Very good article on Intel’s ARC struggles and sort of a microcosm of Intels larger struggles in general. TLDR, ARC may not be long for this world
And PS: this is the type of article that ARS Technica always does a solid job on
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Eh, they’re almost a week late to the party. It’s well written, but still not timely.
Agreed, but I give points to ARS for both being thorough and also for explaining it in relatively layman terms, which other sites like ZDnet fail utterly at.
In other words ARS usually nails the “why this should matter to you” part.
intel 12th gen core i9 HX review.
Unlike them we haven’t tested it yet in a shipping system, but I agree with the broad statements that it’s a very impressive chip based on the “naked motherboard” testing we have done.
BTW: Properly cooling it appears to be exceptionally challenging however. It almost reminds me of the early days of “gaming” laptops where companies like Alienware (before they were swallowed by Dell) and MSI released these enormous sometimes AC power only laptops in name only with actual desktop processors and grahics cards installed.
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Samsung starts producing 3nm GAA chips:
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I have a feeling 13th Gen Raptor Lake is going to rectify a lot of power consumption pain points of 12th Gen Alder Lake has had on mobile thanks to their “Upgraded Intel 7 Process”, “Faster ‘Raptor Cove’ Core” and “Larger L2 Cache” (link: https://download.intel.com/newsroom/2022/2022innovation/13th-Gen-Intel-Core-Desktop-Media-presentation.pdf). We can already see later in this linked slide deck that 13th Gen Raptor Lake’s flagship, the Core i9 13900K, has identical performance to the last generation at only 65W, or a mere quarter of the power draw. That means the Core i9 13900K is only 1000 points off in the benchmark Cinebench R23 (27500 points versus 28500 points: https://b2c-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/11_Eco_Cinebench_R23_nT.png?w=1200) from the Ryzen 9 7950X at 65W power mode which translates to a huge efficiency improvement to where they were with Alder Lake. So I would not be the least bit surprised that Intel sees some significant improvement and at least closes the gap in multi-core performance in the mobile processor market with 13th Gen Raptor Lake.
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I hope you are right and that they address some of thermal issues as well. The current 12th gen can be a very performant chip, but you can’t just stick it in an existing system design and expect optimum results
Microsoft leaks the future raptor lake processors:
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I have commented before on the state on Intel 7 (Intel 10nm) being highly broken until only recently. Just to get you perspective, this is how it is now when I call it “fixed” and I say that generously. By comparison, TSMC’s processes typically net yield rates >90% within several months of production. Intel 7/Intel 10nm has been delayed for 5 years+…
According to the latest TrendForce research, the mass production schedule of new Sapphire Rapids products has been delayed due to the poor yield rate of the Intel 7 process. At present, the production yield rate of Sapphire Rapids is estimated at only 50~60%, which affects mainstream Sapphire Rapids MCC products.
— TrendForce, Mark Liu
Link:
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While not quite up to the standards of the old Anadtech, before Anand left to join Apple, this is still a fairly good dive in to Core I 13th gen and also has some of the better explanations of the new architecture. I.E. the mix of performance and efficiency cores, and why you should care and what you should consider when using them.
Intel Core i9-13900K and i5-13600K Review: Raptor Lake Brings More Bite (anandtech.com)
So, intel now is a full-on participant in the “more cores” race.
The problem I have with that is outside of benchmarks, adding more cores has ever diminishing real world returns.
Why won’t/can’t they focus on revising northbridge and southbridge which increasingly are becoming the bottlenecks in embracing other improvements in things like SSD throughput, video IO etc.
It will make the Tim Taylor types happy I suppose “more cores, huh, huh”
Intel’s 13th Gen mobile processors include the first 24-core laptop CPU - The Verge
PS: One interesting tidbit one of our engineers has heard is that this will not even boot Windows 10 or earlier as it requires the rewritten scheduler in Windows 11 to function.
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If they add more cores, they should also increase the number of memory channels to four or eight like it’s done on the XEONs or on the Apple M1, otherwise this is not very useful…
(we will see what Sapphire Rapids has in store for the next XEONs, it will be available soon).
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Intel 13th Gen T series are now actually shipping. There was an unknown hitch in getting these out the door, but we received our production samples last week. They are geared towards efficiency versus raw performance, by design.
OTOH they performed better across the board than we were led to expect, and perhaps most importantly they stay quite cool even under fairly heavy load. Which makes them a great fit for the thin and light devices the OEMS will deploy them in (as soon as next month we hear).
Low-Power Intel 13th Gen T Series CPUs Finally Hit Market | Tom’s Hardware (tomshardware.com)
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Intel is on schedule and on track with their new 20A (2nm) and 18A (1.8nm) manufacturing processes, and could overtake TSMC and Samsung.
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New Substrate to pack more transistors on a chip…
… And the future of the X86 Instruction Set (AVX10 and APX)
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Intel’s Lunar Lake disclosed…
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While I commend Intel for at least giving it the good old college try, it feels like them playing another round of “too little, too late” with Lunar Lake being compared with M2, a 2022 product. Given Meteor Lake is coming out in very limited volume in mid-December, Lunar Lake will not be coming out any sooner than 2025. That’s three years behind the competition, or in their rearview mirror. I suspect Intel doesn’t become competitive in low TDP SoCs until at best 2026 or realistically 2027.