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Rocket Lake was designed for 10nm, but Intel couldn't get 10nm to work, so they backport Rocket Lake to 14nm. https://semiaccurate.com/2020/10/29/intels-palpab

Rocket Lake was designed for 10nm, but Intel couldn't get 10nm to work, so they backport Rocket Lake to 14nm. https://semiaccurate.com/2020/10/29/intels-palpable-desperation-on-display-with-rocket-lake/ https://semiaccurate.com/2020/10/29/intels-palpable-desperat... Just filter out Charlie Demerjian's grudge against Intel. Companies don’t backport because a core is designed for a process. It’s efficiency and architecture is based on the transistors that it will use from the design start, caches are sized based on the process too, and a lot of the architectural gains are due to the added transistor counts. If you backport a CPU you lose the efficiency of these new transistors so the energy use goes up and the clocks likely go down as well. Cores take up 2x the size, or at least a lot more than the older core did on the older process, so costs go up too. You can either cut out bits of the core and lose performance or eat it on area and therefor cost. Backporting a design not made for portability isn’t a lose/lose proposition, it is a lose/lose/lose/lose proposition. But Intel is desperate so…

dralley 6y ago
Grudge or not, it's not like he's been wrong the last few years. Turns out all the negativity is well justified...
- Firehawke 6y ago
  Yep, he's been saying the sky was falling for some time, and it turns out he was pretty accurate in his statements on Intel's problems. This review makes it clear that unless Intel magically gets a process improvement they're entirely screwed. This is precisely the same kind of design issue that hit with the latter end of the P4 era, where thermal limitations were so severe that they were crippling the chips. I'd have to do some digging, but I absolutely remember reading an interesting set of benchmarks that made it clear that you were 99% likely to thermally throttle those P4s even with proper thermal paste and an improved high-end heatsink/fan.
  - dragontamer 6y ago
    Are they really? AMD will make gains for sure at this rate, but TSMC can't serve the whole market. Intel owns fabs, and these rocket lake chips will sell to the mainstream just fine. I expect intel's fabs to be a big asset in these COVID times with sold out computers.
    - wtallis 6y ago
      This chips really don't seem to be a good use of Intel's limited fab capacity. The CPU cores are substantially larger while offering basically no benefits other than AVX-512 support. It looks like Intel would have been better off pairing the upgraded IO and integrated graphics with their existing, smaller Skylake cores.
      - dragontamer 6y ago
        https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph16535/111160.png https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph16535/111160.png Pretty much every Rocket-lake score is faster than Skylake across the board. I'd definitely buy a Rocket Lake over any old Skylake based off of these reviews. Rocket Lake seems a wee-bit inferior to Zen3, but AMD Zen3 is pretty much sold out, so if you need a computer, Intel is still there.
        wtallis 6y ago
        But Intel doesn't need the incremental performance increase in order to sell their processors. With AMD so supply-limited, Intel should be trying to sell smaller, cheaper processors that they can produce in larger volume with higher margins.
        kllrnohj 6y ago
        > Pretty much every Rocket-lake score is faster than Skylake across the board Except for gaming, where rocket-lake is across the board slower. Which is important since gaming was Intel's last holdout prior to the arrival of Zen3. So if you're gaming this is worse, and if you're not gaming why would you go with this over a 3900x at basically the same price? Even verse skylake if you're doing productivity stuff a 10920x seems likely to be consistently faster thanks to 50% more cores (and way way more pcie lanes if you're into that) The only reason to get this seems to be if the unique combination of avx512, no ECC, and only up to 8 cores is somehow ideal for your use case.
- msh 6y ago
  Well he is also the guy who kept saying that the snapdragon 810 was fine well after everyone knew that it had major thermal issues.

dralley 6y ago

Grudge or not, it's not like he's been wrong the last few years. Turns out all the negativity is well justified...

Firehawke 6y ago
Yep, he's been saying the sky was falling for some time, and it turns out he was pretty accurate in his statements on Intel's problems. This review makes it clear that unless Intel magically gets a process improvement they're entirely screwed. This is precisely the same kind of design issue that hit with the latter end of the P4 era, where thermal limitations were so severe that they were crippling the chips. I'd have to do some digging, but I absolutely remember reading an interesting set of benchmarks that made it clear that you were 99% likely to thermally throttle those P4s even with proper thermal paste and an improved high-end heatsink/fan.
- dragontamer 6y ago
  Are they really? AMD will make gains for sure at this rate, but TSMC can't serve the whole market. Intel owns fabs, and these rocket lake chips will sell to the mainstream just fine. I expect intel's fabs to be a big asset in these COVID times with sold out computers.
  - wtallis 6y ago
    This chips really don't seem to be a good use of Intel's limited fab capacity. The CPU cores are substantially larger while offering basically no benefits other than AVX-512 support. It looks like Intel would have been better off pairing the upgraded IO and integrated graphics with their existing, smaller Skylake cores.
    - dragontamer 6y ago
      https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph16535/111160.png https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph16535/111160.png Pretty much every Rocket-lake score is faster than Skylake across the board. I'd definitely buy a Rocket Lake over any old Skylake based off of these reviews. Rocket Lake seems a wee-bit inferior to Zen3, but AMD Zen3 is pretty much sold out, so if you need a computer, Intel is still there.
      - wtallis 6y ago
        But Intel doesn't need the incremental performance increase in order to sell their processors. With AMD so supply-limited, Intel should be trying to sell smaller, cheaper processors that they can produce in larger volume with higher margins.
      - kllrnohj 6y ago
        > Pretty much every Rocket-lake score is faster than Skylake across the board Except for gaming, where rocket-lake is across the board slower. Which is important since gaming was Intel's last holdout prior to the arrival of Zen3. So if you're gaming this is worse, and if you're not gaming why would you go with this over a 3900x at basically the same price? Even verse skylake if you're doing productivity stuff a 10920x seems likely to be consistently faster thanks to 50% more cores (and way way more pcie lanes if you're into that) The only reason to get this seems to be if the unique combination of avx512, no ECC, and only up to 8 cores is somehow ideal for your use case.
msh 6y ago
Well he is also the guy who kept saying that the snapdragon 810 was fine well after everyone knew that it had major thermal issues.