CES 2021: Intel Highlights Next-Generation 'Alder Lake' Chips

[magicschoolbus]

You think Taiwan will be under Chinese control? Why?

China seeks global domination. Semi conductor market is essential to USA; and TSMC manufactures the majority of all chipsets. China isn't afraid to go for the juggler and reign in Taiwan. Massive national security issues around the manufacturing of Semi's only in Taiwan. We need to bring semi manufacturing to the USA for national security purposes.

 

[Chocomonsters]

I am interested if it makes the second half of 2021. I still need access to Bootcamp and eGPU for next macbook pro. Unless Apple strikes a deal with MS for Windows ARM64 and support eGPU, I still need to run Windows 10 natively.

 

[Chocomonsters]

China seeks global domination. Semi conductor market is essential to USA; and TSMC manufactures the majority of all chipsets. China isn't afraid to go for the juggler and reign in Taiwan. Massive national security issues around the manufacturing of Semi's only in Taiwan. We need to bring semi manufacturing to the USA for national security purposes.

We already do. Intel. Intel has its 4 out of 8 fab locations in the US. It is just that Intel has fallen behind TSMC for fab. Intel can build more fabs but if Intel cannot keep up with TSMC or even Samsung for manufacturing fabs.... No point. Intel is even considering outsourcing to take advantage of TSMC's advanced fab. TSMC is building some fabs in the US, EU, and China, but its top of the line 3nm process will only be in Taiwan. Yes. Keeping its cream of the crop in Taiwan only. Global semiconductor manufacturing race is basically #1 TSMC, #2 Samsung, #3 Intel, and distant #4 SMIC.

 

[cmaier]

China seeks global domination. Semi conductor market is essential to USA; and TSMC manufactures the majority of all chipsets. China isn't afraid to go for the juggler and reign in Taiwan. Massive national security issues around the manufacturing of Semi's only in Taiwan. We need to bring semi manufacturing to the USA for national security purposes.

Not sure how a juggler is relevant. Is Taiwan afraid of clowns or something?

 

[ErikGrim]

 

[Michael Scrip]

View attachment 1711846

LOL @ "Please don't compare us to Mx"

 

[Henk Poley]

Lets see if they can hit <70 milliwatt idle package power 😅

 

[pacalis]

Imo Android offerings for the low end laptop market is almost non existent. The closest thing is Chromebooks.

Yes. I think of low end computing as tablets too - so probably should have put Chrome OS/Android. Regardless, Intel still has a stuck in the middle problem. And don't get me wrong, I actually ditched using my mac - I now entirely us a pc and an ipad pro. But my kids are chromebooks and ipads.

 

[djgamble]

Intel always makes big promises and delivers years late.

Intel's still got the fastest consumer-grade chips on the market and I've never been disappointed by their ability to deliver.

It's truely odd seeing all the new-age Apple fanbois making this a polarised issue and talking absolute smack just because they wanna believe Apple's the best at everything.

Whatever happened to people discussing pros/cons/possibilities rather than rooting for a team in every possible discussion? For all we know, Apple's gonna use these chips in Mac Pros!

 

[cmaier]

Intel's still got the fastest consumer-grade chips on the market and I've never been disappointed by their ability to deliver.

It's truely odd seeing all the new-age Apple fanbois making this a polarised issue and talking absolute smack just because they wanna believe Apple's the best at everything.

Whatever happened to people discussing pros/cons/possibilities rather than rooting for a team in every possible discussion? For all we know, Apple's gonna use these chips in Mac Pros!

I‘m not “rooting” for anyone. I designed SPARC, PowerPC, x86, and x86-64 microprocessors. And I am simply speaking the cold, hard, technical truth - Intel has lagged well beyond even its own sad roadmaps for many consecutive years, and deserves what is happening to it, and what is about to happen to it.

 

[djgamble]

I designed SPARC, PowerPC, x86, and x86-64 microprocessors. And I am simply speaking the cold, hard, technical truth...

Well done mate, I feel honoured to be able to learn from the cold, hard, technical truths of one such as yourself who has designed almost every popular CPU in my lifetime. You sure you didn't design 68k processors as well?

This moment is almost as great as when I had a 1-on-1 meeting with Woz.

 

[chucker23n1]

Intel's still got the fastest consumer-grade chips on the market

Apple beats them in single-threaded tasks; AMD in multi-threaded tasks.

 

[I7guy]

Apple beats them in single-threaded tasks; AMD in multi-threaded tasks.

It's not that simple. Comparing m1 to x86 there really are very few comparable use cases. Javascript benchmarking, compiling, compression/decompression, video editing. The biggest use case in single core performance is games, which with Zen 3 intel lost out, but allegedly will retake back that use case.

As far as multi-threaded, other than synthetic benchmarks I have yet to see real-world differences in multi-core performance for real-world use cases. (Going to exclude one-off use cases, similar to compiling and zipping as presumably one's real world use cases are not serial compiling or serial compression)

 

[chucker23n1]

As far as multi-threaded, other than synthetic benchmarks I have yet to see real-world differences in multi-core performance for real-world use cases. (Going to exclude one-off use cases, similar to compiling and zipping as presumably one's real world use cases are not serial compiling or serial compression)

That’s all multi-threaded is, though. Having two or three cores is nice for running background tasks, but having eight cores and beyond only gives you a boost in specialized applications.

 

[cmaier]

Well done mate, I feel honoured to be able to learn from the cold, hard, technical truths of one such as yourself who has designed almost every popular CPU in my lifetime. You sure you didn't design 68k processors as well?

This moment is almost as great as when I had a 1-on-1 meeting with Woz.

I’m not sure what this off-topic personal attack is supposed to mean, other than you doubting my credentials, but maybe you should ask around, or search the forums. I’ve posted plenty of proof of who I am.

And no, I didn’t design 68k processors. The only other ISA I designed for was MIPS-based, and non-commercial (for DARPA). I did, of course, design an ADC interface board to connect to a 68k, but that was a college lab.

 

[I7guy]

That’s all multi-threaded is, though. Having two or three cores is nice for running background tasks, but having eight cores and beyond only gives you a boost in specialized applications.

So what are those specialized applications? Folding? Nuclear simulations? Weather simulations? CAD work? Some application where a zen 3 due to more cores than an i9 reduces the time to a task or is a "time is money" situation?

Benchmarks are all well and good, similar to taking the car to the race trace, but what are real life scenarios that boil down to time and money for pci 4 and more cores/hyperthreading.

 

[DaRev]

Intel's still got the fastest consumer-grade chips on the market and I've never been disappointed by their ability to deliver.

It's truely odd seeing all the new-age Apple fanbois making this a polarised issue and talking absolute smack just because they wanna believe Apple's the best at everything.

Whatever happened to people discussing pros/cons/possibilities rather than rooting for a team in every possible discussion? For all we know, Apple's gonna use these chips in Mac Pros!

My 2017 iMac in day to day use is not all much faster than the 2012 iMac it replaced, Intel has largely stagnated for years and missed deadline after deadline, often having to slow their own chips down substantially to protect against chip vulnerabilities. Before Apple starting using M chips there was no real option for Apple since we know they would never switch to AMD chips.

I look forward to seeing what Apple can do, and Intel for once playing a serious game of catch up.

 

[Andropov]

Intel's still got the fastest consumer-grade chips on the market and I've never been disappointed by their ability to deliver.

It's truely odd seeing all the new-age Apple fanbois making this a polarised issue and talking absolute smack just because they wanna believe Apple's the best at everything.

Whatever happened to people discussing pros/cons/possibilities rather than rooting for a team in every possible discussion? For all we know, Apple's gonna use these chips in Mac Pros!

Well, their consumers and stockholders sure have been. Intel released its first 14 nm chips on september 2014. They promised their first processors in 10 nm to come Q2 2016 under the name Cannon Lake. Their flagship chips are still on 14 nm as of Q1 2021, FIVE YEARS LATER. If you don't consider that a complete lack of ability to deliver I don't know what is.

 

[djgamble]

I’m not sure what this off-topic personal attack is supposed to mean, other than you doubting my credentials, but maybe you should ask around, or search the forums. I’ve posted plenty of proof of who I am.

And no, I didn’t design 68k processors. The only other ISA I designed for was MIPS-based, and non-commercial (for DARPA). I did, of course, design an ADC interface board to connect to a 68k, but that was a college lab.

There were no personal attacks, I was congratulating you on your flex about designing just about every CPU known to man. Well done on that achievement...

Now that that's aside, I agree with you that your identity is off-topic, so let's stick to the facts.
- Apple could still use Intel chips in future high-end Macs (MR is reporting this as a rumour). Thus, it could be some time until Apple silicon catches up!
- Intel generally releases new chips what... at least every year? They have been the standard for some time and this will continue into the future as their main market is Windows PCs.
- It's not unthinkable that we'll see these chips in late 2021 Macs. Be interesting to see how the fanbois react to that

 

[chucker23n1]

So what are those specialized applications? Folding? Nuclear simulations? Weather simulations? CAD work? Some application where a zen 3 due to more cores than an i9 reduces the time to a task or is a "time is money" situation?

If you ask me: there aren't a lot. With something like Swift, having many cores helps; with a lot of other software development toolchains (say, web dev or .NET), it doesn't help much at all.

That's why I think Apple is correct to focus more on single-threaded performance. It inevitably benefits everyone, whereas increasing multi-threaded performance is only useful for edge cases. Many people lusting after an 8+4, 8+8, whatever higher-end ARM Mac will find in practice that it doesn't actually help that much compared to the 4+4 setup in the M1.

This could improve a little when the stuff outlined in Swift's concurrency manifesto ships, but, with concurrency, the bottleneck is I/O rather than CPU more often than not.

 

[cmaier]

There were no personal attacks, I was congratulating you on your flex about designing just about every CPU known to man. Well done on that achievement...

Now that that's aside, I agree with you that your identity is off-topic, so let's stick to the facts.
- Apple could still use Intel chips in future high-end Macs (MR is reporting this as a rumour). Thus, it could be some time until Apple silicon catches up!
- Intel generally releases new chips what... at least every year? They have been the standard for some time and this will continue into the future as their main market is Windows PCs.
- It's not unthinkable that we'll see these chips in late 2021 Macs. Be interesting to see how the fanbois react to that

If apple releases any other Intel macs it will be one last Mac Pro, and that won’t use these chips. As for ”the standard,” x86 sells in far smaller quantities (orders of magnitude less) than Arm machines. So it is Arm that is the standard, not Intel chips.

 

[chucker23n1]

There were no personal attacks, I was congratulating you on your flex about designing just about every CPU known to man. Well done on that achievement...

🙄

- Apple could still use Intel chips in future high-end Macs (MR is reporting this as a rumour). Thus, it could be some time until Apple silicon catches up!

I can plausibly see this for the 16-inch MacBook Pro (Tiger Lake or Rocket Lake) and/or the Mac Pro. However, there is no new Xeon W CPU generation yet.

It's unclear to me if Ice Lake Xeon W parts are still planned. (Ice Lake Xeon SP is apparently coming this quarter.)

I can't see any other product receiving another upgrade; it doesn't seem like a problem worth solving. They might leave a few more existing Intel models around though. For example, I expect the next iMac model to be ARM, but I wouldn't be surprised if they leave the existing Comet Lake model around for a while — just like they've left the Ice Lake 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Coffee Lake Mac mini.

- Intel generally releases new chips what... at least every year?

For many tiers, yes; for the workstation and up tier, no.

They have been the standard for some time and this will continue into the future as their main market is Windows PCs.
- It's not unthinkable that we'll see these chips in late 2021 Macs.

I don't see what relevance "standard" has. If that's the goal, then Apple should move to Windows and Android?

Be interesting to see how the fanbois react to that

Um, OK?

My guess: those who benefit from another Intel Mac will appreciate it, and everyone else won't care at all?

 

[djgamble]

As for ”the standard,” x86 sells in far smaller quantities (orders of magnitude less) than Arm machines. So it is Arm that is the standard, not Intel chips.

Petty - clearly we're talking about desktop grade chips 'for some time' (since what, the 80's?)

 

[cmaier]

Petty - clearly we're talking about desktop grade chips 'for some time' (since what, the 80's?)

In the 80’s x86 was far from the standard. In the 90’s x86 had a tiny fraction of the server and workstation markets. It was only around 2000-2010 that Intel owned essentially all of computing. It’s already lost the mobile market completely and is well on the way to losing the server market again. Its share of the productivity PC market has dropped from 92% to around 60-something % in the last couple of years.

The Intel juggernaut was never an Intel juggernaut. It was always a Wintel juggernaut. And now that Microsoft can go its own way, it’s bye-bye Intel.

 

[BradMacPro]

Source? Apple only said it would introduce more Macs with Intel processors during WWDC, and the intel-based iMac of 2020 was released shortly after that. There has not, to my knowledge, been any signs of additional intel-based Macs still yet to be released.

Actually the next full size Mac Pro is rumored to still be Intel but these don’t seem to be Xeon models. The iMac Pro possibly as well, but again also uses Xeon.