Discussion Intel current and future Lakes & Rapids thread

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ondma

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Mar 18, 2018
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"The 3DMark Fire Strike results that we've received show that even the entry-level Core i3 Tiger Lake with 48 EUs is about 20% faster than the Ice Lake Iris Plus Graphics G7 with 64 EUs."
Wow this is exciting. This means that cheap Tigerlake i3 laptops will most definitely beat Vega 3 laptops and maybe match Vega 6 laptops of the 3200u and 3500u respectively. I don't like Intel but it seems AMD is simply allowing Intel to gain the lead even in iGPU department which is honestly crazy because AMD had begun with a huge lead when it comes to integrated graphics.
I would much rather see 2 or even 4 extra cores and a smaller gpu. Is it known yet the plans for Tiger Lake H, and how many cores it will be?
 

Gideon

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Nov 27, 2007
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They are finally learning to put Optane with a SSD. It will be interesting to me to see the storage benchmarks on that. 16 GB RAM is a nice base too.
They have done it for some time. My wife's x360 spectre (this one but with 4k OLED screen) comes equiped with Ice Lake and 32GB Optane + SSD. Unfortunately the SSD is pretty crappy and overall the performance is somewhat dissapoining (given the price). The drivers/firmware are also iffy, sometimes the optane software just keeps going for no apparent reason and hammering on battery life (latest Windows 10 2004 all updates done to Bios, drivers, Intel SW).

These results mirror mine.
notebookcheck said:
Unsurprisingly, only one internal storage bay is available. The 512 GB HP HBRPEKNX0202AH M.2 PCIe SSD integrates 32 GB of Intel Optane H10 memory with mixed results. Sequential read and write rates according to AS SSD, for example, average only about 1000 MB/s and 300 MB/s, respectively, compared to 1800 MB/s and 1100 MB/s on the Toshiba BG4 KBG40ZPZ512G as found on the XPS 13 7390 2-in-1. The price premium for Optane technology has yet to become competitive against traditional NVMe SSDs.

The Battery life results were also rather dissapointing all considering (even when running the sreen at 1080p). Had the Renoir Envy been available at that time it probably would have been a better pick.

Regardless Tiger-Lake looks to be considerably better. Hopefully they also improve on battery life and fix their optane software/firmware issues.
 
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ikjadoon

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They are finally learning to put Optane with a SSD. It will be interesting to me to see the storage benchmarks on that. 16 GB RAM is a nice base too.

Unfortunately, it's likely the Intel H10, which is a QLC + Optane hybrid. It's 90% QLC + 10% Optane caching, unfortunately. HP, Dell, and others have hopped onto this bandwagon.

The H1 is OK and for the price, it's probably the highest capacity any consumer will get and most will never notice the QLC foundation. But I do tend to avoid it, if possible.

EDIT: ninja'd by Gideon. It's like a software RAID in some ways and the caching is hit or miss. And, yep, it always runs the Intel Optane software in the background.
 
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LightningZ71

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Remember that the H10 splits it’s interface to a PCIe 3.0 x2 link for the Optane side and an x2 link for the SSD. Nothing gets to transfer at it’s full rate, and the split between the devices is handled entirely in software, so there is additional cpu overhead in managing everything. It’s certainly better than a SATA ssd or hdd, but it’s not going to compare with a quality NVME ssd.
 
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IntelUser2000

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Oct 14, 2003
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@LightningZ71 The two devices can actually combine together for higher throughput.

@Gideon The lower battery life is due to Icelake. Other Icelake devices mirror it. Peak battery life for Intel was Kabylake/-R generation. Before that, Broadwell.
 

clemsyn

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Aug 21, 2005
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They may have attached fancy words to it but the gains are real. The MIM capacitance increase over Icelake's process is greater than Icelake versus Cannonlake.

Product also speaks for itself. Base frequency increases by nearly 2.5x and peak Turbo by 20%.



That's apparently in addition to the process.

Can't wait for reviews on this new CPU. Not sure why they didn't mention this after their disastrous 7nm announcement. Could have helped their investors from the massive drop.
 

jpiniero

Lifer
Oct 1, 2010
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Ooh, Tiger Lake's L2 and L3 are now non-inclusive.

Also Tiger Lake does support LPDDR5 but no devices will use it at launch due to cost.

Edit: Also confirms there are no changes to the core itself other than the cache.
 
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Bouowmx

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SuperFin turned out to be a marketing name for intra-node improvement, rather than using +. It works, rather than getting confused on or memeing the number of pluses.

As you all expected, Willow Cove won't have a big IPC gain over Sunny Cove. Small gain from bigger cache and improved memory subsystem (LPDDR5 and double ring bandwidth). The rest of performance gain is from big frequency increase.

Xe-LP can go up to 1.8 GHz, compared to 1.1 GHz in Ice Lake Gen 11. For Tiger Lake 96 EU, that's 2.7 TFLOPS (NVIDIA GTX 1050 Ti ~ 1650 level). Of course noting that 1.8 GHz may not be reached in the power targets for mobile, performance is limited by less memory bandwidth.
 

blckgrffn

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I am still pretty stoked that Intel looks to be coming out with a competitive chip and package for the vast majority of productivity laptops in 2020.

My biggest gripe about my 8th Gen i7 laptop part is that the Intel graphics just aren't that great at driving 3 screens, the primary being 4k and the others 1440p.

I can force everything to the quadro part, but then when I need to actually use it on battery the battery life sucks (in comparison) and I find myself manually juggling the config of the graphics and applications aren't super excited about that. Which, near as I can tell, is the opposite of how switchable graphics is supposed to work :p

That's why AMD parts with a solid GPU built in are attractive to me - if Intel really does step in this area and we can do away with all the less than/equal to GTX 1650 add in parts that'll be great.

(Referencing the news on Anandtech proper today)
 
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ondma

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SuperFin turned out to be a marketing name for intra-node improvement, rather than using +. It works, rather than getting confused on or memeing the number of pluses.

As you all expected, Willow Cove won't have a big IPC gain over Sunny Cove. Small gain from bigger cache and improved memory subsystem (LPDDR5 and double ring bandwidth). The rest of performance gain is from big frequency increase.

Xe-LP can go up to 1.8 GHz, compared to 1.1 GHz in Ice Lake Gen 11. For Tiger Lake 96 EU, that's 2.7 TFLOPS (NVIDIA GTX 1050 Ti ~ 1650 level). Of course noting that 1.8 GHz may not be reached in the power targets for mobile, performance is limited by less memory bandwidth.
Supposedly it is a bigger improvement than a typical + step though. Of course it is an intra-node improvement, what else could it be?
Obviously take with the usual grain of salt from WCCF tech. link
 

Bouowmx

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Nov 13, 2016
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My biggest gripe about my 8th Gen i7 laptop part is that the Intel graphics just aren't that great at driving 3 screens, the primary being 4k and the others 1440p.

I can force everything to the quadro part, but then when I need to actually use it on battery the battery life sucks (in comparison) and I find myself manually juggling the config of the graphics and applications aren't super excited about that. Which, near as I can tell, is the opposite of how switchable graphics is supposed to work :p
Chances are if you have a laptop with a Quadro, the Intel CPU is part of the H series. Tiger Lake 96 EUs is only for the U and Y series, and the future Tiger Lake-H will come with a smaller GPU (supposedly 32 EU) because it is assumed it will likely be paired with a dedicated GPU.
 

blckgrffn

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Chances are if you have a laptop with a Quadro, the Intel CPU is part of the H series. Tiger Lake 96 EUs is only for the U and Y series, and the future Tiger Lake-H will come with a smaller GPU (supposedly 32 EU) because it is assumed it will likely be paired with a dedicated GPU.

I have an 8550U in a P52s Thinkpad. The gimped Quadro was in my mind required for those times when any 3D grunt is needed, I believe it is maybe a 1030 equivalent. P500 - 256 shaders - 2GB of dedicated GDDR5.

Lots of U parts seem to find their way into anything "thin and light" but ditching the requirements for dedicated graphics in pseudo workstation chassis is welcome. If the promises are close to true, this should eliminate this whole graphics card segment.
 
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eek2121

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Not going to lie, looking forward to the Tiger Lake reviews. I would not be surprised if we eventually see 8 core desktop variants.

EDIT: If I were Intel, I would stop chasing clock frequency and focus on efficiency. A 65 Watt 8 core Tiger Lake chip with a 3.6/4.8 Ghz clock speed isn’t just more appealing than Comet Lake, it actually sounds like it would be more appealing than Ryzen. Intel would really have to put it’s foot down and stop OEMs from abusing power limits, however. Let the overclockers chase clockspeed.

EDIT: GB5 result in case it wasn’t already posted: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/3269370

Oh, another edit: Ryzen 4800U in comparison: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/3216706
 
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Ajay

Lifer
Jan 8, 2001
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Interesting Article on the AT front page: Tiger Lake, SuperFin and Willow Cove

I was struck by this quote...

As a final thought – one of the first comments made by Intel as part of our briefings was that the Tiger Lake design is going to be scalable, from 10 watts to 65 watts. The current processor we know about today is a four core processor at 15 watts. We’ve already surmised that Intel is preparing an eight core variant, with double the L3 cache, which we suspect to go up to that 65 W mark - however there is a question of where that product would end up. Traditional mobile processors tend to have a ceiling of 45-54 W TDP, and the 65 W space is usually reserved for desktop / socketed processors. Intel previously launched 65 W versions of its Broadwell mobile CPU on the desktop in 2015, and I wonder if we might see something similar here, which would enable Willow Cove, 10SF, and integrated Xe-LP on the desktop.

Edit: late to the party...
 
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blckgrffn

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Not going to lie, looking forward to the Tiger Lake reviews. I would not be surprised if we eventually see 8 core desktop variants.

EDIT: If I were Intel, I would stop chasing clock frequency and focus on efficiency. A 65 Watt 8 core Tiger Lake chip with a 3.6/4.8 Ghz clock speed isn’t just more appealing than Comet Lake, it actually sounds like it would be more appealing than Ryzen. Intel would really have to put it’s foot down and stop OEMs from abusing power limits, however. Let the overclockers chase clockspeed.

EDIT: GB5 result in case it wasn’t already posted: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/3269370

Oh, another edit: Ryzen 4800U in comparison: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/3216706

Indeed, 8C/16T Desktop 65W chip at a competitive price would be a big, big deal for potential sales volume one would think.

It sure is cool that AMD has 12C and 16C desktop parts, but those are really MT halo products that don't result in any meaningful user experience differences in many scenarios.

(I'm AMD biased but competition is awesome. I've bought lots of Intel.)

Ha, please don't overkill it with a thousand barely different SKUs though, Intel. How about a couple 8C/16T parts and a couple 4C/8T parts and we'll call it good. lol, there is no way that will happen :D

Since we are dropping the ++++++++ for the process tech, maybe it's a good time to reboot the desktop CPU branding strategy? Just a thought. As cool as a 11$%#k CPU would be...
 

Thunder 57

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Aug 19, 2007
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Ooh, Tiger Lake's L2 and L3 are now non-inclusive.

Also Tiger Lake does support LPDDR5 but no devices will use it at launch due to cost.

Edit: Also confirms there are no changes to the core itself other than the cache.

I don't get why they went with a non-inclusive L2. Won't that just make cache coherency more expensive? I wish they gave a latency too. AMD probably has to jump to a 1MB L2 sooner than later now. I wouldn't be surprised if they do with Zen 3, but I was thinking it's more likely in Zen 4 on 5nm.
 

eek2121

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Aug 2, 2005
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That's the thing... there is aparently a 4 core and 8 core H die variants. Will the 8 actually be in any kind of volume? Guessing no, which is why Rocket Lake exists.

Who knows. Rocket Lake may never see a public release, or Tiger Lake may never get an 8 core variant.

I always thought the back ports were “just in case”.
 

jpiniero

Lifer
Oct 1, 2010
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I have an 8550U in a P52s Thinkpad. The gimped Quadro was in my mind required for those times when any 3D grunt is needed, I believe it is maybe a 1030 equivalent. P500 - 256 shaders - 2GB of dedicated GDDR5.

Lots of U parts seem to find their way into anything "thin and light" but ditching the requirements for dedicated graphics in pseudo workstation chassis is welcome. If the promises are close to true, this should eliminate this whole graphics card segment.

If you are doing anything that might be considered workstation graphics, you are way better off either going with AMD or using a dGPU. Drivers are the bigger issue than just actual performance.
 

jpiniero

Lifer
Oct 1, 2010
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No device will use it because the first wave of Tigerlake only supports DDR4 and LPDDR4x. A later version of Tigerlake might enable LPDDR5 support.

This is what AT's article says:

LPDDR5 is the latest new technology for mobile memory subsystems, and we are told that Tiger Lake will support this out of the box, however it will be up to Intel’s OEM partners to use it in their Tiger Lake systems. At present, we are told that the cost of LPDDR5 is too high for consumer products, so we’re likely to see DDR4/LP4 systems to begin with. The cost of LP5 will come down as manufacturing ramps up and demand increases, however those systems might be later in the Tiger Lake life cycle.
 
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