Intel takes on Ryzen with Rocket Lake S and the Core

Intel debuted its next-generation 11th-gen “Rocket Lake S” desktop Core chips at CES 2021 on Monday, boasting that its flagship Core i9-11900Okay processor presents a 19 p.c efficiency enchancment over the prior era, and with gaming efficiency that rivals AMD’s strongest Ryzen chip.

Intel’s Core i9-11900Okay does take a step again: Intel’s 10th-gen Core i9-10900Okay supplied 10 cores and 20 threads. The new i9-11900Okay wields simply Eight cores and 16 threads as an alternative, at turbo speeds as much as 5.three GHz (single core) and a slower 4.8GHz (all cores) than the i9-10900Okay supplied. It’s additionally a 14-nanometer chip. But there are delicate, important enhancements, too: a brand new, wider, 8-lane DMI interface between the processor and chipset, and an elevated 20 lanes of PCIe 4.zero off the CPU for GPUs and SSD storage, matching the PCIe 4.zero capabilities that AMD has supplied for the final two Ryzen generations. All informed, Intel’s promising as much as a 19 p.c IPC (instruction per clock) enchancment and a 50 p.c increase in built-in graphics efficiency, due to the brand new, built-in Xe GPU core.

Intel mentioned that the Core i9-11900Okay will probably be obtainable later this quarter, at an undisclosed worth. Fortunately, although a brand new 500-series motherboard chipset will probably be launched alongside it, the i9-11900Okay will probably be backwards-compatible with present 400-series motherboards. 

Intel

Intel’s Gregory Bryant, government vp and basic supervisor of Intel’s Client Computing Group, additionally confirmed off a short sneak preview of the next-generation Alder Lake hybrid chip, too. Alder Lake will mix “Golden Cove” Core cores and Gracemont Atom cores in a hybrid design. Bryant additionally mentioned that it’s going to debut on an “enhanced” 10nm SuperFin course of.

Rocket Lake…however in 14nm

Many of the options of Rocket Lake-S have been recognized since final October, when Intel confirmed the existence of Rocket Lake and its new CPU structure, code-named Cypress Cove. What we didn’t know was whether or not the brand new chip would embrace Intel’s newest 10nm course of or be manufactured on the comparatively historical 14nm line. Well, now we all know: it’s a 14nm chip, which additionally explains the drop in core depend, acknowledged Brandt Guttridge, Intel’s senior director of the Desktop Products Group. The Cypress Cove CPU core initially designed for 10nm was backported to the 14nm expertise, he mentioned.

“I feel one of many questions a lot of you may need immediately is, Why are you going from ten to eight cores? “ Guttridge mentioned. “The reply to that query actually goes again to…our focus was on maximizing actual world efficiency, which is a mix of frequency and IPC [instructions per clock]. So as we regarded on the microarchitecture, we ported the 10nm design for each the CPU and the graphics again to the 14nm manufacturing node. As the 10nm design has smaller transistors and the 14nm is a bit bigger set, the utmost core depend we may match on Rocket Lake was eight.”

Intel

The different issue influencing Intel’s alternative was that transferring to 14nm allowed the corporate to reap the benefits of the SuperFIN transistor that Intel added to Tiger Lake. Last yr, Ruth Brain, an Intel fellow specializing in expertise improvement and interconnects, mentioned the sum complete of all of the intranode enhancements made within the 14nm generations can be equaled by the one intranode efficiency improve from Ice Lake to Tiger Lake, by way of SuperFIN. 

“That trade off we got was that 19 percent IPC gain… and the 50 percent graphics improvement,” Guttridge mentioned. “So again, the focus here was on maximizing performance for for the end users in the real world.” 

Rocket Lake-S additionally consists of always-on Intel Quick Sync Video, which Guttridge says now works concurrently with the built-in GPU. Previously, just one desktop GPU (both the built-in GPU or the discrete GPU)…