An interview with CEO Pat Gelsinger about Intel’s progress in his tenure, and why he believes that Intel can compete with TSMC for process leadership. Plus, mistakes that were made, why Intel…
Pushing silicon chips way past their optimum voltage/frequency curve, just to match the performance of 2X more power efficient competition, is hardly “progress.” Same goes to brand renames.
It’s Phenom I vs. Core 2 Quad all over again, only the roles have been reversed!
For example, AMD’s 2.5GHz Phenom I X4 9850 required 125W. Less than 6 months later, Intel released the 2.8GHz Core 2 Quad Q9550S which ran at 65W and had superior IPC to boot.
And then there was the Sandy Bridge, released just 2 years later, which could easily break the 4GHz barrier with stock voltages and cooler.
Intel - or rather their foundry - really need to step-up their game. Otherwise, Zen5 - with its rumored ~20-30% IPC uplift - is going to make things very difficult for Intel.
For perspective, Sandy Bridge had 20% and 25% superior IPC to Nehalem and Core, respectively.
Intel aren’t pushing any of their current chips nearly as far on the diminishing returns on the V/F curve as AMD is with the 7000X chips. Raptor Lake is barely at 3.5 GHz at 0.9V, Zen 4 is easily hitting 4 GHz at 0.9V
Well, for one thing, you just proved my point! Clearly, chips fabbed on Intel 7 have far higher leakage than TSMC N6, hence they require more voltage at any given frequency to stay stable.
Secondly, voltage is just one side of the equation. You also have to consider current because of Ohm’s Law. For example, an RTX4090 running at 1V will have far higher power consumption than an RTX4060, also running at 1V.
And, clearly, Intel is injecting far more current into their chips than AMD which not only translates into high power consumption and heat (more amps = more heat) but also compromises long-term longevity of the silicon die.
It’s the price Intel pays for making chips that clock higher than AMD on a less dense node. Meteor Lake is significantly denser, and doesn’t clock as high, so it’ll be interesting to see if Intel has managed to improve performance/W.
Not that AMD is in a great spot either, even the monolithic chips seem to have quite high idle power draw. The Snapdragon X Elite will hopefully shake up the laptop market significantly.
I’ve no idea why all of a sudden everyone’s concerned about idle power consumption!
Anyhow, it’s just a myth that Zen4 has high idle power draw than Raptor Lake. Per Guru3D, the Ryzen 9 7950X3D has a total system idle of 78W, compared to i9-13900K’s 69W. That’s only 13%.
And in single and multli-threaded application, the 7950X3D draws 114W and 264W, respectively, compared to 13900K’s 124W and a whopping 368W.
And let’s not forget that the 7950X3D is a chiplet based CPU with high-bandwidth interconnects and a massive 32+96MB 3D V-Cache on-board. The fact that it’s only marginally more power hungry than the monolithic 13900K at idle is quite an achievement.
Pushing silicon chips way past their optimum voltage/frequency curve, just to match the performance of 2X more power efficient competition, is hardly “progress.” Same goes to brand renames.
It’s Phenom I vs. Core 2 Quad all over again, only the roles have been reversed!
For example, AMD’s 2.5GHz Phenom I X4 9850 required 125W. Less than 6 months later, Intel released the 2.8GHz Core 2 Quad Q9550S which ran at 65W and had superior IPC to boot.
And then there was the Sandy Bridge, released just 2 years later, which could easily break the 4GHz barrier with stock voltages and cooler.
Intel - or rather their foundry - really need to step-up their game. Otherwise, Zen5 - with its rumored ~20-30% IPC uplift - is going to make things very difficult for Intel.
For perspective, Sandy Bridge had 20% and 25% superior IPC to Nehalem and Core, respectively.
Intel aren’t pushing any of their current chips nearly as far on the diminishing returns on the V/F curve as AMD is with the 7000X chips. Raptor Lake is barely at 3.5 GHz at 0.9V, Zen 4 is easily hitting 4 GHz at 0.9V
Well, for one thing, you just proved my point! Clearly, chips fabbed on Intel 7 have far higher leakage than TSMC N6, hence they require more voltage at any given frequency to stay stable.
Secondly, voltage is just one side of the equation. You also have to consider current because of Ohm’s Law. For example, an RTX4090 running at 1V will have far higher power consumption than an RTX4060, also running at 1V.
And, clearly, Intel is injecting far more current into their chips than AMD which not only translates into high power consumption and heat (more amps = more heat) but also compromises long-term longevity of the silicon die.
It’s the price Intel pays for making chips that clock higher than AMD on a less dense node. Meteor Lake is significantly denser, and doesn’t clock as high, so it’ll be interesting to see if Intel has managed to improve performance/W.
Not that AMD is in a great spot either, even the monolithic chips seem to have quite high idle power draw. The Snapdragon X Elite will hopefully shake up the laptop market significantly.
I’ve no idea why all of a sudden everyone’s concerned about idle power consumption!
Anyhow, it’s just a myth that Zen4 has high idle power draw than Raptor Lake. Per Guru3D, the Ryzen 9 7950X3D has a total system idle of 78W, compared to i9-13900K’s 69W. That’s only 13%.
And in single and multli-threaded application, the 7950X3D draws 114W and 264W, respectively, compared to 13900K’s 124W and a whopping 368W.
And let’s not forget that the 7950X3D is a chiplet based CPU with high-bandwidth interconnects and a massive 32+96MB 3D V-Cache on-board. The fact that it’s only marginally more power hungry than the monolithic 13900K at idle is quite an achievement.
Alder/Raptor Lake is also an idle stinker. There’s a reason battery life has regressed since 11th gen Intel