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Cake day: October 25th, 2023

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  • No, but its a far more nuanced situation than the event suggested.

    The hardware is pretty good, but it’s launching late next year, M3 and Meteor Lake are on the market this year. Heck you could argue that Arrow Lake mobile, Lunar Lake and Zen 5 mobile are the actual competition due to release windows.

    The GPU drivers clearly need work as seen by the 2 games they showcased performing worse than AMD’s 780m (and likely Meteor Lake), despite being better in synthetics.

    WoA is still not good, and nearly every Windows application will need to be emulated for the Elite X/any Arm chips. That wont change anytime soon as Qualcomm has no chance of outselling Intel or even AMD. So why would developers cater to Arm when billions of people already have x86 computers and x86 will outsell Arm on PC for the foreseeable future.

    Limited partners with likely limited models. If you want a Windows PC, you can get whatever you want, beefy desktop replacement, ultrabook, even dual touch screen, there are countless options, and countless products on sale. Having the choice of like 12 different Elite X laptops is severely limiting, especially when Windows laptops are all over the place in price points and quality. Obviously if it sells well the number of models will grow, but someone has to early adopt it.

    Pricing will probably be $1200+ for these laptops, that’s premium laptop territory, and WoA is not a premium experience, I would not pay premium pricing to beta test for Qualcomm either. We’ve already seen Meteor Lake’s highest core configuration up for pre-order for under $1000 for one model, and in 6-8 months those laptops will be on sale, and significantly cheaper than brand new Elite X laptops.

    So at the end of the day, it simply doesnt look that compelling, despite the good hardware, there are a lot of other factors that drag it down while competition is stronger than ever.



  • Pretty impressive that Intel is already competing with AMD’s best mobile IGP. Intel would’ve even been ahead if they actually brought the 192 EU Meteor Lake IGP die like they originally marketed. We never got a reason why it went from 192 EU to 128 EU, but there was that rumor that Intel was supposed to use some N3B for MTL but that clearly didnt happen.

    Really excited for this competition. Hopefully AMD brings some good RDNA 3.5 designs for 2024, because Intel will probably bring out a 192 EU Battlemage on N3E die for Arrow Lake mobile late in the year.



  • Not sure I really see the point at this point.

    In terms of performance the 5800x3D lost its gaming crown to raptor lake and Zen 4, which are also much better at MT and oddly cheaper (13600k, 7600(x), 7700x).

    The 5600x3D is on sale at Microcenter for $199, it couldnt even hold MSRP for 3 months. These new SKUs are bins with 400MHz less max boost, nearly a 10% decrease from the exist x3D SKUs. Zen 3 came out 3 years ago, and prices have nosedived so most people on AM4 probably already have Zen 3 at this point.

    I just dont see how these parts fit in. At Microcenter prices are:

    5800x3D: $319

    13600k: $269

    12700k: $269

    7600: $199

    12600k: $199

    5600x3D: $199

    5700x: $169



  • The example you chose is a terrible one, as for those that dont know that behavior is INTENDED by the Handbrake developers, This has been a known thing since Alder Lake’s launch. The developers didnt ever want Handbrake to use 100% of your system, so its flagged as a low priority process so you can still use your PC without it being lagged out while encoding. So the scheduler sees that and will free up the P-cores when you put another window in focus, so you can use your system without lag, while the e-cores encode in the background.

    If you go through the github you’ll see the developers tell people they can override this manually, but the current implementation is exactly how its supposed to work.

    You cant blame Thread Director or Windows scheduling for this specific case with Handbrake as its what the developers intended.



  • If Intel in the response to HUB says “We have no plans to support previous generations for APO”, how else are you supposed to interpret it?

    When a reviewer or journalist reaches out to companies, they usually get a response from someone that has no technical knowledge or insight on future products or changes, unless the inquiry is very serious and then it gets forwarded internally.

    Im not saying this wont possibly stay exclusive to 14th gen and beyond, but this response is almost certainly by someone that has zero knowledge of how APO works, what the team working on APO is doing, and if it will come to older generations and what games they are currently testing.


  • It’s the exact opposite of what you’re saying.

    Intel’s E-cores + Thread Director work perfectly fine 98% of the time, but there are edge cases where the Windows Scheduler cant get it right, even with the hints from Thread Director, and that’s where APO comes in, to manually force the correct scheduling.

    Also lets not pretend that AMD isnt suffering scheduling issues themselves, the 7950x3D and 7900x3D are shunned because they have WORSE scheduling in games as they rely on the Windows Scheduler to just try and figure things out itself, and that doesnt usually work with 2 CCD’s with one having a higher frequency and the other more cache.


  • I actually want to have a 3D construct where I have lots of cache in a base die, and put the advanced computing on top of it into a 3D sandwich, and now you get the best of a cache architecture and the best of the next generation of Moore’s law

    Not the first time Pat has mentioned a desire for a stacked cache product.

    In no way do I think that just because we’ve now demonstrated 18A

    Lunar Lake? There is a debate on whether Lunar Lake is actually 18A or 20A. They demo’d Lunar Lake last month, but with it being so early there is speculation if it was actually on 18A, but this suggests that it actually was?

    Now, on the other side of it, though, I have to create clean separation between these two businesses and that’s what the internal Foundry model is all about, because I need to be able to go to Qualcomm or AMD or—

    Literally calls out AMD as a potential foundry customer and the cliffhanger or would most likely be Nvidia.


  • These sanctions indirectly make Intel and AMD even more competitive in HPC in China due to the performance cap. Take for example Gaudi2, its significantly cheaper than Nvidia’s offerings but also comes up a bit short on performance (ends up being better price to performance than Nvidia). These sanctions would affect Gaudi2 too but not the Chinese variant Intel is making, and with the U.S. government setting a performance cap suddenly the other metrics become far more important, like pricing and availability.


  • There are so many issues with this video im not sure where to start or even to bother trying to address the video.

    So i’ll just keep to the one big question in the room, what is Intel going to do to against competitive Arm designs?:

    The same thing they are already doing… Despite desktop having a raptor lake refresh, Intel hasnt been sitting still. The roadmap of nodes, new architectures and introducing new design philosophies is more aggressive than Intel has been in the last decade. AMD is providing competition, and Apple too. Intel isnt sitting and doing buybacks while they struggle to improve like they used to, capital is being pulled from other divisions to focus their core foundry and CPU design business. Did Intel predict that maybe Qualcomm would have a competitive SoC for 2024? Maybe? But they’ve already been planning to compete with Apple and AMD, so it changes very little. Also its not like Intel, AMD or Apple could scrap their roadmaps and come up with completely new designs to make sure they bury Qualcomm, all these companies already have designs in motion for the next 4ish generations. Just like Qualcomm, AMD and Apple wont be able to instantly react if Royal Core puts Intel far out in front.

    We also dont even know if Qualcomm can legally use their Nuvia designs, Arm has their lawsuit scheduled for later in 2024. If Qualcomm loses none of this matters, as Snapdragon X will be dead after 1 generation.


  • The more I look into the details the more gotacha’s I see.

    LPDDR5X @ 8533Mbps, which is going to be expensive and affects every benchmark run, even Cinebench 2024 is now memory sensitive. Likely no upgradeable SODIMM memory options for OEMs.

    Considerably higher Linux scores than Windows.

    GPU benchmarks perform better than the actual gaming demos they’ve shown (seen in other previews)

    Geekbench and Cinebench 2024 natively support Arm, very few Windows applications and games do, they all have to be emulated from x86.

    80W needed to edge out competition was more than I thought these chips were using.

    Its a very good showing, but I question if it actually will be enough to convince people to use Windows on Arm, when Meteor Lake and Zen 5 should be very competitive.