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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Jon Tseng - Wednesday, July 27, 2016 - link
Great chip. Only just upgraded from my QX6850 last month. Paired with a GTX 970 it was doing just fine running all new games maxed out at 1080p. Amazing for something nearly a decade old!!Negative Decibel - Wednesday, July 27, 2016 - link
my E6600 is still kicking.tarqsharq - Wednesday, July 27, 2016 - link
My dad still uses my old E8400 for his main PC. He's getting my old i7-875k soon though.jjj - Wednesday, July 27, 2016 - link
You can't do DRAM in glasses, not in a real way. Since that's what mobile is by 2025.On-package DRAM is next year or soon not 2025.
You can't have big cores either and you need ridiculous GPUs and extreme efficiency. Parallelism and accelerators, that's where computing needs to go, from mobile to server.
We need 10-20 mm3 chips not 100cm2 boards. New NV memories not DRAM and so on.
Will be interesting to see who goes 3D first with logic on logic and then who goes 3D first as the default in the most advanced process.
At the end of the day, even if the shrinking doesn't stop, 2D just can't offer enough for the next form factor. Much higher efficiency is needed and the size of a planar chip would be far too big to fit in the device while the costs would be mad.Much more is needed. For robots too.The costs and efficiency need to scale and with planar it's at best little.
wumpus - Thursday, August 4, 2016 - link
On package DRAM seems to be a "forever coming" tech. AMD Fury-X basically shipped it, and it went nowhere. I'm guessing it will be used whenever Intel or IBM feel it can be used for serious advantage on some high-core server chip, or possibly when Intel want to build a high-speed DRAM cache (with high-speed-bus) and use 3dXpoint for "main memory".The slow rollout is shocking. I'm guessing nvidia eventually gave up with it and went with tiling (see the Kanter demo on left, but ignore the thread: nothing but fanboys beating their chests).
willis936 - Wednesday, July 27, 2016 - link
I'm certainly no silicon R&D expert but I'm very skeptical of those projections.Mr.Goodcat - Wednesday, July 27, 2016 - link
Typo:"On the later, we get the prediction that 450nm wafers should be in play at around 2021 for DRAM"
450nm wafers would be truly interesting ;-)
wumpus - Thursday, August 4, 2016 - link
I like the rapidly falling static safety. Don't breathe on a 2030 chip.faizoff - Wednesday, July 27, 2016 - link
My first Core 2 Duo was an E4400 that I bought in 2007 I believe, thing lasted me up to 2011 when I upgraded to an i5 2500k. I should've kept that C2D just for nostalgia's sake, I used it intermittently as a plex server and that thing worked great on FreeNAS. The only issue was it was really noisy and would get hot.Notmyusualid - Thursday, July 28, 2016 - link
I've got a few old servers kicking around, all with valid Win server licenses, but due to UK electricity costs, just can't bring myself to have them running at home 24/7 just to serve a backup, or yet another Breaking Bad viewing session... :) which we can do locally now.