A performance review of the Intel Core i5-L16G7 "Lakefield" Hybrid processor (powering a Samsung Galaxy S notebook) was recently published by Golem.de, which provides an in-depth look at Intel's ambitious new processor design that sets in motion the two new philosophies Intel will build its future processors on - packaging modularity provided by innovative new chip packaging technologies such as Foveros; and Hybrid processing, where there are two sets of CPU cores with vastly different microarchitectures and significantly different performance/Watt curves that let the processor respond to different kinds of workloads while keeping power-draw low. This concept was commercially proliferated first by Arm, with its big.LITTLE topology that took to the market around 2013. The "Lakefield" i5-L16G7 combines a high-performance "Sunny Cove" CPU core with four smaller "Tremont" cores, and Gen11 iGPU.

The Golem.de report reveals that Windows 10 thread scheduler is aware of the hybrid multi-core topology of "Lakefield," and that it is able to classify workloads at a very advanced level so the right kind of core is in use at any given time. The "Sunny Cove" core is called upon when interactive vast serial processing loads are in demand. This could even be something like launching applications, new tabs in a multi-process web-browser, or less-parallelized media encoding. The four "Tremont" cores keep the machine "cruising," handling much of the operational workload of an application, and is also better tuned to cope with highly parallelized workloads. This is similar to a hybrid automobile, where the combustion engine provides tractive effort from 0 kph, while the electric motor sustains a cruising speed.

Intel's 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake-S" desktop processors in the LGA1700 package could see the desktop debut of Intel's Hybrid Technology that it introduced with the mobile segment "Lakefield" processor. Analogous to Arm big.LITTLE, Intel Hybrid Technology is a multi-core processor topology that sees the combination of high-performance CPU cores with smaller high-efficiency cores that keep the PC ticking through the vast majority of the time/tasks when the high-performance cores aren't needed and hence power-gated. The high-performance cores are woken up only as needed. "Lakefield" combines one "Sunny Cove" high-performance core with four "Tremont" low-power cores. "Alder Lake-S" will take this concept further.

According to Intel slides leaked to the web by HXL (aka @9550pro), the 10 nm-class "Alder Lake-S" silicon will physically feature 8 "Golden Cove" high-performance cores, and 8 "Gracemont" low-power cores, along with a Gen12 iGPU that comes in three tiers - GT0 (iGPU disabled), GT1 (some execution units disabled), and GT2 (all execution units enabled). In its top trim with 125 W TDP, "Alder Lake-S" will be a "16-core" processor with 8 each of "Golden Cove" and "Gracemont" cores enabled. There will be 80 W TDP models with the same 8+8 core configuration, which are probably "locked" parts. Lastly, there the lower wrungs of the product stack will completely lack "small" cores, and be 6+0, with only high-performance cores. A recurring theme with all parts is the GT1 trim of the Gen12 iGPU.

HKEPC's retail market scouts discovered that some AMD Ryzen 5 3600 desktop processors are shipping in paperboard boxes meant for the company's Ryzen 3000G series "Picasso" desktop APUs. Depending on factors such as iGPU, or the size of the included cooling solution, AMD uses common box sizes among various processor models. The largest cube-shaped boxes hold SKUs with the largest Wraith Prism RGB coolers, a slightly smaller, through still cube-shaped box is meant for SKUs with the Wraith Spire. Smaller cuboid boxes are meant for SKUs that either have the smaller Wraith Stealth coolers, or completely exclude a cooling solution.

Much of the SKU differentiation comes from a prominent brand extension (3/5/7/9) motif on the front-face, besides the top label that lists out the model name, OPN, serial number, and doubles up as a security seal. Boxes for the company's APUs (processors with integrated graphics), however, have a prominent "processor with AMD Radeon graphics" chrome insert on the front- and top faces. The 3600 shipping in such a box could confuse some buyers, particularly those shopping in brick-and-mortar stores, as they'd expect an iGPU where none exists. It's only the SKU sticker on the top-face that has the cautionary note "discrete graphics required." Other retail boxes (meant for non-APU products) have this note prominently printed on the box.

In the next big step toward complete silicon independence, Apple is planning to dump AMD as a supplier of discrete GPUs in the near future, closely following its decision to dump Intel and the x86 machine architecture in favor of its own SoCs based on the Arm machine architecture. The company is developing its own line of discrete GPUs under the "Metal GPU Family," a name borrowed from its own Metal graphics API.

This explosive bit of information comes from a WWDC 2020 presentation slide posted by Longhorn (@never_released) on Twitter. The slide suggests that along with the processor, Apple is making a clean break with its graphics hardware. The SoCs powering client-segment Macs, such as future iMacs or MacBooks, could feature iGPUs based on this graphics architecture, while larger platforms such as MacBook Pros, Mac Pros, and iMac Pros of the future could feature Apple's own discrete GPUs.

The first homebrew processor for Macs by Apple could leverage Arm big.LITTLE technology, according to a slide from a developer-relations presentation leaked by Erdi Özüağ of Donanim Haber. Apple is referring to the setup as "asymmetric cores" in its documentation, although it essentially is big.LITTLE, a technology that's been implemented by Arm SoC vendors since 2012. It combines groups of low-power (high-efficiency) and high-performance (low-efficiency) cores in response to processing demands by software, with the high-performance cores only been engaged when needed. Intel only recently introduced its rendition of this tech, called Hybrid Processing, with its Core "Lakefield" processor, and looks to scale it up with future chips such as "Meteor Lake."

Besides a multi-core big.LITTLE CPU, the Apple SoC features dedicated AI acceleration hardware, including a neural engine and matrix-multiplication hardware (dubbed ML accelerators), a dedicated video hardware encoder and decoder, and memory controller that's optimized for UMA (unified memory) for the iGPU and system memory. Apple has already started shipping Mac Mini prototypes with an Arm-based processor to its ISVs along with a special version of MacOS "Big Sur" and a wealth of software development kit to help port their x86 Mac software over to the new machine architecture.

In what is possibly the first taste of Intel's Gen12 Xe iGPU running a AAA game, Ryan Shrout, chief performance strategist at Intel, showed off a prototype notebook running a "Tiger Lake" processor that is playing "Battlefield V" by itself (without discrete graphics). "Perks of the job! Took a prototype Tiger Lake system for a spin on Battlefield V to stretch its legs. Impressive thin and light gaming perf with Xe graphics! Early drivers/sw, but it's the first time I've seen this game run like this on integrated gfx. More later this year!," said Shrout.

The gameplay video (linked as source below), shows a playable experience for "Battlefield V" with Gen12 Xe, with 1080p at around 30 Hz. It only serves to appetize us for what would come next, when Intel scales up this IP to discrete GPUs. The Gen12 Xe iGPU appears capable of e-sports gaming with the right settings, and could spell serious trouble for cheap dGPU solutions such as the GeForce MX series or Radeon RX 530 series.

AMD Ryzen 4000 series of desktop APUs are set to be released next month as a quiet launch. What we expected to see is a launch covering only a few models ranging from Ryzen 3 to Ryzen 7 level, meaning that there would be configurations equipped with anything from 4C/8T to 8C/16T. In the beginning thanks to all the leaks we expected to see six models (listed in the table below), however thanks to discovery, we could be looking at even more SKUs of the Renoir family of APUs. Mentioned in the table are some new entries to both consumer and pro-grade users which means AMD will probably do a launch of both editions, possibly on the same day. We are not sure if that is the case, however, it is just a speculation.

Apple is planning to launch its own high-performance processors designed for Macs at the 2020 WWDC, held in the week of 22 June, 2020. This would be the the first step among many toward the replacement of Intel processors and the x86 machine architecture from the Apple Mac ecosystem, in the same fashion as the company replaced PowerPC with x86 last decade. Apple has codenamed the process of graduating to the new machine architecture "Kalamata," and besides detailing the new processor and its architecture, the company could announce a large-scale developer support initiative to help Mac software vendors to transition to the new architecture in time for the first Macs with the new processors to roll out in 2021.

A Bloomberg report on the new processors states that the chips will be based on the "same technology" as the company's A-series SoCs for iOS devices, meaning that Apple will leverage the Arm machine architecture, and has probably developed a high performance CPU core that can match Intel's x64 cores in IPC and efficiency. Macs based on the new processors, will however run MacOS and not iOS, which means much of the clean-break transition woes between PPC and x86 Macs are bound to return, but probably better managed by software vendors. It also remains to be seen how Apple handles graphics. The company could scale up the Metal-optimized iGPU found in its A-series SoCs on its new Mac processor, while also giving them the platform I/O capability to support discrete graphics from companies such as AMD.

Intel's 11th generation Core i7-1165G7 "Tiger Lake-U" processor armed with 4 "Willow Cove" cores and Gen12 Xe graphics fights a pitched battle against AMD Ryzen 7 4800U "Renoir" (8 "Zen 2" cores and Radeon Vega 8 graphics), courtesy of some digging by Thai PC enthusiast TUM_APISAK. The 4800U beats the i7-1165G7 by a wafer-thin margin of 1.9% despite double the CPU core-count and a supposedly advanced iGPU, with 6331 points as against 6211 points of the Intel chip, in 3DMark 11. A breakdown of the score reveals fascinating details of the battle.

The Core i7-1165G7 beats the Ryzen 7 4800U in graphics tests, with a graphics score of 6218 points, against 6104 points of the 4800U, resulting in a 1.9% lead. In graphics tests 1, 2, and 3, the Gen12 Xe iGPU is 7.3-8.9% faster than the Radeon Vega 8, through translating to 2-4 FPS. The Intel iGPU crosses the 30 FPS mark in these three tests. With graphics test 4, the AMD iGPU ends up 8.8% faster. Much of AMD's performance gains come from its massive 55.6% physics score lead thanks to its 8-core/16-thread CPU, which ends up beating the 4-core/8-thread "Willow Cove," with the 4800U scoring 12494 points compared to 8028 points for the i7-1165G7. This CPU muscle also plays a big role in graphics test 4. This battle provides sufficient basis to speculate that "Tiger Lake-U" will have a very uphill task matching "Renoir-U" chips such as the Ryzen 7 4800U, and the upcoming Ryzen 9 4900U (designed to compete with the i7-1185G7).

The "Rocket Lake-S" microarchitecture by Intel sees the company back-port its next-generation "Willow Cove" CPU core to the existing 14 nm++ silicon fabrication process in the form of an 8-core die with a Gen12 Xe iGPU. An engineering sample of one such processor made it to the Futuremark database. Clocked at 3.20 GHz with 4.30 GHz boost frequency, the "Rocket Lake-S" ES was put through 3DMark "Fire Strike" and "Time Spy," with its iGPU in play, instead of a discrete graphics card.

In "Fire Strike," the "Rocket Lake-S" ES scores 18898 points in the physics test, 1895 points in the graphics tests, and an overall score of 1746 points. With "Time Spy," the overall score is 605, with a CPU score of 4963 points, and graphics score of 524. The 11th generation Core "Rocket Lake-S" processor is expected to be compatible with existing Intel 400-series chipset motherboards, and feature a PCI-Express gen 4.0 root complex. Several 400-series chipset motherboards have PCIe gen 4.0 preparation for exactly this. The increased IPC from the "Willow Cove" cores is expected to make the 8-core "Rocket Lake-S" a powerful option for gaming and productivity tasks that don't scale across too many cores.

As we reported earlier this week, the release of Adobe Premiere Pro 14.2 brought GPU acceleration to select NVIDIA and AMD GPUs taking advantage of NVIDIA's NVENC chips to boost encoding and decoding speeds. Intel has now showcased the improvements to encoding and decoding with Intel Quick Sync Video (QSV) on 11th generation iGPUs found in mobile Ice Lake chips with Adobe Premiere Pro 14.2.

Compared to the previous 9th generation graphics found in Skylake and Kabylake CPUs the new 11th generation iGPUs perform anywhere from 49-82% better. While impressive, these performance gains can only be found on limited low power 10 nm mobile chips with a maximum of four cores and are yet to arrive on desktop platforms.

Intel Xe graphics architecture makes its commercial debut as an iGPU solution in the company's upcoming "Tiger Lake" mobile processors. The iGPU can be configured along three tiers, with GT1 featuring 48 execution units (EUs), GT2 80 EUs, and GT3 leading the pack with 96 EUs, all within a 15 W envelope (for the total chip). There's a higher tier still of GT3 that comes with higher boost frequencies, tapping into the chip's overall increased 28 W TDP, but this variant of "Tiger Lake" could likely be an Apple-exclusive like its "Ice Lake" based predecessor.

NotebookCheck compiled a 3DMark FireStrike comparison between the various tiers of the Xe iGPU, and compared it to the Gen11 iGPU found with current-generation "Ice Lake-U" processors. The graph doesn't put out scores, but relative performance. Apparently, the 48 EU version of Gen12 Xe is a little over twice as fast as Gen11 GT1, and faster than even the 64 EU Gen11 GT2. The Gen12 GT2 with 80 EUs is around 1.7x faster than the Gen11 GT2 (64 EU). The 96 EU GT3 trim is over twice as fast, and its 28 W variant faster still. These performance give Gen12 a shot against AMD's Radeon Vega-based iGPU solution found in "Renoir." AMD has slimmed the number of CUs down to 8 (512 SP) with "Renoir," down from 11 CUs in the previous generation, compensating for it with higher GPU engine clocks.

Intel's ambitious Xe graphics architecture is expected to make its first commercial debut as an iGPU that's part of the company's 11th gen Core "Tiger Lake" mobile processors, but it already received a non-commercial distribution as a discrete GPU called the DG1, with Intel shipping it to its independent software vendor ecosystem partners to begin exploratory work on Xe. One such ISV paired the card with a Core i7-8700 processor, and put it through Geekbench. While the Geekbench device identification doesn't mention "DG1," we lean toward the possibility looking at its 96 EU configuration, and 1.50 GHz clock speed, and 3 GB memory.

The Geekbench run only covers OpenCL performance of the selected device: "Intel(R) Gen12 Desktop Graphics Controller." The total score is 55373 points, with 3.53 Gpixels/s in "Sorbel," 1.30 Gpixels/sec in Histogram Equalization, 16 GFLOPs in SFFT, 1.62 GPixels/s in Gaussian Blur, 4.51 Msubwindows/s in Face Detection, 2.88 Gpixels/s in RAW, 327.4 Mpixels/s in DoF, and 13656 FPS in Particle Physics. These scores roughly match the 11 CU Radeon Vega iGPU found in AMD "Picasso" Ryzen 5 3400G processors.

Here is the first picture of the AMD Ryzen 7 4700G, the company's upcoming socket AM4 APU based on the 7 nm "Renoir" silicon, courtesy of VideoCardz. The picture reveals a standard-looking socket AM4 chip with commercial name and OPN markings (100-000000146), matching the Igor's Lab OPN code leak from earlier this week. The Ryzen 7 4700G offers an 8-core/16-thread CPU based on the "Zen 2" microarchitecture, and an integrated graphics solution that combines the SIMD machinery of the "Vega" graphics architecture, with the updated display- and media engines of "Navi." The iGPU is configured with 8 CUs (512 stream processors), which on the 4700G has an impressive maximum engine boost clock of 2.10 GHz, according to the Igor's Lab story.

The 8-core/16-thread CPU of the Ryzen 7 4700G has a nominal clock speed of 3.60 GHz, and a maximum boost frequency of 4.45 GHz, with several Precision Boost power-states in both directions of the nominal clock. The CPU features 512 KB of L2 cache per core, and 8 MB of shared L3 cache (4 MB per CCX). The iGPU engine clock goes all the way up to 2.10 GHz, which could help it overcome some of the CU deficit vs. "Picasso," which has 11 CUs (704 stream processors), but clocked only up to 1.40 GHz. Since the Ryzen 5 3400G has an unlocked multiplier, it stands to reason that even the 4700G could. If the platform I/O of "Renoir" in its mobile avatar is anything to go by, then the 4700G could feature a limited PCI-Express x8 lane setup for its PEG port. AMD is rating the TDP of the 4700G at 65 W.

Intel's 10 nm Xe DG1 silicon made its first public appearance as the DG1-SDV (software development vehicle), a desktop PCIe graphics cards that Intel shipped out to its ISVs (independent software vendors), allowing them to begin preparing software for the Xe architecture. Argonne National Laboratory, the organization behind the Aurora Supercomputing Project that implements Xe HP "Ponte Vecchio" super-scalar compute processors, in its presentation, took a brief technical detour talking a bit about the DG1-SDV.

In the presentation, it is revealed that Intel will indeed monetize (or "productize") the silicon at the heart of the DG1-SDV, only not as a desktop graphics card. The chip will be sold as a mobile GPU, not even as an MXM, but as a GPU meant to be hardwired along with its dedicated memory onto notebooks' mainboards. We predict Intel is attempting to tap into the market segment where NVIDIA sells its GeForce MX300 line of entry-level discrete GPUs. Earlier this week, we spotted a discrete GPU with the specs of the DG1 having significantly increased 1.50 GHz GPU clocks, resulting in a FP32 throughput rivaling the AMD Radeon RX 560 or the "Vega" based iGPU of "Renoir." The Xe architecture will also be released as an iGPU solution, powering Intel's "Tiger Lake" Core mobile processor. Find the Aurora presentation here (PDF).

Intel today released its first Graphics Drivers ready for the upcoming Windows 10 May 2020 Update (2004). Version 27.20.100.8187 of Intel Graphics Drivers are WDDM 2.7 compliant, which means support for Shader Model 6.5, and Dolby Vision, on Gen 9.5 or later iGPUs. The drivers also add readiness for OneAPI, Intel's ambitious unified programming model for x86 processors, iGPU execution units, and future Xe compute processors. For gamers, the latest drivers add optimization for "Gears Tactics," "XCOM: Chimera Squad," and "Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 Campaign Remastered), on Iris Plus or later iGPUs. As with the previous drivers, these drivers are OEM-unlocked.DOWNLOAD: Intel Graphics Drivers 27.20.100.8187

The 11th generation Intel Core "Tiger Lake" mobile processor and pioneering "Lakefield" heterogenous x86 processor could debut around September or October, 2020, according to a leaked Lenovo internal slide posted by NotebookCheck. It also points to Intel denoting future processors' lithography with Foveros 3D Packaging as simply "3D," and not get into a nanometer number-game with AMD (which is now in 7 nm and on course to 5 nm in 2022). This makes sense as Foveros allows the combination of dies built on different silicon fabrication nodes.

"Tiger Lake" is still denoted as a 10 nm as it's a planar chip. Intel is developing it on a refined 10 nm+ silicon fabrication process, which apparently enables Intel to increase clock speeds without breaking the target power envelope. "Tiger Lake" sees the commercial debut of Intel's ambitious Xe graphics architecture as an iGPU solution. "Lakefield," on the other hand, is a 5-core processor combining four "Tremont" low power x86-64 cores with a "Sunny Cove" high-powered core, in a setup rivaling Arm big.LITTLE, enabling the next generation of mobile computing form-factors, which Intel and its partners are still figuring out under Project Athena.

Internal documents of Intel's 10th generation Core "Comet Lake" processor family, leaked by momomo_us, reveal the CPUID, TDP, and configurable-TDP values of the various desktop SKUs. Intel broadly classifies Comet Lake by core-count and companion iGPU tier. The 10-core Comet Lake die ships with 125 W, 65 W, and 35 W TDP, for the K/KF, locked, and T-SKUs, respectively.

For the desktop Comet Lake-S, there are only two iGPU tiers, GT2 (iGPU present in UHD 630 flavor), or completely disabled (denoted as GT0). The charts detailing the non-Turbo clock speeds reveal that the presence or absence of iGPU has no impact on TDP, cTDP, or CPU frequencies. The "Comet Lake" 10-core + GT2 silicon is listed with a CPUID of A0655h, while the 6-core + GT2 and 4-core + GT2 variants share the A0653h CPUID.

ASUS is giving finishing touches to the launch of a new Zenbook 14 (UX434IQ) model with a combination of a Ryzen 4000 "Renoir" processor and NVIDIA's entry-level GeForce MX350 discrete graphics. Although never pictured and with no confirmation of whether it gets the swanky ScreenPad (a color touchscreen that works like the notebook's trackpad); the combine surfaced in a Futuremark database submission.

The Zenbook 14 (UX434IQ) combines an AMD Ryzen 7 4700U (8-core/8-thread) processor with NVIDIA GeForce MX350 discrete graphics, and more interestingly, 16 GB of LPDDR4x-4266 memory. The "Pascal" based MX350 graphics features 640 CUDA cores, and a 64-bit GDDR5 memory interface holding 2 GB of memory. It's marketed to offer a 2.5x performance uplift against an Intel Gen 9.5 iGPU, but we're not sure if it makes even a 1.5x uplift over the iGPU of the 4700U (448 "Vega" stream processors, 1600 MHz engine clock, plenty of memory bandwidth at its disposal thanks to LPDDR4x). The notebook also packs a decent Samsung PM981 1 TB NVMe SSD.

Intel's first integrated graphics solution based on its ambitious new Xe graphics architecture, could match AMD's "Vega" architecture based iGPU solutions, such as the one found in its latest Ryzen 4000 series "Renoir" iGPUs, according to leaked 3DMark FireStrike numbers put out by @_rogame. Benchmark results of a prototype laptop based on Intel's "Tiger Lake-U" processor surfaced on the 3DMark database. This processor embeds Intel's Gen12 Xe iGPU solution, which is purported to offer significant performance gains over current Gen11 and Gen9.5 based iGPUs.

The prototype 2-core/4-thread "Tiger Lake-U" processor with Gen12 graphics yields a 3DMark FireStrike score of 2,196 points, with a graphics score of 2,467, and 6,488 points physics score. These scores are comparable to 8 CU Radeon Vega iGPU solutions. "Renoir" tops out at 8 CUs, but shores up performance to the 11 CU "Picasso" levels by other means. Besides tapping into the 7 nm process to increase engine clocks, improve the boosting algorithm, and modernizing the display- and multimedia engines; AMD's iGPU is largely based on the same 3-year old "Vega" architecture. Intel Gen12 Xe makes its debut with the "Tiger Lake" microarchitecture slated for 2021.

As if reports of Intel's latest mobile flagship Core i9-10980HK pulling up to 135 W power in short bursts to achieve its 5.30 GHz Thermal Velocity Boost (TVB) frequency weren't bad enough, it appears like the 10th generation Core desktop processors won't win Intel any prizes in the energy efficiency contests. According to tech Tweeter "@9550Pro," citing Chinese enthusiast @Wolstame, with a reasonably high hit-rate with tech rumors, Intel's upcoming Core i9-10900F processor can pull up to 224 Watts of power. The i9-10900F isn't even an unlocked chip like i9-10900K, but rather an iGPU-disabled version of the locked i9-10900.

The i9-10900F 10-core/20-thread processor allegedly has its PL1 value set at 170 W, and PL2 at 224 W. The latter is probably needed to give the chip's TVB algorithm power headroom to achieve either the chip's 5.30 GHz TVB max frequency, or its maximum all-core boost frequency of 4.50 GHz. The latter could be Intel's strategy to take on AMD's Ryzen 9 3900X and 3950X in multi-threaded benchmarks (run 10 cores at 4.50 GHz). Intel is possibly looking to price the i9-10900 series (i9-10900F, i9-10900, i9-10900KF, and i9-10900K) at price-points ranging between $450-500, if not more. With these power-draw figures, it's all but certain that Intel could recommend serious cooling solutions for the i9-10900 series, at least a 240 mm x 120 mm AIO. AMD recommends a 280 mm x 140 mm AIO for the 16-core 3950X.

AMD's 4th generation Ryzen desktop processors are expected to launch around September 2020, sources in the motherboard industry tell DigiTimes. Codenamed "Vermeer," successor to "Matisse," these processors will be socket AM4 multi-chip modules of up to two CPU complex dies based on the "Zen 3" microarchitecture, combined with an I/O controller die. The "Zen 3" chiplets are expected to be fabricated on a newer 7 nm-class process by TSMC, either N7P or N7+. The biggest design change with "Zen 3" is the doing away of CCX arrangement of CPU cores, with each chiplet holding a common block of cores sharing a last-level cache. This, along with clock speed headroom gains from the new node are expected to yield generational price-performance increases.

The "Zen 2" based 8-core "Renoir" die is also expected to make its socket AM4 debut within 2020, succeeding the "Picasso" based quad-core Ryzen 3000-series APUs. This is a particularly important product for AMD, as it is expected to compete with Intel's 10th generation Core i5 6-core/12-thread processors in terms of pricing, while offering more cores (8-core/16-thread) and a faster iGPU. The 4th gen Ryzen socket AM4 processor lineup will launch alongside AMD's 600-series motherboard chipset, with forwards- and backwards-compatibility (i.e., "Vermeer" and "Renoir" working with older chipsets, and older AM4 processors working on 600-series chipset motherboards). AMD was originally expected to unveil these processors at the 2020 Computex trade-show in June, but Computex itself is rescheduled to late-September.

Intel is revisiting the concept of asymmetric multi-GPU introduced with DirectX 12. The company posted an elaborate technical slide-deck it originally planned to present to game developers at the now-cancelled GDC 2020. The technology shows promise because the company isn't insulting developers' intelligence by proposing that the iGPU lying dormant be made to shoulder the game's entire rendering pipeline for a single-digit percentage performance boost. Rather, it has come up with innovating augments to the rendering path such that only certain lightweight compute aspects of the game's rendering be passed on to the iGPU's execution units, so it has a more meaningful contribution to overall performance. To that effect, Intel is on the path of coming up with SDK that can be integrated with existing game engines.

Microsoft DirectX 12 introduced the holy grail of multi-GPU technology, under its Explicit Multi-Adapter specification. This allows game engines to send rendering traffic to any combinations or makes of GPUs that support the API, to achieve a performance uplift over single GPU. This was met with lukewarm reception from AMD and NVIDIA, and far too few DirectX 12 games actually support it. Intel proposes a specialization of explicit multi-adapter approach, in which the iGPU's execution units are made to process various low-bandwidth elements both during the rendering and post-processing stages, such as Occlusion Culling, AI, game physics, etc. Intel's method leverages cross-adapter shared resources sitting in system memory (main memory), and D3D12 asynchronous compute, which creates separate processing queues for rendering and compute.

Intel's upcoming Rocket Lake-S desktop platform is expected to arrive sometime later this year, however, we didn't have any concrete details on what will it bring. Thanks to the exclusive information obtained by VideoCardz'es sources at Intel, there are some more details regarding the RKL-S platform. To start, the RKL-S platform is based on a 500-series chipset. This is an iteration of the upcoming 400-series chipset, and it features many platform improvements. The 500-series chipset based motherboards will supposedly have an LGA 1200 socket, which is an improvement in pin count compared to LGA 1151 socket found on 300 series chipset.

The main improvement is the CPU core itself, which is supposedly a 14 nm adaptation of Tiger Lake-U based on Willow Cove core. This design is representing a backport of IP to an older manufacturing node, which results in bigger die space due to larger node used. When it comes to the platform improvements, it will support the long-awaited PCIe 4.0 connection already present on competing platforms from AMD. It will enable much faster SSD speeds as there are already PCIe 4.0 NVMe devices that run at 7 GB/s speeds. With RKL-S, there will be 20 PCIe 4.0 lanes present, where four would go to the NVMe SSD and 16 would go to the PCIe slots from GPUs. Another interesting feature of the RKL-S is the addition of Xe graphics found on the CPU die, meant as iGPU. Supposedly based on Gen12 graphics, it will bring support for HDMI 2.0b and DisplayPort 1.4a connectors.

Microsoft Thursday released the DirectX 12 Ultimate logo. This is not a new API with any new features, but rather a differentiator for graphics cards and game consoles that support four key modern features of DirectX 12. This helps consumers recognize the newer and upcoming GPUs, and tell them apart from some older DirectX 12 capable GPUs that were released in the mid-2010s. For a GPU to be eligible for the DirectX 12 Ultimate logo, it must feature hardware acceleration for ray-tracing with the DXR API; must support Mesh Shaders, Variable Rate Shading (VRS), and Sampler Feedback (all of the four). The upcoming Xbox Series X console features this logo by default. Microsoft made it absolutely clear that the DirectX 12 Ultimate logo isn't meant as a compatibility barrier, and that these games will work on older hardware, too.

As it stands, the "Navi"-based Radeon RX 5000 series are "obsolete", just like some Turing cards from the GeForce GTX 16-series. At this time, the only shipping product which features the logo is NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 20-series and the TITAN RTX, as they support all the above features.