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
Features are quite even, IMO slightly better on the Intel side.
Performance... well, let's wait for the actual benchmarks.
Zen+ mobile APUs were also great on paper.
If you're amazed by the fact that AMD runs 2x more cores on 15W, don't be.
The real question is how they perform over longer period and how much energy they pull on the way.
All Renoir -U have 15W TDP - even the 4C/4T 4300U.
And of course by the time Renoir becomes available in mainstream products, it'll compete against 6 or 8-core Tiger Lake, not 4-core Ice Lake. :)
As for the i7-1065G7 being bad? Nah. It has the best iGPU Intel has ever made - which is genuinely quite good - and perfectly adequate performance overall. It definitely shows the weaknesses of the 10nm node - I would expect higher clocks overall if that node wasn't still seriously flawed - but despite this it manages to be perfectly decent. And I personally value the boost in iGPU performance far more than any boost in CPU performance at 15-25W. Still, I wouldn't buy a laptop with one, mainly because I think Renoir will be better overall (particularly in iGPU performance), but if I had the choice between ICL and CML I would definitely go for the former.
In Blender, which is probably the best case scenario for Ryzen, 4800U is just 40% faster.
But of course this year Intel launches Tiger Lake, which is a different beast. Most likely 20%+ faster cores and improved iGPU.
So even if Tiger Lake stops at 4 cores, it won't be far behind the best from AMD.
I'm not sure why you're so inclined to persuade us that Intel is so far behind. Roughly equivalent node, same scientific level, similar know-how and workforce quality. There's no reason why one company would make a product much better than the other.
There will be some nuances and some implications of architectures, but we should expect both companies to turn 15W into similar performance.
But frankly, this would be fine as well. WiFi 6, USB 4, PCIe4, 2.5GbE, Xe GPU with all it's goodies.
10nm desktops would only add performance or lower power draw - something I can live without shopping for a mid-range i5.
Give me a single transistors dimension on N10 and N14 that is equal to ten (or fourteen, for that matter) nanometres in length, width or depth!
Because 10 nm doesn't correspond to the reality, to the set rules, and because it's easier to standardise across the board using something like N in front.
TSMC has 10FF.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10_nm_process
Everyone calls it 7 nm, I will call it "N10" or "10 nm".
What do you mean "These nodes aren't directly comparable"?
N6 is a marketing name, like Ford Focus. So you're now calling a competing car VW Focus, because you like that naming better and the car absolutely doesn't look like a piece of clothing.
And your wicked idea of "standarizing" is that we should call all compact cars "Focus", because you can't handle multiple naming schemes.What's wrong with PCIe 4.0?Ryzen will be significantly better in laptops than Intel's architecture that won't be used in laptops? I don't understand this comment. :)
Rocket Lake S is a desktop platform. Intel will make mobile platforms using more dense nodes.
As for everyone calling it 7nm: well, no, TSMC doesn't, at least not in their node names.
And you fail to respond to the main point here, which is reiterated and exemplified beautifully by @notb above. Why do you insist on using one brand's marketing names on other brands' products?
I find it a little odd that there is so little substantive about Rocket Lake, if it's supposed to be launched in a few months. I haven't found any references to it in the drivers either, while the Tiger Lake support was just updated a few days ago.
The link gives an error, but other sites redirect to it, so the articles are up and well.
www.ptt.cc/bbs/PC_Shopping/M.1574942523.A.868.html
But it more closely resembles to a leak by an internal for the matters person..
Actually, every single employee who has access to this data, can leak it anonymously and you will never know who exactly were they.
Rumour is information by a person who doesn't understand.
Leak is information by a person who has access to the proper data.