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My main question would be why Intel would even bother releasing Rocket Lake if, balancing between higher IPC and lower clocks, the performance would be _lower_
by henriquez 6y ago
My main question would be why Intel would even bother releasing Rocket Lake if, balancing between higher IPC and lower clocks, the performance would be _lower_ than the 10 series chips. So I disagree with the article that this will be an unqualified disaster. It's quite likely that they will be a little faster, at least core for core. But it also seems like these are notebook chips hacked into a desktop socket and limited to just 8 cores.
That means the best case scenario for Intel would be (barely) scraping back their "single threaded gaming performance" crown while completely giving up against the multi-threaded performance of AMD's higher core count Zen 3 chips. The only way Rocket Lake would make any sense in the market would be if these are priced less than $400 (probably a lot less), and so Intel's margins will be much lower on what is likely to be a much larger die with more transistors.
I don't think it's possible to call this anything other than a pure desperation move.
- drewg123 6y agoI think one reason is that they need to release a desktop CPU with PCIe Gen4. And if they can't do it in 10nm, they have to backport it to 14nm just to stay competitive. Amd has had Gen4 out in desktop CPUs for over a year now.
- muro 6y agoThey don't need to release one at all. They can skip PCIe 4 completely and go to 5. Their roadmap lists Sapphire Rapids in about a year (so in about 3 years on calendars everyone else uses).
- phkahler 6y ago>> My main question would be why Intel would even bother releasing Rocket Lake... Pure speculation, but maybe someone's bonus depended on delivering and this technically satisfies the requirement. It's not designs problem fab can't deliver the right node.
- ChuckMcM 6y agoYou ask: "Why Intel would even bother releasing Rocket Lake if, balancing between higher IPC and lower clocks, the performance would be _lower_ than the 10 series chips?" My understanding from the article is that the answer to that question is that Intel is unable to produce any quantity of chips at 10nm that makes (enough) money. The author surmises that rather than go a year with AMD essentially unchallenged in the market, Intel back ported a 10nm chip to a process that they have better margins on 14nm, so that they could tout "improvements" on an architectural basis while skipping over the question of improvements on a system basis. For me, what is most telling is the 500 series chip set which seems uncharacteristic. From a purely speculative point of view (that is code for pulling a wild ass guess out of my butt here) I could see this as having been the design they had done for Apple's next generation Macbooks before they lost to Apples' A14x chip. The factors that lead me to that guess are that it really looks like a 'point' product (specific changes, not a general set of family changes) to me that doesn't fit into thee PC ecosystem as well as other chip introductions (like IceLake) did with respect to their overall roadmap.