Discussion Intel current and future Lakes & Rapids thread

[Ajay]

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?

 

[DrMrLordX]

@Ajay

Alder Lake-P and Alder Lake-S. That we know of.

 

[Cardyak]

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]

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]

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.

 

[IntelUser2000]

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

 

[lobz]

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

Ah the good old times. Nehalem was a beast!

 

[IntelUser2000]

~4.8Ghz with 1.5x the IPC of Skylake on at least 16 cores.

Yup. Even Gracemont should slightly outperform Skylake.

 

[Ajay]

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.

 

[mikk]

Some new information on the TGL-U SKUs:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1273971885542273025

Looks like most of these will be getting the full 96 EUs!

Big surprise if true that so many SKUs will get the highest G7 graphics but I'm not sure if this is correct. Even the lower end i3 gets a G4 with 80 EUs.

 

[jpiniero]

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

Acer Swift 5 laptops with Intel Tiger Lake listed by Dutch retailer - VideoCardz.com

The first retail listing of Intel’s 11th Gen Core processor. Intel Tiger Lake count launch in July Intel has begun sending Tiger lake marketing kits to the press and advertising its performance on ultra-thin laptops in popular games. Meanwhile, online stores are beginning to list laptops with...

videocardz.com

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]

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]

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 😱

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.

 

[Carfax83]

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? 😵

 

[Exist50]

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.

"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.

Matrix multiply on a CPU?

 

[DrMrLordX]

@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.

 

[mikk]

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

https://twitter.com/x/status/1274207707063451648

Previous best i7-1165G7 timespy graphics score: 1338

https://twitter.com/x/status/1270322830585073672

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.

 

[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.

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]

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]

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]

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.

 

[IntelUser2000]

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.

 

[IntelUser2000]

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.

Intel 'Ice Lake' Benchmarked: How 10nm CPUs Could Bring Major GPU Grunt to New Laptops

We got to test one of Intel's new 10th Gen Core "Ice Lake" mobile CPUs. How does the Core i7-1065G7 stack up against earlier "Lakes"? Does Intel's vaunted Gen11 integrated graphics live up to the hype? You might be surprised at what we found.

www.pcmag.com

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

 

[mikk]

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]

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.