Quote:
Originally Posted by PB PM
Right, forgot they bumped everything back again. 
Don’t mix up the TDP on the box for what the chips really pull from the wall, Intel has been fudging the numbers since Skylake (first gen 14nm) for the desktop chips anyway. |
Right. They can't optimize their 14nm stuff much any more, and they also don't want to improve the microarchitecture, because they figured Palm Cove would have replaced it long ago. But that was mostly stillborn, so then they had to wait for Sunny Cove, which still can't scale to desktops, so now they have to wait for Willow Cove, which might finally offer some microarchitecture improvements in desktop CPUs later this year. So, put all that together, and Intel loses about half a decade against the competition.
So instead, they need to resort to stuff like Turbo Boost. Which isn't bad per se, but couple it with increasingly disingenuous marketing, and it's no longer great. You can't both say "it's a 45W CPU! and it boosts to 5 GHz!" — yeah, you can run it at 45W, but then it won't do 5 GHz for more than a fraction of a second. Or you say it can in fact run 5 GHz, but now you're really at a wattage of more like 70, and suddenly, your laptop looks like a gaming one.
We'll see how Willow Cove does.