Looks like Intel gets it wrong with higher latencies whereas the AMD part is a single chip let. AVX512 though screams on this chip.
Intel Core I7-11700K Review: Blasting Off with Rocket Lake
151–160 of 264 posts
Re: Intel Core I7-11700K Review: Blasting Off with Rocket Lake
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, he's been saying the sky was falling for some time, and it turns out he was pretty accurate in his statements on Intel's problems. This review makes it clear that unless Intel magically gets a process improvement they're entirely screwed. This is precisely the same kind of design issue that hit with the latter end of the P4 era, where thermal limitations were so severe that they were crippling the chips. I'd hav…
Are they really? AMD will make gains for sure at this rate, but TSMC can't serve the whole market. Intel owns fabs, and these rocket lake chips will sell to the mainstream just fine. I expect intel's fabs to be a big asset in these COVID times with sold out computers.
TSMC is making huge investments into new fabs. And AMD doesn't have to take the whole market. They just have to take enough that Intel loses too much economy of scale to sell at profitable prices. Intel's fabs don't mean anything if their volumes are too low-- and they're dropping rapidly.
Their fixed costs & massive R&D requirements have to be paid for by shrinking revenue: Projected 1st quarter 2021 revenue is down about 12% over the same quarter in 2020. This isn't COVID-related: AMD's projected revenue for the same period jumped 80% year over year.
Intel is far from okay. They are far from having a safe path due to production bottlenecks by competitors: TSMC's 7nm capacity-- which is what AMD uses-- is on track to increase 18% in just the next quarter alone. I don't know how sustainable that production growth is, but it doesn't have to last long when they're bringing new fabs online and Samsung's fabs may be taking on some of Apple's M1 production, further freeing up TSMC capacity.
I don't think I'm saying anything particularly controversial or surprising or new when I say that Intel probably has about 2 years to figure out their own fab problems before they're well out of things for the next decade or so, having to claw their way back the way AMD has done.
Re: Intel Core I7-11700K Review: Blasting Off with Rocket Lake
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
This chips really don't seem to be a good use of Intel's limited fab capacity. The CPU cores are substantially larger while offering basically no benefits other than AVX-512 support. It looks like Intel would have been better off pairing the upgraded IO and integrated graphics with their existing, smaller Skylake cores.
https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph16535/111160.png Pretty much every Rocket-lake score is faster than Skylake across the board. I'd definitely buy a Rocket Lake over any old Skylake based off of these reviews. Rocket Lake seems a wee-bit inferior to Zen3, but AMD Zen3 is pretty much sold out, so if you need a computer, Intel is still there.
But Intel doesn't need the incremental performance increase in order to sell their processors. With AMD so supply-limited, Intel should be trying to sell smaller, cheaper processors that they can produce in larger volume with higher margins.
Re: Intel Core I7-11700K Review: Blasting Off with Rocket Lake
#154Anyone have any idea when intel's 10nm will hit desktop? Are they making any progress at all? Are they just planning on skipping straight to 7 at this point?
a few months after the first fusion reactor starts producing power for the grid /s
Re: Intel Core I7-11700K Review: Blasting Off with Rocket Lake
#155Anyone have any idea when intel's 10nm will hit desktop? Are they making any progress at all? Are they just planning on skipping straight to 7 at this point?
Very theoretically, ADL-S is meant to be released in September. This seems a bit surprising, given that people won't typically by buying systems with RKL until April - a very tight window.
RKL might turn out to have been a stop-gap measure that was only semi-needed. A lot of the hyperventilating about how much trouble Intel is in here (which is, frankly, moderately justified) ignores the fact that the desktop segment just isn't that important. I mean, it's important to me. I've been waiting for a new desktop for a while (and, despite being ex-Intel, may go Team Red). But the money is in laptops and servers. Desktop is clearly not high in the queue.
It's at the point where I'll either go Team Red (and probably buy a TGL NUC for AVX-512 experimentation) or buy an 8-core TGL "desktop replacement laptop". The power consumption is ridiculous. A lot of my argument for wanting a desktop is not having laptop-style power management wobbles while trying to do fine-grain performance benchmarking, but what kind of wobbles am I going to have on a system like RKL? 291W? 104C? Yeesh.
Supposedly the issues are fixed with 10nm in 10++ or whatever it's called (SuperFin?). We're not going to learn about that until September or whenever ADL tips up.
Re: Intel Core I7-11700K Review: Blasting Off with Rocket Lake
#156I see nothing in this review that would make me choose the Intel part over a Ryzen 5800X.
Price is the biggest factor. You can get 10 cores with Intel for cheaper than 8 with AMD, plus with Intel you get integrated graphics as well which is really important right now considering the GPU shortage. Also, Intel allows virtual GPUs for virtualization in QEMU which AMD won't do.
AMD needs to integrate basic gpu in its higher end CPUs. With the current gpu prices where even old low end models are selling for double it will make sense for anyone needing good desktop experience without need for a fast gpu otherwise AMD is missing a market segment.
Re: Intel Core I7-11700K Review: Blasting Off with Rocket Lake
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why didn’t you just go with AMD?
OP is implying the i5 was Pareto-optimal in terms of price and performance.
Exactly. In 2020 the 10400f was about 40% more expensive; now Intel is forced to lower the price of their entire lineup to compete against AMD. These days, at most performance tiers, Intel+mobo combo are slightly cheaper than AMD's equivalent.
Of course, Intel's CPUs have less PCIE lanes, no ECC support, lessor upgrade path, generates more heat, etc.
Finally my old desktop was Intel and I am working on a lot of kernel/VM stuff. I don't want to switch architecture halfway. I did that before and it was painful.
Re: Intel Core I7-11700K Review: Blasting Off with Rocket Lake
#158Intel is on my shitlist now for their new "Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity" with Microsoft and Adobe. I don't care how fast their CPUs are, they are dead to me.
Wait, this just looks like cryptographically signing pictures. What's so scary about that? You can do it today from your terminal if you feel like it.
I guess I agree that the 'trusted computing' stuff it seems like they're trying to do is a little scary, but the tech isn't really there yet, at least not on the desktop (look at the fiasco that is Intel SGX) and it's happening with or without whatever this CAI thing is.
I guess a world where your iPhone's camera sends signed frames to the processor's secure enclave which processes them and signs them with a key signed by Apple is... a little different from today? They do basically this for Face ID today.
Re: Intel Core I7-11700K Review: Blasting Off with Rocket Lake
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
GPU is not a prerequisite unless you're into gaming or ML. For someone like me, a GeForce 8800GT is sufficient, but I'll take all the cores and RAM I can get.
Some form of GPU with modern display out is needed for some multi-monitor setups (mostly 4k), even if you don't do ML or gaming. Unfortunately there are also many motherboards out there that only support running one 4k monitor at 60 Hz even if the integrated graphics support more.
if you are going to use the GPU solely for the video (output) acceleration then you still have many options that can do that but (fortunately?) can't mine digital currency efficiently.
Re: Intel Core I7-11700K Review: Blasting Off with Rocket Lake
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there any advantage to using ECC for a gaming or desktop PC?
Given the choice, why would anyone ever want RAM that can flip bits undetected? It's basically a design flaw.
ECC RAM is more expensive - from a very quick search looks like 16gb ddr4 2666mhz would be about 30% higher price for ECC.
I've used non-ECC RAM for my entire life so far and bit flipping has never caused an obvious error for me, so if I'm going to pay more for ECC RAM I'd need a good reason to do so.