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Will Intel’s Kaby Lake Outshine AMD’s ZEN?
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A Wall Street analyst, with no thought to his personal safety, has dared to question what AMD fans have been telling us for ages – Zen will bring about peace on earth, cure cancer and above all give Intel a good kicking.
However, Christopher Danely with Citigroup has bravely claimed that with its “Kaby Lake” family of processors, Intel remains a “step-function ahead of AMD Zen when Zen chips are released in Q416.”
He also doubts the benchmark stats that AMD presented to promote Zen’s capabilities relative to Intel’s microprocessors claiming that the AMD controlled benchmark compared an engineering sample of a Zen processor that has not been released yet against a three-month old Intel processor, with both chips clocked at 3.0 Ghz.
“We note the maximum speed for the Intel chip is 3.2 GHz. The result showed AMD completing the benchmark 2 per cent faster than Intel, implying higher CPU efficiency on a “clock for clock” basis. AMD kept both 8 core chips at the same clock speed of 3.0 Ghz, below the native clock speed of the Intel chip. The benchmark result showed the Zen Summit Ridge processor completing the Blender rendering benchmark in 48.07 seconds, 2 per cent ahead of Intel Broadwell-E chip’s time of 49.06 seconds. We note this is only one benchmark using a custom workload performed at an AMD event under controlled conditions, and therefore cannot be verified by third parties and does not represent expected results under all workloads, Danely said.
Instead he thinks that Chipzilla will benefit from its process technology lead while AMD’s manufacturing partner, Global Foundries, which has a “spotty track record.”
“After several of delays and eventually failing to develop 20nm and 14nm on its own, GlobalFoundries entered into a partnership agreement with Samsung in April 2014 to adopt Samsung’s 14nm FinFET process. Despite using the same tools, recipes, and materials as Samsung’s 14nm process, products built on GlobalFoundries’ 14nm did not appear until earlier this year, roughly a year after Samsung released its Exynos 7420 SoC built on its 14nm process,” Danely pointed out.
Since the partnership agreement with Samsung does not include 10nm or lower nodes, we think the technology gap between AMD and Intel will widen again once Intel migrates to 10nm next year.
Meanwhile Intel released its new Kaby Lake chips on an improved 14+nm process this month, featuring a 15 per cent performance improvement over its Skylake chips. Kaby Lake chips deliver up to 12 per cent faster productivity performance and 19 per cent faster web performance over comparable Skylake chips
“We expect independent benchmarks to show Intel’ performance is a step function ahead of AMD Zen when Zen chips are released in 4Q16,” he said.
Below you will find lots of rantings from Intel and AMD fanboys and we expect the language to be colourful. Those of a sensitive disposition might want to look away now.
Courtesy-Fud
Intel Discusses SoFIA
Intel has shed more light on its upcoming SoFIA SoC, which stands for Smart of Feature Phone with Intel Architecture. For SEO purposes we’ll just call it Sophie.
The SoFIA project is being spearheaded by Intel’s Singapore office and CNET had a chance to catch up with recent developments. The chip was announced back in December, but details were sketchy and to some extent they still are.
SoFIA is going after MediaTek and Qualcomm in the mainstream and entry level segments. It features a dual-core Silvermont processor on a 28nm die. This is where it gets interesting, as Intel simply doesn’t do 28nm. SoFIA will be manufactured by TSMC instead, but Intel is planning to build SoFIA chips in-house in the future. The company has already made it clear that it is moving to 14nm, so there is a good chance the next generation chip will be a 14nm design churned out by Intel fabs.
SoFIA has an integrated 3G modem, but a 4G version is coming later. Bluetooth and WiFi are on other chips. Lack of 4G connectivity might not be a big deal for potential SoFIA customers, as the chip is supposed to go after entry level smartphone designs. Intel told CNET that SoFIA could pave the way to $50 smartphones in Asian markets and realistically nobody expects a $50 phone to feature 4G connectivity.
It is hard to say anything about SoFIA’s real-world performance. Quad-core tablet processors based on the Silvermont architecture can still hold their ground against many high-end ARM SoCs, so a dual-core version optimised for smartphones should have no trouble keeping up with lesser ARM parts.
Haswell Refresh Coming Next Year
Intel has been executing its tick tock strategy flawlessly since January 2006 and now there is some indication that we might see the first slip in 8 years come 2014. Intel’s latest roadmap claims that in 12 months from now, in Q2 2014 Haswell will be replaced by a “Haswell refresh”.
Haswell is a tock, a 22nm new architecture and Broadwell is supposed to be based on Haswell fundamentals, but shrunk to 14nm like a proper “tock”. In case that the Haswell refresh is a tweaked 22nm core, this would mean that after 7 years of execution and billions of investments in cutting edge fabrication processes, Intel would have to slow things down.
It is not certain what would happen to 2015 Skylake, a new 14nm architecture, or the 10nm Skymont that is supposed to be the shrink, but in case Broadwell gets pushed back by a year there is a big possibility that the whole roadmap would slip a year.
When it gets ready the Haswell refresh (possibly a disguise name for Broadwell ed.) is replacing Core i7, Core i5, Core i3, Pentium and Celeron based Haswell chips, some sooner rather than later.
The chipset responsible for Haswell refresh is already branded as Z97 and H97 in desktop versions replacing the Z87 and H87 boards proving that the socket are likely to continue existing at least through 2014. It will be interesting to see the developments and if Broadwell is really delayed or this is just game of words on Intel’s part.
Does Haswell Need A Separate GPU?
Nvidia actually has a person with the catchy title of Chief Blogger and this person managed to get “an interview” with Rene Haas a VP and GM of computing products that currently takes care of Geforce mobile among other things.
Rene was asked to explain “why Gamers still need a discrete GPU with Haswell” and the answer is as logical as why do you use a seatbelt. Rene expects that Intel will continue to suck in graphics (our words not his ed.) and that that most popular games won’t play well on Haswell at standard resolution.
It seems that history really does repeat itself, as Intel had big claims for both Ivy Bridge and Sandy Bridge had been struggling to run new games of their time. Any serious gamers know that the answer is a proper discrete GPU. Haswell won’t change that, claims Rene.
It looks like Nvidia will have at least as many design wins as with Ivy Bridge, and Ivy Bridge was the record number or design wins for Nvidia. Rene claims that with this refresh Nvidia will have as much as 95 per cent of the gaming notebook which is nothing short of spectacular.
Rene also attacks Intel boldly claiming that “Their (Intel) comparison is misleading on a number of fronts.” Commenting the fact that Intel claims that GT3e will be faster than Geforce GT 650M. Intel based its claims on synthetic benchmarks, something that can be optimised, while Nvidia prefers real games, and even if GT3 wins again Geforce GT650, the new Geforce GT 750 is much faster than its predecessor and will have double the performance of GT3e in games.
Rene reminds us that GT3e is only available in top quad core mobile cores such as Core i7 4880QM that usually find their place in $3,000 notebooks. Rene tells customers that getting a Core i5 of Core i3 notebook with a better discrete GPU is the right way to get better gaming performance, although the vast majority of consumers already know that.
We remember that the last time we sat down with Rene, he said that when Intel gets faster with Integrated, Nvidia will simply gets even better with its corresponding low-end products and offers something faster. The cat and mouse game never ends.
Intel Releases More Celeron CPUs
Intel added three curious ultra-low voltage chips to its official price list and their official designations is strange.
All three are 22nm parts and their product numbers are N2805, N2810 and N2910, which seems to indicate that they are Atoms, but they are listed in the ULV Celeron M section, reports CPU World. The top SKU features four cores with no hyperthreading, which means that it is probably based on the new Valley View M core.
The N2805 is a dual-core clocked at 1.46GHz, with a single megabyte of cache. The N2810 is also a dual-core, but it’s clocked at 2GHz, while the N2910 is the previously mentioned quad-core, with 2MB of cache and a clock speed of 1.6GHz. All of them are priced at $132, which sounds like way too much for Atom branded parts.
With Temash and Kabini just around the corner, Intel needs to step up its game in the low-end low-voltage market fast, but at this point it seems that AMD be the first to market and it will enjoy at least a few months on top. Even when Intel launches its first 22nm Atoms, it won’t have an easy time matching AMD’s price or performance.
Haswell Core i7 Overclocked To 5GHz
As we draw closer to the launch of Intel’s 4th generation Core CPUs, or Haswell, it is no wonder that we are starting to see more leaks and one showing Intel’s Core i7 4770K overclocked to 5GHz at 0.9V certainly drew a lot of attention.
An impressive overclocking achievement was spotted by Ocaholic.ch and shows a CPU-Z validation of Core i7 4770K overclocked to exactly 5005.83MHz at just 0.904V. As far as we can tell, Hyper-threading was disabled and it is not clear if the CPU is actually stable enough to run anything, but in any case, it is still an impressive result, especially at such low voltage.
The rest of the specs include 4GB of DDR3 memory and ASRock’s upcoming Z87 Extreme4 motherboard.
Will Intel Buy AMD?
A few years ago it would have been impossible for Intel to acquire AMD, simply due to regulatory constraints put in place by the FTC and the European Union. Intel had more than a 60 percent of the PC and notebook market, so picking up AMD, a company that has some 20 percent of the market, would make Intel a real monopoly.
In the last two years the iPad, smartphones and ARM based tablets have changed the landscape, eating up Intel’s revenue and market share. It is true that most people, especially professionals and the business crowd, use x86 processors, but this is rapidly changing as home users are happy with emailing, browsing and playing some games on their iPad or other tablets. This puts Intel in a world trouble, as the PC market nosedived by 14 percent last quarter, due to a lack of interest for new devices and upgrade.
Tablets are becoming couch browsing devices, people use their smartphones to read news on the go and sometimes at home. More and more users don’t even touch their notebooks or desktops at home. With ARM staying the dominant instruction set in the phone and tablet space, Intel is facing a serious issue as Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm and Nvidia are all making money on ARM chips.
With this in mind, this would be the main reason for Intel to pick up AMD. AMD would not cost them that much, as Intel still has billions in bank, but with AMD, Intel would gain great graphics, something that the company has been struggling to crack for many years. It would make Intel slightly more competitive, but it would not solve all of its problems.
ARM manufacturers also face challenges, they need to produce more powerful chips and deliver a better user experience in order to win more notebooks and detachable devices, but this is going well with non-Apple based tablets. Apple uses ARM, so in the tablet world ARM is winning this fight, but Qualcomm and Nvidia as two independent chip manufactures could do a much better job at getting popular design wins. The Snapdragon S800 and Tegra 4 will get these two companies a step closer, while Apple will continue making good chips for iPads and iPhones. Let’s not forget about Samsung, as it makes many chips for its phones and tablets.
AMD gained 14 percent on May 1st, and an additional 5.9 percent yesterday, getting its stocks up to $3.41. Back on April 30th, AMD stock was trading at $2.68. In last three days of trading AMD gained 27.24 percent or $0.73 per share, which is a huge leap for a company with a 52-week low of just $1.81.
Intel’s Haswell Arriving In June
Intel has announced that it will launch its next generation Haswell processors at Computex.
Intel showed running Haswell silicon to journalists last month at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in a bid to talk up the upcoming chip’s GPU. Last Friday the firm announced what some already knew and many had already guessed, that it will launch Haswell at Computex in June.
Intel published a blog post on 26 April saying that the fourth generation Core processor known as Haswell would arrive in 3,337,200,000,000,000 nanoseconds, which worked out to just under 39 days. The countdown figure matched perfectly with the start of Computex on 4 June, and confirmed what an Intel insider said that the chip would be launched at Computex.
The fact that Intel is using Computex to launch its next generation chip is not surprising, given that there are few big IT shows during the summer and launching the chip later will not give the firm’s system builder and OEM partners enough time to gear up marketing for the lucrative back to school and holiday buying seasons.
While Intel’s Haswell launch is a big event for the firm, it isn’t the most important. Rather, the firm is expected to launch updated low-power Atom chips that it hopes will help it compete in the tablet market, a market that is growing, as opposed to the PC market that Haswell addresses.
Intel’s decision to launch at Computex means that the late spring computer industry show should be awash with updated notebook and desktop PCs, as well as the firm’s preferred ultrabook branded laptops.
Shark Bay 1 Chipset Goes Pentium
In the universe where Haswell comes as two-chip platform, formally referred to as Shark Bay 2-chip platform by Intel, there will be three mobile chipsets. The HM86 is targeting at mainstream consumers, HM87 targets Premium consumers and SMBs, while the top one QM87 targets the hard working corporate market.
Things get a bit simpler with the Shark Bay 1-chip platform. The value consumer chipset is simply called Baseline, while the next one is simply called Premium. It can’t get any simpler than that. The Shark Bay 1-chip Platform has same I/O, or what we call a chipset, integrated on either Haswell U or Haswell Y processors line.
The Premium chipset supports Windows 8 connected stand by, Intel Active Management Technology 9.0, Intel Small Business Advantage, ACHI and Raid Rapid storage technology, Intel Insider, Intel Anti-Theft Technology, wireless display and three independent displays.
The list goes on with 8 USB ports where two to four can be USB 3.0 ports, up to 6 devices with PCI express 2.0 5GT/s, four SATA ports capable of 6Gbps. The chipset doesn’t have VGA or LVDS as the CPU has the graphics on it, but the Premium chipset has two sensors interface with I2C and UART, 1.5 to 5MB firmware support, Anchor Cover, Platform trust technology and Platform Flash Armoring technology.
Getting away from numbers and naming the chipset simply Premium means that U and Y line of CPUs are meant for tablet and Ultrabook markets, where manufacturers want you to love the product as a whole, not specifics. Premium and Baseline chpisets for Y and U line Haswell processors capable of TDPs as low as 13W are coming in Q3 2013.
Dual Core 35w Haswell Coming In Q3
We found out peculiar fact that some members of Intel’s M Processor line, 35W dual-core products, won’t get the Haswell upgrade until Q4 2013. Haswell starts in very late Q2 2013 and is still scheduled to launch in late May or early June, but most of the parts are aimed at the very expensive quad core MX line and MQ line edition parts.
When it comes to dual-core 35W Core i7 and Core i5 Haswell parts they won’t come at least until Q4 2013, at least this is the current part. Core i7 3540 launched in this quarter, Q1 2013, and it is a 3GHz dual-core with four threads and a top turbo frequency set at 3.7 GHz. It is a 35W, 22nm Ivy Bridge part with 4MB of cache memory. A replacement part might be on the way with a slightly higher clock in Q3 2013, but the Haswell based replacement is set for Q4 2013. With an official price of $348 it is not really the cheapest kid on the block.
Core i5 3380 remains the fastest dual-core 35W Pentium part until Q4 2013 Haswell reinforcement. The 2.7GHz / 3.4GHz turbo clocked dual-core will remain the fastest in this league at least until Q3 2013, when it might get slightly faster version of the Ivy Bridge based core, but it won’t be replaced by Haswell 35W dual-cores before Q4 2013.
Intel definitely wants to prioritize the quad-core 55W i7-3940XM $1096.00 replacement called Core i7 4930MX and Core i7-3840QM replacement in $568 market segment, branded as Core i7 4800 MQ, as it can simply make more money on these pricey these parts. These quad-core Haswell parts start selling in Q2 2013, followed by 17W Ultra low voltage dual-cores in Q3 2013 and only after these two lines rolls out, Intel will introduce the rest of the Haswell line-up.