Friday, July 24th 2020
Intel 7nm CPUs Delayed by a Year, Alder Lake in 2H-2021, Other Commentary from Intel Management
Intel's silicon fabrication woes refuse to torment the company's product roadmaps, with the company disclosing in its Q2-2020 financial results release that the company's first CPUs built on the 7 nanometer silicon fabrication node are delayed by a year due to a further 6-month delay from prior expectations. The company will focus on getting its 10 nm node up to scale in the meantime.
The company mentioned that the 10 nm "Tiger Lake" mobile processor and "Ice Lake-SP" enterprise processor remains on-track for 2020. The company's 12th Generation Core "Alder Lake-S" desktop processors won't arrive before the second half of 2021. In the meantime, Intel will launch its 11th Gen Core "Rocket Lake" processor on the 14 nm node, but with increased IPC from the new "Cypress Cove" CPU cores. Also in 2H-2021, the company will launch its "Sapphire Rapids" enterprise processors that come with next-gen connectivity and updated CPU cores.
It's interesting to note that Intel was specific about "CPU" when talking about 7 nm, meaning that Intel's foundry woes only affect its CPU product stack, and not a word was mentioned in the release about the company's discrete GPU and scalar compute processors that are being prototyped and validated. This is probably the biggest hint we'll ever get from Intel that the company's dGPUs are being designed for third-party foundries (such as Samsung or TSMC), and that the Xe dGPU product roadmap is disconnected from that of Intel's fabs.
Given the delays in Intel's 7 nm foundry node, the first Intel client-segment processors based on the node won't arrive before late-2022 or 2023, which means refinements of the current 10 nm silicon fabrication node should support Intel's client-segment product stack for the foreseeable future. The first enterprise 7 nm processors will arrive by the first half of 2023. Intel also mentioned that they expect to see "one full node improvement" from a refined 10 nanometer process, which isn't surprising, given how much experience they have improving their 14 nanometer process.
The company mentioned that the 10 nm "Tiger Lake" mobile processor and "Ice Lake-SP" enterprise processor remains on-track for 2020. The company's 12th Generation Core "Alder Lake-S" desktop processors won't arrive before the second half of 2021. In the meantime, Intel will launch its 11th Gen Core "Rocket Lake" processor on the 14 nm node, but with increased IPC from the new "Cypress Cove" CPU cores. Also in 2H-2021, the company will launch its "Sapphire Rapids" enterprise processors that come with next-gen connectivity and updated CPU cores.
Intel is accelerating its transition to 10 nm products this year with increasing volumes and strong demand for an expanding line up. This includes a growing portfolio of 10 nm-based Intel Core processors with "Tiger Lake" launching soon, and the first 10 nm-based server CPU "Ice Lake," which remains planned for the end of this year. In the second half of 2021, Intel expects to deliver a new line of client CPU's (code-named "Alder Lake"), which will include its first 10 nm-based desktop CPU, and a new 10 nm-based server CPU (code-named "Sapphire Rapids"). The company's 7 nm-based CPU product timing is shifting approximately six months relative to prior expectations. The primary driver is the yield of Intel's 7 nm process, which based on recent data, is now trending approximately twelve months behind the company's internal target.Intel's post results call also revealed a handful interesting tentative dates. For starters, "Tiger Lake" is shipping in "a matter of weeks," indicating an imminent launch ahead of the "Back to School" shopping season. Next up, the company's high-performance scalar compute processor, codenamed "Ponte Vecchio" remains slated for 2021-22, and given that it's reportedly being designed for 7 nm, we have our next big hint confirmation that these dGPUs will be built on third-party 7 nm fabs. Intel did mention that the Foveros packaging technology could be further developed over the years, and its upcoming discrete GPUs could combine dies (tiles) from multiple sources, which could include its own fabs.
Given the delays in Intel's 7 nm foundry node, the first Intel client-segment processors based on the node won't arrive before late-2022 or 2023, which means refinements of the current 10 nm silicon fabrication node should support Intel's client-segment product stack for the foreseeable future. The first enterprise 7 nm processors will arrive by the first half of 2023. Intel also mentioned that they expect to see "one full node improvement" from a refined 10 nanometer process, which isn't surprising, given how much experience they have improving their 14 nanometer process.
175 Comments on Intel 7nm CPUs Delayed by a Year, Alder Lake in 2H-2021, Other Commentary from Intel Management
Also PCIe 5.0 will be very expensive and might be a premium feature for a while.CPU upgrades are really only relevant if a platform offers compatibility for 3-4 years, and AM4 has shown us that it only sort of works with some major compromises.
It's much more important that a platform properly supports its CPUs and works from "day one". The Zen(1) launch was horrible in terms of BIOS support(inc. memory, PCIe stability etc.), Zen 2 a lot better, yet had BIOS issues and firmware issues for 2-3 months. I will be watching Zen 3 closely to see if it's more mature at launch, I can't recommend any platform until it's fairly reliable.No game is "made around Intel's architecture". It's not possible to target the microarchitecture in x86 code.
And no, the Skylake family does very well in tasks including Photoshop, Premiere, web browsing etc.
And for your information, back when Skylake launched there were indication that it would move to 6-core for mainstream, but the yields for 14nm were still not good enough. Engineering samples of Cannon-Lake-S, which were targeted for late 2016/early 2017, featured 8 cores. So it's the struggles (incompetence?) with Intel's nodes which have kept them at 4-cores, not lack of ambition or "evil" plans to keep you at 4 cores.
I'm just spitballing but Intel certainly isn't after the consumer performance crown or value crown with Alderlake parts, and they're not exactly server-grade either....
Will be interesting to see where we are in 5 years. Lisa has been at AMD for 5 years and made very strategic moves to outmaneuver the giant. Having Nvidia pushing performance aggressively on the GPU front, they took that same formula to the CPU side and look where we are!
That explains most stuff in the world.
I saw another store also, only the big OEM's like Dell still resisting, I would also like to see Dell XP15 with 4 series AMD Cpu.
The only thing that I did is about the battery life - AMD's U-series with 8c/16t should be great both with ultra high performance and ultra durable battery life.
What explains most of the world stuff? Presence of corruption among the humans?
Suddenly Came across money in August 2017, so made decision at that time to go with a higher end Intel System as friends in games was saying to purchase an Intel based build, so i was like ok guess will, been a long time since i was on Intel/nvidia setup, used that to started having overheating problems til June 2020, and local PC shop gave me a sweet deal for a newer Intel 10th Gen 10700, board, and case (and reuse some of the older hardware from old system)
Will i stay on Intel years from now, not sure, i just may Try AMD in a 3-5 years again perhaps, depending on whats on by then and such.
Alder Lake with its hybrid technology doesn't excite me, I believe it doesn't belong on the desktop. While Rocket Lake might be a decent "stop gap" for the mainstream desktop, I think most is missing the most interesting piece of the puzzle. Ice Lake-X will be a very interesting contender against Zen 3 based Ryzen 9 and Threadrippers. And while it probably can't get close to the highest core count of Threadripper, most power users are looking for a balance between core count and core speed, while having good IO options. Many such users are doing either photo or video editing or development on the same machine as gaming, and I think there are many such users in our audience here. I believe it would be a mistake by AMD if their next Threadrippers start at 24 cores, I think 12-16 core HEDT models would be compelling to many buyers. This is a segment I want more competition; high core speed and "medium" core count, plenty of IO.
I rather energy efficient with extreme IPC (80+ over 10th Gen) 16 cores ( 7nm+ & big.Little)
Intel new Fab42 is 7nm from the start, everyone is waiting for Meteor Lake Intel first 7nm+ & PCIe 5.0 basically its the rebirth of the great Ivy Bridge (3770K) Intel first 22nm & PCIe 3.0
All eyes are watching Intel 7nm very closely
Intel Alder Lake 10nm++ will be just as good as Sandy Bridge was all around quality.
Intel 10nm++ will be used to make Intel 700 series chipsets as well.
Intel has improved designs beyond the node, such as changing TIM, modifying the heat spreader and of course optimizing the chip design.Zen 3 will probably be closer to Intel in gaming performance, but to beat it they need to make a better CPU front-end than Intel and get similar or better memory latency.
I don't buy the argument that they wanted but couldn't, partially yes but not completely, weirdly in the recent "generations" suddenly they were able to add more cores.
Realistically, the more cores your CPU has, the more chance there is of a stable framerate since background OS tasks, and even background game-engine threads are likely to be finished sooner and without interrupting or causing any kind of resource conflict with the ultra-crucial game-engine thread that is the current bottleneck to lower frame times. That's felt in the minimum or 99th percentile numbers.
Can a 4GHz Zen2 core provide the very fastest gaming performance on the market? No. It's genuinely worse at the job than Intel's current lineup.
Can a 4GHz Zen2 core run a gaming thread fast enough that in 99.9% of all situations it doesn't matter? Absolutely.
I'm not going to say no to more gaming performance, but we do have to remember how unrealistic and unrepresentative of actual gaming the CPU game testing methodologies are. Nobody, and I mean nobody dropping $3000+ on a water-cooled, overclocked i9 with a 240Hz+ monitor and 2080Ti is playing games at 720p.
If you think that because a piece of software performs better on one CPU than another, it proves it's optimized for that CPU? That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
In order for software to be optimized for a piece of hardware it needs to be intentionally designed to utilize either a specific feature or a specific characteristic of that hardware.
PC software relies on the same ISA whether it's running on AMD or Intel. And with the exception of AVX-512 and a few other features, Zen and Skylake has pretty much feature parity. All modern x86 designs relies on microoperations which we can't target, so we can't write truely low-level code for either of these architectures. These CPUs are also highly superscalar, but it's not explicit, so software can't control or optimize for it directly.
Software scales differently on different CPUs because their architectures have different strengths in terms of resource balancing. Skylake has a stronger front-end with better branch prediction and has a larger instruction window, it has lower latency in the memory controller and there are some differences in the caches. Zen/Zen2 have a different configuration of execution ports which can have a slightly higher peak combined int/vec performance under the right conditions. Zen 2 is also on a more energy efficient node, which helps a lot under those heavily threaded benchmarks where Skylake throttle much more, but this has nothing to do with software optimization. So the the only thing software developers can do to "optimize" for one microarchitecture or the other is to shuffle around the assembly code and see if they get a minor performance difference. Since they are not explicitly superscalar, executes out-of-order and we can't control or debug the microoperations, this is pretty much a pointless effort that probably yields <5% gains, and the gains will not be consistent. Pretty much no software, and especially games, do low-level assembly code anyway. Software today is mostly high-level bloated code, and such code generally performs a tiny bit better on Intel hardware, not due to optimizations (rather lack thereof), but due to a stronger front-end.
There is no software out there "optimized for Intel" (unless you count custom software relying on features AMD have not implemented yet).
But I've seen a case where a library intentionally runs slower code on AMD hardware in runtime, but this is not optimization, this is sabotage, and is not playing fair.No, they need to be close enough, and with Zen 3 they might be within the margin of error in many cases.I know 720p or 1080p at low or medium is pointless with an high-end card, that's only interesting for "academic discussions", not buying recommendations.
But then consider, if you're buying a gaming machine, and there are two mostly "equal" options in your budget, while one has ~3% more gaming performance, would you say no to it?
Another argument which most ignores is that Zen 2 (for now) needs overclocked memory to become "competitive" in gaming, while Intel can run stock memory speeds and still perform better. I'll take the long-term stability please.Sure, any time the OS scheduler kicks out any of the game's threads, it can cause stutter, at the scale of ~1-20ms for Windows. But then again, a faster core will finish sooner, so other threads waiting for it will get working earlier and finish with a larger margin before the "deadline". So it's a complicated balancing act.
Core i5-8500 is not a valid choice. It's a turd.
2 more cores and 10 more threads is a big deal. Both chips are also the same size while 7nm is 70% denser, so about 70% more transistors in 4800U.
Desktop CPUs are not at their point of power efficiency and to be honest, neither is 4800U - it is pretty heavily constrained by its power limit (which pretty much never seems to be 15W).
At least choose an apt comparison - 4800U should be able to convincingly beat 1065G7 or 10810U.
4800U is a mobile CPU that has been out for little under 2 months.
Ryzen 4000 series APUs were announced this Tuesday.
4800U price in unknown and AMD is probably discounting them heavily to get as wide adoption as possible.
i5-8500 (or newer and HT-enabled i5-10500) costs officially ~190 moneys and i5-10400 is ~20 moneys less. Old i5-8500 is probably heavily discounted for OEMs or they are clearing stock.
The 8-core Renoir for desktop - 4750G PRO that we can see for sale now - costs 400.
In Cinebench R20 MT, R7 4750G PRO is about 50% faster than i5 10500. Power consumption is probably comparable.