The Future of Intel and AMD
|Intel
- 11th gen is a bit of a dumpster fire. High end is really dumb. Mid range is priced competitively, especially 11400F which doesn’t have direct competition from AMD right now. This is currently the budget king.
- Intel Xeon 3rd gen Scalable (Ice Lake SP) now offers 40 cores, lower price, 64 PCIe lanes, 270W TDP, 4TB RAM support, and 10nm process.
Intel’s Future
- 2021
- Q4 – Alder Lake not confirmed if that’s mobile or desktop variants, a whole new approach. Golden Cove + Gracemont cores, similar to ARM big.Little – Intel “Hybrid Technology”
- 10nm Enhanced Super Fin
- PCIe Gen 5 support, DDR4 and DDR5
- Up to 8 Golden Cove, 8 Gracemont cores
- DMI Gen4 (up to x8)
- X16 PCIe 5 lanes to CPU, x4 PCIe Gen 4 to CPU too
- Thunderbolt 4 “USB 4 compliant”
- LGA 1700 – 500 more pins!
- Will support 4800MHz DDR5, or 3200MHz DDR4
- Z690, high end boards will support DDR5, lower end options will support DDR4 like Skylake.
- 2022
- Raptor Lake – refresh
- 2023
- ‘7nm Enhanced SuperFin’, same design, new version of perf cores, same socket
AMD
- Ryzen 5000 is killer – and now everything but 5900X and 5950X are in stock
- Likely due to single vs dual chiplet. Easier to make 2 5600X’s than 1 5900X
- 5600X currently lowest end option, leaving a big gap for Intel’s i5 lineup. 11400F looks very hard to beat for value, so AMD need to offer a 5600 non-X if they want to compete.
AMD’s Future
- 2021
- Threadripper 5000 launching in August – Zen 3 arch (maybe Zen 3+?). Expected the same 19% IPC uplift, better clock speeds, same core counts.
- Zen 3+ – refreshed Zen 3 arch, rumour says ‘more IPC uplift than Zen -> Zen +, but not much more’ so 4-7% more. Decent, not amazing. Hopefully more SKUs available!
- Zen 3+ is due to be on TSMC’s N6 node, which is smaller but not a “true new node”
- Interestingly, apparently it may be on AM5 still as it has a revised IO die which may use DDR5 – not the same IO die as Zen 4, but more similar to that than Zen 3’s.
- Zen 3+ due out Q4 2021 apparently
- Z570S – could be refreshed version for Zen 3+, or potentially more likely a revised version of the chipset with lower power ‘S = “Silent”’
- 2022
- Zen 4 – TSMC N5, quoted IPC of 25%, total perf uplift of 40% thanks to higher clock speeds.
- Leak says Genoa EPYC chip (zen 4) was 29% faster than Milan EPYC (Zen 3)