Intel Says Power-Efficient Sierra Forest Chip Will Be Delivered in H1 2024

U.S. chip giant Intel said on Wednesday its first semiconductor for data center customers focused on power efficiency, Sierra Forest, would be delivered in the first half of next year, as it outlined a chip release schedule after prior delays. From a report: "It's been a challenging few years as we had introduced a lot of innovation but also a lot of complexity and our product release dates had pushed out," Intel Data Center and AI Group head Sandra Rivera told Reuters ahead of an investor event. Intel still dominates the markets for PC and server processing chips, with a market share greater than 70%, tech research firm IDC has calculated. But that is down from more than 90% in 2017. Intel's most powerful fourth-generation Xeon processor for data centers, Sapphire Rapids, had faced delays that gave competitor Advanced Micro Devices time to catch up. But Rivera said Intel's "roadmap is on track" and was "hitting all of our key engineering milestones."

So, is it a guaranteed delay?

[Targon]

The Intel track record suggests Intel will announce delays in May, or they won't announce the delays, they just won't ship more than a handful of them.

Power-efficient?

[DontBeAMoran]

They're saying "power-efficient" like it's a new thing. I'm sorry but Apple was there first, followed by AMD. Intel are simply really late to the game and are finally waking up to the fact that power efficiency and operations-per-watts has become more critical than raw computing numbers.

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[arglebargle_xiv]

Yup, and you know it's got to be good, I mean with a name like Sierra Rainforest it'll be much greener than the preceding V8 Hemi Gasguzzler CPU, right?

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[account_deleted]

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[DontBeAMoran]

I'm not ignoring history at all. Intel already knew about operations-per-watt and they chose to ignore it just to beat AMD's raw computing numbers. As soon as power efficiency became a requirement, they should never have dropped it.

In any case, Intel and nVidia now seem to be run by idiots who only release power-hungry hardware selling at prices that nobody can afford. Screw them both.

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[Ed Avis]

It's not operations per watt, it would be operations-per-second per watt, or in more reasonable units, operations per joule.

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[AmiMoJo]

The Pentium 4 was a disaster for Intel. Worse performance than AMD's Athlon line, and it never scaled to the very high clock frequencies they were aiming for to be competitive. It ran hot too.

For the Core series they ditched the P4 architecture and went back to the Pentium 3 Mobile design.

Their current line up is crap for efficiency. I doubt these new ones will be better than Ryzen.

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[account_deleted]

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[AmiMoJo]

Intel is getting screwed by having a crap process to build on. Their efficiency gains are mostly because their CPUs now have a load of efficiency cores. When you run them all flat out, the power consumption is ridiculous. The Ryzen 7850X3D consumes about half as much power for slightly better performance than the equivalent Intel 13th gen part. The intel part hits over 300W under load.

The efficiency cores aren't even that great. Better than the Atom crap they were putting out, but not by much. I have a feel

Re:Power-efficient?

[serviscope_minor]

They're saying "power-efficient" like it's a new thing. I'm sorry but Apple was there first,

I love Apple fanbois. Apple also invented touch screens, the phone, music and sex. True story.

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[Stormwatch]

But it's true: ARM started as a joint venture of Acorn, VLSI, and Apple.

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[serviscope_minor]

No, it is not true. ARM started as an in house processor at Acorn, the Acorn RISC Machine.

I used an Archie (Acorn Archimedes) in the 1980s which is before Apple got involved. Why are Apple fanbois so desperate that Apple invented everything?

They didn't invent pinch zoom either. Or rounded corers. Or tablets.

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[Stormwatch]

Acorn invented the architecture, definitely. But from the late 80s, Apple was assisting with development (at least I read so somewhere) because they wanted it on the Newton.

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[serviscope_minor]

Acorn invented the architecture, definitely. But from the late 80s, Apple was assisting with development

In other words, Apple was NOT first because Acorn was before Apple. Why are Apple fanatics obsessed with the idea that Apple invented everything?

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[account_deleted]

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[NFN_NLN]

Apple may not have invented sex but they did perfect the act of corn-holing customers.

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[bn-7bc]

Are there many apple fanbois that claim Apple invented the smartphone and touch screens, or is this just a case of "it's always entertaining to make fun of $group_Im_not_in"? The above statement (eleged) by the fanbois can aliso be no more than a simplification, whil Apple invented neither the smartphone nor the touchscreen I think it is hand of hard to dispute that apple certainly made both smartphones and other touchscreen devices way more of a thing in the general public that they were before.

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[serviscope_minor]

Apple also invented hyperbole and sarcasm.

Re: Power-efficient?

[jaredm1]

I think itâ(TM)s more accurate to say Intel felt power efficiency only applied to battery-powered scenarios like phones and laptops. Theyâ(TM)d given up on phones a while ago. I think they believed their dominance in servers could never be challenged while they held the crown for raw compute. They were wrong and theyâ(TM)ve only woken up to their complacency after losing double digit market share in that segment.

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[NFN_NLN]

> They're saying "power-efficient" like it's a new thing. I'm sorry but Apple was there first, followed by AMD.

I'm pretty sure Intel was first in power efficiency. The 8086 draw 360mA @5V or 1.8W. You just don't see that in servers today ;)

https://ece-research.unm.edu/j... [unm.edu]

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[bn-7bc]

And how many 8086s does it take to deliver the same amount of MIPS that a single mid range consumer core from intel//amd delivers today let alone multi core setups? I only ask because we need a level playing field when comparing. Ok you could probably argue successfully that todays software (all the way from the os and up) is a bit bore bloated than needed (abstraction on top of abstraction etc) so a lot of those MIPS are wasted, but that is the fault of sw devs not cpu devs

The big innovation?

[DulcetTone]

Instead of 1s and 0s, it uses 0.5s and 0s

Why I just spent $100k on AMD chips

[LostMyBeaver]

I hope someone from Intel reads this.

So, here's the thing. I'm actual an Intel Fanboi. I love Intel and always have because unlike all the other vendors on earth, they know how to write developer documentation. Ever since the Intel 80386 Programmer's Reference, I've just been in love!!!

So, here I am sitting with a few hundred thousand dollars of a government's funds in my pocket to spend on systems for use with the Large Hadron Collider. And I've architected and begun phase-1 deployment of a storage system