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CES 2021: Intel Highlights Next-Generation 'Alder Lake' Chips
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The last few generations of MBP have had Intel chips significantly faster than your 2013 MBP. It's just that they've continued to run very hot while doing it on an inferior process.
They should name the new products '...Lake Bed'. Their new tech is ancient history compared to the competitors.
I know, but it took Intel a long time to finally get to "significantly faster," and that was the frustration. On a better note, that frustration led to me completely avoiding the butterfly keyboard fiasco.
I'm in a similar boat (4750HQ, late 2013), but to be fair, a late 2019 16-inch MBP will be significantly faster in many ways.
Sure, the single-core performance has only increased 24%, which is very weak after six years*. (The Tiger Lake-H 11370H seems to score around 1500, to that would be a 70% increase compared to your CPU.) But, you also get six to eight cores instead of four. You also get a much, much faster SSD — the one in your MBP probably does around 500 MiB/s; the one in a newer one gets closer to 3 GiB/s. The GPU is way faster. Etc., etc.
*) contrast that to Apple, who have been doing ~20% increases year-over-year for many years in a row now.
That's the bottom line with this, assuming this is as significant as its being spun as, can they build on it again next year, or is it a one time flash in the pan before another few years of stagnation?
Not everything is transistor size. And these videos are ill-informed.
What people should be looking at is the full ”design rules,” which includes things like:
- minimum transistor size
- minimum wires width
- minimum wire pitch
- minimum wire spacing
- minimum active pitch and spacing
- minimum device area
- layer thickness
- via sizing
etc.
Looking at these things carefully, you’ll find that TSMC and Intel are about equivalent if you look one generation apart. In other words, a 7nm TSMC device has approximately the same design rules as a 10nm Intel device.
If you compare a 14nm Intel part to a 14nm+ or 14nm++ part, the design rules are more or less the same.
In contrast, a 5nm TSMC part vs an Intel 14nm++ part are about 2 generations apart.
It is also true that *actual* transistors are almost *never* minimum-sized. The drive strength for a 1:1 transistor is terrible. And it is also true that it is not uncommon for first generation parts on a new fab node to not shrink everything.
However all the other things that change when going from one node to the smaller node make a huge difference in performance and power consumption. Changing the wire thickness, for example, which would not be evident when looking at the die from the top down, greatly affects parasitic capacitance, which affects speed and power consumption, depending on whether wires are also pushed closer together or not.
Transistors that look the same can perform very differently, because of changes to the layer structure, doping, and fin geometries.
So, in short, yes, Intel is a giant pile of suck.
I don't disagree that Apple is not going to go heavily down market. But it's not like there isn't an insane amount of competition there with android offerings. Intel is stuck in the middle.
It'll be interesting to see how much of this is real improvement and how much is hype to save face and bolster investor confidence. The ARM architecture needs serious competition to keep driving innovation. I'm hopeful that Intel can find a way to keep x86 relevant and useful into the future, but after nearly a decade of slow growth and stagnation, I can't say I'm very confident of that for the short term.
The Arm architecture doesn't really need competition. There is plenty of competition among Arm designers. Qualcomm, Samsung, Apple, nVidia, and many many more companies can compete to make the best designs. Once you've gone RISC, the incremental improvements between alternative ISAs will be fairly small. (They differences can certainly make a big difference for certain tasks, of course).
We’ll see.
Here’s a bunch of high-end 28W Intel CPUs, from Haswell on (all Geekbench 5 single-threaded results).
I’m ignoring considerations like actual heat, etc.
Haswell4578U = 679
Broadwell5557U = 754
Skylake6567U = 830
KabyLake7567U = 954
CoffeeLake8569U = 1140
IceLake1068NG7 = 1241
TigerLake1165G7 = 1409
Gen over gen, those are improvements of 11%, 10%, 15%, 19%, 9%, 14%, for a total of 107% over seven years. Not as good as Apple, but not too terrible.
What about 45W?
Haswell4980HQ = 848
Broadwell5700HQ = 820
Skylake6920HQ = 892
KabyLake7920HQ = 945
CoffeeLake8950HK = 1070
CoffeeLakeRefresh9980HK = 1112
CometLake10875H = 1207
Yikes. Here, it’s -3% (to be fair, that’s cause I couldn’t find scores for any better Broadwell model), 9%, 6%, 13%, 4%, 9%, or 42% over seven years.
What particularly strikes me is how the Haswell 45W part was 25% ahead of its 28W counterpart, but by Coffee Lake, that calculus reverses: it’s now 7% slower. (Granted, it also offers more cores, but, again, many won’t actually benefit as much from this as they think they will, and Intel is supposed to have Turbo Boost to opportunistically turn cores off.) By now, it’s 17% slower.
Rocket Lake and/or Tiger Lake will fix that at least partially, but boy, has Intel fallen behind in their high-end laptop CPUs.
Ahh, my favourite quotes when the M1 Macs were released were along the lines of:
“Those are synthetic benchmarks....just wait for the real-world tests. There’s no way a mobile processor will manage the sustained workload.”
Nek minnit.
They don’t need to because that is not where the profit is. Apple doesn’t do commodity items.
Truth. Apples are better, but you have to pay the Apple tax for that privilege, and most people simply can't afford it. Intel isn't dead yet.
Refer to the post I replied to. I was replying on the claim that Apple would eat these market, which I stated the reasons they wouldn't.
Imo Android offerings for the low end laptop market is almost non existent. The closest thing is Chromebooks.
Yes but they are all manufacture by TSMC. One vendor. In Taiwan. Who could be under communist Chinas control at any moment.
not good.