Raptor Lake will have a few optimization gains but performance improvements will primarily come from more little cores and higher clock speeds. In other words, even more power draw.
Add to this what appears to be a totally botched ARC GPU launch and a no contest in the server market….
I think we are about to witness a Titanic moment for Intel. Intel is of course to big to sink but suddenly IDM 2.0 is starting to look like Gelsinger’s life raft plan.
How many “titanic moments” for Intel in the past 25 years? I’ve lost count.
Raptor Lake will feature “decent single-core and massive multi-core performance uplifts”. The power usage is high, but that will drop going to Intel 4 with Meteor Lake next year. Intel has faced much worse conditions. I don’t see this as a disaster for Intel, nor a big win. Just more typical Intel meandering along.
ARC being a failure, no surprise there. Intel took a shot and missed again, but no long term damage.
From your link:
Intel’s 13th Gen Raptor Lake Desktop CPUs are expected to bring decent single-core and massive multi-core performance uplifts but we aren’t expecting IPC gains since the underlying architecture is the same. What has changed though are the clock speeds, cache sizes & core configurations, all three of which are resulting in the performance uplift versus the 12th Generation Alder Lake CPUs.
ARC being a failure, no surprise there. Intel took a shot and missed again, but no long term damage.
I think the real deadline is when they are ready to integrate a TSMC N3 GPU into the Meteor Lake desktop APU… The drivers need to be ready by then. I don’t think many people buy laptops for higher end gaming so if the drivers are still a problem for gamers when the laptop part launches INTC should be okay.
Alan
I think the real deadline is when they are ready to integrate a TSMC N3 GPU into the Meteor Lake desktop APU… The drivers need to be ready by then. I don’t think many people buy laptops for higher end gaming so if the drivers are still a problem for gamers when the laptop part launches INTC should be okay.
Um, there is a significant market for gaming laptops. In Japan and lots of other areas, there is not room for a desktop setup, but a gaming laptop fits better–and can be folded up and put in a drawer if tabletop area is needed. There is another market, mostly in the US, for gaming conventions and competitions, where participants will bring their own laptop systems.
This market has pretty much consisted of AMD APUs and Intel CPUs with discrete graphics. The discrete graphics for the most part come from nVidia, but there are some AMD laptop discrete graphics, and Intel has been hoping to take back the GPU slot in laptops with Intel CPUs.
This is the market that Intel will lose, or rather not gain if they can’t get decent driver performance soon. In addition, AMD is biting into nVidia’s discrete laptop graphics market share with their APUs. Rembrandt is a significant improvement over AMD’s Vega-based GPUs in previous APU chips. We could argue over how close RDNA2 and FSR in Rembrandt get to separate GPUs–it is not there yet but much closer. The important point for Intel (and nVidia) is that Phoenix Point, the Zen 4 laptop chip, should reach parity with mid-range laptop discrete GPUs. That will close off the market for discrete GPUs for laptops, at least for Intel. (There will also be lower-end Zen 4 APUs, but they won’t be competing with discrete graphics.)
Will Phoenix Point ship this year? Sort of the wrong question. The right question is when Phoenix Point will replace Rembrandt in new laptop models. Probably in 1Q or 2Q2023. At that point, the market for discrete laptop GPUs will dry up. Intel will still show up as the APU in lots of low-end and thin and light laptops. There will still be a few high-end gaming laptops with discrete GPUs, but there won’t be a large enough market to cover the design costs for new laptop GPUs.
With the cooling solutions that are available for a laptop, it seems keeping the GPU and CPU physically distant would provide more performance for the gamer. I would expect the laptop gaming market to continue to use a discrete GPU. OTOH, I think you can get an adequate heat sink on the APU in a desktop to do the job for midlevel gamers. I suspect the high end gamers (300W+ GPU’s) will still be discrete in desktops.
Alan
I have a gaming laptop. Surprise, game designer buys a great AMD rig. And yeah, in some games heat was a problem. So I bought a laptop fan, which also raises the screen a bit (good for my ergonomics). I haven’t had to plug in the fan this year (playing gentler on the GPU games) but when I need it, it’s there. I know AMD laptops have improved in every way, but my twitch has ditched me. I think a laptop fan is very common for gamers; this is my third. It’s better than heat crashing. I once fixed my boss’s crash problems by putting his laptop atop two cardboard boxes so there was lots of airflow underneath, so this is neither a new problem nor a rare one.