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- Oct 24, 2013
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- i9-13900K
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- RX 6900 XT
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I think many of acknowledge that Intel was asleep during the quad core years. An 8700K was barely faster than a 6700K and the 6700K only got slower because of Spectre and Meltdown microcode updates that fixed security but botched performance. Skylake 14nm was a beast for its time. Intel couldn't ramp 10 nm to volume production for several years, they wanted to move before EUV was available for mass production, and used more masks and quad patterning and so forth adding much more manufacturing complexity for its 10 nm process that led to poor yields and they fell way behind.
But Alder Lake finally realizes the 10nm ambitions and is a major step forward from Skylake/Comet Lake and I think that is an achievement. Of course AMD Zen 3 Core design that's built on TSMC 7nm is more power efficient and AMD has done great things with its 5800X3d, stacking cache in the 3rd dimension.
But given where Intel was 2 years ago with 14nm+++++++ and no sign of a working 10nm process, then with Rocket Lake's insane power consumption that was still slower than Zen3 and a step backwards from Comet Lake (which had up to 10 cores, rocket lake only had up to 8), some thought Intel might fold or outsource its chips completely similar to what AMD does with TSMC. So Alder Lake is a breath of fresh air with that backdrop. Yes power consumption is still high under an all-core load but during gaming and idle the power consumption is quite well actually. And the point is 10nm is finally working and has entered volume production. Raptor Lake is coming late this year and represents a further refinement of 10nm. Meteor Lake, Intel 14th gen for 2023, is already booting windows, linux, chromeOS. Intel showed off Meteor Lake at its Vision Day this week... It is Intel's first EUV design and also its first disaggregated design with tiles. The CPU tile is built on Intel 4 (its old 7nm) and other tiles such as the GPU tile are built using a combination of TSMC 5 and 3 nm processes. Intel once announced that its 7nm process (now Intel 4) was very delayed, but it seems to have worked out the bugs and Intel is about to productize and mass produce multi-chip modules based in part on its 7nm in 2023. They're making progress. As they shrink the nodes, power consumption per watt should improve as well. Let's watch and see.
Companies sometimes stumble. AMD stumbled with Piledriver and Bulldozer but it came back. Apple once upon a time stumbled when it fired Steve Jobs and needed a $250M loan from Microsoft to stay afloat. But it came back. Intel stumbled with 10nm and trying to shrink the node without using EUV. But Intel is coming back and I think that sentiment is what we're celebrating. Not that we're absolutely ecstatic with the status quo, but that we're happy to see Intel come back and finally offer competition again. Zen 3 (5950x) vs Comet Lake (10900K) was a bloodbath at first. A competitive Intel will discipline AMD's performance offerings and prices.
For instance, the mighty 5950x used to sell at $850 at Microcenter during the heights of the pandemic and was usually sold out. Even when it was in stock, it was selling above MSRP. Then the 12900K came out and competed extremely strongly in many creator workloads, toppling the 5950x in certain benchmarks like Cinebench and toppled it in terms of gaming. And in the midst of strong competition from Intel, the mighty 5950x declined in price from well over $800 to now $569.99 at Microcenter. That is competition at play, AMD had no incentive to lower prices until a strong offering from Intel emerged. A strong x86 vs ARM will also keep Apple/Qualcomm on their toes to offer great products too.
And in the end, with healthy competition, consumers win.
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