ASRock, the leading global motherboard, graphics card and mini PC manufacturer, today launched new Phantom Gaming and Challenger series products based on AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT GPUs. The new ASRock graphics cards are built on the 7 nm manufacturing process and AMD RDNA 2 gaming architecture, and include support for the DirectX 12 Ultimate API, hardware-accelerated raytracing, HDMI 2.1, and PCI Express 4.0. In addition, with high-speed 8 GB GDDR6 memory plus a wealth of exclusive features, the ASRock AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT series graphics cards can provide the ultimate 1080p gaming performance.

The high-end ASRock AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT Phantom Gaming D 8 GB OC graphics card features the triple-fan Phantom Gaming 3X cooling system for excellent cooling performance, as well as a unique Striped Axial Fan, Air Deflecting Fin and Ultra-fit Heatpipe to greatly increase cooling efficiency. The stylish metal backplate strengthens the structure and prevents damage to the board. With the addition of an ARGB fan, ARGB LED board, and Polychrome SYNC lighting control software, users can fully customize and control their own lighting system. The cool black and red appearance and the ultimate factory-preset overclocking settings make ASRock AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT Phantom Gaming D 8 GB OC graphics card ideal for hardcore gamers.

NVIDIA's upcoming "Ada Lovelace" architecture, both for compute and graphics, is reportedly being designed for the 5 nanometer silicon fabrication node by TSMC. This marks NVIDIA's return to the Taiwanese foundry after its brief excursion to Samsung, with the 8 nm "Ampere" graphics architecture. "Ampere" compute dies continue to be built on TSMC 7 nm nodes. NVIDIA is looking to double the compute performance on its next-generation GPUs, with throughput approaching 70 TFLOP/s, from a numeric near-doubling in CUDA cores, generation-over-generation. These will also be run at clock speeds above 2 GHz. One can expect "Ada Lovelace" only by 2022, as TSMC N5 matures.

Valve today announced its first big splash into the console market with Steam Deck, a device out to eat the Nintendo Switch's lunch. The announcement comes as yet another feather in AMD's cap for its semi-custom SoC business, benefiting from being the only company with an x86-64 CPU license and having a cutting-edge graphics hardware IP. Built on the 7 nm node at TSMC, the semi-custom chip at the heart of the Steam Deck is designed for extended gameplay on battery, and is a monolithic silicon that combines CPU, GPU, and core-logic.

The yet-unnamed semi-custom chip features a 4-core/8-thread CPU based on the "Zen 2" microarchitecture, with a nominal clock speed of 2.40 GHz, and up to 3.50 GHz boost. The CPU component offers an FP32 throughput of 448 GFLOP/s. The GPU is based on AMD's latest RDNA2 graphics architecture—the same one powering the Xbox Series X, PlayStation 5, and Radeon RX 6900 XT—and is comprised of 8 RDNA2 compute units (512 stream processors). The GPU operates at an engine clock speed of 1.10 GHz to 1.60 GHz, with peak compute power of 1.6 TFLOP/s. The silicon uses a unified memory interface, and a cutting-edge LPDDR5 memory controller.

AMD is allegedly preparing for an August 2021 debut of its Radeon RX 6600 XT graphics card in the retail segment, according to tech YouTuber Coreteks. Released exclusively as custom-design cards, through the company's AIB partners, the card will reportedly come with an MSRP price of USD $399, or roughly $100 less than that of the RX 6700 XT (which is being scalped for north of $800). The lack of a reference-design (MBA) model in the retail channel means that the card will not be sold through the AMD website.

The Radeon RX 6600 XT will reportedly be based on the 7 nm "Navi 23" silicon, although it remains to be seen if it maxes the silicon out. 8 GB will be the standard memory amount, across a 128-bit wide GDDR6 memory interface, cushioned by a 32 MB Infinity Cache. As for performance, Coreteks predicts that the RX 6600 XT will perform ±5% of the RX 5700 XT and the GTX 1080 Ti, which could make it a formidable card for AAA gaming at 1080p, or at 1440p with FSR.

AMD board partner PowerColor's website briefly showed product categories for graphics cards based on the upcoming Radeon RX 6600 XT and Radeon RX 6600 graphics processors. This would mean that a formal launch of the two is just around the corner. Both SKUs are reportedly based on the 7 nm "Navi 23" silicon. The RX 6600 XT maxes it out, featuring 2,048 stream processors, while the RX 6600 is slightly cut down, in featuring 1,792 of them. The "Navi 23" silcon is based on the same RDNA2 graphics architecture as the rest of the RX 6000 series, which means DirectX 12 Ultimate support, including raytracing. Both feature 8 GB of video memory, whereas the RX 6600 also comes in 4 GB. Both memory options use 16 Gbps GDDR6 memory, over a 128-bit wide memory bus. PowerColor is expected to design a variety of custom-design products based on the two.

Intel's struggles with semiconductor manufacturing have been known for a very long time. Starting from its 10 nm design IP to the latest 7 nm delays, we have seen the company struggle to deliver its semiconductor nodes on time. On the other hand, Intel's competing companies are using 3rd party foundries to manufacture their designs and not worry about the yields of semiconductor nodes. Most of the time, that 3rd party company is Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). Today, thanks to some reporting from Nikkei Asia, we are learning that Intel is tapping TSMC's capacities to manufacture some of the company's future processors.

Citing sources familiar with the matter, Nikkei notes that: "Intel, America's biggest chipmaker, is working with TSMC on at least two 3-nm projects to design central processing units for notebooks and data center servers in an attempt to regain market share it has lost to Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia over the past few years. Mass production of these chips is expected to begin by the end of 2022 at the earliest." This means that we could expect to see some of the TSMC manufactured Intel processors by the year 2023/2024.

During this year's ISC 2021 event, as a part of the company's exhibition portfolio, NVIDIA has decided to launch an updated version of the A100 accelerator. A couple of months ago, in November, NVIDIA launched an 80 GB HBM2E version of the A100 accelerator, on the SXM2 proprietary form-factor. Today, we are getting the same upgraded GPU in the more standard dual-slot PCIe type of card. Featuring a GA100 GPU built on TSMC's 7 nm process, this SKU has 6192 CUDA cores present. To pair with the beefy amount of computing, the GPU needs appropriate memory. This time, there is as much as 80 GB of HBM2E memory. The memory achieves a bandwidth of 2039 GB/s, with memory dies running at an effective speed of 3186 Gbps. An important note is that the TDP of the GPU has been lowered to 250 Watts, compared to the 400 Watt SXM2 solution.

To pair with the new upgrade, NVIDIA made another announcement today and that is an enterprise version of Microsoft's DirectStorage, called NVIDIA GPUDirect Storage. It represents a way of allowing applications to access the massive memory pool built on the GPU, with 80 GB of super-fast HBM2E memory.

Applied Materials, Inc. today unveiled a new way to engineer the wiring of advanced logic chips that enables scaling to the 3 nm node and beyond. While size reduction benefits transistor performance, the opposite is true in the interconnect wiring: smaller wires have greater electrical resistance which reduces performance and increases power consumption. Without a materials engineering breakthrough, interconnect via resistance would increase by a factor of 10 from the 7 nm node to the 3 nm node, negating the benefits of transistor scaling.

Applied Materials has developed a new materials engineering solution called the Endura Copper Barrier Seed IMS. It is an Integrated Materials Solution that combines seven different process technologies in one system under high vacuum: ALD, PVD, CVD, copper reflow, surface treatment, interface engineering and metrology. The combination replaces conformal ALD with selective ALD, eliminating a high-resistivity barrier at the via interface. The solution also includes copper reflow technology that enables void free gap fill in narrow features. Electrical resistance at the via contact interface is reduced by up to 50 percent, improving chip performance and power consumption, and enabling logic scaling to continue to 3 nm and beyond.

Intel's upcoming Ponte Vecchio graphics card is set to be the company's most powerful processor ever designed, and the chip is indeed looking like an engineering marvel. From Intel's previous teasers, we have learned that Ponte Vecchio is built using 47 "magical tiles" or 47 dies which are responsible either for computing elements, Rambo Cache, Xe links, or something else. Today, we are getting a new piece of information coming from Igor's LAB, regarding the Ponte Vecchio and some of its design choices. For starters, the GPU will be a heterogeneous design that consists out of many different nodes. Some parts of the GPU will be manufactured on Intel's 10 nm SuperFin and 7 nm technologies, while others will use TSMC's 7 nm and 5 nm nodes. The smaller and more efficient nodes will probably be used for computing elements. Everything will be held together by Intel's EMIB and Foveros 3D packaging.

Next up, we have information that this massive Intel processor will be accountable for around 600 Watts of heat output, which is a lot to cool. That is why in the leaked renders, we see that Intel envisioned these processors to be liquid-cooled, which would make the cooling much easier and much more efficient compared to air cooling of such a high heat output. Another interesting thing is that the Ponte Vecchio is designed to fit inside OAM (OCP Accelerator Module) form factor, an alternative to the regular PCIe-based accelerators in data centers. OAM is used primarily by hyper scalers like Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc., so we imagine that Intel already knows its customers before the product even hits the market.

AMD today announced the AMD Radeon PRO W6000 series workstation graphics, delivering exceptional performance, stability and reliability for professional users. The new graphics products were designed and optimized to power demanding architectural design workloads, ultra-high resolution media projects, complex design and engineering simulations, and advanced image and video editing applications.

Built on award-winning AMD RDNA2 architecture, the foundation of next generation, high-powered PCs, laptops and many of today's game consoles, the new product line features the AMD Radeon PRO W6800, the fastest AMD RDNA workstation graphics card ever. It also includes the AMD Radeon PRO W6600 graphics card, meticulously engineered for ultra-high performance workflows, and the AMD Radeon PRO W6600M GPU, designed to power professional mobile workstations.

AMD today released the Radeon RX 6000M series mobile graphics lineup, based on the RDNA2 graphics architecture. These GPUs offer full DirectX 12 Ultimate readiness, including real-time raytracing capability. The lineup is led by the Radeon RX 6800M, followed by the RX 6700M, and the RX 6600M. The RX 6800M and RX 6700M are based on the 7 nm "Navi 22" silicon, while the RX 6600M debuts the "Navi 23" silicon. The RX 6800M appears to be maxing out the "Navi 22" silicon, much like the desktop RX 6700 XT. It features 40 RDNA2 compute units, amounting to 2,560 stream processors; game clocks of up to 2.30 GHz, 12 GB of GDDR6 memory across a 192-bit wide memory interface, and 96 MB of Infinity Cache. The RX 6700M is slightly cut down, with 36 compute units (2,304 stream processors), the same 2.30 GHz game clocks, 10 GB of video memory possibly across a 160-bit wide memory bus, and 80 MB of Infinity Cache.

The new RX 6600M debuts the 7 nm "Navi 23" silicon, with 28 RDNA2 compute units, game clocks of 2177 MHz, 8 GB of GDDR6 memory across a 128-bit wide memory bus, and 32 MB of Infinity Cache. All three chips feature Smart Access Memory (resizable BAR), and support for AMD SmartShift, a feature that load-balances the discrete GPU with an AMD iGPU. AMD claims that the RX 6800M and RX 6700M are fit for 1440p gaming, with the RX 6800M beating the RTX 2070 Notebook by anywhere between 40-70%, and 120 FPS in a large selection of e-sports titles. The company also claims that the RX 6800M beats the GeForce RTX 3080 8 GB by 14-39%. The RX 6600M, meanwhile is shown matching the RTX 3060 6 GB, in AMD's tests. Notebooks powered by AMD Radeon RX 6000M discrete graphics are shipping now.The graphics press-deck follows.

Taiwan's most valuable company, and chipmaker of the world, TSMC, confirmed that at least two of its fab workers have been diagnosed with COVID-19, but maintains that it doesn't affect operations at the plants. Most regions around world, including Taiwan, are bracing for successive waves of the disease, and a spread of COVID at TSMC could spell big trouble for the tech-giants dependent on the company for contract-manufacturing of their cutting-edge logic chips. Taiwan has been mostly spared from the Corona epidemic, but is now experiencing its largest wave of COVID-19 infections, with its medical infrastructure under strain. The latest outbreak has the potential to throw operations at TSMC off gear, affecting the supply chains of tens of billions of Dollars worth devices and vehicles around the world.

TSMC maintains an internal epidemic prevention committee, which has conducted contact-tracing of the the two employees, and discovered 10 contacts. Some of these have been sent to home-isolation, while others are closely monitoring themselves for symptoms. TSMC pledged that it will monitor the health of its employees on a daily basis. It has also completed the disinfection of the affected employees' workplace, and public areas visited by them. It once again emphasized that the incident will not affect company operations.

A highly plausible looking AMD Radeon RX 6600 series graphics card is doing rounds on the web. The card is purportedly an AMD reference-design OEM-trim "Navi 23" board. We know from recent rumors that the 7 nm "Navi 23" silicon powers the upcoming Radeon RX 6600 XT and RX 6600. The picture only shows a portion of the card, the back-plate as viewed toward the rear I/O, but the bar-code sticker is unmistakable. The sticker reveals the OEM to be PC Partner, which is known to make all OEM and retail reference-design AMD Radeon graphics cards, which are marked "MBA" (made by AMD). You'll find a similar-looking bar-code sticker on all AMD reference-design cards, regardless of the AIB partner marketing it.

The bar-code sticker references "Navi 23 XT," which is very likely the Radeon RX 6600 XT. The card has 8 GB of GDDR6 memory, and its display outputs include one HDMI, and three DisplayPorts. Elsewhere in the picture, we get valuable insights into the design of the cooler, revealing that the card features an aluminium fin-stack heatsink with one or more axial fans (top-flow), rather than a channel-type lateral blower-type cooling solution. The "Navi 23" silicon is rumored to feature up to 32 RDNA2 compute units that amount to 2.048 stream processors, a PCI-Express 4.0 x8 host interface, much like the RX 5500 XT, and a 128-bit wide GDDR6 memory interface.

AMD in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), revealed that its wafer supply agreement with GlobalFoundries has been amended. Under the new terms, AMD places orders for wafers from GlobalFoundries up to 2024, with purchase targets set for each year leading up to 2024. Beyond meeting these targets, AMD is free from all other exclusivity commitments. The agreement was previously amended in January 2019, setting annual purchase targets for 2019, 2020, and 2021, while beginning a de-coupling between AMD and GlobalFoundries. This enabled the company to source 7 nm (or smaller) chips, such as CCDs and GPUs, from other foundries, such as TSMC, while keeping GlobalFoundries exclusive for 12 nm (or larger) nodes.

The updated wafer supply agreement unlocks many possibilities for AMD. For starters, it can finally build a next-generation sIOD (server I/O die) on a more efficient node than GlobalFoundries 12LP, such as TSMC 7 nm. This transition to 7 nm will be needed as the next-gen "Genoa" EPYC processor could feature future I/O standards such as DDR5 memory and PCI-Express Gen 5, and the switching fabric for these could be too power-hungry on 12 nm. The "Zen 4" CPU core complex dies (CCDs) of "Genoa" are expected to be built on TSMC 5 nm.

The 7 nm "Navi 24" silicon will very likely be the smallest discrete GPU based on the RDNA2 graphics architecture. The chip surfaced in technical documentation under the codename "Beige Goby." AMD uses such internal codenames to track sources of leaks. No specs of the "Navi 24" are known yet, but it could be significantly smaller than the "Navi 23" that powers the Radeon RX 6600 series and possibly the RX 6500 series, reportedly packing up to 2,048 stream processors. The "Navi 24" chip could also help AMD compete against NVIDIA and an emerging Intel in entry-level discrete GPUs for notebooks.

AMD's upcoming professional graphics card based on the 7 nm "Navi 21" silicon, the Radeon Pro W6800, will feature 32 GB of GDDR6 memory, according to a new leaked validation on the Userbenchmark database. The card was pictured and detailed in an older article that you can read here. It's likely that AMD achieved 32 GB over the chip's 256-bit wide memory bus using sixteen 16 Gbit memory chips, with two chips piggy-backed per 32-bit path. The picture leak from April also reveals a heatspreader over the reverse side of the otherwise bare PCB that points to the likelihood of memory chips being located there. On the client-segment Radeon RX 6800 XT, 16 GB is achieved using eight 16 Gbit chips, all of which are located on the obverse side. The exact specifications of the Pro W6800 remain unknown, but is expected to be comparable to the RX 6800 series.

Xilinx, Inc. (Nasdaq: XLNX), the leader in adaptive computing, today announced record revenues of $851 million for the fiscal fourth quarter, up 6% over the previous quarter and an increase of 13% year over year. Fiscal 2021 revenues were $3.15 billion, largely flat from the prior fiscal year. GAAP net income for the fiscal fourth quarter was $188 million, or $0.75 per diluted share. Non-GAAP net income for the quarter was $204 million, or $0.82 per diluted share. GAAP net income for fiscal year 2021 was $647 million, or $2.62 per diluted share. Non-GAAP net income for fiscal year 2021 was $762 million, or $3.08 per diluted share.

Additional fourth quarter of fiscal year 2021 comparisons are provided in the charts below. "We are pleased with our fourth quarter results as we delivered record revenues and double-digit year-over-year growth in the midst of a challenging supply chain environment," said Victor Peng, Xilinx president and CEO. "Xilinx saw further improvement in demand across a majority of our diversified end markets with key strength in our Wireless, Data Center and Automotive markets, the pillars of our growth strategy. Our teams have executed well and we remain focused on continuing to meet customers' critical needs.

It's not only graphics cards and CPUs that are best kept on the edge of manufacturing processes; in truth, one could even say that consoles have more to gain from these transitions when it comes to their manufacturers' financial outlooks. This happens because usually, consoles are subsidized by manufacturers in that their actual retail price is lower than manufacturing costs; this works as a way for console players to increase their platforms' attractiveness and user base, so they can then sell them games and subscription services, where the big bucks are actually made. We knew this already, but Microsoft's head of Xbox business development, Lori Wright confirmed it yesterday at the Apple vs Epic Games hearing. Lori Wright is quoted as answering "We don't; we sell the consoles at a loss" when asked whether Microsoft does or does not turn a profit on Xbox Series S | X hardware sales.

Considering the similarities between the Xbox Series X and PS5's SoC, it's very likely that Sony doesn't make a profit on console hardware sales either - or if it actually does, it's nothing actually meaningful. This is part of the reason why consoles are usually actually in the forefront of manufacturing processes' advancements, as it's a way for console players to quickly reduce the BoM (Bill of Materials) for their consoles. Since the specifications don't change within a console generation (discounting Pro models, which both companies have taken to launching some years into their generations), they choose to take advantage of process advancements due to the transistor density increases that allow for both lower silicon area for the SoC, and lower power consumption - which sometimes enables them to develop slim versions of their gaming consoles.

Several benchmark numbers of the upcoming AMD Ryzen 7 5700G and Ryzen 5 5600G desktop processors were fished out by Thai PC enthusiast TUM_APISAK. The 5700G and 5600G are based on the 7 nm "Cezanne" silicon that combines up to 8 "Zen 3" CPU cores across a single CCX, sharing a single 16 MB L3 cache; along with an iGPU based on the "Vega" graphics architecture. Both chips were put through the CPU-Z Bench, where they posted spectacular results.

Both chips post higher single-thread score than the Core i9-10900K "Comet Lake," riding on the back of the high IPC of the "Zen 3" cores, and low latencies from the monolithic "Cezanne" silicon. In the multi-threaded test, the 8-core/16-thread 5700G scored above the Core i9-9900KS (5.00 GHz all-core). An HP OMEN 25L pre-built was put through Geekbench 5, where it was found performing within 90% of the Core i5-11600K. Userbenchmark remarks that the 5600X performs within the league of contemporaries, but falls behind on memory latency. Find the validation pages in the source links below.

PowerColor today teased an upcoming variant of its Radeon RX 6700 XT Hellhound graphics card, featuring an all-white PCB. It's likely that the card will be built around the white color-scheme, with white extending to the card's back-plate and cooler-shroud. It remains to be seen if any other changes are made to the RX 6700 XT Hellhound, such as clock-speeds, or lighting. Based on the 7 nm Navi 22 silicon, the RX 6700 XT features 2,560 stream processors, 40 Ray Accelerators, 144 TMUs, 64 ROPs, and a 192-bit wide memory interface, holding 12 GB of memory.

Cerebras has announced the successor to their record-breaking Wafer Scale Engine. The newly re-engineered Wafer Scale Engine 2 has been redesigned for TSMC's 7 nm manufacturing process - a severe improvement over the original's 16 nm. That Cerebras has moved on to TSMC's 7 nm for this giant, wafer-sized accelerator is telling of the confidence and state of yields on TSMC's 7 nm - if the process wasn't considered to be stable and guaranteeing incredibly good yields, I doubt such an effort would have been undertaken.

Tianshu Zhixin, a Chinese startup company dedicated to designing advanced processors for accelerating various kinds of tasks, has officially entered the production of its latest GPGPU design. Called "Big Island" GPU, it is the company's entry into the GPU market, currently dominated by AMD, NVIDIA, and soon Intel. So what is so special about Tianshu Zhixin's Big Island GPU, making it so important? Firstly, it represents China's attempt of independence from the outside processor suppliers, ensuring maximum security at all times. Secondly, it is an interesting feat to enter a market that is controlled by big players and attempt to grab a piece of that cake. To be successful, the GPU needs to represent a great design.

And great it is, at least on paper. The specifications list that Big Island is currently being manufactured on TSMC's 7 nm node using CoWoS packaging technology, enabling the die to feature over 24 billion transistors. When it comes to performance, the company claims that the GPU is capable of crunching 37 TeraFLOPs of single-precision FP32 data. At FP16/BF16 half-precision, the chip is capable of outputting 147 TeraFLOPs. When it comes to integer performance, it can achieve 317, 147, and 295 TOPS in INT32, INT16, and IN8 respectively. There is no data on double-precision floating-point numbers, so the chip is optimized for single-precision workloads. There is also 32 GB of HBM2 memory present, and it has 1.2 TB of bandwidth. If we compare the chip to the competing offers like NVIDIA A100 or AMD MI100, the new Big Island GPU outperforms both at single-precision FP32 compute tasks, for which it is designed.Pictures of possible solutions follow.

In the past few years, Intel has struggled a lot with its semiconductor manufacturing. Starting from the 10 nm fiasco, the company delayed the new node for years and years, making it seem like it is never going to get delivered. The node was believed to be so advanced that it was unexpectedly hard to manufacture, giving the company more problems. Low yields have been present for a long time, and it is only recently that Intel has started shipping its 10 nm products. However, its competitor, TSMC, has been pumping out nodes at an amazing rate. At the time of writing, the Taiwanese giant is producing the 5 nm node, with a 4 nm node on the way.

So to remain competitive, Intel would need to apply a new tactic. The company has a 7 nm node in the works for 2023 when TSMC will switch to the 3 nm+ nodes. That represents a marketing problem, where the node naming convention is making Intel inferior to its competitors. To fix that, the company will likely start node renaming and give its nodes new names, that are corresponding to the industry naming conventions. We still have no information how will the new names look like, or if Intel will do it in the first place, so take this with a grain of salt.

Intel's problems with processor production, especially with newer nodes like 10 nm and 7 nm, have been widely known. The company has not been able to deliver the latest semiconductor process on time and has thus delayed many product launches. However, things are looking to take a complete U-turn and the hell will freeze. During the "Intel Unleashed: Engineering the Future" webcast event that happened yesterday, the company made several announcements regarding the 7 nm process and its viability. We have already reported that the company is working on the new Meteor Lake processor lineup for 2023, supposed to be manufactured on the fixed 7 nm node.

However, it seems like Intel will have to tap external capacities to manufacture a part of its processor production. The company has confirmed that it will use an unknown TSMC process to manufacture a part of the 2023 processor lineup. That means that Intel and TSMC have already established the needed capacity and that TSMC has already booked wafer capacity for Intel. This has never happened before, as Intel always kept its processor production under the company roof. However, given that there is a huge demand for new semiconductor processes, Intel has to look at external manufacturing options to keep up with the demand.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger made the first official reference to the company's future-generation client processor, codenamed "Meteor Lake." Slated for market release in 2023, the processor's compute tile will be taped out in Q2-2021. Launching alongside the "Granite Rapids" enterprise processor, "Meteor Lake" will be a multi-chip module leveraging Intel's Foveros chip packaging technology.

Different components of the processor will be fabricated on different kinds of silicon fabrication nodes, and interconnected on the package using EMIB inter-die connections, or even silicon interposers. The compute tile is likely the tile containing the processor's CPU cores, and Intel confirmed a 7 nm-class foundry node for it. "Meteor Lake" will be a hybrid processor, much like the upcoming "Alder Lake," meaning that it will have two kinds of CPU cores, larger "high performance" cores that remain dormant when the machine is idling or dealing with lightweight workloads; and smaller "high efficiency" cores based on a low-power microarchitecture.