Intel tries to distract by "finishing the design" of a 7nm chip in Q2 2021

[porina]

7 hours ago, Sarra said:

It was Intel trying to stay relevant. And just like Rocket Lake, sucking hard at it.

I really don't get the hatred. The performance gap between Rocket Lake and Zen 3 is smaller than Zen+ to Skylake, yet people still bought Zen+ by the bucket load. 

 

7 hours ago, Sarra said:

With silicon shortages, it probably will be a 2022 or even 2023 product launch. But, who knows. By the time Alder Lake will launch, I will have hopefully replaced 3 Intel systems with 3 AMD systems.

2023 is the Meteor Lake date. Alder Lake desktop will probably be at worst an early 2022 volume availability, with a "launch" end 2021 to keep up with what they said before. Both AMD and Intel do seem to have desktop as lowest priority in their offerings.

 

I've gone the other way. I've got rid of all my Ryzen systems. More problems than they're worth. Zen/Zen+ were just too slow for anything doing more work than Cinebench R15. Zen 2 is ok but the split CCX was a pain that had to be worked around, and Zen 3 finally overcomes that but at what cost? Where are the lower models? Will wait and see what Zen 4 brings if they can persuade me to try them again. You want to talk about shortages, AMD is suffering more than Intel are.

 

23 minutes ago, kakik09 said:

So Intel is confirmed to go ahead with their own chiplet design? That's news to me.

They're already shipping chiplets, in Lakefied. Ok, it isn't mainstream desktop which is the main interest around here. They have the technology and it is rolling out in future designs.

[Rauten]

21 minutes ago, porina said:

I really don't get the hatred. The performance gap between Rocket Lake and Zen 3 is smaller than Zen+ to Skylake, yet people still bought Zen+ by the bucket load. 

AMD was making huge gains (and still is, for now...) generation by generation. Zen+ was notably better than Zen specially in regards to the memory controller; even if the IPC/clock gains weren't that large, it still "felt" like a big step forward. Specially for something that they clearly indicated was a refresh.

By contrast, Rocket Lake feels like a "we have no idea what to do but we need to keep pushing products out to stay alive".

 

Really hoping Alder Lake will be interesting, though. I think a well-designed (and properly scheduled, but that's up to Microsoft) big.LITTLE CPU could be very useful in a desktop.

 

Also, Zen+ was the budget option back then - if you wanted a cheap-ish 6/12 processor the 2600 was a godsend, and if you really wanted the extra cores for whatever reason, Intel didn't have a direct answer to the 2700x for some time, until they launched 9th gen.

28 minutes ago, porina said:

Zen 2 is ok but the split CCX was a pain that had to be worked around

Can I ask, what those pains were? I'm currently running a R5 3600 and haven't noticed any issues, thing is rock solid - for my use case, at least.

[D13H4RD]

1 hour ago, porina said:

I really don't get the hatred. The performance gap between Rocket Lake and Zen 3 is smaller than Zen+ to Skylake, yet people still bought Zen+ by the bucket load. 

A lot of it is just the AMD circlejerk train. I can definitely understand why some people might not feel highly towards Intel due to its history of anti-competitive behavior, but it's gotten to the point where it's flat out ridiculous. 

[Drama Lama]

9 hours ago, Vishera said:

hope they come back to the PC market,IBM have been exiled from the PC market for way too long.

You can buy an IBM processor for a server,but for desktop there is only one vendor that sells these with ATX motherboards (Raptor Computing Systems)

Also they need to work out a solution for the difference in instruction set support on Windows (they could avoid it,but loose the chance to put their hand on market share)

IBM will never return they sold their PC business to Lenovo long ago and Power PC won’t make it to the desktop. First Microsoft would have to make Windows for the Power Architecture and you can already tell from Windows on ARM how not good it would be if MS would port Windows to Power.

[porina]

1 hour ago, Rauten said:

Also, Zen+ was the budget option back then - if you wanted a cheap-ish 6/12 processor the 2600 was a godsend, and if you really wanted the extra cores for whatever reason, Intel didn't have a direct answer to the 2700x for some time, until they launched 9th gen.

We might have a role reversal going on. The lower end parts that Intel sell at each core count are cheaper than anything AMD currently have. If the target is good enough for lower cost, they can be viable.

 

1 hour ago, Rauten said:

Can I ask, what those pains were? I'm currently running a R5 3600 and haven't noticed any issues, thing is rock solid - for my use case, at least.

It's not a case of work/not work, but performance. Having a unified cache means all the cores can work on the same data at the same time. The split CCX means you have to treat it essentially as multiple quad core CPUs to get the most performance out of it. Most of the time, it does great work, but it starts to fail once the infinity fabric starts to get used and it chokes on the limited bandwidth. Zen 3 at least increases the group size to 8 cores, but multi-chiplet is still less ideal than unified designs. I recognise that is the way the industry has to go to increase core counts, so it will be unavoidable in some way.

 

Stability is a different factor. In my case, I think I just bought cheap Asrock boards and the VRMs were not good enough for 24/7 use. Note this isn't limited to AMD, as I have the same problem with Asrock mobos on Intel systems. This most commonly manifests usually as a crash that can randomly after some time running. On the Intel board it seems to be resolved by implementing a power cap. On the AMD board, it was helped by not fully resolved by positive voltage offset, with power limits actually making it worse. I gave up at that point. Will pay a lot more attention to VRM design looking forward on any system.

 

16 minutes ago, D13H4RD said:

A lot of it is just the AMD circlejerk train. I can definitely understand why some people might not feel highly towards Intel due to its history of anti-competitive behavior, but it's gotten to the point where it's flat out ridiculous. 

Thanks for the comment. I do wonder if I'm that far apart from the rest of the so called "community" here and wider. There is so much excessive negativity in the space, not just against Intel but in general.

 

I suppose the worst part is some thought process along the lines that you can only buy the best. The 2nd best, even if it is only slightly different, is not an option. And the metrics used to make that decision are cherry picked anyway. I really wonder if these people would buy a car in the same way, focusing on specific measures to justify the choice, losing the bigger picture.

[saltycaramel]

Intel CEO name-dropped Apple as a potential customer for the fabbing business. 

This is completely normal (after all Samsung itself makes iPhone displays) but funny after last week’s marketing campaign. 

[Rauten]

26 minutes ago, porina said:

We might have a role reversal going on. The lower end parts that Intel sell at each core count are cheaper than anything AMD currently have. If the target is good enough for lower cost, they can be viable.

Oh yeah, some of the non-K skus could be very interesting. Specially for builds that don't require a dGPU, the new integrated graphics can make these a tantalizing option for certain use cases if the price is right.

29 minutes ago, porina said:

Will pay a lot more attention to VRM design looking forward on any system.

Yup, that's something I learned the hard way too... *glares at his 2500k build with a shitty Gigabyte Mobo*

[D13H4RD]

51 minutes ago, saltycaramel said:

Intel CEO name-dropped Apple as a potential customer for the fabbing business. 

This is completely normal (after all Samsung itself makes iPhone displays) but funny after last week’s marketing campaign. 

The marketing campaign is likely a remnant of the Bob Swan era. It's highly unlikely for Gelsinger to have much of a say in that marketing campaign so soon once his tenure begins. 

 

Adding to that, companies don't always follow what their marketing suggests. A good example are Android manufacturers making fun of Apple in their marketing only to copy them for the exact same thing they mocked. They'll do it if it is in their best business interests. 

 

Gotta remember that the main concern for companies like Intel is and always will be profits. Even if their marketing department loves to make cringy attack ads against Apple, if having Apple as a potential customer benefits their bottom line, they'll do it. 

[Sarra]

8 hours ago, porina said:

I really don't get the hatred.

It's called corporate greed. Intel has literally engineered a system that forces people to buy two chipsets for an iterative change to basically the same chip, the ONLY purpose of that being to make more money.

 

Don't know about anyone else, but I hate that. I WANTED to upgrade from Intel's 4th Gen to something better without having to get a completely new chipset, but that was literally impossible. That's really about the only instance where I would actually give it a pass, since 4th gen was 22nm and 5th gen was 14nm, but there are actually a few 5th gen CPU's that would work on the 1150 boards, and the performance difference didn't justify it. I still give it a pass because they did go from 4c/8t to 6c/12t.

[suicidalfranco]

starting to feel like everyday i read about a new intel arch

[kvuj]

16 hours ago, Vishera said:

I hope they come back to the PC market,IBM have been exiled from the PC market for way too long.

You can buy an IBM processor for a server,but for desktop there is only one vendor that sells these with ATX motherboards (Raptor Computing Systems)

Also they need to work out a solution for the difference in instruction set support on Windows (they could avoid it,but loose the chance to put their hand on market share)

That would be cool, but I doubt that's happening. The big money for IBM is in supercomputers and servers. Spending a lot of money to try and make a minor comeback probably isn't the best idea. (take a look at how (un)popular Windows 10 for ARM is)

 

If you're willing to stick with open source, the POWER ecosystem is surprisingly well established. Compilers get early support for their CPUs, 99+% of Fedora packages works with them, etc.

 

I just hope they drop their prices a bit with the upcoming POWER10, because buying a Raptor Computing system costs wayyyy too much for my wallet.

 

Also quite excited for the new I/O (swich to serial / OMI for much lower latency),  encrypting data at every stage of the pipeline (possible counter to future vulnerabilities ) and new SIMD instructions.

[handymanshandle]

14 hours ago, Brooksie359 said:

Thats great that Intel still is somewhat competitive in gaming but that not what makes Intel being stuck on 14nm so bad. Smaller nodes generally are more efficient than larger ones and you can clearly see that when comparing Intel cpus power consumption vs ryzen. Its not even close as Intel has power consumption that is way higher than the ryzen counterpart. Sure some gamers might not care but I for one would if the parts are basically neck and neck in performance. I mean why would I want a chip that runs hotter if I can get one that runs cooler and has the same performance? Its going to bite Intel in the ass if they don't figure their stuff out. 

Maybe you want a warmer room and don’t have expensive electricity lol

[soldier_ph]

21 hours ago, sounds said:

Next generation 7nm chiplets for ‘Meteor Lake’ will finish design in Q2 2021

Which you'll be able to buy in 2077 at this rate.

[Red :)]

32 minutes ago, soldier_ph said:

Which you'll be able to buy in 2077 at this rate.

and will be just as buggy

[ouroesa]

On 3/24/2021 at 8:31 AM, pinksnowbirdie said:

I mean we're getting nitpicky over process size but the differences at least in gaming between at least 10th gen (10700K and Ryzen 7 3700X) aren't that huge. I mean in some games the Intel part comes out ahead.

 

That being said, I like AMD. I've been around them more or less at least since the mid 2000s Athlon x2/Athlon 64 x2 days, and Ryzen is good but the Ryzen fanbase annoys me to no bounds and only jumped ship once Ryzen was shown to be such a hit, to the point that I would probably get an Intel chip when I do my next build.

My most recent AMD computers have had: A8 4500M, A8 6410, A10 9600P, and Ryzen 7 1700...

I think I lost the point to your post.

[Rauten]

12 hours ago, soldier_ph said:

Which you'll be able to buy in 2077 at this rate.

Just in time to play Cyberpunk and laugh at those silly idiots from the early 21st century and their crazy ideas about the future!

[dizmo]

Why does everything have to be a product launch? I actually found a lot of the news pretty interesting. Intel is a massive company, far more than simply silicon like AMD is, so they can bide their time while they perfect their new chips.

 

Your post seems oddly anti-Intel. Out of an entire presentation with a lot of good points, like them spending billions on new fabs, your take away is that they're not going to have improvements in 2021 on their already released products?

 

 

21 hours ago, FakeKGB said:

1. @FakeNSA, there's something new around you!
2. Intel is trying to be TSMC? I hope it works out for them.

3. If it fails, they'll have great puns.

"Intel's Meteor Lake CPUs explode on impact"

"Meteor Lake has trouble staying in the air"

etc.

 

So Rocket Lake was pointless after all.

Not pointless. To upgrade to? Sure, maybe. People seem to forget that not everyone is upgrading, and millions of people are in fact building new systems.

Thus, it makes perfect sense not to market something that's "old" to new users.

21 hours ago, AbydosOne said:

I so hope AMD buys time on it, just to spite them.

 

(though with IP being the way it is, they probably won't touch it with a 10 foot pole)

You think Intel would care? Profit is profit. They'd likely just say thanks for the money AMD, and keep going.

Intel is a far, far larger company than AMD is.

18 hours ago, Vishera said:

Why the hell Intel's naming scheme is so bad?

Those names aren't meant for you or I, they're internal names.

16 hours ago, SpiderMan said:

10nm is still in Intel's pipeline, they aren't skipping over it entirely. Their 7nm process still has a long way to go before we start seeing mass produced chips just yet, I'll leave this down below from the article. 

Still a long time from now, Intel will be releasing Alder Lake on 10nm SuperFIN supposedly 2H 2021 and they'll probably have a successor sometime next year, with 7nm beginning in 2023. 

 

You do realize the manufacturing node size is different across the semiconductor industry right??? Every semiconductor fabrication plant measures their transistors (gates I believe, if I'm not mistaken) differently. 

They've already made 10nm parts, just not on desktop.

Keep hammering that last point home and maybe one day people will realize it I can only hope.

14 hours ago, D13H4RD said:

-snip-

And I know someone's gonna say "7nm in 2023? LMAO, AMD'S BEEN ON 7NM SINCE 2019 KEKEKE", so I'm just going to say what everyone else has said; You can't compare different manufacturing nodes simply by the nanometer figure. Just like how Samsung 8nm is significantly different from TSMC 7nm despite what the nm figure suggests, Intel's 7nm is going to be very different from TSMC 7nm, being closer in density to TSMC's 5nm node. 

I really wish more people realized this. It gets so old reading that over and over and over again.

10 hours ago, Rauten said:

AMD was making huge gains (and still is, for now...) generation by generation. Zen+ was notably better than Zen specially in regards to the memory controller; even if the IPC/clock gains weren't that large, it still "felt" like a big step forward. Specially for something that they clearly indicated was a refresh.

By contrast, Rocket Lake feels like a "we have no idea what to do but we need to keep pushing products out to stay alive".

 

Really hoping Alder Lake will be interesting, though. I think a well-designed (and properly scheduled, but that's up to Microsoft) big.LITTLE CPU could be very useful in a desktop.

 

Also, Zen+ was the budget option back then - if you wanted a cheap-ish 6/12 processor the 2600 was a godsend, and if you really wanted the extra cores for whatever reason, Intel didn't have a direct answer to the 2700x for some time, until they launched 9th gen.

Can I ask, what those pains were? I'm currently running a R5 3600 and haven't noticed any issues, thing is rock solid - for my use case, at least.

To be fair they were making gains because the products that came before it were shit. The fact that Intel kept pace, even through a couple gens of Ryzen, says a lot about just how far ahead of AMD they were.

 

It's interesting how everyone says they didn't have an answer. Intel was still doing absolutely fine financially. If a company isn't seeing losses, they don't really consider the fact that they don't have something on par technologically as a failing. Look at Nintendo. Worse systems on paper, still get tons of sales.

 

Intel is a powerhouse of a company. They've got enough resources to figure their shit out.

9 hours ago, D13H4RD said:

A lot of it is just the AMD circlejerk train. I can definitely understand why some people might not feel highly towards Intel due to its history of anti-competitive behavior, but it's gotten to the point where it's flat out ridiculous. 

It's not like AMD hasn't done, and won't do the same shit if they're on top.

2 hours ago, Sarra said:

It's called corporate greed. Intel has literally engineered a system that forces people to buy two chipsets for an iterative change to basically the same chip, the ONLY purpose of that being to make more money.

 

Don't know about anyone else, but I hate that. I WANTED to upgrade from Intel's 4th Gen to something better without having to get a completely new chipset, but that was literally impossible. That's really about the only instance where I would actually give it a pass, since 4th gen was 22nm and 5th gen was 14nm, but there are actually a few 5th gen CPU's that would work on the 1150 boards, and the performance difference didn't justify it. I still give it a pass because they did go from 4c/8t to 6c/12t.

Eh, not entirely. They do change things chipset to chipset. Some might be a bit less than others, but they are changes. It makes less sense to keep the same name, make the changes you want to the board, and then have people go sifting through long product names to figure out the difference between the products.

 

I'm not sure if you're an electrical engineer, I'm not, so I'm not going to assume that the changes they make are pointless.

 

[Sarra]

6 hours ago, dizmo said:

Eh, not entirely. They do change things chipset to chipset. Some might be a bit less than others, but they are changes. It makes less sense to keep the same name, make the changes you want to the board, and then have people go sifting through long product names to figure out the difference between the products.

The problem I have, personally, with Intel's 'chipset changes' are that they are often for the entire purpose of keeping people from reusing old hardware.

 

There have been chips made that have different sockets, different chipsets, and yet, will work together. Well, you have to get a socket adapter, but they are available. There was pretty much no reason for the change other than to prevent people from buying X chipset and Y chip, then using X chipset with Z chip, forcing them to instead buy a new chipset AND chip.

 

I understand that things DO change from time to time, but AMD has used the same AM4 socket, and more or less same chipsets, for multiple iterations, generations, and product lines. There really is no reason for Intel not to do the same, beyond greed. Why sell a CPU for $400 if you can sell a CPU AND a new board, and make $900 instead?

[Guest]

On 3/24/2021 at 10:52 AM, sounds said:

10nm was always used as the "just around the corner" promise to keep customers buying 14nm.

 

It's reasonable to be skeptical of Intel's press releases after all their benchmark stunts, undelivered 10nm promises, and lies.

To be fair, I don’t care about which technology they use. Performance and efficiency is performance and efficiency.

 

They’re still behind on both, but not by as much as people think. 

[Rauten]

10 hours ago, dizmo said:

To be fair they were making gains because the products that came before it were shit. The fact that Intel kept pace, even through a couple gens of Ryzen, says a lot about just how far ahead of AMD they were.

 

It's interesting how everyone says they didn't have an answer. Intel was still doing absolutely fine financially. If a company isn't seeing losses, they don't really consider the fact that they don't have something on par technologically as a failing. Look at Nintendo. Worse systems on paper, still get tons of sales.

 

Intel is a powerhouse of a company. They've got enough resources to figure their shit out.

Oh, absolutely, previous AMD products were utter shite and Intel was leaps and bounds ahead.
But despite being so far ahead, Ryzen caught them completely by surprise. Remember that i5 "Extreme Edition!!1!!1!"? Intel was on panic mode, flinging random shit at a wall and hoping something would stick.

 

And no, they didn't have an answer then - of course they're gonna be fine financially, the desktop/laptop market is just a segment, one piece of the giant puzzle that Intel is; but they didn't have an answer, hence the panic mode.
Or, rather, they thought they might have an answer in 10nm, but then that fell through, and then we get such "fantastic" products as the i7-11700k.
 

I feel like the Nintendo comparison just doesn't work - Nintendo's sales, right now, are due to the uniqueness of the device as well as their well established and stupidly strong catalog of first party titles, neither of which applies to Intel.

 

To be clear, I'm not anti-Intel or an AMD fanboy; AMD is already showing signs of wanting to do the same shit Intel was doing when they were on top (5000 series price hike), and I do hope that Alder Lake turns out ok because I am honestly interested in the idea of a Big.LITTLE CPU in the desktop space.

Also really interested in seeing what comes out of their Xe discrete graphics.