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

[Vishera]

All Intel desktop CPUs since November 2008 are based on the Nehalem microarchitecture,even the Core i9 9900K is based on the ancient microarchitecture.

Intel are improving or trying to improve Nehalem since it's November 2008 launch.

Since the improvements of Sandy Bridge all desktop consumer Intel CPUs are capable of 5GHz with a liquid cooler.

Intel have been increasing the base clock and boost clock speeds every year to create an illusion of bigger architectural improvements when in fact all desktop consumer Intel CPUs are capable of 5GHz with a liquid cooler.

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,

It seems like from here on "significant" improvements can only be achieved by a process node shrink.

Intel calling every new generation an "architecture" is misleading considering Intel have been using and improving the same architecture since November 2008.

 

I suggest Intel to ditch Nehalem based microarchitectures and focus on R&D a completely new architecture,

The 2 years old Ryzen architecture is efficient and still has room for improvements but is already outperforming Intel in the server market and has significantly higher IPC.

 

I wonder what are your thoughts on that,and will gladly make any correction.

 

 

 

 

Note:

1 hour ago, GoldenLag said:

There are IPC improvements since sandybridge. Tho they are minor.

 

Also they are actually improving yields and in some cases performance of the nodes they are using.

 

[pizapower]

Intel is Intel.

[pizapower]

I had a Nehalem system back in 2010 or 2011(Xeon W3520 + Asus Rampage ROG 2 Gene mtax) Damn, that motherboard was hot as hell(I had that screeny thing) That thing overclocked pretty well 4.4ghz. And then I sold that x58 system and invested in an AM3+ platform. It was the biggest mistake in my life.

[GoldenLag]

There are IPC improvements since sandybridge. Tho they are minor.

 

Also they are actually improving yields and in some cases performance of the nodes they are using.

31 minutes ago, Vishera said:

Intel calling every new generation an "architecture" is misleading considering Intel have been using and improving the same architecture since November 2008.

They have been using the same "macroarchitecture" like how GCN has been used at AMD since the 7800 series. 

 

33 minutes ago, Vishera said:

architectural improvements when in fact all desktop consumer Intel CPUs are capable of 5GHz with a liquid cooler.

Depends on what liquid you mean and yields and delidding. 

 

There have been improvements. 

 

While second and third gen can do 5ghz. They run hot while doing so and usually at quite a high voltage.

34 minutes ago, Vishera said:

suggest Intel to ditch Nehalem based microarchitectures and focus on R&D a completely new architecture,

Synny cove. Is something new. Its not like they havent got stuff in their pipelines. 

 

And Ryzen has traces of FX in it, so there will allways be stuff leftover. 

 

36 minutes ago, Vishera said:

Intel hit a wall in 2018 and didn't manage to improve Nehalem

They most likely didnt try to improve it too much. Focus on 10nm and sunny cove probably took priority. 

[pizapower]

14 minutes ago, pizapower said:

I had a Nehalem system back in 2010 or 2011(Xeon W3520 + Asus Rampage ROG 2 Gene mtax) Damn, that motherboard was hot as hell(I had that screeny thing) That thing overclocked pretty well 4.4ghz. And then I sold that x58 system and invested in an AM3+ platform. It was the biggest mistake in my life.

Then I bought a used 990fx-ud7 for pretty cheap because it was version 1.0 (no LLC) I ran a Phenom X6 1035t on that board @ 4.2ghz and then I bought a FX8320E in 2014 and used it @ 4.7ghz. My 990FX-UD7 died in late 2016 and then I bought an Asus 970 Aura Pro board and now the whole system is my secondary system.

[Vishera]

3 minutes ago, GoldenLag said:

There are IPC improvements since sandybridge. Tho they are minor.

 

Also they are actually improving yields and in some cases performance of the nodes they are using.

As i said Intel have been improving Nehalem ever since it was launched.

5 minutes ago, GoldenLag said:

They have been using the same "macroarchitecture" like how GCN has been used at AMD since the 7800 series. 

 

True

8 minutes ago, GoldenLag said:

Depends on what liquid you mean and yields and delidding. 

 

There have been improvements. 

 

While second and third gen can do 5ghz. They run hot while doing so and usually at quite a high voltage.

While there have been improvements,Sandy Bridge can still do 5GHz.

10 minutes ago, GoldenLag said:

Synny cove. Is something new. Its not like they havent got stuff in their pipelines. 

 

And Ryzen has traces of FX in it, so there will allways be stuff leftover. 

They sure take their sweet time,10 years and still counting,and the road map of the near future doesn't even mention Sunny Cove...

 

As long as the FX traces don't hinder performance and efficiency it doesn't matter.

14 minutes ago, GoldenLag said:

They most likely didnt try to improve it too much. Focus on 10nm and sunny cove probably took priority. 

Sounds logical,but it's impossible to have an infinite improvements of a microarchitecture (realistically).

[GoldenLag]

2 minutes ago, Vishera said:

As i said Intel have been improving Nehalem ever since it was launched.

you spoke as if there havent been any real changes since sandybridge. thats what i was pointing out. because there have been changes. 

3 minutes ago, Vishera said:

While there have been improvements,Sandy Bridge can still do 5GHz.

5ghz skylake is quite a bit nicer than 5ghz sandybridge. 

 

4 minutes ago, Vishera said:

They sure take their sweet time,10 years and still counting,and the road map of the near future doesn't even mention Sunny Cove...

ice lake is sunnycove. 

 

its the new "macroarchitecture". 

 

AMD has been using GCN since 2012, and still are using it. and for low corecount CPUs, sandybridge derivatives are pretty darn unbeatable. 

6 minutes ago, Vishera said:

Sounds logical,but it's impossible to have an infinite improvements of a microarchitecture (realistically).

at some point yes. at  the end you have to make sacrifises to make something better and other things worse. 

[Vishera]

2 minutes ago, GoldenLag said:

you spoke as if there havent been any real changes since sandybridge. thats what i was pointing out. because there have been changes. 

 

Good point,and an important one too,how shall i correct it?

4 minutes ago, GoldenLag said:

5ghz skylake is quite a bit nicer than 5ghz sandybridge. 

 

True

4 minutes ago, GoldenLag said:

ice lake is sunnycove. 

 

its the new "macroarchitecture". 

Good to know,I didn't know that.

5 minutes ago, GoldenLag said:

and for low corecount CPUs, sandybridge derivatives are pretty darn unbeatable.

That's true but that can't hold forever.

[GoldenLag]

3 minutes ago, Vishera said:

That's true but that can't hold forever

for low corecounts that might actually hold forever. not accounting for node changes. Ringbus is honestly practically unbeatable. 

4 minutes ago, Vishera said:

Good point,and an important one too,how shall i correct it?

just add an "edit:_______" and correct yourself a bit, i dont mind. do what you want. there have been iterative changes. often when it comes to AVX or small cache improvements that increases IPC in certain tasks. 

 

i do not know the exact changes and improvements over each gen (im too young to for that). but i know roughly the full generational leap from sandybridge to skylake. which i think is quoted to be between 3-11% improvements in IPC. varying by task offcourse. 

[Vishera]

19 minutes ago, GoldenLag said:

just add an "edit:_______" and correct yourself a bit, i dont mind. do what you want. there have been iterative changes. often when it comes to AVX or small cache improvements that increases IPC in certain tasks. 

 

i do not know the exact changes and improvements over each gen (im too young to for that). but i know roughly the full generational leap from sandybridge to skylake. which i think is quoted to be between 3-11% improvements in IPC. varying by task offcourse. 

Lol i have no idea how to phrase it.

[pizapower]

34 minutes ago, pizapower said:

Then I bought a used 990fx-ud7 for pretty cheap because it was version 1.0 (no LLC) I ran a Phenom X6 1035t on that board @ 4.2ghz and then I bought a FX8320E in 2014 and used it @ 4.7ghz. My 990FX-UD7 died in late 2016 and then I bought an Asus 970 Aura Pro board and now the whole system is my secondary system.

I still have my 990fx-ud7 board.

[r2724r16]

2 minutes ago, pizapower said:

<snip>

Not to sound rude, but why are you showing us a picture of your 990fx board when this thread is about Nehalem?

[Vishera]

Just now, r2724r16 said:

Not to sound rude, but why are you showing us a picture of your 990fx board when this thread is about Nehalem?

He started talking about Nehalem but then got carried away,

Anyway i don't mind that

[Vishera]

27 minutes ago, GoldenLag said:

just add an "edit:_______" and correct yourself a bit, i dont mind. do what you want. there have been iterative changes. often when it comes to AVX or small cache improvements that increases IPC in certain tasks. 

 

i do not know the exact changes and improvements over each gen (im too young to for that). but i know roughly the full generational leap from sandybridge to skylake. which i think is quoted to be between 3-11% improvements in IPC. varying by task offcourse. 

In the end i just quoted you 

[pizapower]

33 minutes ago, Vishera said:

He started talking about Nehalem but then got carried away,

Anyway i don't mind that

Thank you!

[pizapower]

Wanna hear more?

[pizapower]

hi

1 hour ago, GoldenLag said:

HI!

 

[pizapower]

I use my trusty old NH-D14 for overclocking.
No water for me. Go AIR or go home.

[porina]

How much change is needed before you consider an architecture to be different from its predecessor?

 

My interest only really starts from Sandy Bridge onwards, and each change has bought with it measurable IPC improvements in the FP performance. Sandy Bridge introduced AVX instructions, which gave ~2x the best performance of before, and I consider this my minimum operating level today. Haswell extended that with FMA. For my use of it, that's another 50% IPC boost on top. Skylake didn't add new there, but the cycle times were optismised, and the end result is about 14% IPC increase over Haswell. Moving onto Skylake-X derivatives, AVX-512 is another up to 2x improvement over Skylake.

 

Zen and Zen+ were designed to be low in FP performance, and in practice were around Sandy Bridge levels. Only since Zen 2 have they finally caught up (and slightly overtaken) Intel consumer CPUs, but still lag behind AVX-512 parts with no signs of adding meaningful support. I'm still not done with my own testing, but while the Zen 2 cores are for sure strong, they also gain further uplift from generous if split L3 caches to mitigate their lack of general bandwidth. If rumours I've heard so far of Zen 3 come true, that would be even nicer.

 

Suppose my beef is that saying Intel haven't changed architecture in 10 years is like saying Zen 2 is the same as original Zen. They're not. Each iteration builds upon the past. You get some smaller gains in some areas, bigger gains in others. See below for some of my past testing I did on Skylake vs Zen(+). I still need to fully test for Zen 2. Can't find my WIP on it but they're somewhere in these forums.

 

 

[ZephCloud]

I wonder how many + after the 14nm will it finally stop...

[Intelfreak]

Nehalem where back then a innovative desing with great performance and even throw it cost a pretty penny back then, it whas every single penny good spend. Been on X58/Nehalem for over 10 years now first with a I7 920/Asus Rampage 2 extreme board setup and now a I7 980X/ASUS P6X58D Premium setup. Never exspected it to last this long. Sandy Bridge also delivered a significant performance gain, but after that intel became boring and performance gain whas low like 10 % gain for every new gen after Sandy Brigde. After Nehalem and Sandy Brigde intel really became way less innovative and phase of CPU core count and new features good really slow.

 

But yeah Nehalem where really ahead of its time as OP said, intel still using a desing that can be tracked back to Nehalem. Nehalem had a great long run, but i have desided that it is time forme to move on and i for now consider Ryzen 9 3950X/Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Hero X570 board to be my next setup.

 

Well here is Nehalem in all its glory or maybe not any more. My system beaten throw a few benchmark and games.

I7 920 setup

https://imgur.com/a/WqD1iHK

 

I7 980X

https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/10037039

https://imgur.com/a/uHjbbMg

[Harry Voyager]

Architectures generally last quite a while. The Netburst Architecture from 2000 was only replaced in 2006, and it was supposed to last longer, but turned out to have some significant design problems that drove them to replace it earlier. 

 

The Sunny Cove Architecture was intended to go live a couple years ago, but as I've read, it was closely tied to the 10nm fabrication process, so when that went sideways, it got delayed and they had to keep improving the 14nm architectures in the meantime. 

 

And as was pointed out above, the Ice Lake chips are showing big architectural improvements over the coffee lake CPUs. They just don't seem to be getting the clock cycles to be performance competitive at this iteration of the process. 

[Vishera]

6 hours ago, porina said:

How much change is needed before you consider an architecture to be different from its predecessor?

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

6 hours ago, porina said:

Suppose my beef is that saying Intel haven't changed architecture in 10 years is like saying Zen 2 is the same as original Zen. They're not. Each iteration builds upon the past. You get some smaller gains in some areas, bigger gains in others. See below for some of my past testing I did on Skylake vs Zen(+). I still need to fully test for Zen 2. Can't find my WIP on it but they're somewhere in these forums.

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.

6 hours ago, ZephCloud said:

I wonder how many + after the 14nm will it finally stop...

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

3 hours ago, Intelfreak said:

Nehalem where back then a innovative desing with great performance and even throw it cost a pretty penny back then, it whas every single penny good spend. Been on X58/Nehalem for over 10 years now first with a I7 920/Asus Rampage 2 extreme board setup and now a I7 980X/ASUS P6X58D Premium setup. Never exspected it to last this long. Sandy Bridge also delivered a significant performance gain, but after that intel became boring and performance gain whas low like 10 % gain for every new gen after Sandy Brigde. After Nehalem and Sandy Brigde intel really became way less innovative and phase of CPU core count and new features good really slow.

 

But yeah Nehalem where really ahead of its time as OP said, intel still using a desing that can be tracked back to Nehalem. Nehalem had a great long run, but i have desided that it is time forme to move on and i for now consider Ryzen 9 3950X/Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Hero X570 board to be my next setup.

 

Well here is Nehalem in all its glory or maybe not any more. My system beaten throw a few benchmark and games.

I7 920 setup

https://imgur.com/a/WqD1iHK

 

I7 980X

https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/10037039

https://imgur.com/a/uHjbbMg

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.

2 hours ago, Harry Voyager said:

Architectures generally last quite a while. The Netburst Architecture from 2000 was only replaced in 2006, and it was supposed to last longer, but turned out to have some significant design problems that drove them to replace it earlier. 

 

The Sunny Cove Architecture was intended to go live a couple years ago, but as I've read, it was closely tied to the 10nm fabrication process, so when that went sideways, it got delayed and they had to keep improving the 14nm architectures in the meantime. 

 

And as was pointed out above, the Ice Lake chips are showing big architectural improvements over the coffee lake CPUs. They just don't seem to be getting the clock cycles to be performance competitive at this iteration of the process. 

10 years is too much...

[Zando_]

4 minutes ago, Vishera said:

10 years is too much...

Why? They still perform just fine (also would the X299 lads count as refreshes of Nehalem? IIRC they use some mesh thing, not ringbus).

[Vishera]

18 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

Why? They still perform just fine (also would the X299 lads count as refreshes of Nehalem? IIRC they use some mesh thing, not ringbus).

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

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 design,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.