THE NEWS
the beginning of the magazine, where the articles are small8 MAXIMU MPC APR 2022
quickstart
Team Blue is back with a bang
Intel’s ambitious
investment plans
On stage, the engineering
sample was given a workout
with Blender and Adobe
Premiere, designed to show
all those cores working away.
We can expect those samples
to produce the usual round of
unofficial leaked benchmarks
about now. The chips are due
by fall, with the mobile version
following later in the year.
Intel claims it is “on track
to reclaim performance-per-
watt leadership by 2025”.
The Intel 4 process, using
EUV (extreme ultraviolet)
lithography could be ready to
roll by the second half of the
year with Meteor Lake. This
should produce another 20
percent bump in performance
for the same power. It has
Redwood performance cores
and Crestmont efficiency cores,
integrated AI acceleration,
a next-generation graphics
engine (currently named
tGPU), and a flexible titled
architecture similar to AMD’s
chiplet designs.
After this, the Intel 3
process will be ready by the
end of 2023, offering another18 percent hike with the Arrow
Lake chips. Then we enter the
Angstrom process. Intel says
the 20A process is on track
for 2024 for Arrow Lake. Then
there’s Lunar Lake and the
18A process, also due in 2024.
Five nodes in four years is
impressive, so how has Intel
managed to turn it around?
Intel’s CEO, Pat Gelsinger
claims it is by embracing EUV
tech, massive investment,
and ‘deep’ partnerships. He
says the company stalled
at 14nm, but its research
teams have now produced the
manufacturing capability and
techniques it needs.
We didn’t hear much on the
highly-anticipated Alchemist,
Intel’s proper entry into
the discrete graphics card
market. We were supposed to
have them in the first quarter,
but now it looks as if we’ll
get a mobile version thissummer, and actual desktop
cards in the fall. Intel teasers
show us high-resolution game
images, and we’ve also seen
some leaked photographs of
test cards that sport 6-pin
and 8-pin power connectors.
With room for two 8-pins, it
hints at higher power versions
to come. Work has started
on Celestial, the high-end
enthusiast GPU to follow.
Intel appears to be working
on a ground-up assault on
the graphic card market, with
the good news being that all
indications are that it will
price its cards competitively.
Add some encouraging news
about servers and cloud
business, and Intel’s investors
have reason to be happy. AMD
is currently riding high on a
record market share of over 25
percent, but the competition is
going to be a lot tougher over
the next few years. –CLEVERY YEAR, the big-wigs
at Intel have a meeting with
major investors to keep them
up to date. There’s often plenty
of stuff to interest consumers,
but this year’s Investor Day
proved to be particularly
tasty. For starters, Raptor
Lake, Intel’s 13th generation
processor, had its first public
demonstration and we also got
some solid specs to chew over.
Raptor Lake follows the
same hybrid design as Alder
Lake, but with up to 24 cores
in all—eight performance and
16 efficiency cores, for a total
of 32 threads. It will be socket-
compatible with Alder Lake, so
we won’t all have to invest in
DDR5 memory at once.
Intel claims Raptor Lake
will offer a “double-digit”
performance boost for
single-thread operations,
and more for multi-threaded
applications. The top clock
rate is expected to be a healthy
5.5GHz and Intel has promised
enhanced overclocking
features. There’s also an
optional AI accelerator in the
form of an M2 module.Five nodes in four years is
impressive, so how has Intel
managed to turn it around?
Intel’s CEO
does his best Lion
King impression
with an 18A
process wafer.© INTEL