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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

#181

Post by einsteinx2 »

notenlish wrote: post #70
klardotsh wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nearly all modern SOCs have built in RAM now. Apple Silicon does it, AMD Strix Halo and beyond do it, Intel Lunar Lake does it, most ARM SOCs from vendors other than Apple do it… Now, unified memory shared freely between CPU and GPU would be cool, like Apple and AMD SH have, if that’s what you meant.

Isnt Strix Halo and apple's m series a bit different. Iirc you need to choose how much ram will be allocated to the igpu, whereas on mac it is all handled dynamically.

You can also change it manually on macOS [0], though yes by default it’s automatic but has a much lower limit (I think 2/3 is total RAM or something).

[0]: https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/discussions/2182#discu...

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

#182

Post by MBCook »

lostlogin wrote: post #176
kergonath wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m not sure I hear people call MacOS X 10.10 “ten ten ten”. I think I remember them calling it “ten ten” verbally.

So you’d say “MacOS ten ten”.

At least that’s what I’m used to, it is entirely possible that’s what other people said and you would write it that way. No one wrote “MacOS X.10” or “MacOS X .10” but they would write “MacOS X 10.10”.

So yeah it’s all a bit of a mess. There’s a reason people often use the name of the release, like Snow Leopard or Tahoe, instead of the number numbers.

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

#183

Post by etempleton »

aurareturn wrote: post #177
etempleton wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Didn’t realize that, but they are trailing a bit. Will be interesting to see when the first products ship. My understanding is it will be AMD servers.

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

#184

Post by aurareturn »

etempleton wrote: post #183
aurareturn wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TSMC commenced N2 mass production last month.

Didn’t realize that, but they are trailing a bit. Will be interesting to see when the first products ship. My understanding is it will be AMD servers.

TSMC is not trailing. They’re so far ahead that Intel’s 18A is equal to their N5 family in density.

Therefore, N2 is 2 generations ahead of 18A by definition.

Therefore power advantage you’re referring to is backside power delivery. This is a need long term but it doesn’t bring as much power benefits as you think. TSMC’s customers don’t appear to demand this feature as highly since it’s been getting pushed back to 16A. The design change for designers don’t seem worth it yet.

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

#185

Post by aurareturn »

Numerlor wrote: post #178
aurareturn wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. > Luna…

  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.
It literally throttles in every benchmark shown. Some more than others. It throttles even more than the older Intel SoC LNL replaced.

  LNL is N3B, Apple is on N3E which is a slight improvement for efficency
Still the same family. The difference is tiny. Not nearly enough to make up the vast difference between LNL and M4. Note that N3B actually has higher density than N3E.

  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.
LNL doesn't even have AVX512.

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

#186

Post by MBCook »

ZiiS wrote: post #180
MBCook wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Ultra isn’t always faster.

Apple’s spotty record on the Ultras (they haven’t released one every generation) makes things harder for comparisons without looking at benchmarks.

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

#187

Post by etempleton »

aurareturn wrote: post #184
etempleton wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn’t realize that, but they are trailing a bit. Will be interesting to see when the first products ship. My understanding is it will be AMD servers.

TSMC is not trailing. They’re so far ahead that Intel’s 18A is equal to their N5 family in density. Therefore, N2 is 2 generations ahead of 18A by definition. Therefore power advantage you’re referring to is backside power delivery. This is a need long term but it doesn’t bring as much power benefits as you think. TSMC’s customers don’t appear to demand this feature as highly since it’s been getting pushed back to 16…

By measure of density, but by performance to watt 18a is likely superior to n3. So I don’t think it is fair to say they are cleanly 2 generations ahead, more like 1 or 1.5 ahead now. Yes, n2 / n3 are overall more mature and well rounded processes at this point in time. But this is a big step for Intel and if they can prove 18a they could start bleeding. Bit of market share from TSMC.
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