Friday, April 28th 2023
Intel Core "Meteor Lake" Now Ramping for Production, Market Release in 2H-2023
Intel's next-generation Core "Meteor Lake" processor is now ramping for mass-production, with product launches expected in the second half of 2023, the company announced in its Q1-2023 Financial Results release. "Meteor Lake" will see Intel debut its next-generation foundry node, the Intel 4. The company is expected to use this node for the Compute Tile of the "Meteor Lake" processor, the piece of silicon that has the CPU cores. Intel 4 is said to offer transistor-density and performance/Watt comparable to TSMC's N5-series and N4-series foundry nodes. In the same release, Intel stated that development of its future foundry nodes, Intel 3, Intel 20A, and Intel 18A, are on track. In its top configuration, "Meteor Lake" is expected to feature a CPU core configuration of 6P+16E, and we are hearing that it will see a more limited release in the desktop segment, in that the processor will only come in Core i3 and Core i5 brand extensions, not Core i7 or Core i9 (which would be taken up by "Arrow Lake," with its higher P-core count). "Meteor Lake" will span a variety of mobile segments from 7 W ultraportables, to 45 W mainstream notebooks, and possibly even 55 W gaming notebooks.
13 Comments on Intel Core "Meteor Lake" Now Ramping for Production, Market Release in 2H-2023
And this "AI Acceleration" built it - how do you use it? Or is it just more BS like a "AI Controlled screen brightness" on some new Lenovo laptops I saw :D:kookoo: :banghead:
Intel's processes used to be WAY better than TSMC's but since 14nm and 10nm they've had delay after delay for years and TSMC surpassed them with 7nm and has built on that lead since then.
Generally it seems that Intel can compete with TSMC's latest on the high end if they blow out their power budgets. On the low power end of things TSMC scales down better too but that makes a lot of sense since their customers (ie. Apple, cellphone companies) focus heavily on power efficiency.
The real interesting bit will be to see the IPC of Intel's new CPU architecture and the practical reality of their multi chip production methods. Performance is rumored to be real good which is why AMD is trying to get Zen 5 out early. They've had MCM's before, and they even had advantages in terms of power efficiency for the buses vs AMD, but the prices have been high and so products are pretty much non-existent.
The AI stuff will heavily depend on software support. Short term there won't be anything for it other than what Intel ships with it. Mostly they seem to end up being used for doing some sort've video related tasks going by how cellphones have used them. Hypothetically they can be used for all sorts of things. That has mostly turned out to be hype in the consumer space. ML related stuff is a different story but I doubt this stuff is going to see that sort've application for the common end user or even most enthusiasts.
*Very simple rule of thumb for all recent nodes: add 30.
The Zen 4 cores and RDNA 3 graphics on the Phoenix chips are pretty impressive, but the new XDNA architecture takes the spotlight. AMD has quickly integrated the FPGA technology it acquired with Xilinx last year to integrate a new FPGA-based AI engine directly into the die of the new 7040 series processors. This engine can handle up to 4 simultaneous AI streams, although you can quickly reconfigure to handle varying amounts of streams. AMD claims that the fully programmable "Ryzen AI Engine", which is based on the XDNA architecture, is even faster than Apple's neural engine in its M2 processors.
Intel locked into the 10nm which is the 12th and 13th generation vs. AMD's 4nm. AMD ZEN 4 7040 Phoenix First X86 Processor with AI Artificial Intelligence + RDNA 3
AMD is delivering this hardware early (not many workloads benefit yet), but is working on an API to continue software development work. Additionally, Microsoft is in deep collaboration with AMD to get the most out of the new engine in Windows, with several new features scheduled to be available soon, such as camera tracking and eye focus features. AMD tells us that it is fully committed to an AI roadmap with its XDNA architecture: there will be XDNA 2 and XDNA 3, for example. AMD expects other use cases to emerge quickly, including gaming, security, predictive UIs, and collaborative work.
AMD also confidently claims that its own XDNA engine is supposed to be faster than Apple's neural engine in the M2 processors - which is already in its second generation. For future image and video processing, such engines will become the next turbos and the course for these technologies is set today.
[B]In Phoenix, it has a performance of 12 TOPS, and its focus is apparently on efficiency and low power draw.[/B]
The whole point about Meteor Lake of course is that Intel can at last leave monolithic CPUs behind. And leverage the flexibility and cost savings of chiplet based CPUs that AMD has exploited so effectively.