My biggest issue with these generational messages/classifications is, that I don't know what it means for Atoms (E-cores in today's parlance).
Everything Sandy-Bridge to Broadwell (P-cores-only for newcomers) which I still operate, has always worked with discrete GPUs, either because they didn't have an iGPU (Xeon E5/Xeon-D) or because it wasn't attractive enough (Xeon E3).
With Skylakes I still use Iris Plus based notebooks and while I don't play games with them, I want my Google maps and all those eye-candy compositors to work just fine at my native 4k.
To my understanding everything Sandy/Ivy/Haswell might have been BETA in terms of 3D and there might be issues of features lacking or defect in functional scope.
Everything Broadwell to Comet Lake is pretty much feature-complete and only differs in terms of scale or EUs from "please don't think 3D"-4EUs on J1900 Atoms to Iris Pro Graphics 580 on an i7-6785R with 72EUs and 128MB of eDRAM to make it fly.
That's why a cut just below Xe and Tiger Lake seems to make more sense for the Core CPUs, or perhaps below Haswell, because Sandy/Ivy were still too broken.
Surviving machines with these bigger cores are either mostly workstations or servers, both of which won't use the iGPUs. For them supporting the latest games an APIs isn't as critical as a desktop that works.
The same holds true for the Atoms, but the question is: what does a functional cut at Haswell (2013) translate to--on the Atoms side--which may be embedded and totally depends on iGPU support?
When Jasper Lakes Atoms--which have just become available this year--are subsumed as Haswell generation iGPUs, that is a problem. Perhaps anything below Silvermont may be considered pathetic and truly outdated. But Silvermont hardware reached a performance threshold, which has them still drive quite a bit of critical infrastructure. Goldmonts may be less than Haswell in terms of CPU instruction set support or iGPU scope, but they are still being sold and installed today.
Everything Sandy-Bridge to Broadwell (P-cores-only for newcomers) which I still operate, has always worked with discrete GPUs, either because they didn't have an iGPU (Xeon E5/Xeon-D) or because it wasn't attractive enough (Xeon E3).
With Skylakes I still use Iris Plus based notebooks and while I don't play games with them, I want my Google maps and all those eye-candy compositors to work just fine at my native 4k.
To my understanding everything Sandy/Ivy/Haswell might have been BETA in terms of 3D and there might be issues of features lacking or defect in functional scope.
Everything Broadwell to Comet Lake is pretty much feature-complete and only differs in terms of scale or EUs from "please don't think 3D"-4EUs on J1900 Atoms to Iris Pro Graphics 580 on an i7-6785R with 72EUs and 128MB of eDRAM to make it fly.
That's why a cut just below Xe and Tiger Lake seems to make more sense for the Core CPUs, or perhaps below Haswell, because Sandy/Ivy were still too broken.
Surviving machines with these bigger cores are either mostly workstations or servers, both of which won't use the iGPUs. For them supporting the latest games an APIs isn't as critical as a desktop that works.
The same holds true for the Atoms, but the question is: what does a functional cut at Haswell (2013) translate to--on the Atoms side--which may be embedded and totally depends on iGPU support?
When Jasper Lakes Atoms--which have just become available this year--are subsumed as Haswell generation iGPUs, that is a problem. Perhaps anything below Silvermont may be considered pathetic and truly outdated. But Silvermont hardware reached a performance threshold, which has them still drive quite a bit of critical infrastructure. Goldmonts may be less than Haswell in terms of CPU instruction set support or iGPU scope, but they are still being sold and installed today.
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