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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 cl

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.
  - totalZero 6y ago
    Ignoring both sides of the performance debate entirely, Intel found a way to increase utilization of 14nm process in a time when sector-wide demand exceeds supply. It seems very smart to use 14nm because it presents a lower opportunity cost versus getting worse yield on 10nm process node and taking capacity away from laptop chips, an area where AMD has been struggling to meet demand.
- ineedasername 6y ago
  TSMC is making huge investments into new fabs. And AMD doesn't have to take the whole market. They just have to take enough that Intel loses too much economy of scale to sell at profitable prices. Intel's fabs don't mean anything if their volumes are too low-- and they're dropping rapidly. Their fixed costs & massive R&D requirements have to be paid for by shrinking revenue: Projected 1st quarter 2021 revenue is down about 12% over the same quarter in 2020. This isn't COVID-related: AMD's projected revenue for the same period jumped 80% year over year. Intel is far from okay. They are far from having a safe path due to production bottlenecks by competitors: TSMC's 7nm capacity-- which is what AMD uses-- is on track to increase 18% in just the next quarter alone. I don't know how sustainable that production growth is, but it doesn't have to last long when they're bringing new fabs online and Samsung's fabs may be taking on some of Apple's M1 production, further freeing up TSMC capacity. I don't think I'm saying anything particularly controversial or surprising or new when I say that Intel probably has about 2 years to figure out their own fab problems before they're well out of things for the next decade or so, having to claw their way back the way AMD has done.

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.
- totalZero 6y ago
  Ignoring both sides of the performance debate entirely, Intel found a way to increase utilization of 14nm process in a time when sector-wide demand exceeds supply. It seems very smart to use 14nm because it presents a lower opportunity cost versus getting worse yield on 10nm process node and taking capacity away from laptop chips, an area where AMD has been struggling to meet demand.
ineedasername 6y ago
TSMC is making huge investments into new fabs. And AMD doesn't have to take the whole market. They just have to take enough that Intel loses too much economy of scale to sell at profitable prices. Intel's fabs don't mean anything if their volumes are too low-- and they're dropping rapidly. Their fixed costs & massive R&D requirements have to be paid for by shrinking revenue: Projected 1st quarter 2021 revenue is down about 12% over the same quarter in 2020. This isn't COVID-related: AMD's projected revenue for the same period jumped 80% year over year. Intel is far from okay. They are far from having a safe path due to production bottlenecks by competitors: TSMC's 7nm capacity-- which is what AMD uses-- is on track to increase 18% in just the next quarter alone. I don't know how sustainable that production growth is, but it doesn't have to last long when they're bringing new fabs online and Samsung's fabs may be taking on some of Apple's M1 production, further freeing up TSMC capacity. I don't think I'm saying anything particularly controversial or surprising or new when I say that Intel probably has about 2 years to figure out their own fab problems before they're well out of things for the next decade or so, having to claw their way back the way AMD has done.