Intel's Skylake, Sandybridge architect Returns to Lead Client Chip Development

[Lightwreather]

Summary

 

 IIntel announced that it is bringing back another one of its famed chip architects, 28-year veteran Shlomit Weiss, as CEO Pat Gelsinger continues to rebuild the company's engineering roster.

 

Quotes

Quote

Weiss returns to Intel after a four-year stint as Mellanox/Nvidia's Senior VP of Silicon Engineering, where she ran the company's networking chip design group, a team of more than 1,000.

Weiss holds an M.Sc. with honors in electrical engineering and a first degree in computer science from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. She has registered several patents on microprocessor development and also founded the Intel Israel Women Forum.

During her tenure at Intel, Weiss received Intel's Achievement Award, the company's highest award, for her work developing the company's dual-core architecture. She was then entrusted with leading the team that developed Intel's famed Sandy Bridge and Skylake processors.

Weiss rejoins Intel as the Senior VP and Co-General Manager of the company's Design Engineering Group (DEG) and will be responsible for all of the company's client chip development and design processes. It appears that Weiss will assume the same role previously held by Uri Frank, who recently left Intel to lead Google's SoC development.

Weiss will work with Sunil Shenoy, another long-term Intel veteran that recently rejoined the company. Shenoy will co-manage the Design Engineering Group with Weiss in Isreal. We aren't clear on the division of responsibilities yet (he will likely lead the data center design initiatives), but we're following up with Intel for more details.

Both will also work with famed chip architect Glenn Hinton, who also recently returned to Intel. 

Weiss commented on her appointment, "I am thrilled to return to the place that had been my home for 28 years, where I grew and developed professionally, as a manager and as a person. I have been following Intel Corporation's Pat Gelsinger, charting a new, bold strategy for the company, which I believe will accelerate the 'company's leadership. I will devote my energy to ensuring Intel continues to lead in hardware and chips."

 

My thoughts

 This is amazing news. Hopefully, with this influx of engineering talent from Intel's past, this would mean that Intel might finally get their act together and trully compete. Now, I'm not saying that things will change with immediate effect, after all chip design takes a couple of years, but coupled with their 3nm nodes at TSMC, we might see the effects of this by 2023.  I don't know about all of you, but I'm excited to see what'll happen in forthcoming years, with both Intel and AMD becoming competitive, we might see another golden age of computing.

 

Sources

Tom's Hardware

[Ydfhlx]

Intel Engineers were already doing a great job. Rocket lake (temps to the moon!) is so bad because it was intended for 10nm, not 14. Also, TSMC's 3nm is probably not going to be used in desktop chips, only some specialised according to leaks (which may be wrong, but I still don't expect Intel consumer chips on TSMC).

 

So, unless this man can help adopting 7nm ASAP (10 is pretty much in use), Intel's going to have a hard time regardless.

[LAwLz]

I don't like this trend where people become celebrities in the tech world. We already got too many people obsessed with celebrities in the music and movie industry.

We see this with Jim Keller, with Papermaster, Lisa Su, Raja and many more. Stop idolizing people.

 

I kind of get it more for celebrities in the movie and music industry where a single person has a major impact on the work, but for things like processor design a single person is such a small drop in the bucket it doesn't make sense to sing the praises of any one person.

 

Weiss got an Intel achievement Award? Oh that's cool. There's only like 1000(?) people at Intel that has that... And on top of that the other +100,000 employees Intel has and I am sure Weiss will be the saving grace of the company...

 

 

My point is that highlighting a single person (or even 2, 3, 4 or some other low number) in this way is just masturbation about some celebrity you idolize.

All this does is build unwarranted hype about how some person or a small team of people will be the saving grace. Remember when people were hyping up Raja which just resulted in yet another mediocre product line? I still see people worshipping Lisa Su as if she was the one who saved AMD. She has done really well, but people seem to have this mental image of how she build the Zen architecture or whatever, and complete ignores the thousands upon thousands of other employees at AMD that developed it.

 

Singling out people like this is stupid when we're talking about such massive projects as CPU designs. If you're a company with maybe 100 employees then yes, a single person can have a great impact. Contributing the works of several thousands of people to a single person because you happen to know their name and how they look however is stupid.

[porina]

I have mixed feelings about this. This and other recent notable hires are in senior management positions. To me it feels like the current Intel CEO is getting in known people to get things running. The concern is at what cost? Hiring old people is good up to a point like their 14nm process. At some point, they will need fresh blood. 

[RejZoR]

11 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

I don't like this trend where people become celebrities in the tech world. We already got too many people obsessed with celebrities in the music and movie industry.

We see this with Jim Keller, with Papermaster, Lisa Su, Raja and many more. Stop idolizing people.

 

I kind of get it more for celebrities in the movie and music industry where a single person has a major impact on the work, but for things like processor design a single person is such a small drop in the bucket it doesn't make sense to sing the praises of any one person.

 

Weiss got an Intel achievement Award? Oh that's cool. There's only like 1000(?) people at Intel that has that... And on top of that the other +100,000 employees Intel has and I am sure Weiss will be the saving grace of the company...

 

 

My point is that highlighting a single person (or even 2, 3, 4 or some other low number) in this way is just masturbation about some celebrity you idolize.

All this does is build unwarranted hype about how some person or a small team of people will be the saving grace. Remember when people were hyping up Raja which just resulted in yet another mediocre product line? I still see people worshipping Lisa Su as if she was the one who saved AMD. She has done really well, but people seem to have this mental image of how she build the Zen architecture or whatever, and complete ignores the thousands upon thousands of other employees at AMD that developed it.

 

Singling out people like this is stupid when we're talking about such massive projects as CPU designs. If you're a company with maybe 100 employees then yes, a single person can have a great impact. Contributing the works of several thousands of people to a single person because you happen to know their name and how they look however is stupid.

Maybe, but you also have to give props to those who make gold from anything they touch. Like for example Jim Keller who's almost a legend at this point. Whichever project he worked on always became a huge success. Sure there are others who do great job along such people, but you also can't deny the track record. Lisa Su is another example. She pretty much raised AMD from the dead. I always hate giving credit to leadership because they always bang on their chest when winning and fire the workers below when not doing great, but she obviously did many things right and her charisma on stage further helps with the brand and the products they make also speak for themselves. It's not just "oh she's cool on the stage and she's a woman". Their products are amazing from CPU's to GPU's. And while availability was a huge issue recently, it's not exclusive to AMD anyways.

 

As for Intel, I hope this will work out well. They often did great when Israeli engineers were involved.

[LAwLz]

49 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

Like for example Jim Keller who's almost a legend at this point. Whichever project he worked on always became a huge success.

No it doesn't.

Jim Keller is probably a great engineer, but this is a classic example of making a few banger products and then people will think that everything you touch turns to gold.

He worked along with a bunch of other people on some products that got successful and that's what he is remembered for.

 

In the early 2000 he worked along hundreds of other engineers on the K7. He wasn't even the lead developer (Dirk was), and the K7 was mostly developed by engineers from Motorola. 

Then he became the lead architect for the K8, where he worked with hundreds of other people, for which he often gets credited as having created x86-64 (despite it being written by far more people than just Keller, such as David Christie, I-Cheng Chen, Ramsey Haddad, Bruce Holloway and Kevin McGrath to mention a few).

Then he had a bunch of years where he wasn't really in the spotlight. Some years at Broadcom, some years at P.A Semi, and then he had his other big hit the A4 something like 7 years later. 

Then he worked on things like the K12 at AMD that didn't lead anywhere, although Zen did (which I should add was the collective efforts of thousands of people, not just Jim).

Then he worked for Tesla for a couple of years without seemingly having any major impact there.

Then he worked at Intel for a couple of years that doesn't seem to have amounted to much.

Now he is at Tenstorrent and we have yet to see where that leads.

 

What I am trying to say is that Jim Keller is most likely a great engineer (you don't get employed at Apple as VP of engineering if you aren't good), but to say that everything he touches turns to gold is a big overstatement, and the big projects he did work on were not his work alone.

 

 

49 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

Lisa Su is another example. She pretty much raised AMD from the dead. I always hate giving credit to leadership because they always bang on their chest when winning and fire the workers below when not doing great, but she obviously did many things right and her charisma on stage further helps with the brand and the products they make also speak for themselves. It's not just "oh she's cool on the stage and she's a woman".

Did she do that, or did the engineers that actually worked on the products they sell raise them from the dead? Did she raise them from the dead, or did for example Intel's issues with 10nm and TSMC's sudden lead in process nodes raise them from the dead?

You say that you don't want to give credit to leadership because they always bang on their chests but that is exactly what you are doing right now.

You're accrediting the collective work of thousands upon thousands of people to a single person going "look at how great Lisa is for raising AMD from the dead".

 

Lisa Su might be a great CEO. I can't really say one way or the other, but to give her credit for raising AMD from the dead seems to be exactly the kind of BS I am sick and tired of. Giving a single person the credit for the works of other people.

It's only natural for people to think of Lisa Su as AMD since she is the face of the company. When AMD is doing well people think Lisa is doing well. The problem is that AMD has over 10,000 employees. Lisa Su is not AMD. AMD is a collective of over 10,000 people. When AMD designs a good processor it's not Lisa Su who designed a good processor. It was the thousands of employees at AMD that did.

 

 

  

49 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

Their products are amazing from CPU's to GPU's. And while availability was a huge issue recently, it's not exclusive to AMD anyways.

Yes, and we should thank the thousands of engineers at AMD for that. Not Lisa Su.

Stop giving management the credit for what their workers achieve.

[Brooksie359]

4 hours ago, LAwLz said:

I don't like this trend where people become celebrities in the tech world. We already got too many people obsessed with celebrities in the music and movie industry.

We see this with Jim Keller, with Papermaster, Lisa Su, Raja and many more. Stop idolizing people.

 

I kind of get it more for celebrities in the movie and music industry where a single person has a major impact on the work, but for things like processor design a single person is such a small drop in the bucket it doesn't make sense to sing the praises of any one person.

 

Weiss got an Intel achievement Award? Oh that's cool. There's only like 1000(?) people at Intel that has that... And on top of that the other +100,000 employees Intel has and I am sure Weiss will be the saving grace of the company...

 

 

My point is that highlighting a single person (or even 2, 3, 4 or some other low number) in this way is just masturbation about some celebrity you idolize.

All this does is build unwarranted hype about how some person or a small team of people will be the saving grace. Remember when people were hyping up Raja which just resulted in yet another mediocre product line? I still see people worshipping Lisa Su as if she was the one who saved AMD. She has done really well, but people seem to have this mental image of how she build the Zen architecture or whatever, and complete ignores the thousands upon thousands of other employees at AMD that developed it.

 

Singling out people like this is stupid when we're talking about such massive projects as CPU designs. If you're a company with maybe 100 employees then yes, a single person can have a great impact. Contributing the works of several thousands of people to a single person because you happen to know their name and how they look however is stupid.

Tbh I would say that this would be closer to being obsessed with a movie director rather than an actress or actor as tbh that is sorta what these people are at this point as they lead development of a technology. Without talented people under them yeah it will be hard for them to succeed but the same can be said about a movie director. 

[Brooksie359]

4 hours ago, porina said:

I have mixed feelings about this. This and other recent notable hires are in senior management positions. To me it feels like the current Intel CEO is getting in known people to get things running. The concern is at what cost? Hiring old people is good up to a point like their 14nm process. At some point, they will need fresh blood. 

New blood without experience superiors is not super effective. Having really good engineers with lots of experience is super good to help new people learn from their many years of experience. So I would say it's hard to have too much good experienced engineers so long as you have younger engineers learning from them as well. 

[WolframaticAlpha]

7 hours ago, J-from-Nucleon said:

Summary

 

 IIntel announced that it is bringing back another one of its famed chip architects, 28-year veteran Shlomit Weiss, as CEO Pat Gelsinger continues to rebuild the company's engineering roster.

 

Quotes

 

My thoughts

 This is amazing news. Hopefully, with this influx of engineering talent from Intel's past, this would mean that Intel might finally get their act together and trully compete. Now, I'm not saying that things will change with immediate effect, after all chip design takes a couple of years, but coupled with their 3nm nodes at TSMC, we might see the effects of this by 2023.  I don't know about all of you, but I'm excited to see what'll happen in forthcoming years, with both Intel and AMD becoming competitive, we might see another golden age of computing.

 

Sources

Tom's Hardware

Sandy bridge, haswell and skylake are the GOAT core cpus

[porina]

3 hours ago, Brooksie359 said:

New blood without experience superiors is not super effective. Having really good engineers with lots of experience is super good to help new people learn from their many years of experience. So I would say it's hard to have too much good experienced engineers so long as you have younger engineers learning from them as well. 

It's more complicated than that. I wasn't suggesting a clean slate, there does have to be business continuity. This hire is into a high level management capacity. Good management is needed to get the best out of resources. Rumblings suggest that a lot of Intel's woes of recent years were not helped by internal conflicts. I just feel if taken too far, it almost feels backwards looking not forward looking.

[leadeater]

15 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Raja and many more

With him? Surely not? 

 

I mean his best achievement was dropping a GPU on camera 

[AnonymousGuy]

15 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Weiss got an Intel achievement Award? Oh that's cool. There's only like 1000(?) people at Intel that has that... And on top of that the other +100,000 employees Intel has and I am sure Weiss will be the saving grace of the company...

Wait until you learn about how many people get promoted out of sheer luck or circumstance.  I know of one employee who is a poster child of being promoted back to back just because they have a vagina during the time period (last 5 years) where Intel has a hard on for promoting and hiring women for no reason.  And then once you get past a certain grade level you can basically sit back and chill hopping from meeting to meeting and farming passive "credit" for other people doing actual work.  

 

TLDR don't believe the hype around a senior executive uber ultimate diamond edition vice president actually being technically skilled.  "oh they have patents in their name".  Yeah anyone can go out and patent some concept when you don't have any actual day to day work assigned to you.  You've got to be one of the "golden children" and then they'll pay for you to fuck around getting patents.

 

I could probably rant for a few hours on this subject.  And for the record I called out Jim Keller as being a shit hire too and I was right.  Just a dude farming pensions and sign-on bonuses.

[leadeater]

53 minutes ago, AnonymousGuy said:

And for the record I called out Jim Keller as being a shit hire too and I was right.  Just a dude farming pensions and sign-on bonuses.

In what way were you right? He was the one that both convinced AMD to drop trying to develop Bulldozer architecture, because that was still their path, and pulled together the team to actually start Zen.

[AnonymousGuy]

16 minutes ago, leadeater said:

In what way were you right? He was the one that both convinced AMD to drop trying to develop Bulldozer architecture, because that was still their path, and pulled together the team to actually start Zen.

Tesla? Zero accomplishment.  Apple? Zero accomplishment.  Intel? Zero accomplishment.  He's hopped companies more than I've taken vacations.  Coincidentally staying just long enough for vesting.  His whole claim to fame is doing something with AMD K8 15 years ago.

 

Any idiot could look at Bulldozer and say it was a shit architecture...every tech reviewer was doing just that.  But Jim Keller says it "omg brilliant visionary".

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, AnonymousGuy said:

Tesla? Zero accomplishment.  Apple? Zero accomplishment.  Intel? Zero accomplishment.  He's hopped companies more than I've taken vacations.  Coincidentally staying just long enough for vesting.  His whole claim to fame is doing something with AMD K8 15 years ago.

 

Any idiot could look at Bulldozer and say it was a shit architecture...every tech reviewer was doing just that.  But Jim Keller says it "omg brilliant visionary".

I'm not sure I agree about Apple. And no literally AMD's plan that they were going to execute was to keep doing Bulldozer refinements. Jim Killer went to the engineering team and ask if they could do a complete ground up design that would be competitive, took that information along with the projected improvements for Bulldozer/Piledriver etc and showed that doing so was not a path that would lead to being market competitive, ever.

 

Anybody can look and say Bulldozer isn't completive, but can you present a proper business case to change an entire company's strategic plan and do so successfully? Without a how you're just another parrot.

 

You could go to TechTechPotato YouTube channel and listen to the interview with him and see what involvement he actually had in Zen but I suspect based on what your opinion is you won't be able to get past that.

 

It's completely fair to point out that these efforts are actually casts of thousands not one but it's also true that an orchestra needs a conductor otherwise it's just a group of highly talented people making noise not music.

 

You can say he was a bad hire as much as you like but Zen wouldn't be here if he wasn't A) Hired, B) Did what he did. If all his involvement in Zen was that business case, which is wasn't, then that's still highly, crucially, important to where AMD is today.

[Brooksie359]

1 hour ago, AnonymousGuy said:

Tesla? Zero accomplishment.  Apple? Zero accomplishment.  Intel? Zero accomplishment.  He's hopped companies more than I've taken vacations.  Coincidentally staying just long enough for vesting.  His whole claim to fame is doing something with AMD K8 15 years ago.

 

Any idiot could look at Bulldozer and say it was a shit architecture...every tech reviewer was doing just that.  But Jim Keller says it "omg brilliant visionary".

I mean he did do well at Apple though. Same with AMD both times he was there. As for Intel and Tesla it's hard to say that he had zero accomplishments when we have zero information other than he worked there. It's easy to say he accomplished nothing with zero evidence to back it up. 

[CarlBar]

3 hours ago, leadeater said:

I'm not sure I agree about Apple. And no literally AMD's plan that they were going to execute was to keep doing Bulldozer refinements. Jim Killer went to the engineering team and ask if they could do a complete ground up design that would be competitive, took that information along with the projected improvements for Bulldozer/Piledriver etc and showed that doing so was not a path that would lead to being market competitive, ever.

 

Anybody can look and say Bulldozer isn't completive, but can you present a proper business case to change an entire company's strategic plan and do so successfully? Without a how you're just another parrot.

 

You could go to TechTechPotato YouTube channel and listen to the interview with him and see what involvement he actually had in Zen but I suspect based on what your opinion is you won't be able to get past that.

 

It's completely fair to point out that these efforts are actually casts of thousands not one but it's also true that an orchestra needs a conductor otherwise it's just a group of highly talented people making noise not music.

 

You can say he was a bad hire as much as you like but Zen wouldn't be here if he wasn't A) Hired, B) Did what he did. If all his involvement in Zen was that business case, which is wasn't, then that's still highly, crucially, important to where AMD is today.

 

Thank you for doing this. Tried to write something myself before and was just too bloody furious to come up with anything good.

 

To extend your orchestra analogy though. An orchestra without a conductor will just make noise, whilst an orchestra with a conductor will make some for of music, but a bad conductor will result in poor music. You need not just a conductor, but ones thats actually good at their job. 

 

Also your example with the presenting an argument highlights somthing that a lot of people forget, management teams can be just as prone as individuals to having blinders on and not seeing what is blatantly obvious to outsiders. And you need someone with both the skill set and respect a good manager with a good industry level reputation has if you want to tell them all they've got their heads stuck up their asses. Because just like all the anti-vaxers going around at the moment,they really don;t want to hear that they're wrong so you need one hell of a convincing argument from someone they trust to get them to switch.

 

now pardon me while i go off and rant in private about Mr Wakefield.

[Lightwreather]

6 hours ago, CarlBar said:

To extend your orchestra analogy though. An orchestra without a conductor will just make noise, whilst an orchestra with a conductor will make some for of music, but a bad conductor will result in poor music. You need not just a conductor, but ones thats actually good at their job.

Sorry to break your analogy but in an orchestral setting, if the conductor is absent, the concertmaster (usually the more experienced violinst or pianist) takes over, same as for when there's a bad conductor

[Avocado Diaboli]

7 hours ago, CarlBar said:

To extend your orchestra analogy though. An orchestra without a conductor will just make noise, whilst an orchestra with a conductor will make some for of music, but a bad conductor will result in poor music. You need not just a conductor, but ones thats actually good at their job. 

I hope this isn't too derailing, but I find this comparison to conductors amusing. As someone who happens to have played in brass bands for over 20 years now, I can tell you that the conductor isn't all that important beyond keeping time, something a metronome can fill in. The irony here is that a bad orchestra will always require a good conductor to get the best out of them, but a world class orchestra can function just as well without having a conductor on stage at all. I've played concerts with amateur bands where for individual pieces the conductor wasn't on stage. I've played pieces where the musicians weren't even on stage at the same time, instead we were spread out over the entire concert hall. This made playing with a conductor impossible. You have to go by ear, trust everybody else and listen to what others play. Or whenever you have to play in marching formation, the conductor can do little else other than swing his baton. I've been part of bands that were used to train aspiring conductors who have no experience leading a band and we sounded just as good as if our regular conductor stood in front of us, because we compensated for their inexperience. And it's customary for us to play at weddings of fellow band members and usually the bride or groom, if they aren't also part of our band, traditionally get to conduct a piece too, so we have to play around them and do our best. Heck, I've been to concerts where the conductor does nothing but maintain the tempo. I've seen Star Wars with a live orchestra and the conductor there literally had a metronome on an iPad in front of him, he was just swinging his baton to keep the music in time with the movie.

 

To get back to that ironic part here: It's always the conductor who gets praised to high heavens for his achievements with the orchestra, even though if you conduct an orchestra filled with world class players, your job really isn't that important and the band or orchestra playing the actual music do the heavy lifting. Just like how upper management congratulate themselves (and pay themselves large bonuses) over what they've achieved when the people who actually did all the work are the guys and gals at the bottom that nobody acknowledges. I'm always wary of cult of personality and auteur theory, especially when it concerns something that inherently requires collaboration. The flip side here obviously is that it's hard to pin down what exactly the achievements of a single person in such an environment actually was. But I think speaking authoritatively about Keller in either direction, pro or contra his achievements or lack thereof, is pretty much impossible for an outsider.

[LAwLz]

8 hours ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

But I think speaking authoritatively about Keller in either direction, pro or contra his achievements or lack thereof, is pretty much impossible for an outsider.

I agree with what you said except the part about the orchestra, I have no idea how that works and I think we are analyzing the analogy way too much right now.

I just want to take this opportunity to say that I am not trying to downplay Keller's achievements. Like I said in my post, you don't get employed as VP of engineering at Apple if you aren't good, but I think people give him way too much credit for what is a massive group effort.

There were thousands of people working on the A4 for example, yet people attribute the success of the A4 to Keller and Keller alone. I've seen plenty of people say "Keller was the guy behind the A4" or "Keller was the guy behind the AMD Athlon and 64bit", when in reality he might have been responsible for like 1/100 of the work that went into those products, and even 1/100 is high estimate if you ask me.

 

Same with people like Lisa Su. AMD got thousands of engineers that worked together with thousands of engineers at TSMC to create Zen, and what happens as soon as Zen gets released? People start praising Lisa Su, who wasn't involved with the development of Zen, and saying how amazing she is for making AMD competitive again. She didn't make AMD competitive in the CPU space. AMD's and TSMC's engineers, which are thousands of individual people, made AMD competitive again.

[orbitalbuzzsaw]

14nm++++++++++++++ coming soon

[Brooksie359]

32 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

I agree with what you said except the part about the orchestra, I have no idea how that works and I think we are analyzing the analogy way too much right now.

I just want to take this opportunity to say that I am not trying to downplay Keller's achievements. Like I said in my post, you don't get employed as VP of engineering at Apple if you aren't good, but I think people give him way too much credit for what is a massive group effort.

There were thousands of people working on the A4 for example, yet people attribute the success of the A4 to Keller and Keller alone. I've seen plenty of people say "Keller was the guy behind the A4" or "Keller was the guy behind the AMD Athlon and 64bit", when in reality he might have been responsible for like 1/100 of the work that went into those products, and even 1/100 is high estimate if you ask me.

 

Same with people like Lisa Su. AMD got thousands of engineers that worked together with thousands of engineers at TSMC to create Zen, and what happens as soon as Zen gets released? People start praising Lisa Su, who wasn't involved with the development of Zen, and saying how amazing she is for making AMD competitive again. She didn't make AMD competitive in the CPU space. AMD's and TSMC's engineers, which are thousands of individual people, made AMD competitive again.

Tbh I think most people realize that these are the work of many people. I am not someone who has worked or has alot of knowledge about cpu development so take what I am about to say with a bit of salt. I have worked on large construction projects as an engineering consultant and in those projects there are a ton of people working on things and alot of moving parts and if it wasn't for having competent people managing the project it would be difficult for the project to be successful. I mean people can be very talented at what they do but it's no small task to get all of these people to work as a cohesive group especially when you are talking about 1000 people. I mean you have to take into account that if everyone of those 1000 people have to be constantly worried about how to work together with the other 1000 people then it will negatively effect their performance as they have less time to focus on their specific work. 

[atxcyclist]

On 7/8/2021 at 10:50 AM, WolframaticAlpha said:

Sandy bridge, haswell and skylake are the GOAT core cpus

I'm still on a 4790K in my workstation at the office, perfectly fine for what I do. I also have a Haswell-based Xeon in an HTPC I built and it's solid. Limited with DDR3 and only the highest-end chipset support some features like NVMe, but still viable platforms none-the-less.

[Lightwreather]

8 hours ago, orbitalbuzzsaw said:

14nm++++++++++++++ coming soon

They've alreasy technically moved to 10nm in all but their desktop CPUs which in alder lake they will (at 10nm)

[WolframaticAlpha]

5 hours ago, atxcyclist said:

I'm still on a 4790K in my workstation at the office, perfectly fine for what I do. I also have a Haswell-based Xeon in an HTPC I built and it's solid. Limited with DDR3 and only the highest-end chipset support some features like NVMe, but still viable platforms none-the-less.

I also had a 4790k until last year, but the huge number of threads in new CPUs finally swayed me and I got a 10700k this year on sale.