Discussion Intel current and future Lakes & Rapids thread

[itsmydamnation]

I dont know why, but renior is the best laptop chip i have ever used. Way better then the skylake /whatever gen parts my work provides. it just eats everything, I have like a million web browser windows open along my sql DB's, apache , mojolicious , heaps of visio, excel, power point along with active webex etc my 4core x1 carbon provided work laptop just cries, fan screams get hot and throttles.

im not sure if its just really good at predicting application demand and clocking according or if its really quite low power per core underload just makes it really usable. It would be nice to compare tigerlake but im not going to shell out for one ....lol

 

[teejee]

I dont know why, but renior is the best laptop chip i have ever used. Way better then the skylake /whatever gen parts my work provides. it just eats everything, I have like a million web browser windows open along my sql DB's, apache , mojolicious , heaps of visio, excel, power point along with active webex etc my 4core x1 carbon provided work laptop just cries, fan screams get hot and throttles.

im not sure if its just really good at predicting application demand and clocking according or if its really quite low power per core underload just makes it really usable. It would be nice to compare tigerlake but im not going to shell out for one ....lol

That is as expected with many cores (when each core is pretty good). There are a huge number of processes running in a PC. And with 8 cores you have 8 L2 caches which means that the processes that needs a lot of CPU time can run undisturbed on their own cores to a much larger extent without time consuming cache reloads for every little process that needs to run.

Many of these "little" processes doesn't need much cpu time but they are often latency sensitive and need to run very often without delays (network-stuff, drivers, etc). So it is easy to judge them as not relevant for performance, but that is not really true.

I'm old enough to remember when we got dual core CPU's, and that made a remarkable difference in responsiveness in normal Windows usage despite basically all applications where single threaded.

 

[piokos]

It handles simple office tasks great.

This kind of answer is also expected when people don't really know how computers are used.
Because it's rendering, running benchmarks, gaming - then a big gap of "no idea why these CPUs exist" - and finally "simple office tasks" that can be run on a 9 year old PC.

I've done some Excel tools that run for a few minutes on pretty fast 4-core i7 desktops. I wonder in which of your categories would they land.

I'm old enough to remember when we got dual core CPU's, and that made a remarkable difference in responsiveness in normal Windows usage despite basically all applications where single threaded.

But you're not acquainted with computers well enough to understand why adding the second core made Windows and single-core programs more responsive...

 

[uzzi38]

I've done some Excel tools that run for a few minutes on pretty fast 4-core i7 desktops. I wonder in which of your categories would they land.

And you think this is a normal use-case for most users of Excel?

 

[DrMrLordX]

Business is not about "wiping out". It's about making money. Intel does what - they think - will make them the most money.

Renoir is taking too much market share in a market that Intel was never supposed to give up to a competitor. Mobile was not a priority for AMD. Renoir was basically an afterthought compared to Rome and Matisse. All Intel had to do was slam the door shut on Renoir to restore OEM confidence and kill competing momentum. How could any OEM be excited about waiting for a Cezanne product in maybe March 2021 that might compete with TigerLake-H, when Intel could offer a truly superior 8c option in Q3 2020?

Right now, demand for Renoir remains high enough that AMD can't or won't bother selling any of their Renoir dice for DiY desktop (compare with Raven Ridge and Picasso). Intel could have significantly improved their brand image in mobile with TigerLake-H. Also, the potential applications of TigerLake-H 8c in NUC form factor, small desktop, DiY desktop, and possibly even a limited run of Xeon-D CPUs (okay, I may be reaching here) would open up many doors for Intel to produce future product demand and drive future revenue. Intel badly needs a chip like 35W, 45W, and possibly 52W or 65W 8c TigerLake that it can push into markets that are currently being badly-served by 14nm product. Not to speak of what a downclocked TigerLake 8c die would be like in mobile. If Renoir 8c can run well in a 15W power envelope, what do you suppose 8c TigerLake would be like @ 15W? Or 25W?

You want to argue revenue revenue revenue, but you are looking at last quarter or this quarter, and you are not looking at the big picture. Having TigerLake restricted to 4c in mobile and NUC means that Intel continues to lean on 14nm product which is bad for future revenue and market share. Intel already relies too-heavily on continued sales of 14nm product. The gravy train can't continue forever. TigerLake-H in Q3 2020 says, "Intel is serious about driving revenue through superior technological developments, if not now, then at least in the near future". TigerLake-H in Q2 2021 says, "Intel is serious about driving revenue through vendor lock-in until some miracle bails them out".

 

[teejee]

This kind of answer is also expected when people don't really know how computers are used.
Because it's rendering, running benchmarks, gaming - then a big gap of "no idea why these CPUs exist" - and finally "simple office tasks" that can be run on a 9 year old PC.

I've done some Excel tools that run for a few minutes on pretty fast 4-core i7 desktops. I wonder in which of your categories would they land.

But you're not acquainted with computers well enough to understand why adding the second core made Windows and single-core programs more responsive...

So you think you somewhat understand how all laptops are used and that Tigerlake i7 is best for most of those workloads? Especially since you seems to think 8 cores are only useful for rendering.

And you ignore my main point, i e the advantage of having 8C8T compared to 4C8T. Thread scheduling in modern OS's is very complicated, having twice the number of cores helps a lot to give max performance ((and continous cache) where it is needed.
That is one reason why Renoir has gotten such great reviews, read some and you'll see that they almost always talk about the general speed and reponsiveness of the laptop.


And your comment about my knowledge about going to two cores is just troll bait. It just makes it clear that you don't understand the complexity of how scheduling/caches affects the performance.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Okay I should have put this in my previous post so sorry for multiposting. Trying to cover some more stuff here:

ADL-P includes both U+H, it might tell us that the higher core version of ADL-P comes later than the lower core version of ADL-P. TGL-H won't have a core count disadvantage so they are fine with it until 2022.

Huh. So Intel releases 4c Tiger Lake in Q3 2020, 8c Tiger Lake in Q2 2021, 4-6c(?) Alder Lake-P in Q3/Q4 2021, and 8c+ Alder-LakeP in Q? 2022.

Should be interesting to see where those 8c TigerLake-H SoCs finally wind up. Will they be mass-market high-volume, or will they be limited-volume and niche? By 2021, Intel should be replacing all their 14nm mobile with 10nm, so they can't go low-volume anymore. It all has to be 10SF or 10SFE.

Wondering if big.LITTLE needs more time in the oven, hence Alder Lake-P is getting delayed. S doesn't have that problem since they could just release models with the small core disabled.

I don't see that happening per se. Remember, 8c TigerLake is already delayed, and it isn't relying on heterogeneous core layouts.

That is as expected with many cores (when each core is pretty good). There are a huge number of processes running in a PC. And with 8 cores you have 8 L2 caches which means that the processes that needs a lot of CPU time can run undisturbed on their own cores to a much larger extent without time consuming cache reloads for every little process that needs to run.

I've been on 8c+ for awhile, and the ability to promiscuously open pretty much anything I want and not worry about it, even when running multiple applications that could individually soak up all the computational resources of a 4c/8t CPU released within the last 5-7 years, is really nice. I could see a laptop user wanting to run multiple parts of the Adobe Creative Suite and Office 365 simultaneously. Plus Chrome and who knows what else. As long as you have the RAM, you're good to go with 8c. 4c? Well maybe, if they're fast enough.

This kind of answer is also expected when people don't really know how computers are used.

Assuming that @teejee is somehow ignorant is just rude.

 

[jpiniero]

Remember, 8c TigerLake is already delayed, and it isn't relying on heterogeneous core layouts.

I'm sure that's due to poor 10 nm yield. Alder Lake is presumably using chiplets, and if the GPU chiplet for S is on 14 nm that would help greatly in being able to produce product while offering better CPU performance than they can now. Esp since most of the 11th Gen S is going to still be Comet Lake. Could just be only the 6+0+1 model.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Esp since most of the 11th Gen S is going to still be Comet Lake.

Could you expand on that?

 

[jpiniero]

Could you expand on that?

Rocket Lake only has the 8 core die, and it might just be K and a couple high end parts. As to why, the power consumption probably.

 

[dullard]

And you think this is a normal use-case for most users of Excel?

Most users? No. Many users? Yes. Enough users that it is a significant and important market segment? Yes.

The word "most" is dangerous in discussions. As a silly example, most people in the world are men (https://ourworldindata.org/gender-ratio). Thus, women would not be included in any discussion that uses the word "most". I realize that is just an absurd conclusion to exclude a massive group, but it shows how we should not use the word "most" when discussing things like CPUs that have a wide variety of uses.

I too often run Excel tasks that take quite a long time. Excel's own options let you set the maximum amount of time until Excel just gives up and gives you the closest answer it has found so far.

 

[piokos]

And you think this is a normal use-case for most users of Excel?

There is no "normal use-case". There's a distribution of use cases. And yes, quite a lot of people in offices use Excel for pretty complex tools. Or for processing data that goes near, or beyond, the 1M sheet row limit.

And yes. Of course in that distribution you have people who use Excel for simple calculations or just filling forms. Excel is perfect for that.
But having worked in finance for almost a decade, I wouldn't dare to say that's a majority - let alone "normal" (which I assume is meant to mean "almost everyone"?).

And it absolutely doesn't mean you have to be an Excel/VBA/coding wizard to run complex stuff.
It's actually the opposite.
A very typical situation is that someone who knows how to code is making Excel tools for people who can't code (or even don't know Excel formulas very well).
But the final user, despite maybe not knowing how to extract a month from a date in Excel, may run your tool on 100k or 5M of rows in some sick CSV.

Now, obviously, a lot of these tasks today are moving to cloud. So people start to use Excel as an interface for some server-based apps.
But this means a lot of these people will never a fast CPU like those we're getting today. They don't even need the 4-core i7 they begged for few years back.

 

[cortexa99]

Performance summary by 3dcenter:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1312019138894729217

intel still has a lot of work do. It's a shame that just having an advanced architecture is not enough to make a product perfect. Still in waiting-skeleton-mode to see when will intel have a full-come-back at desktop&HEDT......

 

[mikk]

They did use the old reference system launch driver with build 8439 from which we knew it had lots of issues, the first public driver is from build 8783. Many of these issues might have been solved.

 

[mikk]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1312309079373737985

Alder Lake Intel Hybrid Technology will not support Intel® AVX-512. ISA features such as Intel® AVX, AVX-VNNI, Intel® AVX2, andUMONITOR/UMWAIT/TPAUSE are supported.

If ADL runs in Hybrid mode no AVX512, however ADL alone seems to support AVX512. As we thought Gracemont supports AVX2 by the looks of it.

 

[jj109]

They did use the old reference system launch driver with build 8439 from which we knew it had lots of issues, the first public driver is from build 8783. Many of these issues might have been solved.

The other issue is their 3rd party analysis of other people's reviews was based on a Tiger Lake laptop that throttles to 17W within 50 seconds of full core load being compared to a 25W PL1 Ice Lake laptop.

If ADL runs in Hybrid mode no AVX512, however ADL alone seems to support AVX512. As we thought Gracemont supports AVX2 by the looks of it.

Can the AVX512 units operate as unfused AVX2 units? Otherwise that seems like a waste of silicon.

 

[TheGiant]

The other issue is their 3rd party analysis of other people's reviews was based on a Tiger Lake laptop that throttles to 17W within 50 seconds of full core load being compared to a 25W PL1 Ice Lake laptop.



Can the AVX512 units operate as unfused AVX2 units? Otherwise that seems like a waste of silicon.

Exactly
The tiger lake design has 2 power points 15 and 28W
And as with icelake, increasing power from to 28W brings a lot of mt sustained perf
I think we need Dell xps and especially ma surface to make a conclusion
So far tiger lake 15W equals icelake 25W except ST

About that avx 512 it doesnt make sense at all

 

[mikk]

Exactly
The tiger lake design has 2 power points 15 and 28W

No it's dynamic, it could be 18, 19, 20W etc. The Asus Zenbook is configured for 25W PL1 but throttles back to 18W because of a low temperature limit.

 

[jpiniero]

Can the AVX512 units operate as unfused AVX2 units? Otherwise that seems like a waste of silicon.

That's how it is now on the client parts. Two 256-bit units.

 

[mikk]

Intel Tiger Lake-H, Alder Lake-P and Alder Lake-S detailed: Alder Lake to offer up to 8C/16T configs with Xe LP, DDR5-4400 RAM, Wi-Fi 6E, and PCIe Gen5 support

We have received exclusive information from our OEM sources about upcoming Intel Tiger Lake-H, Alder Lake-P, and Alder Lake-S processors. While Tiger Lake-H will be based on Willow Cove, Alder Lake-P and S will feature a hybrid Golden Cove and Gracemont architecture. Alder Lake will also be the...

www.notebookcheck.net

But I think there are some errors in it.

 

[Ajay]

I wonder if it will be possible to turn off the Gracemont cores in Alder Lake to max package power on only the 8 strongest cores?
Or, maybe it won't matter.

 

[TheGiant]

No it's dynamic, it could be 18, 19, 20W etc. The Asus Zenbook is configured for 25W PL1 but throttles back to 18W because of a low temperature limit.

Yes it is but the design should be built around 15 and 28W
I am dissapointed to see top i7 with thermal limits
That is just paper i7 like with icelake models with performance of i5 but yeah I am sexy with i7
in this aspect renoir is much better, it doesnt gain that much as tigerlake with power increase
the only benefit of ice and especially tigerlake is low thread count performance, which is world class
once that benefit falls because of thermal design renoir clearly wins

 

[TheGiant]

Tested: AV1 video performance in all the hottest CPUs

In the Intel vs. AMD wars, video formats matter too. Intel's 11th-gen Tiger Lake has AV1 codec support, and it shows in tests against 10th-gen Ice Lake and Comet Lake, and Ryzen 4000.

www.pcworld.com

this exactly I expect from ultrabook

content consuming workload with low CPU usage

it reminds me of me surface pro 4 with 6300U, which has hd520 igpu

the 620 has all the befits of modern format acceleration

icelake vs tigerlake = skylake vs kaby lake

my 6300U has 2,9GHz turbo and kaby has 3,5 GHz , same 20% like kaby vs skylake

 

[Edrick]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1312309079373737985

If ADL runs in Hybrid mode no AVX512, however ADL alone seems to support AVX512. As we thought Gracemont supports AVX2 by the looks of it.

Sapphire Rapids looks like a beast.

 

[IntelUser2000]

intel still has a lot of work do. It's a shame that just having an advanced architecture is not enough to make a product perfect. Still in waiting-skeleton-mode to see when will intel have a full-come-back at desktop&HEDT......

Why are they using the crappy Zenbook as a comparison point? The Swift 5 with the same TDP level outperforms it by 25%. In games it can be high as 50%.

The other issue is their 3rd party analysis of other people's reviews was based on a Tiger Lake laptop that throttles to 17W within 50 seconds of full core load being compared to a 25W PL1 Ice Lake laptop.

It's not just that. The Swift 5 is way better. They make completely different conclusions.

NBC is being click-baitey.