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by TylerE 868 days ago
It's really sort of been downhill since they decided to play the speed number game over all else with the Pentium IV. Even the core i7/i9 lines that were good for a long time have gone absolutely crazy lately with heat and power consumption.
2 comments
ColonelPhantom 867 days ago
That's overly reductionist. Conroe topped out at around 3 GHz, compared to its predecessor Presler achieving 3.6 GHz.

I think Netburst mostly came from a misguided place where Intel thought that clock frequency was in fact the holy grail (and would scale far beyond what actually ended up happening), and that all the IPC issues such as costly mispredicts could be solved by e.g. improving branch prediction.

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TylerE 867 days ago
It is exactly that short sited mhz over all else attitude im referring to as a fatal mistake.
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toast0 868 days ago
Intel's market reality is (percieved) speed sells chips.

It's embarassing when they go to market and there's no way to say it's faster than the other guy. Currently, they need to pump 400W through the chip to get the clock high enough.

But perf at 200w or even 100w isn't that far below perf at 400w. If you limit power to something like 50w, the compute efficiency is good.

Contrast that to Apple, they don't have to compete in the same way, and they don't let their chips run hot. There's no way to get the extra 1% of perf if you need it.

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TylerE 868 days ago
Oh, I'm quite well aware. I traded a spaceheater of an i9/3090 tower for an M1 Studio.

The difference in performance for 95% of what I do is zero. I even run some (non-AAA) Windows games via crossover, and that's driving a 1440p 165hz display. All while it sits there consuming no more than about 35w (well, plus a bit for all my USB ssds, etc) and I've never seen the thermals much past 60c, even running nastive-accelerated LLMs or highly multithreaded chess engines and the like. Usually sits at about 40c at idle.

It's exactly what almost 40 year old me wants out of a computer. It's quiet, cool, and reliable - but at the same time I'm very picky about input devices so a-bring-your-own peripherals desktop machine with a ton of USB ports is non-negotiable.

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