MMMMMMmmmmMmMMMm!!! That’s a good waifu.
Speaking of good waifus, today, the Intel 12,000 series of processors was released.
First time on desktop that we’ve got power AND efficiency cores in one design.
Hopefully for the best of both worlds! It’s very exciting. Can’t wait to see how good they are.
…Unfortunately I haven’t been given one, so I’m just going to have to talk about all the old,
boring designs leading up to this point. Hopefully I’ll still make a good video out of it. Thanks to
Anandtech, their website is AMAZING for doing research on this sort of stuff – it’s where I
do all my research, very, very handy. Speaking of… very handy…
MMMMJMmJNMJMjmmMmmmMmm
The Intel 12000 series is exciting, because it’s the first time in a while that Intel has done
something… exciting. This makes now, the PERFECT time to recap the 10 years of Intel processors
leading up to this point, which have had the longest period of consistent naming that I
have ever seen. But this is perhaps in part because it’s also seen the slowest progress!
This is because both AMD and Intel have made epic failures of some sort or another.
Soon after Sandybridge came out, AMD launched their Bulldozer architecture.
And despite some fanboys wanting to defend it to the bitter end, the truth is that it was terrible,
and until Ryzen came out in 2017, it resigned AMD processors to mobile and budget builds.
Despite tweaks and optimisations over the years, Bulldozer was a major misstep that allowed Intel’s
progress to stagnate as they re-released similarly performing processors for similar prices, year
after year, without a care for what AMD was doing. And then suddenly, after Ryzen came out, Intel
started upping the cores across their line-up, and processor performance started to advance again.
But in this time, Intel has had its own problems. Processor performance has relied heavily on
smaller process nodes to be able to fit more into smaller spaces, while consuming less power. But as
you can see here, Intel got stuck on 14 nm for a meme-able length of time! All their roadmaps
planned on moving to smaller nodes, yet they had to keep re-designing new architectures on the 14
nm, time and time again. It’s quite incredible that they’ve managed to squeeze so much more
performance out of it. But with the new 12,000 series they’re finally moving onto a new process
they call ‘Intel 7’. Which is more like 10 nm, but all these measurements have got a bit pointless
now any way so I guess what they mean with their brand name is they deem it to be competitive with
AMD’s 7 nm process. And about time, too. Before we start with the…
‘core’ of this spreadsheet, I’ll briefly mention these coloured areas.
This green bit represents the era before Sandybridge. And I won’t be covering that because
it’s a mess! And it’s now so old and outdated that it’s irrelevant. But just so you know,
Intel Core goes back as far as 2006, with products like the Core 2 duo. These were Intel’s first
PROPER dual core processors- with the first quad cores coming out soon after them.
This kind of processor went through numerous generations and naming schemes, but in my opinion,
the modern era of Intel processors started with Sandybridge, which is still good enough
to be useable today! Plus, these names still make relative sense by today’s standards.
BUT, if you go back any time before then and Intel’s naming scheme turns completely alien-
what should have been named the 1000 series was actually the ‘0’ series,
and you had dual core i5’s and a singular naming scheme that covered multiple different
architectures and process nodes. It was a MESS. This bit in red I’ve referred to as ‘i9?’,
but perhaps a better term for this category would be ‘beyond traditional core counts’.
Because I don’t really think it was a feasible option for most people to consider this tier…
until the 7000 series, which was when Ryzen came out and suddenly having more than 4 cores wasn’t
such an insane proposition anymore. It was at this point that Intel officially rebranded these
processors from being i7’s to being i9’s, and their appearance on this spreadsheet shifted from
representing Intel’s best, to simply being the next tier beyond i7’s as you head towards server
processors. Because by now, we all know that Intel and AMD are capable of consumer processors that
go well beyond the normal core counts. We just don’t particularly care, because every tier of
processor has gained more cores in recent years, and even the lower tier of the i9 series has been
better fleshed out to be a tier of its own. I don’t know. I’m just trying to explain here how
my perception of the i9 lineup has shifted over time, which I believe is in part thanks to AMD,
in part because stuff started utilising more than 4 cores, and also because now I’m older,
and have more money than I did back then and the i9 lineup no longer feels beyond my reach!
But this is where things get confusing: Intel used to release these i9-tier parts a generation
‘later’ than the rest of the series! So although the 3970X’s name sounds like it should be based
on Ivybridge, it’s actually based on the older Sandybridge architecture, but with more cores.
It’s confusing, and since these parts are reserved for the ultra high-end I’m happy just to ignore
this for the sake of simplicity. But that’s why the numbers all look wrong for these parts.
And this bit in blue is where Intel’s cheaper processors tend to be.
Below the i3 lineup is normally the Pentium series, and below that,
the Celeron. They tend to come with fewer cores or threads than the main ‘i’ lineup does,
and there is occasionally an excellent budget processor in these parts.
But this video is already trying to cover enough as it is, so I’ll now focus on the main lineup.
We’ll start with Sandybridge, which came out in 2011.
This was called the 2000 series, and you’ll know these already because they were amazing.
So amazing, in fact, that they’re still functional processors to this day. There was the i5 2500K,
which was an excellent 4 core processor. Then the i7 2600K was 4 cores with Hyperthreading.
So 8 threads. Both were massively overclockable, and immediately rendered everything before them
obsolete by being super fast AND relatively inexpensive. If you bought either of these
when they first came out, then you were pretty much set until Ryzen came out in 2017,
which was the next time anything exciting happened at mainstream pricepoints.
Intel had a ‘tick tock’ strategy, where generations would alternate between a ‘tick’
and a ‘tock’. With a ‘tick’, they’d shrink their processors down to a smaller node. Then with a
‘tock’, they’d build a new architecture to better utilise the smaller node. Doing it in stages like
this meant there was less to go wrong, though as we all know, it still went terribly wrong.
However, the 3000 series was a successful ‘tick’, shrinking the processors down to the 22 nm node.
Codenamed Ivybridge, it was a bit faster, and a bit more power-efficient than Sandybridge was.
Unfortunately, it didn’t tend to overclock as well as the 2000 series had done…
but then, it didn’t need to because it was a bit better in the first place.
The 4000 series was a ‘tock’, remaining on the 3000 series’s’s 22 nm node,
but comprising of a new and improved architecture. I got the feeling at this point that Intel wasn’t
trying to go faster, but was instead focusing on improving laptop performance, and passing
those optimisations over to its desktop parts. The 4000 series was about 5-15% faster than the
3000 series, at a reduced power consumption. The 4000 series was around for quite some time,
because it had a mid-generation refresh called ‘Devils Canyon’ which came out in the form of
parts like the 4790K, which was like the 4770K, but with a superior physical design
to dissipate its heat better and thus to clock higher. So this was really the star of the 4000
series- coming with a greater performance leap than the 4770K had over the 3770K!
Not bad for a mid-generation refresh. The 5000 series was the lost generation.
For desktops, it was out for about 3 months before the faster 6000 series came out- so it hardly even
existed. But it was used in laptops, and thanks to its new 14 nm process, it was extremely efficient.
It was ALMOST as fast as the 4000 series had been, but at a significantly reduced power consumption.
And it came with excellent onboard graphics for the time- with resources which occasionally helped
in other activities as well. So I liked the idea of these processors because they seemed clever,
even if there was no point in upgrading to them if you were on an i5 or i7 already. HOWEVER,
it WAS an exciting generation for another reason that I will be mentioning in a moment.
And now we get onto the Intel 6000 series, known as Skylake. Based on 14 nm again, but improved,
you can see here that Skylyke was -again- not a big improvement over the generation before it.
But all these small improvements added up, and because it was still a BIT of an improvement,
and because it could clock a BIT higher, it was still undisputedly Intel’s fastest
generation of processors to date. And just as well, because while the
newer generations may have different sounding codenames, they’re all based on skylake to some
degree or another. That is, until today with the 12000 series! So that means, for 6 years,
Intel was reliant on Skylake on 14 nm to drive performance forward, and to compete against AMD.
And the 7000 series was, AGAIN, more of the same! It was still 14 nm.
But with a ‘plus’ on the end. (The first of many!) Its manufacturing process had been optimised.
But at the end of the day, the 7000 series was virtually identical to the 6000 series,
but clocked a bit higher again. So they were, technically, the best processors in the world…
but the i5’s still only had 4 cores, and the i7’s still only had 4 cores + hyperthreading.
And this is when AMD launched Ryzen. For its price, Ryzen would offer double the
cores that Intel CPUs had. But Ryzen clocked lower than Intel, and was thus
a bit slower per core. How much slower? Well, Ryzen was comparable to the Intel
6800 and 6900 series, which were based on the Haswell 5000 series,
which itself was a node-shrunk 4000 series with a few optimisations. So in other words:
Ryzen was kind of like the Intel 4000 series. So on paper, it was 3 generations behind
Intel’s 7000 series. But those were 3 very small generations! It wasn’t like bulldozer,
which needed full utilisation of all its cores to match Intel’s processors. It was more like:
up against Intel’s latest i7, Ryzen was 10-20% slower in single-threaded benchmarks, but since
it had double the cores it would absolutely crush the i7 in multi-threaded scenarios. And I guess,
for me, that made it a far more desirable upgrade than Intel’s proposition of jumping from a 4
core processor to… a faster 4 core processor. Which would have been the situation you faced,
had you bought a decent processor at any point in the 6 years prior to this.
If you look over to the ‘i9’ box you’ll notice an 18 core CPU. Technically this was based on Skylake
and not Kabylake so I’ve made a mistake by putting it in line with the rest of the 7000 series but
auhh who cares it’s all technically skylake any way. Any way, 18 cores! Compared with the 10 the
6000 series maxed out with. Which was technically the 5000 series but oFGFHHOHG horrible.
10 to 18! That’s a big leap from Intel! …and the reason for this is, again, AMD, who didn’t just
offer 8 core Ryzen processors, but also up to 16 core Threadripper parts. And for not a lot
of money, which in my opinion created a new tier of processor BEYOND the i7, yet still delivering a
performance leap that justified its price premium. So in a knee-jerk reaction to this,
Intel presumably took a load of their server chips and rebranded them as consumer ones.
Despite looking impressive on paper, the 7000 series of CPUs was confused, and had a lot of dud
products; the high-end processors were up against MUCH cheaper threadripper products-
you could get a 16 core threadripper for less than the cost of a 12 core 7920X, for example.
And then Intel made the strange decision of releasing the 7640X, their fastest 4 core i5 ever,
but on a motherboard platform that cost more than the processor itself did! Who were they
trying to appeal to here, exactly?... In conclusion, Intel’s 7000 series was a
confused barrage of dozens of products across several platforms that were
released in response to AMD’s Zen-based attack. It’s not like Intel stopped making 18 core CPUs-
there’s also the 9980 and 10980, both with 18 cores each. But like I said earlier, it’s almost
like a new tier of processor was created with the 7000 series, for people who want more than the i7,
but who still aren’t interested in some ridiculous 16 core behemoth they have no hope of feeding most
of the time. It’s not like those parts didn’t exist before, but with 6 and 8 cores suddenly
becoming mainstream, the core war was in full swing and the i9 line for consumers was born.
And then Intel’s 8000 series changed things again! As if by magic, the Coffee Lake 8000
series was the first time in ages that Intel upped the core counts across their mainstream
line-ups. The i3’s went from 2 cores with HT to 4 without HT, the i5’s went from 4 to 6 cores,
and the i7’s went from 4 with HT to 6 with HT. Because of how they’ve jumped, it’s hard to know
for sure HOW much faster the 8000 series is over the 7000 series. The new i3’s were like
the older i5’s, but the rest are weird leaps that we’re not used to seeing from Intel.
It seems like the 8000 series was roughly the same speed as the 7000 series in gaming, but thanks to
its 50% more cores and threads, appeared to be 50% faster in multicore tasks! How about that. This
makes the 8000 series the biggest generational leap in performance covered in this video so far.
For the 9000 series, the i7 part went from being 6 cores, 12 threads to 8 cores and…
8 threads. Which is curious, because it’ll clearly be better in some ways, but worse in others.
So a weird sort of sideways step for the i7 line, and I wonder if this was done intentionally to
make room at the top for the premium, but still mainstream-specced i9 9900K. With 8 cores and
16 threads, this was indeed premium for an Intel processor at the time! But I didn’t see it like
that, as over on AMD’s side, the Ryzen 1700 and 2700 series had been sporting this many cores and
threads in the mainstream for years already. To summarise: compared with the 8000 series,
the 9000 series boosted higher, so performed faster, with the 9900K predictably being the
fastest ‘normal’ sort of processor you could get in the world at that time. You know,
not cheap, but at less than $500 not unreasonably expensive either, beating the identically cored
and threaded -but considerably cheaper- Ryzen 2700X by a fair margin. But in doing so, the
9900K ran hot, and consumed a hellalot of power. For the 10000 series, all tiers either got more
threads, more cores or both. At the top of the line is the 10900K, which upped the core count to
10, and the threads to 20! And all of these CPUs boosted even higher than the 9000 series had done.
The underlying architecture hadn’t really changed since Skylake back with the 6000 series,
but by now it had been super optimised and with lots of pluses next to its name.
I don’t even know if I’ve got the right number of plusses here- frankly I don’t care.
It’s how many pluses I think they deserve by this point for reusing the same stuff this many times.
And what do you know, it consumed even more power than ever before, with the i9 part sipping 250
watts at full load. I think it’s fair to say that the 10000 series was faster than the Ryzen
3000 series it was competing with, which I think is what Intel cared about most, but it’s a far
cry from the first few generations of Core which seemed to prioritise efficiency above all else.
And finally, we reach the 11000 series, released earlier this year! On paper, it looks like a
bit of a backwards step- the 11900K has only 8 cores and 16 threads compared with the 10900K’s
10 cores and 20 threads. What’s that about?! This generation was really intended for 10 nm,
and due to YET MORE complications with it, Intel had no choice but to try and get it working on
14 nm. It’s not all bad: it does indeed improve single core performance. And while it isn’t that
exciting for consumers, it’s a big achievement for Intel to have pulled something like this off, and
what they’ve learned from doing this may benefit them some how in the future. I’ll link to an
interesting video on this done by Techtechpotato. SO! Next up is the 12000 series, to be released
today. It’s exciting enough that it’s based on a new, improved node process.
But on top of this, it’s the first series of desktop processors to use a mixture of powerful
and efficient cores, in a bid to improve multitasking and energy efficiency. This is
something that phones have been doing for years yet is still a novel concept for desktop PCs.
So props to Intel for managing so much with a 14 nm process.
For everybody’s sake, let’s hope they don’t get stuck like that again. Onto the future.