Nehalem is 10 years old,and Intel are still using it

[Zando_]

Just now, Vishera said:

They are hot,inefficient and reached the limit of how much they can be improved,

My Zen+ chip got hot as fuck when overclocking too, though the Zen 2 chips appear to stay cool at stock, though not if you let PBO do its thing without manually limiting voltages (that may have been a bug they fixed though). 

Tis true that they probably can't be improved too much. They've got the 9900KS coming out running 5GHz all core stock, given that it usually requires borderline/unsafe voltages to get much more than that, IDK where they could really go from there. 

On the topic of voltages, you claim every consumer CPU since Ivy Bridge can go 5GHz on water, but that's not true. Pretty sure there's golden chips from each gen that can do that, but the majority would require unsafe voltages or not even do 5Ghz in the first place. I have do personal experience with the HEDT chips, my 5820K (Haswell-E) can do 4.6, 4.7GHz isn't quite stable even at borderline safe-ish voltages, 5GHz would be a no-go, full stop. 

 

6 minutes ago, Vishera said:

X299 CPUs are based on Sky Lake,which is based on Nehalem too.

The improvements introduced with Kaby Lake limit the core count to 8,

so to get core count higher than 8 Intel simply used Sky Lake,Sky Lake has a limit of 28 cores,

Aha, didn't know that. 
 

7 minutes ago, Vishera said:

And the new Cascade Lake-X is based on Sky Lake-X,I wonder if Cascade Lake-X has better IPC than Kaby Lake.

Will certainly be interesting to see. IIRC the Skylake-X chips were beaten in gaming/single core workloads by Broadwell-E/Haswell-E chips at the same clocks, but were better in multicore workloads. If Cascade Lake-X outperforms the mainstream chips on IPC and also clocks well, it should be damn speedy. 

[Intelfreak]

19 minutes ago, Vishera said:

As long as the design is similar and based on the same microarchitecture,It's just a revision of the original design...

As i said before: "Intel are improving or trying to improve Nehalem since it's November 2008 launch."

The problem is that Intel have been using the Nehalem microarchitecture for far too long (10 years!) while the Zen microarchitecture is only 2 years old and has plenty of room for improvements,the same thing can't be said about Intel's Nehalem based CPUs,

with Coffee Lake: "Intel hit a wall in 2018 and didn't manage to improve Nehalem (Coffee Lake revision) any further,Even in the end of 2019 Intel still failed to improve the Coffee Lake revision of Nehalem"

 

For proper improvements comparison you could compare Zen 2 and Sandy Bridge,both are a proper second generation of a microarchitecture.

That's a different problem Intel has to worry about.

Nehalem based CPUs are not bad,they are just old and inefficient,

My favorite is the 2600K,it's a legend that could overclock like crazy (5GHz),and had pretty good performance until it became outdated in 2017.

10 years is too much...

Agree about old and inefficient and they are also becoming to slow for my needs as gamings. But man X58 has been a stable platform even throw i have abused it by overclock i high and let it run hot for not to forget high voltage at times. Even so it still just keep on working and booting every day. At the start i said i will not upgrade before X58 died, but it has proven hard to kill this old hardware. CPU, motherboard just keep going. So now i have to say its to slow insted but CPU and motherboard still works perfectly fine after over 10 years of abuse.

 

2600K aka Sandy bridge whas a good cpu and so where I7 920 and i7 980X. I7 920 is also a pretty good overclocker. I took it from stock 2.8 GHz to 4.4 GHz on air and it whas cooling that set the limit, not CPU or motherboard. Look at the benchmark, i have taken my I7 980X to 4.75 GHz all core air cooled.

[porina]

 

3 minutes ago, Vishera said:

X299 CPUs are based on Sky Lake,which is based on Nehalem too.

The improvements introduced with Kaby Lake limit the core count to 8,

so to get core count higher than 8 Intel simply used Sky Lake based solution,Sky Lake has a limit of 28 cores,

And the new Cascade Lake-X is based on Sky Lake-X,I wonder if Cascade Lake-X has better IPC than Kaby Lake.

If you count architecture as the logic and not process related effects, there is no real difference between Skylake-S through to Coffee Lake. Skylake-X was a significant reworking both in and outside the core. Most notable is the addition of AVX-512 units, and ring cache replaced by mesh cache, as well as the additional memory controllers. The only reason Skylake-X happened is that it was based off server Skylake. There wasn't a server Kaby Lake or Coffee Lake. Outside of the new instructions added in Cascade Lake, I wouldn't expect peak IPC difference between it and Skylake-X. Non-peak performance will vary with actual configuration.

[Vishera]

13 minutes ago, porina said:

If you count architecture as the logic and not process related effects, there is no real difference between Skylake-S through to Coffee Lake.

Spot-on

[porina]

35 minutes ago, Vishera said:

For proper improvements comparison you could compare Zen 2 and Sandy Bridge,both are a proper second generation of a microarchitecture.

Missed this earlier. Not sure how to even start with this one... it makes no sense. The main reason I compared Skylake to Zen and Zen+ is that Skylake was still representative of Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake, and at the time only Zen and Zen+ were available from AMD. It was representative of the offerings from both sides at the time. It doesn't matter what generation it was. In my later testing I'm too lazy to look now, it was Coffee Lake vs Zen 2, updated with all the bios and security patches to be more representative of the time.

 

Just picking the 2nd gen of an architecture series... improvement compared to respective 1st isn't really useful. Nor is comparing across different times. Should I throw in Northwood too? Or.. I can't remember the names of the cores the last time AMD were better than Intel.

 

AMD may have finally recaptured the lead, but what did it take them? They're on the third iteration of Zen using 7nm process out for under 4 months, and they're going up against what you call a 10 year old architecture.

[Vishera]

3 minutes ago, porina said:

Missed this earlier. Not sure how to even start with this one... it makes no sense. The main reason I compared Skylake to Zen and Zen+ is that Skylake was still representative of Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake, and at the time only Zen and Zen+ were available from AMD. It was representative of the offerings from both sides at the time. It doesn't matter what generation it was. In my later testing I'm too lazy to look now, it was Coffee Lake vs Zen 2, updated with all the bios and security patches to be more representative of the time.

 

Just picking the 2nd gen of an architecture series... improvement compared to respective 1st isn't really useful. Nor is comparing across different times. Should I throw in Northwood too? Or.. I can't remember the names of the cores the last time AMD were better than Intel.

Well that one was strange of me to say.

5 minutes ago, porina said:

AMD may have finally recaptured the lead, but what did it take them? They're on the third iteration of Zen using 7nm process out for under 4 months, and they're going up against what you call a 10 year old architecture.

A microarchitecture can't be infinitely improved,every microarchitecture has a limit to how much it can be improved,and Intel hit that wall with Coffee Lake.

[porina]

6 minutes ago, Vishera said:

A microarchitecture can't be infinitely improved,every microarchitecture has a limit to how much it can be improved,and Intel hit that wall with Coffee Lake.

If we go back to the earlier question on what microarchitecture is, it could be said they already stopped at Skylake. Gains after that point are more due to process.

[TheOv3rminD]

You can really tell because Nehalem (Gen 1) I-7s are still, to this day performing well in the real world. I would still be using my i7-930 if a defective liquid cooler hadn't killed my x58 board. Also Gen 1 was arguably better because it had triple channel memory as opposed to the dual channel we have seen on all the "refresh" generations since 2008. I really miss LGA-1366 =(