Sunday, March 22nd 2020
Intel Rocket Lake-S Platform Detailed, Features PCIe 4.0 and Xe Graphics
Intel's upcoming Rocket Lake-S desktop platform is expected to arrive sometime later this year, however, we didn't have any concrete details on what will it bring. Thanks to the exclusive information obtained by VideoCardz'es sources at Intel, there are some more details regarding the RKL-S platform. To start, the RKL-S platform is based on a 500-series chipset. This is an iteration of the upcoming 400-series chipset, and it features many platform improvements. The 500-series chipset based motherboards will supposedly have an LGA 1200 socket, which is an improvement in pin count compared to LGA 1151 socket found on 300 series chipset.
The main improvement is the CPU core itself, which is supposedly a 14 nm adaptation of Tiger Lake-U based on Willow Cove core. This design is representing a backport of IP to an older manufacturing node, which results in bigger die space due to larger node used. When it comes to the platform improvements, it will support the long-awaited PCIe 4.0 connection already present on competing platforms from AMD. It will enable much faster SSD speeds as there are already PCIe 4.0 NVMe devices that run at 7 GB/s speeds. With RKL-S, there will be 20 PCIe 4.0 lanes present, where four would go to the NVMe SSD and 16 would go to the PCIe slots from GPUs. Another interesting feature of the RKL-S is the addition of Xe graphics found on the CPU die, meant as iGPU. Supposedly based on Gen12 graphics, it will bring support for HDMI 2.0b and DisplayPort 1.4a connectors.
Some things like Direct Media Interface (DMI) will double the bandwidth and now there will be eight links present, compared to four of the previous platforms. Announced at CES 2020, ThunderBolt 4 will also be present along with USB 3.2 20G. Additionally, Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) have been removed to improve the security of the platform, as the SGX has proved to be quite vulnerable to many kinds of attacks and exploits. There are some updated media encoding standards as well, like 12-bit AV1/HEVC and E2E compression.
Source:
VideoCardz
The main improvement is the CPU core itself, which is supposedly a 14 nm adaptation of Tiger Lake-U based on Willow Cove core. This design is representing a backport of IP to an older manufacturing node, which results in bigger die space due to larger node used. When it comes to the platform improvements, it will support the long-awaited PCIe 4.0 connection already present on competing platforms from AMD. It will enable much faster SSD speeds as there are already PCIe 4.0 NVMe devices that run at 7 GB/s speeds. With RKL-S, there will be 20 PCIe 4.0 lanes present, where four would go to the NVMe SSD and 16 would go to the PCIe slots from GPUs. Another interesting feature of the RKL-S is the addition of Xe graphics found on the CPU die, meant as iGPU. Supposedly based on Gen12 graphics, it will bring support for HDMI 2.0b and DisplayPort 1.4a connectors.
113 Comments on Intel Rocket Lake-S Platform Detailed, Features PCIe 4.0 and Xe Graphics
Also, no chance this launches in 2020, expect it in 2021.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_Lake_(microprocessor)
18% IPC improvement on average compared to the 2015 Skylake.
https://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/amd_ryzen_7_3700x_ryzen_9_3900x_review,9.html
Which would put it ~6-7% above Zen 2 but Zen 3 is expected to bring 15-20% IPC improvement when it comes, finally.
The caches of Skylake-X/-SP is pretty close in size and is not a problem on 14nm.
Intel is ramping up 10nm as much as possible, and 10nm+ arriving this year (for Tiger Lake and Ice Lake-SP/X) and 10nm++ next year. Demand is much higher than expected in both laptop and server segments, so we shouldn't expect 10nm to reach the full lineup. But 7nm is still far away, low volume 2021 and medium volumes 2022 is a best case scenario.
And profitable 10nm sure as hell is not. After all these years of development? lol
Are there actual numbers of this? And not those of investments in fabs, but of 10nm products sold.
But 'they were lazy' is not sufficient to me. I do think this is really a difficult node. 7nm didn't come through easily either, new effects come into play as we go this small. Effectively the fabs need new machinery for it (EUV). That also has its early problems.
The exact reason is that it was a premature jump of 2.3x the transistor density over N14 and there is currently no available equipment that can do it.
Didn't they officially say that we don't need anything more than a quad-core?!
But when I hear about a quad-core of any type, I become like this:
1. Some aspects or measures of Intel's 10nm are the same or even beyond what TSMC's 7nm has (MMP comes to mind out of the major ones). Intel was trying to get there without EUV (this is the equipment availability question) and that backfired.
2. Replacing copper with cobalt is suspected to be a big suspect due to the nature of early errors. Intel has been pretty quiet about this.
Seriously, you're either not tracking the PC market at all or just ignoring mobile segment on purpose.
Ice Lake is available in normal, common notebooks. It's normally available in stores. And it's been there for a few months already.
You're repreating arguments from half a year ago or older. I don't understand why you're unwilling to just CHECK if they're still valid.
You really like Intel to fail and you're going to hold on to this narrative?Why would it not be? Why would Intel offer Ice Lake for mainstream products if it wasn't making money?
And at the end of the day Intel's profit margin is still way higher than AMD (even higher than TSMC's). And it already includes those years of 10nm development with no sales.
You want to deny that as well?
On Geizhals.eu there are 780 10-gen laptops, 527 Comet Lake-U and only 253 Ice Lake-U.
Ice Lake-U also caps at 4 core, 8 threads, and quite low frequency.
As for profitability: recouping costs does not equal making money. Intel have spent several billion USD on developing 10nm, and are only now shipping in anything resembling volume. They will likely never make back their R&D costs on this process node, which means it will never be profitable.
Also: Intel's current, shipping, somewhat available 10nm node is ... not very performant. Ice Lake has a ~18% architectural IPC gain from SKL and its derivatives, yet Comet Lake (14nm ++++ SKL derivative) at 15W outperforms Ice Lake (10nm) even according to Intel itself. In other words the power and clock scaling disadvantages of the 10nm node are still significant enough that Intel can't make it faster than their previous offerings despite a significant IPC advantage. Have you seen how ridiculously low base clocks on Ice Lake chips are? Quad core ICL chips are barely faster at base clock than hexa core CML chips (1.3 v. 1.1 GHz). ICL is also the first ever generation where Intel has announced a top-end U-series SKU that is only available at 28W and nothing lower - the i7-1068G7, which btw has yet to ship in any device - and even at 28W it only manages a 2.3GHz base clock.
Ice Lake is looking more and more like a beta release, with Tiger Lake planned to be the proper, widely available and actually performant part. Though we'll see if they manage to refine the node enough for that to launch in a timely manner.
Do you trust SPEC2017? That's about as industry-standard as you get, and AnandTech's testing using it shows Zen 2 to be ~7% faster than Coffee Lake (~5% SPECINT, ~7.8% SPECFP, ~7.1% overall) (or, if you flip that around, CFL is ~6.7% overall/7.2% SPECFP/4.8% SPECINT slower than Zen 2).
10nm should have been canned a long time ago, it's obvious that's never going to be a volume node, there isn't enough time left for that to happen and still stay competitive. The hallmark of a good node stands in server chips not mobile stuff, that's where yields/volume/performance are paramount. Since there are no 10nm Xeons right now, that should give you an idea of how useful this node is.
14nm could have carried them to next node, ironically that's what is happening right now. They tried to boost 14nm capacity and work on 10nm at the same time, that was a mistake as well.
From what I've seen, this site sometimes shows different versions as separate items. For example, the 72 notebooks with Ice Lake-Y (which you forgot about) are all variations of Macbook Air.
That's why I'm suggesting a more qualitative approach, i.e. looking at what kind of notebooks get Ice Lake. Few months ago, at the moment @Vayra86 stopped updating, these were just a few low-volume products (expensive 2in1s).
Today 10nm is in many mainstream / bestselling lines.
Also, just the fact that Apple puts it into Macbook Air and Dell into XPS is a sign there are no quality / supply issues. They wouldn't take that risk.Which is an optimal configuration for 15W SoCs - the most popular type of consumer CPU we have today.
Smaller 10nm SoCs will arrive this year. Larger - this or next year.
Big desktop CPUs will come last... or never.
http://www.cpu-world.com/Compare/439/AMD_Ryzen_7_Mobile_4800U_vs_Intel_Core_i7_Mobile_i7-1065G7.html
:laugh:
And if we're talking putting chips where the profits are, Intel would have been pushing 10nm to the server world as soon as they could. Margins there are much higher than in the mobile space, and volumes dramatically higher too. And desktop chips would then follow as soon as supply and demand evens out - desktop chips are essentially derivatives of low-end server chips, after all.
As for the second question, Intel offers Ice Lake for many more reasons than just 'profit'. Profit is also branding and mindshare. Not releasing 10nm is a failure and damages that. Another argument that isn't profit related is fab capacity. 14nm is still under pressure, so any available 10nm capacity, even if the yields aren't optimal, is still welcome to relieve pressure.
With 7nm this close, Intel is in a 'screwed if you do, screwed if you don't' situation, I think. Its not like I'm sitting here rubbing my hands and smiling for it. Its just my analysis of how this node develops for them. How it relates to AMD's market share is not even in my mind tbh.
https://www.ultrabookreview.com/36030-amd-ryzen-7-4800u-laptops/