The AnandTech Podcast: Episode 22

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• Computer Bottleneck - Friday, July 19, 2013 - link

  Regarding the B-clock....
  
  Yes, It would definitely be great to have that feature on Non-K parts. (particularly with the budget LGA and BGA chips where the base clocks are still plenty low enough to provide lots of overclocking headroom.)
  
  In fact, just thinking about this more I'd imagine the cost would be quite good on building the entire system. (re: No need on a responsibly OC'd 22nm dual core for a large aftermarket CPU cooler or lots of VRM phases on the motherboard, etc etc etc.)

• gxtoast - Friday, July 19, 2013 - link

  So, given that the silicon is generating more heat per square millimeter (result of increased die density), why did Intel choose to use a lesser heat-transfer medium between the CPU die and the package?

• Soulwager - Friday, July 19, 2013 - link

  There are two parts to the heat dissipation issue, the most obvious half of it is the interface between the die and the cooling solution, which is partially due to the paste being used instead of solder, and partially due to inconsistency in the size of the gap between the die and the IHS. The second half of it is the thermal conduction between the circuitry within the die, and the surface of the die that's contacting the cooling solution. Yes, the surface area here is finite, but if that was actually a problem, it could be solved with additional backgrinding, and a better heat spreader(pyrolitic graphite for example).
  
  The problem isn't technical, it's simply a lack of competition. I still don't understand Intel's motivation for disabling TSX on the i7 4770k. What is preventing Intel from tacking on an extra 50-100 bucks for a fully functional die?

• dragosmp - Saturday, July 20, 2013 - link

  I'm with Dustin on the dispointment in Haswell and Ivy because of the performance plateau (at the OC sweetspot). If one would build a completely new system and were in need of a high end chip I too would advice Haswell, but to upgrade from Sandy or Ivy, there's just so little benefit.
  
  If X would say "I'm constrained by the mITX case @50W", then even an upgrade from Ivy to Haswell may bring performance benefits, but for the most part that's a fringe case. In any other upgrade case I find the cost of passing from SB or IB to Haswell excedes the minute benefits of the architecture, moreover since the best features are either botched (QS), disabled (TSX), unused for months to come (AVX2) or not even on the desktop (Crystalwell)

• ZeDestructor - Saturday, July 20, 2013 - link

  Nice podcast, but I feel that you guys have completely missed one possibility that intel might go for, which has been in speculation for some time now: quitting the "mainstream" socketed desktop market entirely.
  
  Personally, I feel that this could work out quite well: let's face it, most people are buying laptops these days, and all-in-one machines work better with mobile chips anyways. Intel could unify the mainstream desktop and laptop SKUs quite easily, and even keep sockets (most non-ultrabooks machines still retain the good old socket due to the variety of specs they have on offer), although I suspect that even if they did such a thing, they'd go for BGA parts simply to reduce SKU count... afterall.. how many CPU options do you need when building machines on identical boards?
  
  Meanwhile, at the high-end unlocked are Intel can offload some lesser-quality Xeons (disabled cores and QPI, so who cares, really...) fairly easily and keep us enthusuiasts quite happy - in hindsight, I'd have gone for the i7-3820 instead of the i5-3570K for my build late last year.
  
  In addition, intel could also stop releasing large-die server parts on every cycle, instead do so on every tock: how much power-efficiency do you need on a server? Let the mobile parts do the heavy validation testing of the process, then launch your big IPC tweaks across the entire lineup...

• Death666Angel - Saturday, July 20, 2013 - link

  "in hindsight, I'd have gone for the i7-3820 instead of the i5-3570K for my build late last year."
  Why? If you need 8 threads, get the i7-3770K. Unless you need the memory performance/size or the additional PCIe lanes, there is no benefit. The money you save with the CPU you have to spend extra on the mainboard. And there are far fewer options available for that as well. OC wise, I see no better results for the 3820 than the 3770K.

• ZeDestructor - Saturday, July 20, 2013 - link

  I'm planning to drop in a second GTX 670 to power the triple-screen setup and already planned on 32GiB of RAM (very nice for compiling stuff). Factor in all of that, and moving from Z77 to X79 wasn't too big a jump.. I just forgot the 3820 was unlocked and existed at the time and thought I'd need to move to the 3930K which is a much harder pill to swallow.. Oh well.. It's not like there's much to stress a 4.4GHz quad-core IVB now, is there...

• Death666Angel - Sunday, July 21, 2013 - link

  The 3820 is not unlocked. But it does feature base clock oc'ing. But 2 mid-high end gfx cards shouldn't be too hindered by the z77 platform. :)

• ZeDestructor - Monday, July 22, 2013 - link

  Actually it is. I found that out after I finished building... :/
  
  For Ivy-E, Intel is putting the K where it belongs...

• Hung - Saturday, July 20, 2013 - link

  So who owns that cat? Or is that someone making cat noises (happened to me in Skype during LoL once).