What will the Late 2021 Intel Desktop be?

What do you think the Late 2021 Intel desktop will be?

  • 14 nm Willow Cove (Rocket Lake Refresh?)

    Votes: 2 13.3%
  • 14 nm Golden Cove (Toasty Lake)

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • 10 nm Golden Cove (Alder Lake)

    Votes: 2 13.3%
  • TSMC 5 nm Golden Cove (Alder Lake?)

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • 10 nm Willow Cove (Tiger Lake)

    Votes: 2 13.3%
  • 10 nm? Saphhire Rapids

    Votes: 2 13.3%
  • Still Skylake (?)

    Votes: 4 26.7%
  • 7 nm Meteor Lake in 2022 sometime instead

    Votes: 2 13.3%
  • Other...

    Votes: 1 6.7%

  • Total voters
    15
  • Poll closed .

jpiniero

Lifer
Oct 1, 2010
14,510
5,159
136
Since the Late 2020 seems to be decided now (which will be 14 nm Rocket Lake), do you want to take a guess at what the Late 2021 will be?

Gonna be rough for sure since AMD probably will be on TSMC 5 nm by then.
 

ehume

Golden Member
Nov 6, 2009
1,511
73
91
7nm or bust.
Which brings up a question about the questionnaire: why no option for Intel's 7nm in 2021, since Samsung is talking about sampling their 5nm (supposedly equivalent to Intel 7nm) before that?
 

jpiniero

Lifer
Oct 1, 2010
14,510
5,159
136
Which brings up a question about the questionnaire: why no option for Intel's 7nm in 2021, since Samsung is talking about sampling their 5nm (supposedly equivalent to Intel 7nm) before that?

Intel said the absolute earliest is 2022 for anything other than the Xe GPU chiplets for Aurora. And it sounds like even meeting Aurora's deadline is going to be tough.
 
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DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
21,582
10,785
136
Intel said the absolute earliest is 2022 for anything other than the Xe GPU chiplets for Aurora. And it sounds like even meeting Aurora's deadline is going to be tough.

Wait. Really? Wow. 2022 it is then!
 
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TheGiant

Senior member
Jun 12, 2017
748
353
106
I still think, that Intel will build secret big bang as with conroe

until that point it will look like in the Athlon 64 era, except the performance (which is important)
 

TheELF

Diamond Member
Dec 22, 2012
3,967
720
126
Gonna be rough for sure since AMD probably will be on TSMC 5 nm by then.
Yeah?!and then what?! What is AMD going to do after 5nm?
Intel will still be able to match them with 14nm (and still be faster at a lot of niche/low IPC workloads) even then and after that there will be nothing to compete against intel once again as they go sloooooooowly to 10-7-5nm.
 

B-Riz

Golden Member
Feb 15, 2011
1,482
612
136
I still think, that Intel will build secret big bang as with conroe

until that point it will look like in the Athlon 64 era, except the performance (which is important)

I actually think we have reached near parity in performance for the x86 instruction set between the two companies; single thread is still important (but not the most important) and Intel has it right now, but AMD brought cheap 8c / 16t to the masses, and the future is just going to be more cores (more efficient too), as all the consumer gets now is cut down server chips. And server chips are made for hosting VM's / cloud computing.

There are the thermal limits ultimately; do we want high clock or high core?

The future will be on who wants to take a different-ish approach to x86 design, which AMD did with Zen. Intel, so far, has been tweaking and adding on to Sandy Bridge for years.
 

DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
21,582
10,785
136
Yeah?!and then what?! What is AMD going to do after 5nm?
Intel will still be able to match them with 14nm (and still be faster at a lot of niche/low IPC workloads)

No, they won't. You can stick a fork into 14nm. It's about done.
 

PotatoWithEarsOnSide

Senior member
Feb 23, 2017
664
701
106
I don't get why we're supposed to have blind faith in Intel getting its next 3 nodes right when it has been stuck on the current one for so long, yet we're supposed to assume that AMD will suffer when TSMC inevitably gets stuck despite it clearly having no issues with 7nm+ 6nm or even 5nm; they're all at a more asvanced stage of development than Intel's 10nm.
 

sxr7171

Diamond Member
Jun 21, 2002
5,079
40
91
No, they won't. You can stick a fork into 14nm. It's about done.


Haha yeah. People are delidding. Doing bare die cooling. What’s next? Ship the CPU with phase change cooler? Free mini fridge with your 10900x?

The way it’s going these CPUs will need to be shipped with a built in water block that takes thermal resistance between the die and cooler out of the equation. These chips are now stacked and cooling is going to be a part of the die design. We might see grooves laser cut into the silicon die. We might even see liquid channels or pipes as part of the die.

I hope there will be an industry standard quick connect for water coolers AIO or custom.
 

sxr7171

Diamond Member
Jun 21, 2002
5,079
40
91
I’d like to speculate that the 2021 desktop may be a laptop.

I built myself an NUC 8th (not hades canyon - I don’t need that GPU) and using it with an egpu. I put the whole thing into an Akasa Turing passive cooling case. With Intel XTU I can get it to use 50w. It’s undervolted and hits 4.5GHz on one core.

So I heard the next gen NUC will have a PCIe x16 slot. That removes the egpu latency penalty. Hopefully it is a “K” chip.

So the improvement may not be in outright performance but rather in portability.

There will need to be two independent huge power supplies. There might even be some kind of external battery pack to enable light battery usage sufficient for current gen and possibly next gen VR backpack applications.

At the end of the day I think ARM powered would be better for VR though.