The Intel Broadwell-E Review: Core i7-6950X, i7-6900K, i7-6850K and i7-6800K Tested

Catching Up: How Intel Can Re-Align Consumer and HEDT

Earlier in this piece I stated three reasons why the enterprise market has an out of step cadence with the latest CPU microarchitecture: product stability, regular releases, and platform longevity.

To get stability, using Intel’s tried and tested core makes sense, rather than the latest and greatest. The longevity of each enterprise platform is such that each socket and chipset generation must last for two CPU cycles, allowing a potential upgrade path, but also means that customers aren’t ripping out their installations every 12-18 months with fresh new ones in order to beat the competition. Also, by being behind the mainstream platform at a slightly slower refresh rate, it allows the release of enterprise CPUs to compensate for any process delay on the latest architecture.

But at this point, we are now a generation and a year behind the mainstream and latest microarchitecture. There are features in the latest mainstream Skylake CPUs, such as Speed Shift (the ability to react to high priority frequency requests up to 20x faster to save power and improve user experience), that are not in the enterprise and HEDT products. If the out-of-step and slower cadence continues, we could be two generations behind fairly easily. However, Intel has (inadvertently) developed a get-out-of-jail free card here.

Earlier in the year we reported that Intel is changing its processor development strategy due to a combination of factors including the slowing of Moore’s Law and the difficulty in creating a smaller lithography node to create processors. Intel was on their tick-tock strategy for around a decade, alternating between smaller nodes and new microarchitecture designs to give performance increases every cycle (or half-cycle). Tick-tock was well received and provided Intel and its investors with a steady expectation and revenue stream when the new product delivered and if it met expectation. When Intel hit several bumps with 14nm, tick-tock became an extended 'tiiiick-toock', slowly lengthening out the time between updates. Then this year Intel said that, for the CPU product line based on the Core microarchitecture family at least, would move to ‘Process-Architecture-Optimization’, or a three-stage cycle for 14nm (the current node) and 10nm (the next node).

On the mainstream product segment, this means that the 14nm family, originally featuring Broadwell (tick) and Skylake (tock), will become Broadwell (process), Skylake (architecture) and Kaby Lake (optimization). The level of ‘optimization’ that Kaby Lake will provide is unknown at this point, but what used to be a 24-month cycle can now become a 36-month cycle very easily.

But it is not immediately obvious what this means to the enterprise segment. One would naturally expect the segment to follow the PAO implementation, albeit slower. Here’s Intel’s potential trick for the future: depending on the level of ‘optimization’ in the final stage of the cycle, the enterprise segment has the potential to just bypass and ignore it, keeping the cycle length the same and giving Intel an opportunity to realign the microarchitectures. The net product would be 36 month cycles, spanning 3 product generations at the consumer level and 2 product generations at the enterprise/HEDT level.

That being said, it’s a little bit of conjecture. We have spoken to some senior members of Intel about this, and it was acknowledged that it could be a potential strategy, however as expected nothing like this would be confirmed in a casual conversation even if it was decided at a senior level. It will make an interesting point when the enterprise market rolls around to Skylake-E and Skylake-EP based cores and beyond, if Kaby Lake-E will be a ‘thing’ or not.