the beginning of the magazine, where the articles are small8 MAXIMUMPC JAN 2022
quickstart
But AMD’s rebel alliance is ready for Intel’s Alder LakeThe empirestrikes backThere are two versions;
Alder Lake-P with a PBP (or
whatever metric Intel uses) of
up to 45 W and carries up to six
performance cores, and eight
efficient cores, along with
DDR5, and PCIe 5 .0 support.
Alder Lake-M is the low-power
version, which needs just 9 W.
Intel isn’t resting there, with
talk of the 1 3th-generation
chips, code name Raptor Lake,
arriving next fall. It will beAfter this comes the main
event, the 1 4th-generation
Meteor Lake. Intel already
has prototypes of this chiplet
design running. This uses
the Intel 4 process and is
constructed using chiplets, or
tiles as Intel calls them, with a
processor tile (Ocean Cove), a
GPU title, and an I/O title.
The test chip also has
a mysterious fourth title (AI
anyone?). The tiles use second-
generation Foveros technology
to stack other chips on top,
making the complete package
a 3 D hybrid tile design. There
are no solid numbers, this is
still early days. It’s expected
to arrive in late 2022 at the
earliest and will be a big step.
Meanwhile, over in the
red corner, AMD’s response
is a new chip architecture,
and Zen 4 will also be ready
next year. Its CEO, Lisa Su,
gave us a glimpse of the Zen
4 roadmap at its ‘Accelerated
Data Center’ event, which was
all about servers. We learned
about the 9 6-core Genoa and
the 128 -core Bergamo Eypc
chips. Zen 4 will use a 5 nm
process which offers twice the
density of 7 nm, with a roughly
25 percent performance hike,
so the exact IPC gain will
certainly be healthy. Expect
the desktop Zen 4 (Raphael)
before the end of 2 023, some
leaked documents indicate it
will have twice the L 2 of Zen 3.More immediately, we have
V-Cache coming to a Zen 3 chip,
probably after the holidays. It’s
a practical, and wonderfully
simple solution: just drop a fat
slice of L 3 on top. AMD claims
it bumps game performance
by about 15 percent, which is
equivalent to an architecture
change if that is carried across
all applications.
The patents AMD has
taken indicate that V-Cache is
heading to GPUs too, they are
mentioned twice as often as
CPUs in the paperwork. Then
we have a ‘fork’ of the Zen
design, Zen4D, where ‘D’ is
for dense, a stripped-down
version with a redesigned
cache layout aiming to reduce
the die size. After that comes
Zen 5 , AMD’s first hybrid design
with new Zen 5 performance
cores, and employing Zen4D
as the efficiency cores. There
are rumors of an IPC bump of
around 30 percent. Yikes.
For a while, it looked as if
only AMD was making real
strides. We moved from the
original Zen through to Zen 3 in
just 44 months. Intel appeared
to be dragging its heels for
a few years but now it too is
sprinting. Both companies will
have powerful, innovative 3 D
hybrid chiplet designs by 20 23.
Zen 5 against Meteor Lake is
going to be quite a tussle. We
wanted a race, and it looks like
we’ve got one. – CLINTEL HAS released the best
of its new Alder Lake chips
first, the headline-grabbing
performance models.
But what about the more
affordable CPUs, the chips
we stand a better chance of
buying? Thanks to a slip up at
Dell, among others, details of
further Alder Lake SKUs went
online well before the official
launch. As expected, we have
Core i7-12700, i5- 126 00, 125 00,AMD’s CEO, Lisa Su, reveals part of the Zen 4 roadmap as the
company moves to a new core and a new process next year.©^
AM
D
and 124 00, and at the bottom
the Core i3- 12100. Curiously,
the low-end chips don’t appear
to have any efficiency cores.
An early benchmark of the
i5- 12 400, with six performance
cores using Adobe Premiere
Pro, shows it stands toe-to-toe
with a Ryzen 9 5 600X. Alder
Lake is proving to be a match
for Zen 3 across the range.
What’s next? Alder Lake
mobile comes first, which has
entered production, ready for
launch around the holidays.socket-compatible with Alder
Lake and features a ‘new’
hybrid design.
Parts of Alder Lake aren’t
ideal, the die size of the Golden
Cove cores for start. The
Gracemont efficiency cores
aren’t petite either, about half
the size of a Zen 3 core. Raptor
Lake is a development of Alder
Lake with a tidier, streamlined
design and a possible small
increase in the core count. We
expect a typical IPC jump of
about 10 percent.