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Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Debut as First Built on Intel 18A

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Re: Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Debut as First Built on Intel 18A

#141

Post by etempleton »

hnuser123456 wrote: post #90
DrammBA wrote: post #2

> Today at CES, Intel unveiled Intel Core Ultra Series 3 processors, the first AI PC platform built on Intel 18A process technology that was designed and manufactured in the United States. Powering over 200 designs from leading, global partners, Series 3 will be the most broadly adopted and globally available AI PC platform Intel has ever delivered. What in the world is this disaster of an opening paragraph? From the…

It means they did cost cutting on Lunar Lake and are excited to sell a lot of them at similar or higher prices.

Cost cutting? 18a probably has more invested in it then every other process Intel has ever produced combined.

Re: Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Debut as First Built on Intel 18A

#142

Post by undersuit »

davidmurdoch wrote: post #138
sidewndr46 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhat ironically if they were laser focused using infared lasers, wouldn't that imply the company was not very specific at all? Infared is something like 700 nm, which would be huge in terms of transistors

State of the art lithography currently uses extreme ultraviolet, which is 13.5nm. So maybe they are EUV laser-focused, just with many mirrors pointing it in 5 different directions?

Sounds very expensive.

Re: Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Debut as First Built on Intel 18A

#143

Post by davidmurdoch »

undersuit wrote: post #142
davidmurdoch wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

State of the art lithography currently uses extreme ultraviolet, which is 13.5nm. So maybe they are EUV laser-focused, just with many mirrors pointing it in 5 different directions?

Sounds very expensive.

Only like $400 million per fab.

Re: Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Debut as First Built on Intel 18A

#144

Post by ac29 »

phonon wrote: post #119
wtallis wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On package memory is claimed to be a 40% reduction in power consumption. 40% reduction in what power consumption? I don't think memory is usually responsible for even 40% of the total SoC + memory power, and bringing memory on-package doesn't make it consume negative power.

Lunar Lake had a 40% reduction in PHY power use by using memory directly onto the processor packaging (MoP)...roughly going from 3-4 Watts to 2 Watts...

Do you have more information on that? I have a meteor lake laptop (pre-Lunar Lake) and the entire machine averages ~4W most of the time, including screen, wifi, storage and everything else. So, I dont see how the CPU memory controller can use 3-4W unless it is for irrelevantly brief periods of time.

Re: Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Debut as First Built on Intel 18A

#145

Post by etempleton »

skystarman wrote: post #95
alecco wrote: post #65

I really, really want Intel to do well. I like their open oneAPI for unified CPU-GPU programming. It would be nice to have some competition/alternative against NVIDIA and TSMC. But I wont be investing time and money again on Intel while the same anti-engineering beancounter board is still there. For example, they never owned the recent Raptor Lake serious hardware issues and they never showed clients how this will ne…

Great point. This Board nearly destroyed one of the world's great tech companies and they are STILL in charge after not being held accountable or admitting their mistakes over the past decade + The only reason INTC isn't in a death spiral is because the US Govt. won't let that happen

They did reshuffle their board a bit after firing Pat to bring in some people with industry and domain expertise and not just academics / outside industry folks.

Re: Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Debut as First Built on Intel 18A

#146

Post by zozbot234 »

stefanfisk wrote: post #56
gambiting wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Within the same product family and generation, I expect 9 is better than 7 Ah the good old Dell laptop engineering, where the i9 is better on paper, but in reality it throttles within 5 seconds of starting any significant load and the cpu nerfs itself below even i5 performance. Classic Dell move.

Apple had the same problem before they launched the M1. Unless your workloads are extremely bursty the i9 MacBook is almost guaranteed to be slower than the base i7.

The latest iPhone base model performs better than the iPhone Air despite the latter having a Pro chip, because that Pro is so badly throttled due to the device form factor.

Re: Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Debut as First Built on Intel 18A

#147

Post by undersuit »

gambiting wrote: post #22
vbezhenar wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These processors have NPU (Neural Processing Unit) which is supposed to accelerate some small local neural networks. Nvidia RTX GPUs have much more powerful NPUs, so it's more about laptops without discrete GPU.

But like.....what for example. As a normal windows PC user, what kind of software can I run that will benefit from that NPU at all?

Try searching for some like "My mouse pointer is too small"

https://x.com/rfleury/status/2007964012923994364

Re: Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Debut as First Built on Intel 18A

#148

Post by zuhsetaqi »

ZiiS wrote: post #85
stefanfisk wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple had the same problem before they launched the M1. Unless your workloads are extremely bursty the i9 MacBook is almost guaranteed to be slower than the base i7.

Even thier ultra efficent silicon didn't fully solve this; a 16" M4 Pro often outperforms a 14" M4 Max stuck throttling.

First time I’m hearing this. Do you have any sources on this?

Re: Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Debut as First Built on Intel 18A

#149

Post by zozbot234 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #131
wtallis wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ask NVIDIA, inference should always run on the GPU. If you ask anybody else designing chips for consumer devices, they say there's a benefit to having a low-power NPU that's separate from the GPU.

Okay, yeah, and those manufacturers’ opinions are both obvious reflections of market position independent of the merits, what do people who actually run inference say? (Also, the NPUs usually aren't any more separate from the GPU than tensor cores are separate from an Nvidia GPU, they are integrated with the CPU and iGPU.)

If you're running an LLM there's a benefit in shifting prompt pre-processing to the NPU. More generally, anything that's memory-throughput limited should stay on the GPU, while the NPU can aid compute-limited tasks to at least some extent.

The general problem with NPUs for memory-limited tasks is either that the throughput available to them is too low to begin with, or that they're usually constrained to formats that will require wasteful padding/dequantizing when read (at least for newer models) whereas a GPU just does that in local registers.

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