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Ryokurin
Jul 14, 2001

Wanna Die?

Install Gentoo posted:

So? They were more popular then PDAs had been, and we'd already seen "cell phones in general" reach billions sold by that time. As well already knowing that regular computers had taken off.

The only question back then was "when will everyone have a smartphone" not "will smartphones ever be popular". Heck at that point a lot of features once considered exclusive to smartphones - like real data connections, browsers beyond WAP, music playback, screens that could actually show something besides text - had started appearing on regular phones.


They had been saying that for years by that point, and like you said features were starting to overlap. But no one saw items like music streaming or a full featured browser as a potential game change. The need for data was still pretty much seen as something that only business people would need and if a consumer needed it, it was for WAP or IM. People also forget the iPhone was $600 back then. That's why no one took it seriously. Hell even today that price for a unlocked phone makes people cringe.

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Nintendo Kid
Aug 4, 2011

by Smythe

Ryokurin posted:

They had been saying that for years by that point, and like you said features were starting to overlap. But no one saw items like music streaming or a full featured browser as a potential game change. The need for data was still pretty much seen as something that only business people would need and if a consumer needed it, it was for WAP or IM. People also forget the iPhone was $600 back then. That's why no one took it seriously. Hell even today that price for a unlocked phone makes people cringe.

Again, all of that was about "it will take 13 years for smartphones to be everywhere" instead of "it will take 3 years".

Also the iPhone still costs that much if you buy it outright. Tons of regular phones then and now cost $300-$400 easily if you bought them unsubsidized. Like, duh, phones costing a lot of money was nothing new. In the 90s getting a plain old cell phone unsubsidized could easily run you more than $1000.

The iPhone 2G wasn't taken seriously because not only did it cost as much as all the other unsubsidized smartphones, it also did not have any apps or 3G service but still cost as much as devices that did. Which is unsurprisingly why the iPhone 3G released a few moths after the app store finally opened sold a shitload better.

Shaocaholica
Oct 29, 2002

Fig. 5E
Is the whole on-package voltage regulator from Intel still happening with Haswell? I thought I saw a photo of a shipping Haswell CPU with the IHS removed and there was no separate voltage regulator but maybe that photo was bogus or wrong.

Also, how much motherboard real estate does having an on-package or on-die VRM save? What portion of current motherboard ICs/parts will be replaced?

Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.

Shaocaholica posted:

Is the whole on-package voltage regulator from Intel still happening with Haswell? I thought I saw a photo of a shipping Haswell CPU with the IHS removed and there was no separate voltage regulator but maybe that photo was bogus or wrong.

Also, how much motherboard real estate does having an on-package or on-die VRM save? What portion of current motherboard ICs/parts will be replaced?

It's partial. The motherboard still has to step +12V to somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5V (IIRC) for the package, then the package will do step-downs to Vcc, Vdram, and the GPU + Northbridge voltages.

Most of the board shots I've seen haven't really saved so much area as they have saved components. Mostly, high-end boards only have as many MOSFETs as today's midrange boards, and new midrange boards only have as many as current low-end boards. I imagine the controller IC could potentially be cheaper, too.

fookolt
Mar 13, 2012

Where there is power
There is resistance
Just how long will LGA 2011 be with us? I imagine Haswell-E is going to use a new socket, right?

in a well actually
Jan 26, 2011

dude, you gotta end it on the rhyme

fookolt posted:

Just how long will LGA 2011 be with us? I imagine Haswell-E is going to use a new socket, right?

Yup.

Shaocaholica
Oct 29, 2002

Fig. 5E
Does intel ever update chipsets in the middle of a cycle?

movax
Aug 30, 2008

Shaocaholica posted:

Does intel ever update chipsets in the middle of a cycle?

What do you mean by "update"? New steppings and SKUs do roll out, yes (the more esoteric/specialized ones like Bxx might not have been 100% ready at launch time), but in terms of a brand "new" chipset, not really.

The Z68 was kind of a odd occurrence, but IIRC it was "known" at launch that a chipset would come out that would let you get the best of both the P67 and H67, so that wasn't a huge surprise to people.

Shaocaholica
Oct 29, 2002

Fig. 5E
Ah ok, I get it now after reading some stuff on wikipedia. I guess my main question was if something like the enthusiast Z87 would get replaced with something better before or at broadwell launch.

Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.

Shaocaholica posted:

Ah ok, I get it now after reading some stuff on wikipedia. I guess my main question was if something like the enthusiast Z87 would get replaced with something better before or at broadwell launch.

That's different. On one hand, Ivy Bridge got the 7-series chipsets even though Sandy's 6-series chipsets could support IVB processors with a BIOS update. On the other hand, there won't be a socketed Broadwell, so it's a bit irrelevant. It won't be possible to get Broadwell without a chipset and stick it in an old board.

The next "Enthusiast" board will be for Skylake, excepting any overclocking-but-not-socketed Broadwell SKUs.

cstine
Apr 15, 2004

What's in the box?!?

Factory Factory posted:

That's different. On one hand, Ivy Bridge got the 7-series chipsets even though Sandy's 6-series chipsets could support IVB processors with a BIOS update. On the other hand, there won't be a socketed Broadwell, so it's a bit irrelevant. It won't be possible to get Broadwell without a chipset and stick it in an old board.

The next "Enthusiast" board will be for Skylake, excepting any overclocking-but-not-socketed Broadwell SKUs.

Though, Intel has said Broadwell will just be lower TDP but otherwise performance-equivalent with Haswell, so that's not really a big deal.

Anywhere you're using a socketed chip you probably don't give half a poo poo about the TDP.

Khagan
Aug 8, 2012

Words cannot describe just how terrible Vietnamese are.

fookolt posted:

Just how long will LGA 2011 be with us? I imagine Haswell-E is going to use a new socket, right?

Your probably referring to BGA which is reserved for GT3 CPUs like the 4770R. I am curious as to how these may or may not effect motherboard structure and cooler compatibility.

fookolt
Mar 13, 2012

Where there is power
There is resistance

Khagan posted:

Your probably referring to BGA which is reserved for GT3 CPUs like the 4770R. I am curious as to how these may or may not effect motherboard structure and cooler compatibility.

I'm referring to the successor to Ivy Bridge-E (which isn't even out yet).

Shaocaholica
Oct 29, 2002

Fig. 5E
Err, so how are Xeons with GPUs going to work in 2P+ systems? Does Intel have anything in the works for multi GPU?

Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.
Like with SNB-E, they're probably just gonna leave off the GPUs on the models with more than four cores.

Shaocaholica
Oct 29, 2002

Fig. 5E

Factory Factory posted:

Like with SNB-E, they're probably just gonna leave off the GPUs on the models with more than four cores.

Really? The wiki page for Haswell specifically points out that quad core models have GT2 graphics. Or do you mean only one GPU will be active out of all the procs in a system?

Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.
None of the Xeon E3s are dual-socket capable. The E5 line is where dual socket begins, and that will be Haswell-E. As in, the die with at least 8 cores. As in, all the dies with more than four cores.

Sandy Bridge:



Sandy Bridge-E:



Xeon E3 uses the upper die. Xeon E5 uses the lower die. No graphics on Sandy Bridge-E. This will very probably continue with Haswell Xeons.

Factory Factory fucked around with this message at 18:37 on May 26, 2013

necrobobsledder
Mar 21, 2005
Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll
Nap Ghost
The E3s are basically i5/i7 CPUs with (unregistered-only) ECC and VT-d support plus a few other enterprise-class features that are downstream from the actual server CPUs starting with entry level E5 processors that are actually dual socket capable. What's funny is that most E5s wind up in servers and could probably use the integrated graphics while the E3s usually wind up in workstations with Quadros and Fire GPUs (not to mention the price segmentation and such), so it makes more sense to load the E5s with low-end integrated GPUs (and steal some revenue from AMD given the tight integration with the chipset to support onboard graphics and all). The memory controller being that full-featured is exactly why R-DIMMs are byte-for-byte cheaper than UDIMMs as well (the DIMM and the chipset have more responsibility without some dedicated supported from the CPU).

I'm really curious about the E3s getting TSX support though because that'll make a huge difference for people trying to muck about with high-throughput transactions beyond just databases not to mention few developers want to bother shoving their crap onto a production server to test all these fancy new instructions out. Then again, most of the devs involved with the major stuff probably have early access to Haswell and TSX-producing compilers from Intel.

Shaocaholica
Oct 29, 2002

Fig. 5E
Ah ok, didn't realize the E3 procs were single socket only. That would make sense for them to have GPUs and the multi socket chips to go GPU-less.

So July 2013 should be the 3rd anniversary of desktop 6 core CPUs from Intel right?. I guess the market for 8 core desktop CPUs still isn't really around the corner yet? Don't want to eat into workstation market? Or no 'consumer' apps to really tap that power?

Agreed
Dec 30, 2003

The price of meat has just gone up, and your old lady has just gone down

Prosumer workstation/fun-time-happy-place computers are a weird market space. Actual need (e.g. audio work, video work, coding, anything that can USE that power, often either on a freelance basis or supplementary to a more powerful, proper workstation setup at a facility) is lower than people with more money than sense (fuckin sweet Sandy Bridge-E so fast :smuggo:), frankly. And there are only so many people willing to put up that much cash just to have power they more or less understand they don't need, so it's not a priority, I guess. I mean, if the silicon comes out beautifully, business class that mofo, don't give it to desktop users!

cstine
Apr 15, 2004

What's in the box?!?
Actually, that raises a question - something like a Xeon E3-1230 isn't particularly more expensive than the similar Ivy Bridge chip - are the Xeons going to stay socketed, regardless of what Intel does with the 'consumer' line, or is that something that hasn't been discussed at all?

PUBLIC TOILET
Jun 13, 2009

cstine posted:

Actually, that raises a question - something like a Xeon E3-1230 isn't particularly more expensive than the similar Ivy Bridge chip - are the Xeons going to stay socketed, regardless of what Intel does with the 'consumer' line, or is that something that hasn't been discussed at all?

Good question, I'd like to know as well. I'm interested in building a Haswell system but I'm leaning towards Xeon and it would be nice if future revisions are socketed.

necrobobsledder
Mar 21, 2005
Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll
Nap Ghost
From what I've read, the follow-up to Haswell (Broadwell) will be BGA-only and be directly sent to OEMs and so those building aftermarket like most of us in SH/SC do for our home systems will need to wait until Skylake to whitebox. Because this is all a matter of forcing buyers to go directly from the OEM to pair CPU and motherboards (streamlining for costs and to trim logistics expenses while letting Intel pursue their mobile strategy) I think that they'll mark up Xeons even more with Broadwell that are still socketed or we'll all be forced into buying expensive marked-up Dell, HP, etc. servers instead of whiteboxing our own. There's evidence Intel is trying to squeeze a bit more life out of socketed E3s at least via more market segmentation AKA abusing market position (the Haswell E3 Xeon's LGA1150 is not compatible with Z87 LGA1150 sockets) so we may see something else to ruin our day as prosumers. The E3 is a final place where Intel could really put the screws on those of us with professional needs but on non-Fortune 500 budgets and since I don't think AMD will exactly step up to the task (they got rid of ECC support on newer CPUs unless they're Opterons) there's hardly a choice now without losing ECC on buttloads of RAM.

My current workstation / server is an E3-1230 Sandy Bridge system I built in 2011 and it's remarkable how well it's held up through Ivy Bridge. Maxed out at 32GB of RAM and while the clockspeed gets halved as a result (fuckin' UDIMMs), it really doesn't matter for most people's jobs until you start to get into supercomputing sort of workloads (there's a paper some guy running a big cluster with COTS hardware wrote where they actually did notice a substantial improvement in their job throughput with higher clocked RAM). I'm going to anticipate that Haswell will be the last E3 I can whitebox for a Xeon system though and with Intel stopping at 32GB of UDIMMs (not trying to push for DDR4 UDIMMs of 16GB+) for Haswell, they've identified and put their foot down on the memory boundary between workstation needs and "you should just run it on a server." It'll be peculiar to shove my current Xeon into a gaming setup in another year or so when it'll still do great on lots of titles, it's kind of amazing to think that I could have a good chance of using a CPU for gaming for 3 years without complaint as opposed to 10 years ago.


So uh... how about them M.2 slots in those Z87 motherboards? (Nevermind that there's no M.2 SSDs available still)

PUBLIC TOILET
Jun 13, 2009

necrobobsledder posted:

From what I've read, the follow-up to Haswell (Broadwell) will be BGA-only and be directly sent to OEMs and so those building aftermarket like most of us in SH/SC do for our home systems will need to wait until Skylake to whitebox. Because this is all a matter of forcing buyers to go directly from the OEM to pair CPU and motherboards (streamlining for costs and to trim logistics expenses while letting Intel pursue their mobile strategy) I think that they'll mark up Xeons even more with Broadwell that are still socketed or we'll all be forced into buying expensive marked-up Dell, HP, etc. servers instead of whiteboxing our own. There's evidence Intel is trying to squeeze a bit more life out of socketed E3s at least via more market segmentation AKA abusing market position (the Haswell E3 Xeon's LGA1150 is not compatible with Z87 LGA1150 sockets) so we may see something else to ruin our day as prosumers. The E3 is a final place where Intel could really put the screws on those of us with professional needs but on non-Fortune 500 budgets and since I don't think AMD will exactly step up to the task (they got rid of ECC support on newer CPUs unless they're Opterons) there's hardly a choice now without losing ECC on buttloads of RAM.

My current workstation / server is an E3-1230 Sandy Bridge system I built in 2011 and it's remarkable how well it's held up through Ivy Bridge. Maxed out at 32GB of RAM and while the clockspeed gets halved as a result (fuckin' UDIMMs), it really doesn't matter for most people's jobs until you start to get into supercomputing sort of workloads (there's a paper some guy running a big cluster with COTS hardware wrote where they actually did notice a substantial improvement in their job throughput with higher clocked RAM). I'm going to anticipate that Haswell will be the last E3 I can whitebox for a Xeon system though and with Intel stopping at 32GB of UDIMMs (not trying to push for DDR4 UDIMMs of 16GB+) for Haswell, they've identified and put their foot down on the memory boundary between workstation needs and "you should just run it on a server." It'll be peculiar to shove my current Xeon into a gaming setup in another year or so when it'll still do great on lots of titles, it's kind of amazing to think that I could have a good chance of using a CPU for gaming for 3 years without complaint as opposed to 10 years ago.


So uh... how about them M.2 slots in those Z87 motherboards? (Nevermind that there's no M.2 SSDs available still)

Good information. So then what will be the options available for someone who wants to build a Xeon-based workstation when Haswell arrives? I thought Haswell was using a new socket so then they would need a refresh of the Xeons? I'm way behind on the latest news. It seems as though price/performance limits us to E3's (unless you want to drop a lot more on an E5.)

necrobobsledder
Mar 21, 2005
Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll
Nap Ghost
There's hardly any information about Haswell E3s at this time besides that they will exist and that there's some physical incompatibilities noted in current releases to the press. There's still no certainty that they'll even have TSX enabled, which is the #1 reason for developers to care about Haswell for their workstations (hardware transactional memory is serious business). If they don't enable that, then you're forced into buying an E5 with RDIMMs and $200+ motherboards and all that while being unable to test your stuff locally. E5s are not in the same category of prosumer as an E3 is - they're what is typically marketed for low-mid end servers for OEMs starting around the $1200 range with stupidly overpriced RDIMMs and laughable storage choices. This just makes everyone more obligated to go talk to a Dell or HP sales rep to get discounts to make prices somewhat sane, and again that just makes the sales channels easier to manage which reduces customer acquisition and maintenance costs.

I'm going to hold off on any upgrades to Haswell at this point given it's an early adopter thing as well as my need to reduce stock of everything moreso than to acquire even more crap that I don't really need. Nothing I do professionally at this point would benefit from Haswell except maybe a year or two in the future, so I have little need to buy it now anyway.

Proud Christian Mom
Dec 20, 2006
READING COMPREHENSION IS HARD
I just went ahead and built an E3-1240v2 workstation since the gains were already large enough coming from my previous C2D that the minimal gains Haswell were going to give didn't justify(to me) waiting any longer.

Martello
Apr 29, 2012

by XyloJW
I use my computer primarily for gaming, entertainment, and writing. I've been planning on upgrading my CPU from the Sandy Bridge i7 I have now. Is it worth waiting for Haswell or should I just grab an Ivy Bridge right now? Getting a new motherboard would also be a big pain in the rear end.

HalloKitty
Sep 30, 2005

Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast

Martello posted:

I use my computer primarily for gaming, entertainment, and writing. I've been planning on upgrading my CPU from the Sandy Bridge i7 I have now. Is it worth waiting for Haswell or should I just grab an Ivy Bridge right now? Getting a new motherboard would also be a big pain in the rear end.

What Sandy Bridge? If it's a 2500K, 2600K or 2700K, you will see almost no benefit from upgrading to Ivy Bridge. Sandy Bridge overclocks better, and Ivy Bridge doesn't offer any significant performance increases for your usage scenarios.

Edit: scratch that, you say i7. If that's a 2600K or 2700K, you'd be totally wasting your time and money

Martello
Apr 29, 2012

by XyloJW
It's a 2700K. So I guess I'll just stick with it then.

sleepness
Feb 9, 2006

I'm in the same boat, but I'm looking to build a whole new gaming rig. Does anyone know how these new CPU launches usually work? Someone in the PC building thread posted they were confident that this wasn't an "on paper" launch, but I don't see any Haswell CPUS even up for preorder yet.

movax
Aug 30, 2008

Martello posted:

It's a 2700K. So I guess I'll just stick with it then.

Yeah, you shouldn't be thinking about upgrading for a long while, unless you absolutely need every single last drop of performance / have a lot of money to burn.

necrobobsledder
Mar 21, 2005
Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll
Nap Ghost
Haswell is hardly as much of an improvement in the bleeding-edge performance segment as much as low-power efficiency that's relevant for laptops and tablets where Intel's trying really hard to put their foot in the door before they're relegated to the "the server CPU company" with only Xeons to sustain them basically.

HalloKitty
Sep 30, 2005

Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast

movax posted:

Yeah, you shouldn't be thinking about upgrading for a long while, unless you absolutely need every single last drop of performance / have a lot of money to burn.

Tried to find some info on 3770K vs 2700K overclocked.



At least looking at that test, if you can overclock the 2700K 200MHz more than the 3770K, the gains of Ivy Bridge evaporate. That's not too much to ask of a 2700K, either

Also, the gains are almost totally meaningless in gaming at a resolution you might play at. There's a good article on AnandTech: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6934/choosing-a-gaming-cpu-single-multigpu-at-1440p

HalloKitty fucked around with this message at 16:18 on May 28, 2013

movax
Aug 30, 2008

necrobobsledder posted:

Haswell is hardly as much of an improvement in the bleeding-edge performance segment as much as low-power efficiency that's relevant for laptops and tablets where Intel's trying really hard to put their foot in the door before they're relegated to the "the server CPU company" with only Xeons to sustain them basically.

Ivy Bridge ULV is certainly a powerhouse that has a TDP low-enough for ultrabooks/Surface Pros, and it runs circles around its AMD competitors. The current-gen Atom though I think is in trouble compared to the low-cost APUs from AMD; I think the latest Kabini models (A6-xxxx) released from AMD handily exceed Atoms, and come close to matching Ivy Bridge performance at the same clocks (i.e. limited to around 800MHz, they both perform similarly).

With both companies having their sights set on ~10" tablets/portables and trying to compete against ARM, we'll be seeing movement towards the power corner vs. raw clocks/performance/etc I think (R&D dollars have almost certainly been targeted more towards thing that can bring down TDP vs. exploring architectures).

Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

Are the Atoms being used in laptops/netbooks anymore or just stuff like the Surface RT?

davebo
Nov 15, 2006

Parallel lines do meet, but they do it incognito
College Slice
Am I remembering correctly that the Haswell chips will have some sort of built in mpeg encoder? Is that something that'll be tied to the gpu capabilities? I'm just wondering for the sake of rendering mpeg2 footage if that'll be a handy feature for me since I love the nvidia gpu accelerated rendering of h264 footage.

HalloKitty
Sep 30, 2005

Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast

davebo posted:

Am I remembering correctly that the Haswell chips will have some sort of built in mpeg encoder? Is that something that'll be tied to the gpu capabilities? I'm just wondering for the sake of rendering mpeg2 footage if that'll be a handy feature for me since I love the nvidia gpu accelerated rendering of h264 footage.

Some Sandy Bridge chips and above have QuickSync. Haswell probably expands on this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quick_Sync_Video

Martello
Apr 29, 2012

by XyloJW

movax posted:

Yeah, you shouldn't be thinking about upgrading for a long while, unless you absolutely need every single last drop of performance / have a lot of money to burn.

Ah okay, gotta look into overclocking then. Never done it before.

HalloKitty
Sep 30, 2005

Adjust the bass and let the Alpine blast

Martello posted:

Ah okay, gotta look into overclocking then. Never done it before.

If you want to bump it modestly, you literally head into the BIOS, find the setting that turbos all cores under load, and set the turbo multiplier to something like 42. 4.2GHz would be trivial for a 2700K. Keep going if you want to play, by all means, but basically with that, boom, you've upgraded to the CPU you wanted.

You'd definitely want to upgrade from the crappy stock Intel cooler, though. (Assuming that's what you have).

HalloKitty fucked around with this message at 16:59 on May 28, 2013

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Factory Factory
Mar 19, 2010

This is what
Arcane Velocity was like.
What on earth is making your chip feel slow anyway?

sleepness posted:

I'm in the same boat, but I'm looking to build a whole new gaming rig. Does anyone know how these new CPU launches usually work? Someone in the PC building thread posted they were confident that this wasn't an "on paper" launch, but I don't see any Haswell CPUS even up for preorder yet.

I bought Sandy Bridge on launch day. It just pops up in the product listings, first come first serve. If you were gonna go to Micro Center, order it online for pickup, because all the smart people will do that and grab the stuff you want. That's the sole reason I have an i5-2500K and P8P67 Pro instead of an i7-2600K and P8P67.

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