Discussion Intel current and future Lakes & Rapids thread

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Ajay

Lifer
Jan 8, 2001
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Still largely unknown by this point, but most early indicators from leaks and rumours point to Willow Cove having ~7% IPC increase over Sunny Cove, which would mean a ~25% increase over Skylake.

Golden Cove looks to be the one where things will get interesting. The Intel road map from the Architecture day in late 2018 mentioned the term "Strong IPC gain", and also had the following image:

View attachment 23523
So, because my memory is suffering performance degradation, what future 10nm Intel products are using GC?
 

Cardyak

Member
Sep 12, 2018
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Since Zen2's IPC is ahead of Skylake's by some ~7% in everything except gaming (due to latency advantage Skylake has over CCX/chiplet design of Zen2), so I think that the cumulative impressive jump to Golden Cove ,from Skylake, might be just about enough to equal Zen4:
Skylake - 1x
Zen2 - 1.07x (see AT deep dive of Zen2 and spec 1T tests)
SC - 1.185x
WC - 1.26x (rumored/guesswork)
Zen3 - 1.28x (rumored/guesswork)
GC - 1.5x (rumored/guesswork)
Zen4 - 1.47x (rumored/guesswork)

Your IPC estimates for future architectures are exactly in line with what I expect as well.

Exciting times are ahead. If we can have Golden Cove/Zen 4 on Desktop by early 2022 we could be looking at clock speeds ~4.8Ghz with 1.5x the IPC of Skylake on at least 16 cores.
 

french toast

Senior member
Feb 22, 2017
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Would Golden Cove be the first uarch that Jim Keller had some involvement in, or are we talking about Ocean Cove for that?

Intel will certainly be hitting 5ghz next year with their 4th iteration of 10nm if they can already hit 4.7 in 15-28w in 2020.
We are in for a real treat next year.
 

Ajay

Lifer
Jan 8, 2001
15,332
7,792
136
Would Golden Cove be the first uarch that Jim Keller had some involvement in, or are we talking about Ocean Cove for that?

Intel will certainly be hitting 5ghz next year with their 4th iteration of 10nm if they can already hit 4.7 in 15-28w in 2020.
We are in for a real treat next year.
Word is Ocean Cove was cancelled - so Keller may have had something to do with that decision. I'm sure a new design was being worked on, if Keller had input on that, it was probably just a 1000ft overview. From what I've read, he was more involved in reorganizing the Silicon Engineering group during his short tenure at Intel. I'm sure there was more he wanted to accomplish, but we will never know.
 
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Ajay

Lifer
Jan 8, 2001
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Your IPC estimates for future architectures are exactly in line with what I expect as well.

Exciting times are ahead. If we can have Golden Cove/Zen 4 on Desktop by early 2022 we could be looking at clock speeds ~4.8Ghz with 1.5x the IPC of Skylake on at least 16 cores.
I thought current rumor on that is that it had 8 CG cores plus 8 atom cores. Great for a notebook, no such much for enthusiasts.
 

jpiniero

Lifer
Oct 1, 2010
14,510
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EDIT: A couple of Acer TGL-U laptops were listed by a Dutch retailer, with a release date of 7/27.

Hmm, the retailer also sells Icelake i5/i7 Swift 5 models for 100 less than the Tigerlake tho the i7 comes with a 1 TB SSD instead of 512.
 

IntelUser2000

Elite Member
Oct 14, 2003
8,686
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Acer is doing something on the 23rd of June. Perhaps they'll launch new models?

Also either the availability will be much more widespread than Icelake did initially or Acer is the lead vendor.
 

LightningZ71

Golden Member
Mar 10, 2017
1,627
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Times we live in ...
Intel might be faster than AMD in most iGPU tests and AMD might be faster than Intel in most CPU tests :eek:
You're probably right with this through the end of 2021. AMD won't see another big iGPU uplift until they get DDR5 and RDNA2 CUs. That's not scheduled for another year.
 
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Carfax83

Diamond Member
Nov 1, 2010
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I've been stuck on x99 platform for too long, so who do I have to kill to get a 12 or 16 core Golden Cove based desktop CPU with boost clocks up to 5ghz, AVX-512, humongous amount of cache and quad channel DDR5 capable? o_O:smirk:
 
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Exist50

Platinum Member
Aug 18, 2016
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Word is Ocean Cove was cancelled - so Keller may have had something to do with that decision. I'm sure a new design was being worked on, if Keller had input on that, it was probably just a 1000ft overview. From what I've read, he was more involved in reorganizing the Silicon Engineering group during his short tenure at Intel. I'm sure there was more he wanted to accomplish, but we will never know.

Ocean Cove and its cancelation predate Keller's arrival, and is one of the many failings of the BK era. As I've heard it, Keller's work was more to push Atom into the limelight and "encourage" an annual cadence of actual performance improvements from Core.

Intel reuses codenames. Nehalem was originally Netburst uarch based, but it was changed to Core uarch.

Not in this case. The Ocean Cove name is dead.

On another topic, I'm surprised there hasn't been more discussion of this slide from the Cooper Lake launch.

3rd%20Gen%20Xeon_Cooper%20Lake%20Press%20Slides_EMBARGO%206-18-20_0600PT-page-017.jpg


"Next Gen DL Boost: AMX". If AVX is Advanced Vector Extensions, then logically AMX would be Advanced Matrix Extensions. That would also explain this slide.

IMG_20191117_163124.jpg


Matrix multiply on a CPU?
 

DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
21,582
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@french toast

Allegedly Keller had something to do with whatever core comes after Golden Cove.

@Carfax83

That depends, do you want a Xeon? Alder Lake-S looks like 8c Golden Cove + 8c Gracemont. On the desktop. No idea what clockspeeds. Granite Rapids may be Golden Cove in Xeon form, so if Intel makes an HEDT CPU out of that, then maybe that's what you should aim for. No idea if it'll hit 5 GHz.
 
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mikk

Diamond Member
May 15, 2012
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The scores are getting better and better for Tigerlake (as expected), and I think this trend could go on in the upcoming weeks or months because of driver/bios/software improvements as well as better configured devices, LPDDR4x instead of DDR4 and so on.

i7-1165G7 Time Spy (new score) Graphics Score 1482

Previous best i7-1165G7 timespy graphics score: 1338


edit: the new one uses LPDDR4x instead of DDR4, this 10% graphics uplift could be a result of this. Not sure why the CPU score is better as well, LPDDR4x shouldn't really help there.
 
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Carfax83

Diamond Member
Nov 1, 2010
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That depends, do you want a Xeon? Alder Lake-S looks like 8c Golden Cove + 8c Gracemont. On the desktop. No idea what clockspeeds. Granite Rapids may be Golden Cove in Xeon form, so if Intel makes an HEDT CPU out of that, then maybe that's what you should aim for. No idea if it'll hit 5 GHz.

So help me to understand. What's the point of using the big+little approach on desktops? I can see why mobile devices use it due to greater power efficiency and what not, but not for desktops. I suppose they don't think they can put 16 big cores on a single die perhaps?

And Intel has had HEDT CPUs available based on Xeons, so I'm hoping they continue that trend. This 6900K that I am using will be my fourth HEDT CPU to date.
 

Ajay

Lifer
Jan 8, 2001
15,332
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So help me to understand. What's the point of using the big+little approach on desktops? I can see why mobile devices use it due to greater power efficiency and what not, but not for desktops. I suppose they don't think they can put 16 big cores on a single die perhaps?

And Intel has had HEDT CPUs available based on Xeons, so I'm hoping they continue that trend. This 6900K that I am using will be my fourth HEDT CPU to date.
It'll work fine in corporate environments too. It’s just pointless for enthusiast/gaming users. I think we’ll have Rocket Lake at the same time - so that will be the enthusiast platform.
 

Carfax83

Diamond Member
Nov 1, 2010
6,841
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It'll work fine in corporate environments too. It’s just pointless for enthusiast/gaming users. I think we’ll have Rocket Lake at the same time - so that will be the enthusiast platform.

But Rocket Lake will be 14nm right? I'm done with 14nm. I want 10++ nm or better. I will also take a look at Zen 3 this year when it comes out, but I have a strong preference for Intel CPUs so upgrading my entire rig to something like a Golden Cove based system would be best.
 

Tabalan

Member
Feb 23, 2020
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But Rocket Lake will be 14nm right? I'm done with 14nm. I want 10++ nm or better. I will also take a look at Zen 3 this year when it comes out, but I have a strong preference for Intel CPUs so upgrading my entire rig to something like a Golden Cove based system would be best.
For Golden Cove you have to wait till 2021 and it should be 10nm++ (or 10nm+++ if you count Cannon Lake as 1st generation of 10nm).

Intel Atom core is tiny, very tiny, but when it comes to PPA (perf/mm^2) it is real beast. 4 Tremont Atom cores are slightly smaller than single Willow Cove core (in Ice Lake it is ~7 mm^2), while each of those cores is ~Sandy Bridge level performance (integer performance might be closer to Haswell). So 8 Atom Gracemont cores in Alder Lake-S shouldn't take much space (possible same as 2 Golden cove cores), but it performance might be ~Skylake level.
 
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IntelUser2000

Elite Member
Oct 14, 2003
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Intel Atom core is tiny, very tiny, but when it comes to PPA (perf/mm^2) it is real beast. 4 Tremont Atom cores are slightly smaller than single Willow Cove core (in Ice Lake it is ~7 mm^2),

It's a lot smaller. It's only 5.1mm2. Willow Cove with its caches are something like 12mm2.
 
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IntelUser2000

Elite Member
Oct 14, 2003
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The scores are getting better and better for Tigerlake (as expected), and I think this trend could go on in the upcoming weeks or months because of driver/bios/software improvements as well as better configured devices, LPDDR4x instead of DDR4 and so on.

Better. Still can be faster, but that's what shipping systems may offer. 15W ICL SDP gets 609 points and the 25W one 812.


In Time Spy CPU Physics, the 1165G7 is 20% faster than the best 1065G7 score.
 
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mikk

Diamond Member
May 15, 2012
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Better. Still can be faster, but that's what shipping systems may offer. 15W ICL SDP gets 609 points and the 25W one 812.

The sample only did use 8GB of RAM, the very best devices always have 16GB, so it isn't optimal. However I thought the fastest Icelake 25W could do over 900 and not just slightly over 800. This new score close to 1500 is already a very good score actually, even though I believe production units with 16GB LPDDR4x and more matured drivers will beat this.
 

IntelUser2000

Elite Member
Oct 14, 2003
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However I thought the fastest Icelake 25W could do over 900 and not just slightly over 800. This new score close to 1500 is already a very good score actually, even though I believe production units with 16GB LPDDR4x and more matured drivers will beat this.

Icelake gets 900+ using combined score. In graphics the top system gets 850 points. Combined TGL is getting 1660 points. Also, the SDP systems perform worse than the top retail systems.

Combined is flawed as Geekbench 4 in that the CPU already should be accounted for in the game tests. There's no need to add CPU score on TOP of that. I don't know how you could be smart enough to code such a benchmark but dumb enough to forget such basics.