recompiled for ARM, perceived benefits may just be removal of legacy bloat.
 
I like how they were running 1080p on theirs but 1440p on the competitor machine, also not the same OS version.
 
This sort of makes sense. By rough approximation a core core is worth two atom cores, but you can fit four atom cores in the space of one core core, so atom wins spacewise for multithreaded work, and core wins for singlethreaded. Scheduling could be challenging, but maybe just an extension of per-core turbos, tell the OS that they're the same, but the atoms are limited to half the turbo speed or something.

Also, Intel could name their stuff better, so I don't have to write core core.
 
Eh, the IPU has been a part of Intel's mobile processors for a long time, now. It's one of the few things that distinguished U series silicon from H/S/K silicon. It wasn't consistent - afaik, Whiskey Lake or one of the Lakes nearby removed it - but it came back later.

Also, dual display pipes on the CPU IC is nothing new for Intel - that has been done for quite some time (mostly on Atom chips, admittedly). It usually was handled by the chipset.

If there is anything new, it's Intel basically collapsing many (not all - TB3 is missing, AFAIK), of its technologies into a single product. I cannot even say a single package, since they've done much of this before.

Can we we even say "oh it has more bandwidth?" Basically every major generation of products comes with that, almost regardless of vendor.
 


Hey look Buddy, we couldn't fine anything useful that this shit architecture hack brought to the table, so let's relabel all the shit already introduced with Ice Lake last year.

4K HDR playback support is also welcome, and Ice Lake can handle three display pipes with up to 5K 60Hz resolution or 4K 120Hz (10-bit color) resolution.May 28, 2019]

Intel knows they're barely going to beat the 8CX on single-threaded, and the multi-core is going to be about 1/3 slower. And I seriously doubt they can keep up with the same battery life .
 
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