Intel Confirms Raptor Lake Refresh
The company will soon be launch both 14th generation and "1st" generation CPUs for desktop and mobile.
By Josh Norem June 23, 2023
Intel's operation in China has confirmed the company will be launching a Raptor Lake refresh later this year, which is the first time it's put its stamp of approval on all the recent rumors. The company will still be unveiling Meteor Lake as well, but as expected it will be mobile-only. However, there will also be upgraded Raptor Lake mobile parts as well, which will receive new "1st Generation" branding, which sounds like it will be kind of confusing. Intel isn't talking about launch dates or core counts yet, but at least we know there will be updates across the board later this year.
Intel China confirmed the company's plans via the usual methods; a post on the social media site Bilibili. The translated version, via Tom's Hardware, shows a complete list of revamped products spanning the company's product stacks for desktop and mobile, and confirms several previous rumors. The first is that the upgraded Raptor Lake for desktop will indeed be named 14th Generation, which is odd since it's likely just a refresh of the existing CPUs. However, Intel may throw us a bone and bump up core counts in addition to clocks for some of its i5 and i7 SKUs. The chart confirms it'll be the same lineup as what we have now; Raptor Lake desktop parts in i3, i5, i7, and i9 versions. There will also be upgraded high-end mobile parts with the HX moniker, and all of these will be labeled Intel 14th generation, both desktop and mobile.
Micron Announces GDDR7 for GPUs Coming in First Half of 2024
Though it'll arrive just in time for mid-cycle refresh from AMD, Nvidia, and Intel, it's unclear if there will be any takers just yet.
By Josh Norem June 29, 2023
Next-gen GPUs just got a shot in the proverbial arm thanks to a new announcement from Micron about its GDDR7 plans. The company's fiscal Q3 earnings call shed new light on the much-hyped memory standard, which is set to replace GDDR6/X at some point in the future. The company says it is on track to deliver GDDR7 to the market in the first half of 2024, which is good news for those still holding out on a GPU upgrade.
The new memory standard promises to offer a massive increase in bandwidth, even for midrange GPUs with wee 128-bit memory buses. This technology would have been useful for the beleaguered RTX 4060 and Radeon RX 7600, as it would have practically doubled the available memory bandwidth depending on the memory clocks. Micron is targeting 36G/bs of bandwidth per pin, according to Wccftech. That compares with the current 22Gb/s GDDR6X used by Nvidia, with AMD settling for 20Gb/s modules for its 7900 series GPUs. On the call, the company stated, "We plan to introduce our next-generation G7 product on our industry-leading 1ß node in the first half of calendar year 2024."
Setting its sights on evolving graphics processing units in a growing universe of generative AI, Intel announced the release of several papers outlining efforts it is pursuing in what observers say is a multibillion-dollar opportunity in coming years for the semiconductor chip giant.
Intel is presenting seven papers over three conferences covering advances in computer graphics.
The first papers were formally presented at last month's joint conference conducted by the High Performance Graphics (HPG) forum and the Eurographics Symposium on Rendering at the the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. The remaining papers will be discussed at a conference to be held by SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques) in August.
A key focus is on how to improve historically heavy graphics-rendering processes.
The papers discuss two processes in particular, ray tracing and path tracing. Both are used for recreating realistic images, especially in gaming, where accurate representation of the physics of light is critical for natural-looking imagery.
Ray tracing applies algorithms to track the trajectory of light waves and calculate color values, reflections and shadows. The enormous processing power required for real-time rendering is so great that frame rates often take a noticeable hit.
Path tracing can require even heavier processing. It follows multiple rays of light, tracking paths as they reflect off surfaces and interact with lighting among other elements. A process known as Monte Carlo integration helps determine accurate color and shading values.
Intel says these tracing methods can be accomplished more efficiently. One of its papers, "Sampling Visible GGX Normals with Spherical Caps," describes an innovative approach to calculating hemispheric items that accomplished "systematic speed-ups in our benchmarks."
Another paper reveals a 500% speed improvement in renderings of "glittery" objects such as speckled car paints, snow, molded plastics and running water. "Real-Time Rendering of Glinty Appearances using Distributed Binomial Laws on Anisotropic Grids" explains that current approaches achieve stunning realism but "come at a very high cost" in terms of processing power and speed.
In a paper to be discussed at the August SIGGRAPH conference, Intel will review advances in neural graphics, an approach the company says "is revolutionizing the graphics field." It is used to quickly scale high-quality graphics across games and movies.
Intel's Meteor Lake Architecture to Offer Much Higher iGPU Clocks
Due to the platform's mobile-only focus, improved iGPU performance is seemingly a key objective.
By Josh Norem July 12, 2023
Intel is putting the final touches on its upcoming Meteor Lake laptop architecture and has sent qualification samples to some folks. Now a hardware tipster is reporting on the clock speeds of these early samples, and it seems like iGPU performance could be vastly improved over previous offerings thanks to much higher clock speeds. Clocks for the CPU tile are also high, but as a mobile part, not quite as high as current desktop chips. Still, it seems Intel is focusing on mobile GPU performance, which makes sense given the ubiquity of its CPUs in the laptop market and stiff competition from AMD's Phoenix APUs.
The informant du jour is a Chinese hardware journalist who goes by the handle Golden Pig Upgrade. This person has been known to offer pre-release information about new hardware, and it now appears they have had some hands-on time with a Meteor Lake CPU or know someone who has one. According to their post on the social media site Bilibili, they had access to a Meteor Lake qualification sample, which featured a configurable TDP that ranged from 20W to 65W. Additionally, the CPU tile featured a maximum boost clock of 4.8GHz, while the iGPU maxed out at 2.2GHz.
Samsung Beats Micron, Announces GDDR7 Memory for Future GPUs
The company has seemingly beaten Micron to the punch in delivering the next memory standard for HPC, AI, and of course, next-gen GPUs.
By Josh Norem July 19, 2023
Samsung has announced it has completed developing the world's first GDDR7 memory module for high-performance computing (HPC). This paves the way for its adoption by both AMD and Nvidia in future GPUs, which will be arriving in 2024 and beyond. It also marks a turning point for the industry, which has used GDDR6 since 2018, when it first appeared in Nvidia's Turing line of graphics cards. It promises a major leap in performance and efficiency over GDDR6 and is exciting news for fans of pure PC power.
There are now 128-core 256-thread x86 CPUs in the market. That's 2^7 cores. Seven doublings since the Athlon XP 20 years ago. 512 threads with 2 sockets. Probably 1024 in 2 years.
Global economy doubles in product every 15-20 years. Computer performance at a constant price doubles nowadays every 4 years on average. Livestock-as-food will globally stop being a thing by ~2050 (precision fermentation and more). Human stupidity, pride and depravity are the biggest problems of our world.
Bergamo is visibly (by 50%) faster than Genoa in V-Ray and massively (2.37x increase) faster than Sapphire Rapids in V-Ray. One 96-core Genoa chip is enough to match TWO 60-core Sapphire Rapids chips. No wonder Intel is losing money... seems like Intel is defeated. Sapphire Rapids was delayed by 2 years, it was supposed to come out at the beginning of 2021. Sapphire Rapids refresh won't help. AMD is already preparing their next-gen Turin CPUs.
Global economy doubles in product every 15-20 years. Computer performance at a constant price doubles nowadays every 4 years on average. Livestock-as-food will globally stop being a thing by ~2050 (precision fermentation and more). Human stupidity, pride and depravity are the biggest problems of our world.
Newest Ryzen 9 7945HX3D is a 16-core Zen 4 laptop CPU with a base clock of 2.3 GHz and boost up to 5.4 GHz. This means that the base clock is 200 MHz lower than the existing Ryzen 9 7945HX. The CPU has a TDP up to about 75 watts and is equipped with 1 MB L1, 16 MB L2 and 128 MB (2x more than the non-V-cache 7945) of L3 cache. Supports 64 GB of DDR5 with 83.2 GB/s bandwidth. Integrated iGPU Radeon 610M with 128 SPs, 8 TMUs, 4 ROPs and 563.2 gigaflops. AMD claims that their new SKU will be on average 15% faster than the existing 7945HX SKU.
Global economy doubles in product every 15-20 years. Computer performance at a constant price doubles nowadays every 4 years on average. Livestock-as-food will globally stop being a thing by ~2050 (precision fermentation and more). Human stupidity, pride and depravity are the biggest problems of our world.
Intel made headlines last week when it unveiled its earnings for the second quarter of 2023. The company announced it had finally returned to profitability after back-to-back quarters of losses, marking a surprising turnaround for the former 800-pound gorilla of chip making. Buried inside the lengthy earnings report was an update on its future nodes, including its Intel 3 process, expected to debut in 2024. The company announced it has already hit its yield and performance targets for its newest node, which will theoretically allow it to launch both Granite Rapids and Sierra Forest server chips on schedule next year.
To backtrack briefly, Intel is currently using Intel 7 (formerly 10nm) for Raptor Lake, with Intel 4 (formerly 7nm) ramping now for Meteor Lake. After that, there’s Intel 3 (formerly 5nm), which is seen as an evolution of Intel 4, and it's the company’s second generation of extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) CPUs. CEO Pat Gelsinger stated in the earning call that the company’s first EUV node, Intel 4, is “essentially complete” as it’s currently ramping production. Moving on to Intel 3, he noted it’s already hit the company’s defect density (yield) and performance targets and is on track to hit the final targets for both metrics in 2024.
