Ten Year Anniversary of Core 2 Duo and Conroe: Moore’s Law is Dead, Long Live Moore’s Law
by Ian Cutress on July 27, 2016 10:30 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Core 2 Duo
- Conroe
- ITRS
- Nostalgia
- Time To Upgrade
Looking To The Future: Mobile, 32-cores and 8K Displays
The volume of the mobile industry today is certainly a hot topic, especially with Intel scrapping their mobile platform as recently as April 2016. This primarily leaves ARM (who was recently acquired by Softbank) in the driving seat for providing the next decade of mobile processor designs. Because ARM sells licences, both processor licences and architecture licences, a number of ARM’s partners have taken the base instructions and decided to forgo ARM’s core designs for their own. This is why we currently see Samsung with their M1 core, Qualcomm with their Kryo core, and Apple with their Twister cores as well, while Huawei, Mediatek and others are combining parts of ARM’s core designs with various GPU designs either from ARM or Imagination. Getting the right combination of parts, as well as the industrial design, are key elements to the user experience as well as the mobile industry as a whole.
Then of course, Mediatek announced the Helio X20 last year, which is finally now in devices. This is a 10-core part, using a paradigm such that the most relevant cores needed for performance and power consumption are in play at the right time. The creation of a 10-core part made a number of industry analysts wonder which direction this market was going in, as on the one end we have the Helio X20, while Apple’s latest iPhone family were using dual-core designs of Apple’s custom implementation. So if 10-cores are too much, this roadmap might come a little surprising.
As we stand in 2016, this roadmap states we are currently in a 6-core mobile CPU arrangement with 12 GPU cores, with the CPU running at 2.8 GHz. Displays are around the Full-HD mark, with overall board power at 4.42W. Well we certainly have hex-core parts today (2xA57 + 4xA53), 12-core GPUs also exist in Apple’s products, and Samsung’s M1 core is rated at 2.8 GHz. Some phones, such as Sony’s Xperia Z5 Premium, already have 4K screens (8.3MP), which is more geared towards 2020 in this roadmap.
Cycle now from 2016 to 2025, almost 10 years in the future. ITRS’ roadmap states the following:
- 36-cores
- 247 GPU cores
- 4.0 GHz
- 8K Screens (33.2 MP)
- 61.9 GB/s memory bandwidth
- 28 Gbit/s WiFi
- 6.86W Board Power
- 103 cm2 board area
Now clearly, for this piece I conferred with our mobile team and I got a lot of confused faces. Even scaling down from 16nm in 2016 to 4nm in 2025, they felt that so many all-purpose cores in a chip (as well as all the GPU cores) was probably excessive, not only in terms of utility but also for 2D floor plan. In order to implement this, more z-height would be needed as well as appropriate 3D technologies in place. Andrei felt the frequency targets were more respectable, and the memory bandwidth would depend on how the silicon designers decided to implement on-package DRAM vs multi-channel implementations. The board power seemed a little excessive, if only because the laws of physics can’t change that drastically, and an increase in +50% board area just means a bigger device.
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Namisecond - Thursday, July 28, 2016 - link
NVMe may not be all it's cracked up to be. It, for the most part, limits you to booting windows 8 and higher, and good luck with the free upgrade to windows 10 (which supposedly ends tomorrow).FourEyedGeek - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Same CPU here, mine is running at 4Ghz, I can't see a reason other than NVMe to upgrade.dotwayne - Thursday, July 28, 2016 - link
Had a trusty E6300 @ 3.4-5 ghz back then. ahhh...miss those days of oc-ing the shit out of these cheap but super capable silicons.jamyryals - Thursday, July 28, 2016 - link
Neat article, I enjoyed it Ian!azazel1024 - Thursday, July 28, 2016 - link
Yeah a lot of those assumptions and guestimates for the future seem either overly optimistic or seem to ignore realities. I realize board power doesn't equate to average power use, but you are still talking about max power consumption that would drain a current cell phone battery dead in less than an hour, even on some of the biggest phone batteries.Beyond that is the heat dissipation, that phone is going to get mighty hot trying to dissipate 8+ watts out of even a large phone chassis.
As pointed out, 32 cores seems a wee excessive. A lot of it seems to be "if we take it to the logical extreme" as opposed to "what we think is likely".
Peichen - Thursday, July 28, 2016 - link
Take a 45nm C2Q Q9650 ($50 eBay), overclock to 4.0GHz, and you will be as fast as AMD's FX-9590 that's running at 220W. Older motherboard and DDR2 will be harder to come by but it is sad how AMD never managed to catch up to Core 2 after all these years. E6400 was my first Intel after switching to AMD after the original Pentium and I have never look back at AMD again.Panoramix0903 - Thursday, July 28, 2016 - link
I have made an upgrade from C2D 6550 to Q9650 in my old DELL Optiplex 755 MT. Plus 4x 2GB DDR2 800 MHz, Intel 535 SSD 240 GB, Sapphire Radeon HD7750 1GB DDR5, Sound Blaster X-FI, and USB 3.0 PCI-E card. Running Windows 7 Professional. 3-times more power then original DELL configuration :-)JohnRO - Thursday, July 28, 2016 - link
I just logged in to tell you that I'm reading this article on my desktop PC which has a Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 processor (1,8 GHz, 200 MHz FSB) with 4 GB of RAM (started with 2). When I wanted (or needed) I overclocked this processor to 3 GHz (333 MHz FSB).My PC will have its 10 years anniversary this December. During the years I upgraded the video card (for 1080p h264 hardware decoding and games when I still played them) and added more hard drives. The PC has enough performance for what I’m using it right now – so I would say that this is a good processor.
siriq - Thursday, July 28, 2016 - link
I still got my mobile 2600+ barton @2750 mhz , 939 3800+ x2 @2950 mhz . They were awesome!althaz - Thursday, July 28, 2016 - link
I bought a C2D E6300 the week it came out, my first Intel CPU since 2000. My previous CPUs had been an AMD Athlon 64 and an AMD Athlon Thunderbird.That E6300 remains my all-time favourite CPU. It's still running in a friend of mine's PC (@ 2.77Ghz, which I overclocked it to soon after getting it). It was just *so* fast compared to my old PC. Everything just instantly got faster (and I hadn't even upgraded my GPU!).