Discussion Intel current and future Lakes & Rapids thread

[CHADBOGA]

So I guess the CPU world for desktop users is going to be mighty boring for much of the rest of the year.

Need Zen 4 & Alderlake to awake me from a soon to be slumber.

 

[ultimatebob]

Honestly, it seems like the Core i9 11900K shouldn't even exist as a model number. That chip probably should have been called the Core i7 11700K, and the disappointing chip actually got that name should have been scrapped.

 

[Gideon]

The only part worth looking at is 11600K and that is only if you cannot grab 5600X.

Well that's a bit unfair. 11600K is often available for $100 less so it $ has it's own niche at least before 5600X is at 300 and 5600 is available. 10600KF and 10400F are particularily good deals now (and all available here in Estonia).

And even though the power draw is far from great, for 6 cores it's around 5800X, which is managable. Just Check HWUB's review for gaming power draw:

Oh and in UK Intel Core i5-11400f and a MSI B560M MORTAR is £50 cheaper (£288) in total, than AMD Ryzen 5 5600X alone, which is currently £328.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1377059329644359681

One can meme about "tehh power draw!!" all it wants but these 6-cores are actually genuinely decent value (not just because of AMD's bad availability) and it's unfair to ignore it.

 

[JoeRambo]

One can meme about "tehh power draw!!" all it wants but these 6-cores are actually genuinely decent value (not just because of AMD's bad availability) and it's unfair to ignore it.

AMD pricing and availability is not helping these discussions either. For example in my country the only Zen3 CPUs available are 5600x and 5800x, 5900x was available for a week in the winter and no distributor/retailer has even seen 5950x yet.

Intel simply has way more compelling deals versus what is available for AMD and when buying non-F CPU you get iGPU that will be enough to check 30X0 stock for months.

View attachment 42194

While i would not care for power usage spike much if performance was there, sadly this is not the case, this thing is burning up to 50% watts for nothing to show.
Sadly for enthusiasts RKL is dead. Ruined by memory latency for everyone except "i have 500$ watercooled memory" crowd who can run DDR4 5000+ 1.55V in 2v1 mode.
That $300 deal 10850k is much better deal with equal MT performance, great gaming perf with B-Die mem.

 

[cortexa99]

RKL IMC has been changed a lot so that memory configuration is more complicated than before

(Gear 1 stall at 3866mhz if i'm reading it correctly)

 

[Racan]

About power consumption not being an issue, maybe it's true for those using large tower cases, but if you're building a small form factor PC, having a a more energy efficient CPU is an advantage, you want to avoid dumping too much heat into a sub 20L case

 

[Shivansps]

Yeah, the 11400F is the best value by far, its a strange world when Intel is forcing AMD to lower prices and it also has the best IGP (in notebooks), WTH is going on here.

 

[DrMrLordX]

The 11600K is better for the money but really Z490 + 10850, 10700 or 10400 are probably the best choices depending on price point and use case if you are buying a whole new platform.

I expected that Intel would have problems competing with itself on value.

It might have been OK to get an 11900K for some OC fun, but the price completely shuts down any incentive to get one. How they are charging a similar price as a 5900X has me feeling pretty confused.

Intel is banking on 5900X (and 5950X) CPUs simply not being available. People might buy a 11900k out of frustration.

Yeah, the 11400F is the best value by far, its a strange world when Intel is forcing AMD to lower prices and it also has the best IGP (in notebooks), WTH is going on here.

Has AMD actually lowered their prices yet?

 

[IntelUser2000]

I didn't know Rocketlake increased MSRP over Cometlake. 10% increase over 10900K, are you kidding me? They are LUCKY prices are whack due to supply constraints. Unfortunately for Rocketlake, Cometlake is still cheaper.

They should have just added PCI Express 4.0 and UHD 750 to Cometlake instead. It would have ended up smaller anyway.

Price increases, the leaks claiming they have the gaming leadership, presentations making it sound they are proud of backporting. Either they are in the greatest denial we've seen in a while, or marketing is lying it's ass off.

11900K should have been $380.

I'm wondering how Intel 10ESF will compare to TMSC 5nm in terms of transistor density and power? Will the gap be larger than 14nm vs. TMSC 7nm which exists currently?

They'll be closer, as 5nm is more of a 0.65 node jump rather than a full one. Density is good, perf/watt not so much. Similar to 20nm and 10nm.

That said TSMC is having an easier time so maybe Intel eventually needs to shrink less but faster as TSMC does. Perhaps that's what the plusses will eventually achieve.

Another cost of back porting, had to cut it way, way down...

That's not really due to back porting. Tigerlake-H and Alderlake-S will have the same 32EU configuration.

Also overclocking looks to be pretty much on existent as well. It is an IPC step but the down sides are too great.

Funny thing is every generation that further steals overclocking headroom, there's more fanfare over how much overclocking options it adds. You can't make this stuff up.

For the sake of people who have fun overclocking, I hope 20% ST gains on Alderlake means it does that using lower clocks so you get some of that headroom back. So what if not all parts can clock at X frequency? Silicon lottery is part of the fun!

 

[lobz]

Well that's a bit unfair. 11600K is often available for $100 less so it $ has it's own niche at least before 5600X is at 300 and 5600 is available. 10600KF and 10400F are particularily good deals now (and all available here in Estonia).

And even though the power draw is far from great, for 6 cores it's around 5800X, which is managable. Just Check HWUB's review for gaming power draw:

Oh and in UK Intel Core i5-11400f and a MSI B560M MORTAR is £50 cheaper (£288) in total, than AMD Ryzen 5 5600X alone, which is currently £328.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1377059329644359681

One can meme about "tehh power draw!!" all it wants but these 6-cores are actually genuinely decent value (not just because of AMD's bad availability) and it's unfair to ignore it.

Literally nobody has ignored the 6 core i5s in the past 1-2 years. It's been the FIRST day of the review cycle, I don't really understand the drama the tweeting person's going through.

 

[IntelUser2000]

The UHD 750 seems to overclock great. There's the review with 1.7GHz, which is a 30% overclock.

Performance gains are surprisingly low over the UHD 630: https://hexus.net/tech/reviews/cpu/147440-intel-core-i9-11900k/?page=11

The 50% is really an up to figure. I wonder if negatives of the backport also apply here? Or if Gen 11 and Xe were just focused on power efficiency and die size which is relevant for mobile?

 

[beginner99]

11900K should have been $380.

Why if the can sell all they can make (probably not many)?

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Benchmark Steve was not going to be left out. The thumbnail for the vid has the poop emoji and says its the s word, in the bad context. He proceeds to kick the dead body longhair Steve left him. 11900K getting no love -

 

[Asterox]

Intel UHD 750 IGPU test, but for now only on older games.

 

[Shivansps]

The TL;DR is : Better than Vega 3, but not by much. UHD 730 is probably about the same as Vega 3.

 

[Hulk]

As Anand used to write, "There are no bad products, only bad price points."

The problem with Rocket Lake isn't so much the performance, it's simply meant as a placeholder until Alder Lake arrives, it's the pricing.

The 5800X is a better performer than the 11900K so the 11900K should be priced less than the 5800X and then the rest of the stack below that. I wrote this same sentiment in this thread when preliminary pricing was revealed and I remember I was chided by someone. Looks like my assessment back then was correct regarding the pricing structure based on preliminary performance reports.

 

[dullard]

I didn't know Rocketlake increased MSRP over Cometlake. 10% increase over 10900K, are you kidding me? They are LUCKY prices are whack due to supply constraints. Unfortunately for Rocketlake, Cometlake is still cheaper.

Blanket statements on Rocket Lake prices are not accurate.

• 11900K and 11900KF got $50 and $41 price increases
• 11700K and 11700KF got $25 price increases.
• Everything else Rocket Lake is basically even (from $1 more to $2 less).

So, if you are looking at the flagship Rocket Lake processors, it is a bad deal. Find an AMD chip.

But, all the rest of the lineup, Rocket Lake is quite an improvement over Comet Lake. Think of a new 11600K vs new 10600K system. For the same price, the 11600K gets you:

• PCIe 4.0
• Average of 13.35% gain (13.21% geomean gain) on Anandtech's non-gaming and non-AVX tests.
• Average of 3.86x gain (3.46x geomean gain) on Anandtech's AVX tests.
• Better iGPU.
• Motherboard dependent:
  • Possibly 2.5 gigabit internet.
  • Possibly more PCI lanes.
  • Possibly native USB 3.2.

To me, that is quite a lot of gains for the same price. Thus, Rocket Lake has a strong mid-range use case until Alder Lake comes along.

 

[gdansk]

As Anand used to write, "There are no bad products, only bad price points."

I suspect they will be able to sell a lot of these low end chips but it won't be an improvement to their ASP. The low end chips seem to have the same MSRP as the previous series. In an attempt to increase ASP they are pricing the top end chips, in my opinion, too high. But they'll probably sell enough anyway...

 

[Bouowmx]

RKL IMC has been changed a lot so that memory configuration is more complicated than before

(Gear 1 stall at 3866mhz if i'm reading it correctly)

View attachment 42235

So as I read it, Gear is limited by the QCLK ratio of 29
133.3 MHz (DRAM ref clk) * 29 = 3866 MHz

So, can one stay in Gear 1 by raising the BCLK?
Such as BCLK 110 MHz for: 133.3 MHz * 29 * 1.10 = 4250 MHz memory

 

[ondma]

Blanket statements on Rocket Lake prices are not accurate.

• 11900K and 11900KF got $50 and $41 price increases
• 11700K and 11700KF got $25 price increases.
• Everything else Rocket Lake is basically even (from $1 more to $2 less).

So, if you are looking at the flagship Rocket Lake processors, it is a bad deal. Find an AMD chip.

But, all the rest of the lineup, Rocket Lake is quite an improvement over Comet Lake. Think of a new 11600K vs new 10600K system. For the same price, the 11600K gets you:

• PCIe 4.0
• Average of 13.35% gain (13.21% geomean gain) on Anandtech's non-gaming and non-AVX tests.
• Average of 3.86x gain (3.46x geomean gain) on Anandtech's AVX tests.
• Better iGPU.
• Motherboard dependent:
  • Possibly 2.5 gigabit internet.
  • Possibly more PCI lanes.
  • Possibly native USB 3.2.

To me, that is quite a lot of gains for the same price. Thus, Rocket Lake has a strong mid-range use case until Alder Lake comes along.

I assume you are talking about MSRP. Thing is though, there are some good discounts on CL. The actual market price for CL most likely will be lower than for RL, at least initially.

As an aside, I just dont understand how Intel could screw up so badly on RL. Obviously, they were not going to win the multi threaded lead when dropping to 8 cores from 10 (or 12 Ryzen). So the only thing they could hope to gain was to equal or surpass Ryzen in gaming performance. Yet, despite a nice IPC gain, they managed to bork the gaming performance so that it was no better than CL, (edit: with a few exceptions that showed a nice gain, like Flight Simulator).

 

[lobz]

Blanket statements on Rocket Lake prices are not accurate.

• 11900K and 11900KF got $50 and $41 price increases
• 11700K and 11700KF got $25 price increases.
• Everything else Rocket Lake is basically even (from $1 more to $2 less).

So, if you are looking at the flagship Rocket Lake processors, it is a bad deal. Find an AMD chip.

But, all the rest of the lineup, Rocket Lake is quite an improvement over Comet Lake. Think of a new 11600K vs new 10600K system. For the same price, the 11600K gets you:

• PCIe 4.0
• Average of 13.35% gain (13.21% geomean gain) on Anandtech's non-gaming and non-AVX tests.
• Average of 3.86x gain (3.46x geomean gain) on Anandtech's AVX tests.
• Better iGPU.
• Motherboard dependent:
  • Possibly 2.5 gigabit internet.
  • Possibly more PCI lanes.
  • Possibly native USB 3.2.

To me, that is quite a lot of gains for the same price. Thus, Rocket Lake has a strong mid-range use case until Alder Lake comes along.

I challenge you to describe a situation for me, where AVX-512 improvement is a factor that's worth mentioning as a bullet point, talking about an i5, seeing as you so generously managed to exclude gaming performance.

 

[dullard]

I assume you are talking about MSRP. Thing is though, there are some good discounts on CL. The actual market price for CL most likely will be lower than for RL, at least initially.

As an aside, I just dont understand how Intel could screw up so badly on RL. Obviously, they were not going to win the multi threaded lead when dropping to 8 cores from 10 (or 12 Ryzen). So the only thing they could hope to gain was to equal or surpass Ryzen in gaming performance. Yet, despite a nice IPC gain, they managed to bork the gaming performance so that it was no better than CL, (edit: with a few exceptions that showed a nice gain, like Flight Simulator).

Yes, MSRP. Wait a couple weeks for the initial buyer penalty to go away and the retail prices will be similar.

Intel has left themselves with one market: the mid-range non-gamer. That is a large market (think businesses) but it is not the market that forums talk about much or reviews are geared towards.

 

[Mopetar]

I suspect they will be able to sell a lot of these low end chips but it won't be an improvement to their ASP. The low end chips seem to have the same MSRP as the previous series. In an attempt to increase ASP they are pricing the top end chips, in my opinion, too high. But they'll probably sell enough anyway...

My take is that the top chips are so limited in quantity that it hardly matters if the price is bad. Someone will buy them, so Intel may as well try to squeeze an extra $100 out of the sale.

Of course if that's true, the ASP won't change too much. If the 11900K is only the top 1% of CPUs it can't move the ASP much even if it's priced ridiculously higher than it should be.

 

[eek2121]

Now that Rocket Lake has been released, looking back at our pages and pages of discussion, leaks, rumors, and now verified tests Intel's decisions are looking just a little clearer to me.

I think it really comes down to production. Intel has billions and billions of dollars of fabs and they can't let them sit idle. It's easy to say, "Why didn't they just release Tiger Lake 8 core 10SF instead of Rocket Lake?" They simply didn't have the production capability for 10SF to make this happen now. They have orders to fill and they only way they were going to be able to fill them is by utilizing their 14nm fabrication process. I assume once they produce enough Rocket Lake parts to fulfill order to Dell, HP, Acer, etc.. and enough stock for retailers they will begin to transition their fabs to 10SF.

Thing is by the time they are in full swing with 10SF/ESF, AMD will be full swing with 5nm.

I'm wondering how Intel 10ESF will compare to TMSC 5nm in terms of transistor density and power? Will the gap be larger than 14nm vs. TMSC 7nm which exists currently?

I have been saying this for a long time.

Intel’s bigger issue is going to be AMD’s 5nm refresh. Intel should really push hard to deliver 7nm earlier than planned. I doubt they will though. Their only real saving grace is that AMD is not expected to deliver client parts on 6nm or 5nm before late Q1/early Q2 of next year.

 

[dullard]

I challenge you to describe a situation for me, where AVX-512 improvement is a factor that's worth mentioning as a bullet point, talking about an i5, seeing as you so generously managed to exclude gaming performance.

I broke AVX-512 out for that very reason so that it does not contaminate the 13% gain of the non-AVX data. But, to really answer yourself, you'll have to wait. Now that AVX-512 is finally hitting mainstream in the last few months (laptops late last year and now desktops early this year) software will slowly be introduced that uses it. Think encryption/decryption. Think photo editing. Think compression. Etc. New hardware features are often a chicken and the egg problem. No mainstream software uses the new hardware features until there is new hardware available. New hardware thus has no software at the start to use the new features. This is true of any new feature set--they often look terrible at first, but when you go back and rebenchmark CPUs a year or two after launch the new CPUs look far better than they did at launch.

Gaming performance was barely changed, so of course I didn't put it into the list of changes.