If Intel were to have a saving grace in 2021 it would potentially be Alder Lake. That Alder Lake is being pushed aside in favor of Tiger Lake doesn't bode well for Intel. It is possible 10 ESF capacity is limited, and Intel is prioritizing dies for high-end mobile and desktop-s, but only time will tell.
Man, give it a rest. Tiger Lake is competitive with Zen 3. The only shortcoming is that they don’t have 8-core U chips. The 11800H thus far looks to be faster than the Ryzen 5900HX.
Surely the cooling system of your notebook is of poor quality. It is priced by AMD to enter the market with assemblers to offer low prices. ALREADY with Rysen 5000 that changed for the most part.
Intel's power consumption has been proven (also here at AnandTech) to be vastly underreported. A 45W 11800H is slightly faster than Ryzen 5800H (in Geekbench only) but it likely consumes twice as much (I could not find any actual data on real power consumption) and it is slower than the 5900H. I'm with Otritus here.
Since the real Tiger Lake H hasn't been released yet (the current "H" models are just Tiger Lake U with a higher TDP), any data is from leaked testing on engineering samples, not real production parts.
"Tiger Lake is competitive with Zen 3." Only its iGPU is, and only at its (scarce and expensive) fattest configurations. That's because AMD got cocky and thought their APUs could still take on Intel's brand new Xe iGPUs with an ancient iGPU from 2017. A fat (64+ EU) Xe iGPU can surpass in performance an equivalent Vega iGPU just like it was expected. If even Xe couldn't beat Vega Intel would be in even deeper trouble..
Yeah, I have to agree that seeing a TL refresh gives me the impression that Intel are either going to be later with AL than planned, or - more likely - *later with volume* than planned.
Rocket Lake's volume launch was already giving me that impression before, albeit to a lesser extent.
The slide puts Tiger Lake R in the thin and light segment and Alder lake in the nebulous "mobile" segment which hints that Alder lake's performance in thin and light may not be as good as expected.
The thin and light <15W Alder lake SKUs are supposed to have up to 2 Golden Cove cores and 8 Gracemont cores so it may be possible that Tiger lake R's 4 Sunny cove cores provide better performance in this segment.
For the thin and light 15-28W segment Alder lake will have 4-6 Golden cove cores so if they are also positioning Tiger lake R in this segment then delays or yields may be the issue.
Nit-pick, Tiger Lake has Willow Cove cores. Alder lake starting with the ultralow power segment would make sense in regard to both yields and heat, both of which are uncertain with 10ESF and Foveros. I'm sure Alder Lake will stay below 4 Golden Cove cores for the mobile market. 2 Golden Cove and 8 Gracemont cores should have both better single- and multithreaded performance at similar area to 4 Golden Cove cores.
Another possibility is that OEMs want a safe option, fearing that the new Alder Lake design will be unstable or hard to market. Laptops with active cooling will need to have their CPU cooling redesigned, which introduces risks.
Yea the prior poster probably got confused from everyone talking about Sunny Cove/Cypress Cove for Rocket Lake.
I don't know if I'd call it a nitpick -- Willow Cove had a pretty big performance jump.
My speculation with Alder Lake is that it isn't as small as Tiger Lake and won't fit in existing designs. Also, I'm assuming Intel once again is producing at most 2-3 distinct dies for consumer products, and the lowest-sized die might be bigger than Tiger Lake.
Alder Lake is a hybrid core design but doesn’t use Foveros, at least not that I’m aware of. There are 2 LP dies (2+8+2 and 6+8+2) and 2 HP dies (6+0+1 and 8+8+1) along with 4 packages (M,P,S-BGA, and S). TGL-UR will supplement the ADL-U15 and ADL-U28 platforms, which are the 2+8+2 LP and 6+8+2 LP dies respectively along with the ADP-LP PCH in the P package (BGA 1744, 50 mm x 25 mm).
In order for Intel to maintain their typical annual launch cadence (U/Y press embargo in August) they would need to hit PRQ and begin volume production of those dies within the next few weeks. Either they know that is unlikely, or this was the plan all along. I’m guessing this is just the necessary continuation of their split process / split architecture strategy, except with ADL on 10ESF and TGL-R on 10SF replacing TGL on 10SF and CML on 14++.
Not sure why Ian went from LPDDR5-5400 to LPDDR5-5600 at the end of the article. I wasn’t expecting anything more than LPDDR5-5400 out of TGL or ADL.
Seconding that lack of Foveros - it wouldn't make any sense in that market segment, and there's no indication that Intel have figured out how to get power levels above ~7W with a stacked die.
Thanks for the clarity on the die designs and such, that was a lot of info!
Also, your comment on split process/architecture makes sense, and ties into the possibility that they're still either capacity or yield constrained on the various 10nm processes.
I'd expect to see trade-offs between Alder Lake and Tiger at the 15W level depending on whether the focus is on MT performance, peak ST, or mixed workloads. In theory AL should have more sustainable performance at restricted power levels, but it probably won't look as good for mixed workloads where the cooling system can cope with ~30W thermal load.
Faster memory and increased frequency in the same TDP are always welcome. It'll be interesting to see what actually comes to fruition with this refresh.
" A fully populated LPDDR5-5600 mobile processor would enable a peak memory bandwidth of 89.6 GB/s, which is 75% above DDR4-3200 or 31% above LPDDR4X-4267. For graphics workloads, this would surely boost performance."
The increase in performance could be immaterial or negative. A ryzen Mobile cpu in general performs better with 3200 ddr instead of lp 4200mhx ddr because the later has horrible latency. It's a shame the article doesn't mention the importance of latency. Just YouTube search for this, that's how I found out.
Is Xe as latency sensitive as Ryzen iGPU? I haven't seen that. Ryzen has always had some interesting memory dependencies that Intel doesn't seem to respond to as strongly. I am looking forward to reviews and launch of the 8 cores TGL. Also what iGPU is going to come with Alder? we looking at the same 96EU top end? Really want to see Intels plan on the GPU space on the consumer side, we all need the competition.
Alder Lake will have a variant of Xe iGPU which will probably also max at 96 EUs. I doubt Intel can add more EUs since the dies will be large enough already due to the extra cores.
CPU or GPU performance? AFAIK the GPU on these chips benefits from the higher bandwidth of LPDDR while the CPU prefers the lower latency of DDR. They'd likely not lose much on the CPU side, but the GPU might get closer to the performance levels they were claiming before TL released.
We don't know how the changes made to LPDDR5 would affect this picture, either.
That was always going to be a Q2’21 launch. Typically the H press embargo date is in April, so either it will happen by the end of this week, or the launch will slide to May-June. The latter seems likely given Intel’s record with 10nm product launches.
Alder Lake is on 10 nm enhanced superfin, Tiger Lake is on 10 nm superfin. That's most likely the reason for the Tiger Lake refresh. Intel sees a market for what Tiger Lake can offer. That is, they expect these chips to be bought no matter if they are Tiger Lake or Alder Lake, but if they are Tiger Lake they don't have to upgrade the process to advanced superfin. So they make more money. It most likely doesn't have much to do with Alder Lake's performance or potential.
I feel the Tiger Lake U refresh is likely going to be more on the frequency side of things, which I don't think Intel have a lot of wriggle room in the mobile space. In my opinion, the current Intel 10nm is not going to save them because at least from what I can tell, Intel is just bumping power consumption up to stay competitive. This supposed "SuperFin" just looks like a 14nm+++++ where they are optimising the node for high clockspeed at the expense of power. Again, Intel can get away with the high power consumption on desktop, but unlikely to make significant improvement in the mobile space due to power and cooling constraints.
As to Tiger Lake U being an "Alder Lake" in mobile form, I feel it is quite unlikely because I suspect while 10nm is denser, it may not be enough to claw back the fat iGPU that they stuffed in the chip. Which is what I suspect is one of the the reasons why they are stuck to 4 cores, with power constraints being another reason.
Alder Lake will have its own mobile lineup. Intel's 10 nm will definitely not kick AMD's ass. Intel doesn't need saving, though. What the 10 nm will do is to slow down the bleeding, though not completely stop it. Intel's hope is that their 7 nm will stop the bleeding and their 5 nm will turn things around.
10SF definitely improved power and thermal characteristics over the 10nm+ that Ice Lake ran on. You might be right about ESF though - I guess we'll see by the end of the year (ish).
All indications are that 10nm haven't been meaningfully more dense than TSMC 7nm since at least the first revision, and it's likely they've relaxed it further to enable the performance improvements of SF and ESF.
Apparently, ASUS has announced availability of 8 Core TL notebooks starting May 11th. @Ian, have you reserved/requested your review sample? If that announcement holds true and they send you one right away we should know what's what in three weeks from now. Would love to see you putting one of those through its paces!
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Otritus - Tuesday, April 27, 2021 - link
If Intel were to have a saving grace in 2021 it would potentially be Alder Lake. That Alder Lake is being pushed aside in favor of Tiger Lake doesn't bode well for Intel. It is possible 10 ESF capacity is limited, and Intel is prioritizing dies for high-end mobile and desktop-s, but only time will tell.eek2121 - Tuesday, April 27, 2021 - link
Man, give it a rest. Tiger Lake is competitive with Zen 3. The only shortcoming is that they don’t have 8-core U chips. The 11800H thus far looks to be faster than the Ryzen 5900HX.goatfajitas - Tuesday, April 27, 2021 - link
"Tiger Lake is competitive with Zen 3"- Until you factor in heat and power.
teamet - Thursday, May 6, 2021 - link
I'm running a AMD 4650U Pro, 6 cores, and the needed cooling is obcene.. I wish I'd opted for an intelgagegfg - Friday, May 7, 2021 - link
Surely the cooling system of your notebook is of poor quality. It is priced by AMD to enter the market with assemblers to offer low prices. ALREADY with Rysen 5000 that changed for the most part.yankeeDDL - Tuesday, April 27, 2021 - link
Intel's power consumption has been proven (also here at AnandTech) to be vastly underreported. A 45W 11800H is slightly faster than Ryzen 5800H (in Geekbench only) but it likely consumes twice as much (I could not find any actual data on real power consumption) and it is slower than the 5900H.I'm with Otritus here.
goatfajitas - Tuesday, April 27, 2021 - link
Exactly. Its past the point of deceptive on Intels part.drothgery - Wednesday, April 28, 2021 - link
Since the real Tiger Lake H hasn't been released yet (the current "H" models are just Tiger Lake U with a higher TDP), any data is from leaked testing on engineering samples, not real production parts.Spunjji - Wednesday, April 28, 2021 - link
Competitive, for sure - but that has nothing to do with the post you're replying to 🤔Santoval - Saturday, May 1, 2021 - link
"Tiger Lake is competitive with Zen 3." Only its iGPU is, and only at its (scarce and expensive) fattest configurations. That's because AMD got cocky and thought their APUs could still take on Intel's brand new Xe iGPUs with an ancient iGPU from 2017. A fat (64+ EU) Xe iGPU can surpass in performance an equivalent Vega iGPU just like it was expected. If even Xe couldn't beat Vega Intel would be in even deeper trouble..Spunjji - Wednesday, April 28, 2021 - link
Yeah, I have to agree that seeing a TL refresh gives me the impression that Intel are either going to be later with AL than planned, or - more likely - *later with volume* than planned.Rocket Lake's volume launch was already giving me that impression before, albeit to a lesser extent.
drothgery - Wednesday, April 28, 2021 - link
Intel had already announced they were going to launch Adler Lake on the desktop first.Arsenica - Tuesday, April 27, 2021 - link
The slide puts Tiger Lake R in the thin and light segment and Alder lake in the nebulous "mobile" segment which hints that Alder lake's performance in thin and light may not be as good as expected.The thin and light <15W Alder lake SKUs are supposed to have up to 2 Golden Cove cores and 8 Gracemont cores so it may be possible that Tiger lake R's 4 Sunny cove cores provide better performance in this segment.
For the thin and light 15-28W segment Alder lake will have 4-6 Golden cove cores so if they are also positioning Tiger lake R in this segment then delays or yields may be the issue.
Rudde - Tuesday, April 27, 2021 - link
Nit-pick, Tiger Lake has Willow Cove cores. Alder lake starting with the ultralow power segment would make sense in regard to both yields and heat, both of which are uncertain with 10ESF and Foveros. I'm sure Alder Lake will stay below 4 Golden Cove cores for the mobile market. 2 Golden Cove and 8 Gracemont cores should have both better single- and multithreaded performance at similar area to 4 Golden Cove cores.Another possibility is that OEMs want a safe option, fearing that the new Alder Lake design will be unstable or hard to market. Laptops with active cooling will need to have their CPU cooling redesigned, which introduces risks.
lmcd - Tuesday, April 27, 2021 - link
Yea the prior poster probably got confused from everyone talking about Sunny Cove/Cypress Cove for Rocket Lake.I don't know if I'd call it a nitpick -- Willow Cove had a pretty big performance jump.
My speculation with Alder Lake is that it isn't as small as Tiger Lake and won't fit in existing designs. Also, I'm assuming Intel once again is producing at most 2-3 distinct dies for consumer products, and the lowest-sized die might be bigger than Tiger Lake.
repoman27 - Tuesday, April 27, 2021 - link
Alder Lake is a hybrid core design but doesn’t use Foveros, at least not that I’m aware of. There are 2 LP dies (2+8+2 and 6+8+2) and 2 HP dies (6+0+1 and 8+8+1) along with 4 packages (M,P,S-BGA, and S). TGL-UR will supplement the ADL-U15 and ADL-U28 platforms, which are the 2+8+2 LP and 6+8+2 LP dies respectively along with the ADP-LP PCH in the P package (BGA 1744, 50 mm x 25 mm).In order for Intel to maintain their typical annual launch cadence (U/Y press embargo in August) they would need to hit PRQ and begin volume production of those dies within the next few weeks. Either they know that is unlikely, or this was the plan all along. I’m guessing this is just the necessary continuation of their split process / split architecture strategy, except with ADL on 10ESF and TGL-R on 10SF replacing TGL on 10SF and CML on 14++.
Not sure why Ian went from LPDDR5-5400 to LPDDR5-5600 at the end of the article. I wasn’t expecting anything more than LPDDR5-5400 out of TGL or ADL.
Spunjji - Wednesday, April 28, 2021 - link
Seconding that lack of Foveros - it wouldn't make any sense in that market segment, and there's no indication that Intel have figured out how to get power levels above ~7W with a stacked die.Thanks for the clarity on the die designs and such, that was a lot of info!
Spunjji - Wednesday, April 28, 2021 - link
Also, your comment on split process/architecture makes sense, and ties into the possibility that they're still either capacity or yield constrained on the various 10nm processes.Spunjji - Wednesday, April 28, 2021 - link
I'd expect to see trade-offs between Alder Lake and Tiger at the 15W level depending on whether the focus is on MT performance, peak ST, or mixed workloads. In theory AL should have more sustainable performance at restricted power levels, but it probably won't look as good for mixed workloads where the cooling system can cope with ~30W thermal load.Hulk - Tuesday, April 27, 2021 - link
Faster memory and increased frequency in the same TDP are always welcome. It'll be interesting to see what actually comes to fruition with this refresh.GoldenBullet - Tuesday, April 27, 2021 - link
" A fully populated LPDDR5-5600 mobile processor would enable a peak memory bandwidth of 89.6 GB/s, which is 75% above DDR4-3200 or 31% above LPDDR4X-4267. For graphics workloads, this would surely boost performance."The increase in performance could be immaterial or negative. A ryzen Mobile cpu in general performs better with 3200 ddr instead of lp 4200mhx ddr because the later has horrible latency. It's a shame the article doesn't mention the importance of latency. Just YouTube search for this, that's how I found out.
cyrusfox - Tuesday, April 27, 2021 - link
Is Xe as latency sensitive as Ryzen iGPU? I haven't seen that. Ryzen has always had some interesting memory dependencies that Intel doesn't seem to respond to as strongly. I am looking forward to reviews and launch of the 8 cores TGL. Also what iGPU is going to come with Alder? we looking at the same 96EU top end? Really want to see Intels plan on the GPU space on the consumer side, we all need the competition.Spunjji - Wednesday, April 28, 2021 - link
I understand that Alder will have 96EU for the "U" class devices and 48EU for the "H" class devices.Santoval - Saturday, May 1, 2021 - link
Alder Lake will have a variant of Xe iGPU which will probably also max at 96 EUs. I doubt Intel can add more EUs since the dies will be large enough already due to the extra cores.Spunjji - Wednesday, April 28, 2021 - link
CPU or GPU performance? AFAIK the GPU on these chips benefits from the higher bandwidth of LPDDR while the CPU prefers the lower latency of DDR. They'd likely not lose much on the CPU side, but the GPU might get closer to the performance levels they were claiming before TL released.We don't know how the changes made to LPDDR5 would affect this picture, either.
Fulljack - Tuesday, April 27, 2021 - link
that's cool and all but where is Tiger Lake-H with 8 cores?PS: no Intel, Tiger Lake-H35 doesn't count. you know full well it's just amped up version of Tiger Lake-U
repoman27 - Tuesday, April 27, 2021 - link
That was always going to be a Q2’21 launch. Typically the H press embargo date is in April, so either it will happen by the end of this week, or the launch will slide to May-June. The latter seems likely given Intel’s record with 10nm product launches.drothgery - Wednesday, April 28, 2021 - link
FWIW, an article just popped up at Tom's strongly suggesting a May 11 launch.Yojimbo - Tuesday, April 27, 2021 - link
Alder Lake is on 10 nm enhanced superfin, Tiger Lake is on 10 nm superfin. That's most likely the reason for the Tiger Lake refresh. Intel sees a market for what Tiger Lake can offer. That is, they expect these chips to be bought no matter if they are Tiger Lake or Alder Lake, but if they are Tiger Lake they don't have to upgrade the process to advanced superfin. So they make more money. It most likely doesn't have much to do with Alder Lake's performance or potential.defaultluser - Tuesday, April 27, 2021 - link
And meanwhile, Intel would ;like you to look over here and forget that it' going to be another three months before you can buy Tiger Lake Hladuran - Sunday, May 2, 2021 - link
Umm, no. H series benchmarks are already appearing in Geekbench from oem machines.Qasar - Monday, May 3, 2021 - link
yea, too bad geekbench isnt reliable, or trust worthy...watzupken - Tuesday, April 27, 2021 - link
I feel the Tiger Lake U refresh is likely going to be more on the frequency side of things, which I don't think Intel have a lot of wriggle room in the mobile space. In my opinion, the current Intel 10nm is not going to save them because at least from what I can tell, Intel is just bumping power consumption up to stay competitive. This supposed "SuperFin" just looks like a 14nm+++++ where they are optimising the node for high clockspeed at the expense of power. Again, Intel can get away with the high power consumption on desktop, but unlikely to make significant improvement in the mobile space due to power and cooling constraints.As to Tiger Lake U being an "Alder Lake" in mobile form, I feel it is quite unlikely because I suspect while 10nm is denser, it may not be enough to claw back the fat iGPU that they stuffed in the chip. Which is what I suspect is one of the the reasons why they are stuck to 4 cores, with power constraints being another reason.
Yojimbo - Wednesday, April 28, 2021 - link
Alder Lake will have its own mobile lineup. Intel's 10 nm will definitely not kick AMD's ass. Intel doesn't need saving, though. What the 10 nm will do is to slow down the bleeding, though not completely stop it. Intel's hope is that their 7 nm will stop the bleeding and their 5 nm will turn things around.Spunjji - Wednesday, April 28, 2021 - link
10SF definitely improved power and thermal characteristics over the 10nm+ that Ice Lake ran on. You might be right about ESF though - I guess we'll see by the end of the year (ish).All indications are that 10nm haven't been meaningfully more dense than TSMC 7nm since at least the first revision, and it's likely they've relaxed it further to enable the performance improvements of SF and ESF.
eastcoast_pete - Friday, April 30, 2021 - link
Apparently, ASUS has announced availability of 8 Core TL notebooks starting May 11th. @Ian, have you reserved/requested your review sample? If that announcement holds true and they send you one right away we should know what's what in three weeks from now. Would love to see you putting one of those through its paces!