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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

#171

Post by gambiting »

mrandish wrote: post #158
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.

Yeah, putting an i9 in any laptop that's not an XL gaming rig with big fans is very nearly always a waste of money (there might exist a few rare exceptions for some oddball workloads). Manufacturers selling i9s in thin & light laptops at an ultra price premium may fall just short of the legal definition of fraud but it's as unconscionable as snake-oil audiophile companies selling $500 USB cables.

Tbf 2 jobs ago I had a Dell enterprise workstation laptop, an absolute behemoth of a thing, it was like 3.5kg, it was the thicker variant of the two available with extra cooling, specifically sold to companies like ours needing that extra firepower, and it had a 20 core i9, 128GB of DDR5 CAMM ram, and a 3080Ti - I think the market price of that thing was around £14k, it was insane. And it had exactly that kind of behaviour I described - I would start compiling something in Visual Studio, I would briefly see all cores jump to 4GHz and then immediately throttle down to 1.2GHz, to a point where the entire laptop was unresponsive while the compilation was ongoing. It was a joke of a machine - I think that's more of a fraud than what you described, because companies like ours were literally buying hundreds of these from Dell and they were literally unsuitable for their advertised use.

(to add insult to the injury - that 3080Ti was literally pointless as the second you started playing any game the entire system would throttle so hard you had extreme stuttering in any game, it was like driving a lamborghini with a 5 second fuel reserve. And given that I worked at a games studio that was kinda an essential feature).

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

#172

Post by simulator5g »

DannyBee wrote: post #107
throwaway81523 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't we just focus on everything?

I think you mean laser focus on everything. Maybe they have a prism.

I’m sure they have something like a prism. Perhaps, a PRISM.

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

#173

Post by ajross »

Tostino wrote: post #167
ajross wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, you're talking about the design of Panther Lake, the CPU IC. No one cares, it's a CPU. The news here is the launch of the Intel 18A semiconductor process and the discussion as to if and how it narrows or closes the gap with TSMC. Trying to play this news off as "only cost cutting" is, to be blunt, insane. That's not what's happening at all.

I'm not GP, but I think that it really doesn't matter if Intel is able to sell this process to other companies. But if they're only producing their own chips on it, that's quite a valid criticism.

And for the fourth time, it may be a valid "criticism" in the sense of "Does Intel Suck or Rule?". It does not validate the idea that this product release, which introduces the most competitive process from this company in over a decade, is merely a "cost reduction" change.

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

#174

Post by mrguyorama »

Marsymars wrote: post #129
KeplerBoy wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we calling tensor cores NPUs now?

How did we end up with Tensor Cores and a Tensor SoC from two different companies?

The same way we ended up with both Groq and Grok branded LLMs

Maybe these people aren't that creative....

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

#175

Post by olyjohn »

cherioo wrote: post #27
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…

AI PC has been in the buzz for more than 2 years now (despite itself being a near useless concept), and intel has like 75% marketshare for laptop. Both of those are well with in norm for an intel marketing piece. It’s not really meant for consumer. Who would even visit newsroom.intel.com?

CES stands for Consumer Electronics Show last I checked.

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

#176

Post by lostlogin »

kergonath wrote: post #165
MBCook wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. MacOS X was the marketing name. But it was pronounced 10, just a stylization with Roman numerals. The version number the OS reported always said 10.whatever. Exactly as you said.

Yes, and you did sound silly when saying it out loud the official way (OS ten ten ten was a famous one, for Yosemite).

I stand corrected. I thought the X(10) was part of the version number, not a prefix that got added.

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

#177

Post by aurareturn »

etempleton wrote: post #151
aurareturn wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So 18A is roughly TSMC N4P. N4P is part of the N5 family.

18a supposedly has some advantages in power efficiency and some other areas compared to TSMCs approach. Ultimately, TSMC doesn’t have a 2nm product yet, so it is a pretty big deal Intel is competitive again with TSMC latest. Samsung is incredibly far behind at this point.

TSMC commenced N2 mass production last month.

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

#178

Post by Numerlor »

aurareturn wrote: post #69
Numerlor wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is duplicating the macbook experience because Apple is integrating both hardware and os, while others are fighting Windows, and OEMs being horrible at firmware. LNL should only power throttle when you go to power saver modes, battery life will suffer when you let it boost high on all cores but you're not getting great battery life when doing heavy all core loads either way. Overall MT should be better on Panth…

LNL throttles heavily even on the default profile, not just power saver modes.[0] Meanwhile, Qualcomm's X Elite 1 did not throttle. Lunar Lake uses TSMC N3 for compute tile. There is no node advantage. Yet, M4 is 42% faster in ST and M5 is 50% faster based on Geekbench 6 ST. [0] https://www.pcworld.com/article/2463714/tested-intels-lunar-...

> LNL throttles heavily even on the default profile, not just power saver modes.

This does also show it not changing in other benchmarks, but I don't have a LNL laptop myself to test things myself, just going off of what people I know tested. It's still also balanced so best performance power plan would I assume push it to use its cores normally - on windows laptops I've owned this could be done with a hotkey.

> Lunar Lake uses TSMC N3 for compute tile. There is no node advantage.

LNL is N3B, Apple is on N3E which is a slight improvement for efficency

> Yet, M4 is 42% faster in ST and M5 is 50% faster based on Geekbench 6 ST.

Like I said they simply have a better architecture at the moment, which also more focused on client that GB benchmarks because their use cases are narrower. If you compare something like optimized SIMD Intel/AMD will come out on top with perf/watt.

And I'm not sure why being behind the market leader would make one lose faith in Intel, their most recent client fuckup was raptor lake instability and I'd say that was handled decently. For now nothing else that'd indicate Windows ARM getting to Apple level battery performance without all of the vertical integration

ETA: looking at things the throttling behaviour seems to be very much OEM dependent, though the tradeoffs will always remain the same

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

#179

Post by hnuser123456 »

ajross wrote: post #173
Tostino wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not GP, but I think that it really doesn't matter if Intel is able to sell this process to other companies. But if they're only producing their own chips on it, that's quite a valid criticism.

And for the fourth time, it may be a valid "criticism" in the sense of "Does Intel Suck or Rule?". It does not validate the idea that this product release, which introduces the most competitive process from this company in over a decade, is merely a "cost reduction" change.

It's only as exciting as a cost reduction because they're playing catch-up by trying to not need to outsource their highest performance silicon. Let me know when Intel gets perf/watt to be high enough to be of interest to Apple, gamers, or anyone who isn't just buying a basic PC because their old one died, or an Intel server because that's what they've always had.

Every single performance figure in TFA is compared to their own older generations, not to competitors.

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

#180

Post by ZiiS »

MBCook wrote: post #133
ZiiS wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I can’t comment on that. But at least you always know an A7 is better than an A6 or an A4. The M4 is better than the M3 and M1. The suffixes make it more complicated, but at least within a suffix group the rule still holds.

But if you buy a Mac Studio today, you have to choose a M4 Max or a much faster M3 Ultra.
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