Ryzen 7 9850X3D vs Core Ultra 7 270K Plus: Which CPU Is Better in 2026?

AMD's Ryzen 7 9850X3D leads in gaming, while Intel's Core Ultra 7 270K Plus delivers much stronger multi-threaded performance for less.

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Best CPU Coolers for 2026: Arctic, Noctua, Thermalright, Corsair and be quiet!

Five CPU coolers from Arctic, Thermalright, Noctua, Corsair, and be quiet! stand out for cooling, noise, compatibility, and value in 2026.

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Matériel d'occasion - Riot bannit le matériel des tricheurs

Alors ça c'est fou mais fallait s'y attendre... Un joueur allemand a acheté un processeur Ryzen 7 5800X3D d'occasion (lien affilié), l'a monté dans son PC, puis a lancé Valorant ! Selon ce qu'il explique sur Reddit, il s'est alors fait virer du jeu de Riot dès le tout premier lancement ! Problème de compte ? Que nenni ! En fait il s'est fait dégagé à cause du processeur car son premier propriétaire était un tricheur !

D'après Heise , le support de Riot lui a bien confirmé que l'ancien propriétaire trichait. Du coup, le CPU s'est retrouvé sur une liste noire chez eux, ainsi que la carte mère et le stockage. Et bien sûr, on peut venir chialer au support, Riot ne retirera pas ce matériel banni de ses listes à la main. Sans parler du fait que le blocage est global pour tous les jeux PC de l'éditeur comme League of Legends, Teamfight Tactics, Legends of Runeterra et 2XKO.

Ce type de sanction vise donc les composants physiques de la machine, en plus du compte et malheureusement, tout autre compte qui s'y connecte est donc instantanément bloqué sur cet appareil et banni puisque le système suppose qu'il s'agit là d'une tentative de contournement. Pour votre culture G, sachez que l'erreur qui s'affiche s'appelle VAN 152, et réinstaller le jeu n'y changera rien.

Reste maintenant à savoir comment Riot reconnaît un processeur précis... L'identifiant qu'un CPU remonte à Windows ne donne que son modèle, donc un 5800X3D ressemble à n'importe quel autre 5800X3D mais il est possible que le système anti triche extrapole une empreinte à partir du comportement électrique de la puce (fréquences, tensions), ou récupère les identifiants inscrits dans le TPM .

La seconde option me semble la plus logique, car sur un Ryzen, le TPM n'est pas une puce à part. C'est plutôt un firmware, le fTPM, intégré au processeur, et Riot exige un TPM firmware pour les comptes sous restriction. Ça ne prouve pas encore qu'il s'en servent pour identifier le matériel, en 2021 PC Gamer expliquait que le TPM empêcherait un tricheur Valorant banni de se refaire un identifiant matériel tout neuf, donc ça se tiendrait...

Alors faut-il pour autant fuir le matériel d'occasion ?

Je ne pense pas qu'il faille flipper non plus parce que ce cas de figure semble extrêmement rare. Tous les tricheurs ne se font pas choper, et tous les tricheurs ne vendent pas leur matériel en occaz... Mais le risque n'est pas nul et il n'y a pas vraiment moyen de savoir si une pièce a été marquée, sauf si le vendeur-tricheur le dit.

Bref, si vous voyez apparaître un VAN 152 juste après avoir installé du matos d'occasion, n'allez surtout pas tester le jeu avec un autre compte car il serait lui aussi banni. Vaut mieux ouvrir un ticket pour demander une réévaluation à Riot qui apparemment a prévu le coup mais sans toutefois le garantir... La preuve avec notre joueur allemand qui s'est fait jeter par le support... J'ignore comment ça s'est fini pour lui mais vu la médiatisation de toute cette affaire, j'espère que Riot a fait un geste !

Intel Beats Expectations as AI Infrastructure Boom Expands Beyond GPUs

Intel beat quarterly expectations as AI infrastructure spending boosted demand for its data center processors and foundry business, signaling broader growth beyond GPUs.

The post Intel Beats Expectations as AI Infrastructure Boom Expands Beyond GPUs appeared first on TechRepublic.

AI’s Memory Boom Is Reshaping the Smartphone Market

Counterpoint says rising AI memory demand helped drive smartphone shipments to their weakest second quarter since 2013 as DRAM and NAND costs climbed.

The post AI’s Memory Boom Is Reshaping the Smartphone Market appeared first on TechRepublic.

Une tour à 15 274 €, deux GPU AMD et aucun abonnement cloud : on a testé l’IA locale à son maximum [Sponso]

Cet article a été réalisé en collaboration avec AMD

Une tour à 15 274 € posée sous un bureau, deux cartes graphiques AMD, et l'intégralité d'une chaîne de production logicielle qui tourne sans jamais toucher au cloud. On a voulu savoir ce que permet vraiment une machine d'IA en local.

Cet article a été réalisé en collaboration avec AMD

Il s’agit d’un contenu créé par des rédacteurs indépendants au sein de l’entité Humanoid xp. L’équipe éditoriale de Numerama n’a pas participé à sa création. Nous nous engageons auprès de nos lecteurs pour que ces contenus soient intéressants, qualitatifs et correspondent à leurs intérêts.

En savoir plus

« Un véritable bond en avant » : IBM conçoit la première puce gravée à moins d’un nanomètre

IBM a affirmé avoir conçu une puce avec une gravure inférieure à 1 nm. Une prouesse technologique qui pourrait changer beaucoup de choses.

Users cry foul after AMD stripped memory crypto from its consumer CPUs

A decade ago, AMD added a protection to its high-end CPUs to protect them against cold boot attacks and other types of physical exploits that siphon sensitive data out of the connected memory chips. Short for Transparent Secure Memory Encryption, TSME encrypts the entire contents stored in memory, making the data useless to physical attackers.

Over time, AMD added TSME to lower-end processors, including the consumer version of its Ryzen chips, a CPU that costs less than the Pro version. Over the years, users of these lower-end chips have gotten used to the added security. Recently and without warning or notice, this lower-end line of AMD chips suddenly dropped the protection, and did so in a way that was impossible to detect on Windows machines and required a fair amount of technical work when using Linux.

Now you see it, now you don't

AMD has yet to say why TSME worked on these CPUs, or even to confirm the change. AMD declined to answer questions sent by email other than to say TSME "is a security feature only applied to PRO CPUs as part of AMD PRO Technologies." The statement is the first known time the chipmaker has explicitly made this restriction public.

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Microsoft dévoile le Surface Laptop Ultra avec une puce Nvidia : le MacBook Pro a un vrai rival

Microsoft vient d'annoncer la machine la plus ambitieuse de l'histoire de sa gamme Surface : le Surface Laptop Ultra. Un PC portable haut de gamme avec un objectif clair : détrôner le MacBook Pro d'Apple et offrir à Windows une vraie alternative puissante et endurante. Cet ordinateur sera un des premiers avec une puce Nvidia RTX Spark.

Linux commence à retirer le support des processeurs russes Baikal

Le noyau Linux est en train de retirer le support matériel des processeurs Baikal, fabriqués par Baikal Electronics en Russie. Pas juste les mainteneurs cette fois, le code lui-même. Les drivers et le support de la plateforme MIPS Baikal-T1 sont en cours de suppression dans les sources du noyau, après des années de tensions autour des sanctions internationales.

Pour remettre en contexte, le support du Baikal-T1 (un CPU MIPS double coeur P5600 cadencé à 1,2 GHz) et du SoC BE-T1000 avait été intégré au noyau Linux à partir de la branche 5.8. Baikal Electronics travaille sur des processeurs domestiques russes, en MIPS et en ARM, pensés pour réduire la dépendance de la Russie aux puces étrangères.

Le problème, c'est que l'entreprise est directement sanctionnée par les États-Unis, l'Union européenne et d'autres pays, avec le soupçon que ses puces puissent finir dans du matériel militaire.

En octobre 2024, une première étape avait été franchie. Onze mainteneurs russes avaient été retirés du fichier MAINTAINERS du noyau, dont Serge Semin, responsable du driver Baikal-T1 PVT et de la plateforme MIPS Baikal-T1.

Linus Torvalds avait tranché clairement : "C'est parfaitement clair pourquoi le changement a été fait, il ne sera pas annulé." Greg Kroah-Hartman, de son côté, avait invoqué des "exigences de conformité" liées aux sanctions américaines OFAC.

Mais à l'époque, le code restait. Les mainteneurs partaient, les drivers non. Du coup, un développeur de chez Baikal pouvait toujours soumettre un patch, même si trouver quelqu'un pour le merger devenait compliqué.

Jakub Kicinski, mainteneur du sous-système réseau du noyau, avait d'ailleurs refusé publiquement d'accepter des patches venant d'employés de Baikal Electronics, en invoquant un malaise personnel face à la situation.

L'étape en cours va plus loin. C'est le support matériel lui-même qui est en train d'être retiré. Concrètement, ça veut dire que les futures versions du noyau ne compileront plus pour cette plateforme, et que les distributions qui montent en version perdront le support natif de ces puces.

Pour les quelques machines qui tournent sur du Baikal-T1 en dehors de Russie (il y en a très peu), ça implique de rester sur un noyau ancien ou de maintenir un fork.

Côté Russie, Baikal Electronics maintient son propre fork du noyau Linux sur GitHub. Le projet n'est pas mort, il est juste découplé de l'upstream. Ça pose quand même une vraie question sur la viabilité long terme d'un fork désormais très isolé, sans les contributions de la communauté internationale.

Bref, Linux tranche dans le dur cette fois. Plus de mainteneurs, et bientôt plus de code non plus.

Source : Phoronix

Flambée de la RAM : voici trois PC gaming déjà assemblés pour amortir la hausse des composants

L’explosion du prix des composants (et notamment de la RAM) vous freine peut-être dans l’achat d’un nouveau PC, et c’est bien normal. Mais il existe encore une alternative pour esquiver quelque peu ces coûts exorbitants : se tourner vers un PC déjà assemblé. Voici 3 configurations pour amortir la flambée du prix des composants.

Qualcomm Adds Snapdragon 7s Gen 3: Mid-Tier Snapdragon Gets Cortex-A720 Treatment

Qualcomm this morning is taking the wraps off of a new smartphone SoC for the mid-range market, the Snapdragon 7s Gen 3. The second of Qualcomm’s down-market ‘S’ tier Snapdragon 7 parts, the 7s series is functionally the entry-level tier for the Snapdragon 7 family – and really, most Qualcomm-powered handsets in North America.

With three tiers of Snapdragon 7 chips, the 7s can easily be lost in the noise that comes with more powerful chips. But the latest iteration of the 7s is a bit more interesting than usual, as rather than reusing an existing die, Qualcomm has seemingly minted a whole new die for this part. As a result, the company has upgraded the 7s family to use Arm’s current Armv9 CPU cores, while using bits and pieces of Qualcomm’s latest IPs elsewhere.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 7-Class SoCs
SoC	Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 (SM7550-AB)	Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 (SM7635)	Snapdragon 7s Gen 2 (SM7435-AB)
CPU	1x Cortex-A715 @ 2.63GHz 3x Cortex-A715 @ 2.4GHz 4x Cortex-A510 @ 1.8GHz	1x Cortex-A720 @ 2.5GHz 3x Cortex-A720 @ 2.4GHz 4x Cortex-A520 @ 1.8GHz	4x Cortex-A78 @ 2.4GHz 4x Cortex-A55 @ 1.95GHz
GPU	Adreno	Adreno	Adreno
DSP / NPU	Hexagon	Hexagon	Hexagon
Memory Controller	2x 16-bit CH @ 3200MHz LPDDR5 / 25.6GB/s @ 2133MHz LPDDR4X / 17.0GB/s	2x 16-bit CH @ 3200MHz LPDDR5 / 25.6GB/s @ 2133MHz LPDDR4X / 17.0GB/s	2x 16-bit CH @ 3200MHz LPDDR5 / 25.6GB/s @ 2133MHz LPDDR4X / 17.0GB/s
ISP/Camera	Triple 12-bit Spectra ISP 1x 200MP or 64MP with ZSL or 32+21MP with ZSL or 3x 21MP with ZSL 4K HDR video & 64MP burst capture	Triple 12-bit Spectra ISP 1x 200MP or 64MP with ZSL or 32+21MP with ZSL or 3x 21MP with ZSL 4K HDR video & 64MP burst capture	Triple 12-bit Spectra ISP 1x 200MP or 48MP with ZSL or 32+16MP with ZSL or 3x 16MP with ZSL 4K HDR video & 48MP burst capture
Encode/ Decode	4K60 10-bit H.265 H.265, VP9 Decoding Dolby Vision, HDR10+, HDR10, HLG 1080p120 SlowMo	4K60 10-bit H.265 H.265, VP9 Decoding HDR10+, HDR10, HLG 1080p120 SlowMo	4K60 10-bit H.265 H.265, VP9 Decoding HDR10, HLG 1080p120 SlowMo
Integrated Radio	FastConnect 6700 Wi-Fi 6E + BT 5.3 2x2 MIMO	FastConnect Wi-Fi 6E + BT 5.4 2x2 MIMO	FastConnect 6700 Wi-Fi 6E + BT 5.2 2x2 MIMO
Integrated Modem	X63 Integrated (5G NR Sub-6 + mmWave) DL = 5.0 Gbps 5G/4G Dual Active SIM (DSDA)	Integrated (5G NR Sub-6 + mmWave) DL = 2.9 Gbps 5G/4G Dual Active SIM (DSDA)	X62 Integrated (5G NR Sub-6 + mmWave) DL = 2.9 Gbps 5G/4G Dual Active SIM (DSDA)
Mfc. Process	TSMC N4P	TSMC N4P	Samsung 4LPE

Officially, the Snapdragon 7s is classified as a 1+3+4 design – meaning there’s 1 prime core, 3 performance cores, and 4 efficiency cores. In this case, Qualcomm is using the same architecture for both the prime and efficiency cores, Arm’s current-generation Cortex-A720 design. The prime core gets to turbo as high as 2.5GHz, while the remaining A720 cores will turbo as high as 2.4GHz.

These are joined by the 4 efficiency cores, which, as is tradition, are based upon Arm’s current A5xx cores, in this case, A520. These can boost as high as 1.8GHz.

Compared to the outgoing Snapdragon 7s Gen 2, the switch in Arm cores represents a fairly significant upgrade, replacing an A78/A55 setup with the aforementioned A720/A520 setup. Notably, clockspeeds are pretty similar to the previous generation part, so most of the unconstrained performance uplift on this generation is being driven by improvements in IPC, though the faster prime core should offer a bit more kick for single-threaded workloads.

All told, touting a 20% improvement in CPU performance over the 7s Gen 2, though that claim doesn’t clarify whether it’s single or multi-threaded performance (or a mixture of both).

Meanwhile, graphics are driven by one of Qualcomm’s Adreno GPUs. As is usually the case, the company is not offering any significant details on the specific GPU configuration being used – or even what generation it is. A high-level look at the specifications doesn’t reveal any major features that weren’t present in other Snapdragon 7 parts. And Qualcomm isn’t bringing high-end features like ray tracing down to such a modest part. That said, I’ve previously heard through the tea leaves that this may be a next-generation (Adreno 800 series) design; though if that’s the case, Qualcomm is certainly not trying to bring attention to it.

Curiously, however, the video decode block on the SoC seems rather dated. Despite this being a new die, Qualcomm has opted not to include AV1 decoding – or, at least, opted not to enable it – so H.265 and VP9 are the most advanced codecs supported.

Compared to CPU performance gains, Qualcomm’s expected GPU performance gains are more significant. The company is claiming that the7s Gem 3 will deliver a 40% improvement in GPU performance over the 7s Gen 2.

Finally, the Hexagon NPU block on the SoC incorporates some of Qualcomm’s latest IP, as the company continues their focused AI push across all of their chip segments. Notably, the version of the NPU used here gets INT4 support for low precision client inference, which is new to the Snapdragon 7s family. As with Qualcomm’s other Gen 3 SoCs, the big drive here is for local (on-device) LLM execution.

With regards to performance, Qualcomm says that customers should expect to see a 30% improvement in AI performance relative to the 7s Gen 2.

Feeding all of these blocks is a 32-bit memory controller. Interestingly, Qualcomm has opted to support older LPDDR4X even with this newer chip, so the maximum memory bandwidth depends on the memory type used. For LPDDR4X-4266 that will be 17GB/sec, and for LPDDR5-6400 that will be 25.6GB/sec. In both cases, this is identical to the bandwidth available for the 7s Gen 2.

Rounding out the package, the 7s Gen 3 does incorporate some newer/more powerful camera hardware as well. We’re still looking at a trio of 12-bit Spectra ISPs, but the maximum resolution in zero shutter lag and burst modes has been bumped up to 64MPix. Video recording capabilities are otherwise identical on paper, as the 7s Gen 2 already supported 4K HDR capture.

Meanwhile on the wireless communication side of matters, the 7s Gen 3 packs one of Qualcomm’s integrated Snapdragon 5G modems. As with its predecessor, the 7s Gen 3 supports both Sub-6 and mmWave bands, with a maximum (theoretical) throughput of 2.9Gbps.

Eagle-eyed chip watchers will note, however, that Qualcomm is doing away with any kind of version information as of this part. So while the 7s Gen 2 used a Snapdragon X62 modem, the 7s Gen 3’s modem has no such designation – it’s merely an integrated Snapdragon modem. According to the company, this change has been made to “simplify overall branding and to be consistent with other IP blocks in the chipset.”

Similarly, the Wi-Fi/Bluetooth block has lost its version number; it is now merely a FastConnect block. In regards to features and specifications, this appears to be the same Wi-Fi 6E block that we’ve seen in half a dozen other Snapdragon SoCs, offering 2 spatial streams at channel widths up to 160MHz. It is worth noting, however, that since this is a newer SoC it’s certified for Bluetooth 5.4 support, versus the 5.2/5.3 certification other Snapdragon 7 chips have carried.

Finally, the Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 itself is being built on TSMC’s N4P process, the same process we’ve seen the last several Qualcomm SoCs use. And with this, Qualcomm has now fully migrated the entire Snapdragon 8 and Snapdragon 7 lines off of Samsung’s 4nm process nodes; all of their contemporary chips are now built at TSMC. And like similar transitions in the past, this shift in process nodes is coming with a boost to power efficiency. While it’s not the sole cause, overall Qualcomm is touting a 12% improvement in power savings.

Wrapping things up, Qualcomm’s launch customer for the Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 will be Xiaomi, who will be the first to launch a new phone with the chip. Following them will be many of the other usual suspects, including Realme and Sharp, while the much larger Samsung is also slated to use the chip at some point in the coming months.

Intel Sells Its Arm Shares, Reduces Stakes in Other Companies

Intel has divested its entire stake in Arm Holdings during the second quarter, raising approximately $147 million. Alongside this, Intel sold its stake in cybersecurity firm ZeroFox and reduced its holdings in Astera Labs, all as part of a broader effort to manage costs and recover cash amid significant financial challenges.

The sale of Intel's 1.18 million shares in Arm Holdings, as reported in a recent SEC filing, comes at a time when the company is struggling with substantial financial losses. Despite the $147 million generated from the sale, Intel reported a $120 million net loss on its equity investments for the quarter, which is a part of a larger $1.6 billion loss that Intel faced during this period.

In addition to selling its stake in Arm, Intel also exited its investment in ZeroFox and reduced its involvement with Astera Labs, a company known for developing connectivity platforms for enterprise hardware. These moves are in line with Intel's strategy to reduce costs and stabilize its financial position as it faces ongoing market challenges.

Despite the divestment, Intel's past investment in Arm was likely driven by strategic considerations. Arm Holdings is a significant force in the semiconductor industry, with its designs powering most mobile devices, and, for obvious reasons, Intel would like to address these. Intel and Arm are also collaborating on datacenter platforms tailored for Intel's 18A process technology. Additionally, Arm might view Intel as a potential licensee for its technologies and a valuable partner for other companies that license Arm's designs.

Intel's investment in Astera Labs was also a strategic one as the company probably wanted to secure steady supply of smart retimers, smart cable modems, and CXL memory controller, which are used in volumes in datacenters and Intel is certainly interested in selling as many datacenter CPUs as possible.

Intel's financial struggles were highlighted earlier this month when the company released a disappointing earnings report, which led to a 33% drop in its stock value, erasing billions of dollars of capitalization. To counter these difficulties, Intel announced plans to cut 15,000 jobs and implement other expense reductions. The company has also suspended its dividend, signaling the depth of its efforts to conserve cash and focus on recovery. When it comes to divestment of Arm stock, the need for immediate financial stabilization has presumably taken precedence, leading to the decision.

The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X and Ryzen 9 9900X Review: Flagship Zen 5 Soars - and Stalls

Earlier this month, AMD launched the first two desktop CPUs using their latest Zen 5 microarchitecture: the Ryzen 7 9700X and the Ryzen 5 9600X. As part of the new Ryzen 9000 family, it gave us their latest Zen 5 cores to the desktop market, as AMD actually launched Zen 5 through their mobile platform last month, the Ryzen AI 300 series (which we reviewed).

Today, AMD is launching the remaining two Ryzen 9000 SKUs first announced at Computex 2024, completing the current Ryzen 9000 product stack. Both chips hail from the premium Ryzen 9 series, which includes the flagship Ryzen 9 9950X, which has 16 Zen 5 cores and can boost as high as 5.7 GHz, while the Ryzen 9 9900X has 12 Zen 5 cores and offers boost clock speeds of up to 5.6 GHz.

Although they took slightly longer than expected to launch, as there was a delay from the initial launch date of July 31st, the full quartet of Ryzen 9000 X series processors armed with the latest Zen 5 cores are available. All of the Ryzen 9000 series processors use the same AM5 socket as the previous Ryzen 7000 (Zen 4) series, which means users can use current X670E and X670 motherboards with the new chips. Unfortunately, as we highlighted in our Ryzen 7 9700X and Ryzen 5 9600X review, the X870E/X870 motherboards, which were meant to launch alongside the Ryzen 9000 series, won't be available until sometime in September.

We've seen how the entry-level Ryzen 5 9600X and the mid-range Ryzen 7 9700X perform against the competition, but it's time to see how far and fast the flagship Ryzen 9 pairing competes. The Ryzen 9 9950X (16C/32T) and the Ryzen 9 9900X (12C/24T) both have a higher TDP (170 W/120 W respectively) than the Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 5 (65 W), but there are more cores, and Ryzen 9 is clocked faster at both base and turbo frequencies. With this in mind, it's time to see how AMD's Zen 5 flagship Ryzen 9 series for desktops performs with more firepower, with our review of the Ryzen 9 9950X and Ryzen 9 9900 processors.

Intel Publishes First Microcode Update for Raptor Lake Stability Issue, BIOSes Going Out Now

Following Intel’s run of financial woes and Raptor Lake chip stability issues, the company could use some good news on a Friday. And this week they’re delivering just that, with the first version of the eagerly awaited microcode fix for desktop Raptor Lake processors – as well as the first detailed explanation of the underlying issue.

The new microcode release, version 0x129, is Intel’s first stab at addressing the elevated voltage issue that has seemingly been the cause of Raptor Lake processor degradation over the past year and a half. Intel has been investigating the issue all year, and after a slow start, in recent weeks has begun making more significant progress, identifying what they’re calling an “elevated operating voltage” issue in high-TDP desktop Raptor Lake (13^th & 14^th Generation Core) chips. Back in late July the company was targeting a mid-August release date for a microcode patch to fix (or rather, prevent) the degradation issue, and just ahead of that deadline, Intel has begun shipping the microcode to their motherboard partners.

Even with this new microcode, however, Intel is not done with the stability issue. Intel is still investigating whether it’s possible to improve the stability of already-degraded processors, and the overall tone of Intel’s announcement is very much that of a beta software fix – Intel won’t be submitting this specific microcode revision for distribution via operating system updates, for example. So even if this microcode is successful in stopping ongoing degradation, it seems that Intel hasn’t closed the book on the issue entirely, and that the company is presumably working towards a fix suitable for wider release.

Capping At 1.55v: Elevated Voltages Beget Elevated Voltages

So just what does the 0x129 microcode update do? In short, it caps the voltage of affected Raptor Lake desktop chips at a still-toasty (but in spec) 1.55v. As noted in Intel’s previous announcements, excessive voltages seem to be at the cause of the issue, so capping voltages at what Intel has determined is the proper limit should prevent future chip damage.

The company’s letter to the community also outlines, for the first time, just what is going on under the hood with degraded chips. Those chips that have already succumbed to the issue from repeated voltage spikes have deteriorated in such a way that the minimum voltage needed to operate the chip – Vmin – has increased beyond Intel’s original specifications. As a result, those chips are no longer getting enough voltage to operate.

Seasoned overclockers will no doubt find that this is a familiar story, as this is one of the ways that overclocked processors degrade over time. In those cases – as it appears to be with the Raptor Lake issue – more voltage is needed to keep a chip stable, particularly in workloads where the voltage to the chip is already sagging.

And while all signs point to this degradation being irreversible (and a lot of RMAs in Intel’s future), there is a ray of hope. If Intel’s analysis is correct that degraded Raptor Lake chips can still operate properly with a higher Vmin voltage, then there is the possibility of saving at least some of these chips, and bringing them back to stability.

This “Vmin shift,” as Intel is calling it, is the company’s next investigative target. According to the company’s letter, they are aiming to provide updates by the “end of August.”

In the meantime, Intel’s eager motherboard partners have already begun releasing BIOSes with the new microcode, with ASUS and MSI even jumping the gun and sending out BIOSes before Intel had a chance to properly announce the microcode. Both vendors are releasing these as beta BIOSes, reflecting the general early nature of the microcode fix itself. And while we expect most users will want to get this microcode in place ASAP to mitigate further damage on affected chips, it would be prudent to treat these beta BIOSes as just that.

Along those lines, as noted earlier, Intel is only distributing the 0x129 microcode via BIOS updates at this time. This microcode will not be coming to other systems via operating system updates. At this point we still expect distribution via OS updates to be the end game for this fix, but for now, Intel isn’t providing a timeline or other guidance for when that might happen. So for PC enthusiasts, at least, a BIOS update is the only way to get it for now.

Performance Impact: Generally Nil – But Not Always

Finally, Intel’s message also provides a bit of guidance on the performance impact of the new microcode, based on their internal testing. Previously the company has indicated that they expected no significant performance impact, and based on their expanded testing, by and large this remains the case. However, there are going to be some workloads that suffer from performance regressions as a result.

So far, Intel has found a couple of workloads where they are seeing regressions. This includes PugetBench GPU Effects Score and, on the gaming side of matters, Hitman 3: Dartmoor. Otherwise, virtually everything else Intel has tested, including common benchmarks like Cinebench, and major games, are not showing performance regressions. So the overall outcome of the fix is not quite a spotless recovery, but it’s also not leading to widespread performance losses, either.

As for AnandTech, we’ll be digging into this on our own benchmark suite as time allows. We have one more CPU launch coming up next week, so there’s no shortage of work to be done in the next few days. (Sorry, Gavin!)

Intel’s Full Statement

Intel Postpones Innovation 2024 Event, Cites Poor Finances

As Intel looks to streamline its business operations and get back to profitability in the face of weak revenues and other business struggles, nothing is off the table as the company looks to cut costs into 2025 – not even Intel’s trade shows. In an unexpected announcement this afternoon, Intel has begun informing attendees of its fall Innovation 2024 trade show that the event has been postponed. Previously scheduled for September of this year, Innovation is now slated to take place at some point in 2025.

Innovation is Intel’s regular technical showcase for developers, customers, and the public, and is the successor to the company’s legendary IDF show. In recent years the show has been used to deliver status updates on Intel’s fabs, introduce new client platforms like Panther Lake, launch new products, and more.

But after 3 years of shows, the future of Innovation is up in the air, as Intel has officially postponed the show – and with a less-than-assuring commitment to when it may return.

In a message posted on the Innovation 2024 website (registration required), and separately sent out via email, Intel announced the postponement of the show. In lieu of the show, Intel still plans on holding smaller developer events.

Separately, in a statement sent to PCMag, the company cited its current financial situation, and that they “are having to make some tough decisions as we continue to align our cost structure and look to assess how we rebuild a sustainable engine of process technology leadership.”

While Intel had not yet published a full agenda for the now-delayed show, Innovation 2024 was expected to be a major showcase for Intel’s Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake client processors, both of which are due this fall. Arrow Lake in particular is Intel’s lead product for their 20A process node – their first node implementing RibbonFETs and PowerVia backside power delivery – so its launch will be an important moment for the company. And while the postponement of Innovation won’t impact those launches, it means that Intel won’t have access to the same stage or built-in audience that comes with hosting your own trade show. Never mind the lost opportunities for software developers, who are the core audience for the show.

Officially, the show is just postponed. But given the lead time needed to reserve the San Jose Convention Center and similar venues, it’s unclear whether Intel will be able to host a show before the second half of 2025 – at which point we’d be closer to Innovation 2025, making Innovation 2024 de facto cancelled.

In the meantime, the company has already announced that they’ll be launching Lunar Lake at IFA in Germany in September. So that remains the next big trade show for Intel’s client chip group.

The AMD Ryzen 7 9700X and Ryzen 5 9600X Review: Zen 5 is Alive

Last month, AMD launched their first processors using the Zen 5 microarchitecture for the mobile market via their Ryzen AI 300 series. Typically, with AMD Ryzen launches, we usually see the desktop parts come first, with the flagship model and then the mobile coming after. This time around, AMD has changed the dynamic of their release schedule with Zen 5 by launching the mobile chips first, which includes the Ryen AI 9 HX 370, which we reviewed last month. Today, Zen 5 on desktop has its turn, as AMD has launched two mid-range desktop processors, the Ryzen 7 9700X and the Ryzen 5 9600X.

AMD has launched two of the four announced Ryzen 9000 series processors today. The entry-level model is the Ryzen 5 9600X, a 6C/12T part with full-sized Zen 5 cores that can boost up to 5.4 GHz out of the box. The other model launched today is the Ryzen 7 9700X, which also features 8C/16T of Zen 5 and a boost clock speed of up to 5.5 GHz.

As part of AMD's push on platform longevity, the Ryzen 9000 series shares the same AM5 socket as its predecessor, meaning users can use X670E/X670 and B650E/B650 motherboards with a firmware update. We expected to see the newer X870X motherboards come with the Ryzen 9000 release, but unfortunately, these have been delayed.

So now we have Zen 5 in the form of the Ryzen 9000 series finally hitting the desktop, sans the top two SKUs, the Ryzen 9 9950X and Ryzen 9 9900X, which are coming later, it's time to see how much of an improvement Zen 5 is over Zen 4, not just in single-threaded but also multi-threaded workloads as AMD has promised up to an uplift of16% IPC on average. Both the Ryzen 7 9700X and Ryzen 5 9600X have a TDP of 65 W, which we see as more aligned with the non-X SKUs, so it will be interesting to see how Zen 5 performs in terms of both performance and efficiency.

Intel 18A Status Update: First Chips Booting, First External Customer Tape-Out in H1’25

Following Intel’s painful Q2 earnings call and the announcement of their 2025 cost reduction plan last week, it has become increasingly evident that Intel’s future is in the hands of their foundry group. Between Intel’s IDM 2.0 initiative and their internal chip production plans, all roads lead back to Intel retaking – and retaining – fab process leadership. To win as both a chip designer and a contract chip maker, Intel needs to be able to regain the fab technology lead it once held. In many respects it’s a return to Intel’s classic (and most successful) operating model, but never has it been so risky at it is for the already weakened Intel.

Intel’s do-or-die dash for process leadership means that, for the next 18 months or so, all eyes are on the company’s 20A and 18A process nodes. The final nodes in their ambitious 5 Nodes in 4 Years roadmap, the twinned 20A/18A are the culmination of several new technologies, primarily Intel’s GAAFET implementation (RibbonFET), which is being combined with PowerVia, Intel’s backside power delivery network (BS-PDN) technology. 20A is set to serve as Intel’s early version of the node, and 18A the refined version for long-term use both internally, and as the first major external node for Intel Foundry. To say that everything rides on Intel 18A isn’t quite accurate, but it’s only a slight embellishment.

To that end, we’re going to see Intel deliver a lot of status updates on 18A over the next year as they continue to outline to investors and external customers alike that they have the manufacturing side of their business in order. And today is one of those days, with a fresh update on the state of 18A.

18A Chips Back & Booting

So what’s new with 18A? The biggest news out of Intel this morning is that their first 18A chips are back from the development fab and are successfully booting operating systems. This means the silicon not only works (power-on), but works well enough to complete core tasks. It’s a major step in bringing up a chip, and at this point, Intel wants to make sure to let the whole world know.

Earlier this year the company finished taping out both of its lead 18A chips: Panther Lake for clients, and Clearwater Forest for servers. And it’s both chips that are booting. This is made all the more significant by the fact that Clearwater Forest also relies on Intel’s die-to-die hybrid bonding packaging technology, Foveros Direct 3D, where it will be the lead product for that technology as well. Which for Intel, is a promising sign that not only are their silicon lithography ambitions paying off, but their intention to lead in advanced packaging is on-track as well.

And while Intel doesn’t normally talk about yields this early in the game, it’s interesting to note that in a separate Q&A being published this morning with Intel Foundry’s new boss, Kevin O’Buckley, the head of Foundry Services explicitly comments that Panther Lake is “yielding well”. Similarly, Panther Lake’s DDR memory controller (a complex block mixing logic with a PHY) is already running at its target frequency. Progress is going so well, apparently, that according to O’Buckley, it’s ahead of schedule on its product qualification milestones.

PDK 1.0 Released, First External Customer Tape-Out Expected in H1’25

As for Intel’s contract foundry business, the company is ramping up its efforts there now that the first full process design kit (PDK) is ready for 18A. Intel released their 18A PDK 1.0 last month, giving Intel’s customers (and potential customers) the tools to finally finish designing their chips for production. As is typically the case of a new node, pre-release PDKs were available for companies to get started on their designs, but the 1.0 PDK is typically needed to finish those designs and align them with the formal and finalized process specifications.

For Intel, getting an external PDK out for a leading-edge process node is no small feat, as the company has spent decades operating its fabs for the benefit of its internal product design teams. A useful PDK for external customers – and really, a useful fab environment altogether – not only needs process nodes that stick to their specifications rather than making bespoke adjustments, but it means that Intel needs to document and define all of this in a useful, industry standard fashion. One of the major failings of Intel’s previous efforts to get into the contract foundry business, besides being half-hearted efforts overall, is that they didn’t author PDKs that external companies could easily use. At the end of the day, Intel is looking to woo customers from TSMC and Samsung, and as such Intel needs to provide PDKs that chip designers accustomed to contemporary contract fabs can use.

Those efforts are finally paying off, if slowly. While still not sharing any names, Intel expects their first external customer chip design will tape out in the first half of 2025 (H1’25). And, as Intel hopes, it will be the first of many.

Ultimately, the hard work for Intel foundry is not yet complete, and it will continue from here. With initial 18A development wrapping up, Intel’s needs are no longer just fab R&D, but marketing and customer relations. Which, going back to the start of this article, is why Intel is so keen to release status updates on 18A: it’s part of a broader approach to entice new customers to give Intel a try. Even in the best-case scenario, it will take upwards of a decade to capture a majority of the market for fabbing cutting-edge chips. But Intel has to start that marketing push if they’re going to get there.

In the meantime, if all continues going well for Intel, we should be seeing the first 18A chips released in the latter half of near year.

Update: Intel Extends 13th & 14th Gen Core Retail CPU Warranties By 2 Years In Response to Chip Instability Issues

Update 08/06: Intel published an additional note on Monday, confirming which SKUs are covered by the program. The full list of SKUs has been added to the article below, but it's essentially the 13600K/14600K and above – all of Intel's high-TDP desktop parts using the Raptor Lake B0 die.

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Capping off an extensive (and expensive) week for Intel, the company has also announced that they are taking additional steps to address the ongoing chip stability issues with desktop Raptor Lake chips – the 13^th and 14^th Generation desktop Core processors. In order to keep owners whole, Intel will be extending the warranty on retail boxed Raptor Lake chips by two years, bringing the cumulative warranty for the chips to five years altogether.

This latest announcement comes as Intel is still in the process of preparing their major Raptor Lake microcode update, which is designed to mitigate the issue (or rather, further damage) by fixing the elevated voltage bug in their existing microcode that has led to the issue in the first place. That microcode update remains scheduled for mid-August, roughly a couple of weeks from now.

But until then – and depending on how quickly the update is distributed, even afterwards – there is still the matter of what to do with Raptor Lake desktop chips that are already too far gone and are consequently unstable. Intel’s retail boxed Raptor Lake chips ship with a 3 year warranty, which given the October 2022 launch date, would have the oldest of these chips covered until October of 2025 – a bit over a year from now. And while the in-development fix should mean that this is plenty of time to catch and replace any damaged chips, Intel has opted to take things one step further by extending the chips’ warranty to five years.

Overall, this is much-needed bit of damage control by Intel to restore some faith in their existing Raptor Lake desktop processor lineup. Even with the planned microcode fix, it remains unclear at best about what the long-term repercussions of the voltage bug is, and what it means for the lifespan of still-stable chips that receive the fixed microcode. In the best-case scenario, an extended warranty gives Raptor Lake owners a bit more peace of mind, and in a worst-case scenario, they’re now covered for a couple of years longer if the chip degradation issues persist.

One important thing to note, however, is that the extended warranty will only apply to boxed processors, i.e. Intel’s official retail chips. Intel’s loose chips that are sold by the tray to OEMs and certain distributors – commonly referred to as “tray” processors – are not covered by the extended warranty. While Raptor Lake tray processors do technically come with a three-year warranty of their own, Intel does not provide direct, end-user warranty service for these chips. Instead, those warranties are serviced by the OEM or distributor that sold the chip.

With the bulk of Intel’s chips going to OEMs and other professional system builders, Intel will undoubtedly need to settle things with those groups, as well. But with OEM dealings typically remaining behind closed doors, it’s unlikely we’ll hear about just what is agreed there. Regardless, whatever Intel does (or doesn’t do) to assuage OEMs and distributors, those groups will remain responsible for handling warranty claims for tray chips.

Finally, it should be noted that while today’s announcement outlines the two-year warranty extension, it doesn’t deliver the full details on the program. Intel expects to release more details on the extended warranty program “in the coming days.”

Intel’s full statement is below:

On Monday, Intel published an additional post outlining the specific SKUs covered by the extended warranty program. As the voltage/instability issues are thought to only affect high-TDP chips using Intel's Raptor Lake B0 die, which was used for both the 13th Gen and 14th Gen Core processors, the extended warranty program is also being setup to cover those processors specifically. In other words, only chips that are capable of being affected by the issue are receiving the extended warranty.

The rest of Intel's messaging is essentially unchanged from last week, telling customers of boxed processors to contact Intel directly, while tray processor owners need to contact their retailer/OEM.

Additional Details on Via Oxidation Issue

Separately, Intel’s community team also posted a brief update on the via oxidation issue that, although distinct from the current Raptor Lake instability issues, came into question at roughly the same time. Intel has previously stated that that issue is unconnected to the ongoing stability issues, and was fixed back in 2023. And this latest update offers a few more details on just what that manufacturing issue entailed.

Update: Intel Accelerated Ireland EUV Fab Ramp-Up as Meteor Lake Chips Were In Short Supply

Update 08/02: Patrick Moorhead has published a further tweet, clarifying that "Pat [Gelsinger] didn’t tell me l that there were yield issues. This was *my* interpretation." The text of the article has been updated accordingly to reflect this tweet, as well as Intel statements about accelerating their Ireland Fab 34 ramp-up.

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Alongside Intel’s weak Q2 2024 earnings report and the announcement of $10 billion in spending cuts and layoffs for 2025, the company is also disclosing some new information about their chip deliveries over the first half of the year. A brief report, posted on X by analyst Patrick Moorhead and citing a conversation with Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, revealed that Intel encountered a major production bottleneck on Meteor Lake earlier this year. The issue was significant enough to drive intel to take the extraordinary and costly step of accelerating their Ireland fab ramp-up in order to improve chip capacity.

It was a very rough Q2 for $INTC. And that guide... Thanks, @Pgelsinger, for the time to discuss.

It appears that there were yield/throughput issues on Meteor Lake, negatively impacting gross margins. When you have to get the product to your customers, and you have wafers to… pic.twitter.com/pHU66xvFe7

— Patrick Moorhead (@PatrickMoorhead) August 1, 2024

In a separate tweet posted several hours later, Moorhead then clarified that the yield issues mentioned in his first tweet were his interpretation of the matter, rather than something Pat Gelsinger had told him directly.

Decoding Moorhead’s dense tweets, fundamentally, Moorhead is questioning why Intel's Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) – how much the company's chips cost to produce – were on the rise with the launch of Meteor Lake.  The analyst surmised that yields and/or some other unexpected production bottleneck must be the case, as these are the typical issues that drive up chip COGS on a short-term basis like Intel has been experiencing.

And, judging from Intel's earnings call that took place after the initial tweet, Moorhead was right to an extent. Referencing the increased COGS, Intel CFO David Zinsner noted that Intel opted to ramp up its high-volume production in Ireland faster than initially planned. This increased Intel's capacity for Intel 4 (and Intel 3) capacity, but doing so also increased their costs, as wafers out of Ireland cost more in the near term.

Between Moorhead's report that OEMs have been receiving fewer Meteor Lake chips than they could use, and Intel's announcement that they accelerated the Ireland fab ramp-up, this is the first significant disclosure that Meteor Lake chips were, at least at some point, in unexpectedly short supply. Which in turn required Intel to take unexpected and extraordinary steps in order to improve chip production, at the cost of lower short-term profit margins and higher COGS.

The first of Intel's high-volume manufacturing (HVM) fabs to be equipped for the Intel 4 and Intel 3 processes, Fab 34 in Ireland is a critical element to Intel's cutting-edge product plans over the next couple years. Intel was not initially planning on relying so much on Fab 34 this soon – instead using their Oregon development fabs to do more of their Intel 4 & Intel 3 fabrication – but the company opted to ramp up at a faster pace. The benefit to Intel is that they get more fab capacity sooner, but it means they're incurring around $1 billion in costs now of what would have otherwise been spread out over further quarters during a more gradual ramp-up.

The net result was that, while Intel took a margin hit, it also allowed them to supply more Meteor Lake chips than they otherwise would have, even beating their own previous projections for Q2 shipments. Overall, Intel reported in their Q2 earnings that they’ve shipped 15 million “AI PC” chips since Meteor Lake’s launch, though the company doesn't break down how many of those were in Q2 versus Q1 and Q4'23. Still, according to Moorhead, this was fewer chips than OEMs would have liked to have, and they would have taken more chips if they were available.

COGS and Ireland ramp-ups aside, Moorhead also posits that some of Intel's capacity boost came from running “hot lots” of Meteor Lake – high priority wafer batches that get moved to the front of the line in order to be processed as soon as possible (or as reasonably close as is practical). Hot lots are typically used to get highly-demanded chips produced quickly, getting them through a fab sooner than the normal process would take. As a business tool, hot lots are a fact of life of chip production, but they’re undesirable because in most cases they cause disruptions to other wafers that are waiting their turn to be processed.

If true, running hot lots of Meteor Lake would be a significant development given the potential disruptions. At the same time, however, the situation with Meteor Lake is somewhat particular, as the Intel 4 process used for Meteor Lake’s compute tile (the only active tile made at Intel) is not offered to external foundry customers, or even used by other Intel CPUs (Xeon 6s all use Intel 3). So hot lots of Meteor Lake would have few other wafers to even jump ahead of for EUV tooling (Intel would certainly not put them ahead of high-margin Xeon products), while it's unclear how this would cascade down to any tools shared with Intel 7.

Intel, for their part, did not comment on Meteor Lake chip yields or hot lots in their earnings call.

In any case, Intel at this point is looking to turn around their troubled fortunes in the second half of this year. The company’s next-gen client SoC for mobile, Lunar Lake, is set to launch on September 3^rd. And notably, both of its active tiles are being built by TSMC. So Lunar Lake would be spared from any Intel logic fab bottlenecks, though it still has to go through Intel’s facilities for assembly using their Foveros technology. And there remains the thorny issue of higher production costs altogether, since Intel is paying for what's effectively the fully outsourced production of a Core CPU.

Intel Bleeds Red, Plans 15% Workforce Layoff and $10B Cuts For 2025

Amidst the backdrop of a weak quarterly earnings report that saw Intel lose money for the second quarter in a row, Intel today has announced that the company will be cutting costs by $10 billion in 2025 in an effort to bring Intel back to profitability. The cuts will touch almost every corner of the company in some fashion, with Intel planning to cut spending on R&D, marketing, administration, and capital expenditures. The most significant of these savings will come from a planned 15% reduction in force, which will see Intel lay off 15,000 employees over the next several months – thought to be one of Intel’s biggest layoffs ever.

In an email to Intel’s staff, which was simultaneously published to Intel’s website, company CEO Pat Gelsinger made the financial stakes clear: Intel is spending an unsustainable amount of money for their current revenues. Citing the company’s current costs, Gelsinger wrote that “our costs are too high, our margins are too low,“ and that “our annual revenue in 2020 was about $24 billion higher than it was last year, yet our current workforce is actually 10% larger now than it was then.” Consequently, Intel will be enacting a series of painful cuts to bring the company back to profitability.

Intel is not publicly disclosing precisely where those cuts will come from, but in the company’s quarterly earnings release, the company noted that it was targeting operating expenses, capital expenditures, and costs of sales alike.

For operating expenses, Intel will be cutting “non-GAAP R&D and marketing, general and administrative” spending, with a goal to trim that from $20 billion in 2024 to $17.5 billion in 2025. Meanwhile gross capital expenditures, a significant expense for Intel in recent years as the company has built up its fab network, are projected to drop from $25 billion to $27 billion for 2024, to somewhere between $20 billion and $23 billion in 2025. Compared to Intel’s previous plans for capital expenditures, this would reduce those costs by around 20%. And finally, the company is expecting to save $1 billion on the cost of sales in 2025.

Intel 2025 Spending Cuts
	2024 Projected Spending	2025 Projected Spending	Projected Reduction
Operating Expenses (R&D, Marketing, General, & Admin)	$20B	$17.5B	$2.5B
Capital Expenditures (Gross)	$25B - $27B	$20B - $23B	$2B - $7B
Cost of Sales	N/A	$1B Savings	$1B

Separately, in Intel’s email to its employees, Gelsinger outlined that these cuts will also require simplifying Intel’s product portfolio, as well as the company itself. The six key priorities for Intel will include cutting underperforming product lines, and cutting back Intel’s investment in new products to “fewer, more impactful projects”. Meanwhile on the administrative side of efforts, Intel is looking to eliminate redundancies and overlap there, as well as stopping non-essential work.

• Reducing Operational Costs: We will drive companywide operational and cost efficiencies, including the cost savings and head count reductions mentioned above.
• Simplifying Our Portfolio: We will complete actions this month to simplify our businesses. Each business unit is conducting a portfolio review and identifying underperforming products. We are also integrating key software assets into our business units so we accelerate our shift to systems-based solutions. And we will narrow our incubation focus on fewer, more impactful projects.
• Eliminating Complexity: We will reduce layers, eliminate overlapping areas of responsibility, stop non-essential work, and foster a culture of greater ownership and accountability. For example, we will consolidate Customer Success into the Sales, Marketing and Communications Group to streamline our go-to-market motions.
• Reducing Capital and Other Costs: With the completion of our historic five-nodes-in-four-years roadmap clearly in sight, we will review all active projects and equipment so we begin to shift our focus toward capital efficiency and more normalized spending levels. This will reduce our 2024 capital expenditures by more than 20%, and we plan to reduce our non-variable cost of goods sold by roughly $1 billion in 2025.
• Suspending Our Dividend: We will suspend our stock dividend beginning next quarter to prioritize investments in the business and drive more sustained profitability.
• Maintaining Growth Investments: Our IDM2.0 strategy is unchanged. Having fought hard to reestablish our innovation engine, we will maintain the key investments in our process technology and core product leadership.

The bulk of these cuts, in turn, will eventually come down to layoffs. As previously noted, Intel is planning to cut about 15% of its workforce. Just how many layoffs this will entail remains to be seen; Gelsinger’s letter puts it at roughly 15,000 employees, while Intel’s most recent published headcount would put this figure at closer to 17,000 employees.

Whatever the number, Intel is expecting to have most of the reductions completed by the end of this year. The company will be using a combination of early retirement packages and buy-outs, or what the company terms as “an application program for voluntary departures.”

Intel’s investors will be taking a hit, as well. The company’s generous quarterly dividend, a long-time staple of the chipmarker and one of the key tools to entice long-term investors, will be suspended starting in Q4 of 2024. With Intel losing money over multiple quarters, Intel cannot afford (or at least, cannot justify) paying out cash in the forms of dividends when that money could be getting invested in the company itself. Though as the long-term health of the company is still reliant on offering dividends, Intel says that the suspension will be temporary, as the company reiterated its “long-term commitment to a competitive dividend as cash flows improve to sustainably higher levels.” For Q2 2024, Intel paid out $0.125/share in dividends, or a total of roughly $0.5B.

Ultimately, the message coming from Intel today is that it is continuing (if not accelerating) its plans to slim down the company; to focus on a few areas of core competencies that suit the company’s abilities and its financial goals. Intel is throwing everything behind its IDM 2.0 initiative to regain process leadership and serve as a world-class contract foundry, and even with Intel’s planned spending cuts for 2025, that initiative will continue to move forward as planned.

On that note, cheering up investors in what’s otherwise a brutal report from the company, Intel revealed that they’ve achieved another set of key milestones with their in-development 18A process. The company released the 1.0 process design kit (PDK) to customers last month, and Intel has successfully powered-on their first Panther Lake and Clearwater Forest chips. 18A remains on track to be “manufacturing-ready” by the end of this year, with Intel looking to start wafer production in the first half of 2025. 18A remains a make-or-break technology for Intel Foundry, and the company as a whole, as this is the node that Intel expects to return them to process leadership – and from which they can improve upon to continue that leadership.

Sources: Intel Q2'24 Earnings, Intel Staff Letter

Best Buy Briefly Lists AMD's Ryzen 9000 CPUs: From $279 to $599

Although AMD delayed launch of its Ryzen 9000-series processors based on the Zen 5 microarchitecture from July 31, to early and mid-August, the company's partner (and major US retailer) Best Buy briefly began listing the new CPUs today, revealing a very plausible set of launch prices. As per the retailer's product catalog, the most affordable unlocked Zen 5-based processor will cost $279, whereas the highest-performing Zen 5-powered CPU will cost $599 at launch.

AMD will start its Ryzen 9000 series rollout from relatively inexpensive six-core Ryzen 5 9600X and eight-core Ryzen 7 9700X on August 8. Per the Best Buy listing, the Ryzen 5 9600X will cost $279, whereas the Ryzen 7 9700X will carry a recommended price tag of $359.  Meanwhile, The more advanced 12-core Ryzen 9 9900X and 16-core Ryzen 9 9950X will hit the market on August 15 at MSRPs of $449 and $599, respectively, based on the Best Buy listing.

AMD Ryzen 9000 Series Processors Zen 5 Microarchitecture (Granite Ridge)
AnandTech	Cores / Threads	Base Freq	Turbo Freq	L2 Cache	L3 Cache	TDP	MSRP
Ryzen 9 9950X	16C / 32T	4.3GHz	5.7GHz	16 MB	64 MB	170 W	$599
Ryzen 9 9900X	12C / 24T	4.4GHz	5.6GHz	12 MB	64 MB	120 W	$449
Ryzen 7 9700X	8C / 16T	3.8GHz	5.5GHz	8 MB	32 MB	65 W	$359
Ryzen 5 9600X	6C / 12T	3.9GHz	5.4GHz	6 MB	32 MB	65 W	$279

It is noteworthy that when compared to the launch prices of the Zen 4-based Ryzen 7000 processors, the new Zen 5-powered Ryzen 9000 CPUs come in cheaper. The range topping Ryzen 9 5950X started at $799 in 2020, while the Ryzen 9 7950X had a recommended $699 price tag in 2022. By contrast, the top-end Ryzen 9 9950X is listed at $599. Both Ryzen 7 5600X and Ryzen 7 7600X cost $299 at launch, while the upcoming Ryzen 5 9600X will apparently be priced at $279 at launch.

As always with accidental retailer listings, it should be emphasized that AMD has not yet announced official pricing for their Ryzen 9000 CPUs. Given Best Buy's status as one of the largest US electronics retailers, these prices carry a very high probability of being accurate; but none the less, they should be taken with a grain of salt – if only because last-minute price changes are not unheard of with new CPU launches.

Source: Best Buy (via @momomo_us)

Intel to Launch "Lunar Lake" Core Ultra Chips on September 3rd

Intel’s next-generation Core Ultra laptop chips finally have a launch date: September 3^rd.

Codenamed Lunar Lake, Intel has been touting the chips for nearly a year now. Most recently, Intel offered the press a deep dive briefing on the chips and their underlying architectures at Computex back in June, along with a public preview during the company’s Computex keynote. At the time Intel was preparing for Q3’2024 launch, and that window has finally been narrowed down to a single date – September 3^rd – when Intel will be hosting their Lunar Lake launch event ahead of IFA.

Intel’s second stab at a high volume chiplet-based processor for laptop users, Lunar Lake is aimed particularly at ultrabooks and other low-power mobile devices, with Intel looking to wrestle back the title of the most efficient PC laptop SoC. Lunar Lake is significant in this respect as Intel has never previously developed a whole chip architecture specifically for low power mobile devices before – it’s always been a scaled-down version of a wider-range architecture, such as the current Meteor Lake (Core Ultra 100 series). Consequently, Intel has been touting that they’ve made some serious efficiency advancements with their highly targeted chip, which they believe will vault them over the competition.

All told, Lunar Lake is slated to bring a significant series of updates to Intel’s chip architectures and chip design strategies. Of particular interest is the switch to on-package LPDDR5X memory, which is a first for a high-volume Core chip. As well, Lunar Lake incorporates updated versions of virtually every one of Intel’s architecture, from the CPU P and E cores – Lion Cove and Skymont respectively – to the Xe2 GPU and 4^th generation NPU (aptly named NPU 4). And, in a scandalous twist, both of the chiplets/tiles on the CPU are being made by TSMC. Intel isn’t providing any of the active silicon for the chip – though they are providing the Foveros packaging needed to put it together.

Intel CPU Architecture Generations
	Alder/Raptor Lake	Meteor Lake	Lunar Lake	Arrow Lake	Panther Lake
P-Core Architecture	Golden Cove/ Raptor Cove	Redwood Cove	Lion Cove	Lion Cove	Cougar Cove?
E-Core Architecture	Gracemont	Crestmont	Skymont	Crestmont?	Darkmont?
GPU Architecture	Xe-LP	Xe-LPG	Xe2	Xe2?	?
NPU Architecture	N/A	NPU 3720	NPU 4	?	?
Active Tiles	1 (Monolithic)	4	2	4?	?
Manufacturing Processes	Intel 7	Intel 4 + TSMC N6 + TSMC N5	TSMC N3B + TSMC N6	Intel 20A + More	Intel 18A
Segment	Mobile + Desktop	Mobile	LP Mobile	HP Mobile + Desktop	Mobile?
Release Date (OEM)	Q4'2021	Q4'2023	Q3'2024	Q4'2024	2025

Suffice it to say, no matter what happens, Lunar Lake and the Core Ultra 200 series should prove to be an interesting launch.

It’s worth noting, however, that while Intel’s announcement of their livestreamed event is being labeled a “launch event” by the company, the brief reveal doesn’t make any claims about on-the-shelves availability. September 3^rd is a Tuesday (and the day after a US holiday), which isn’t a typical launch date for new laptops (for reference, the lightly stocked Meteor Lake launch was a Thursday). So Intel’s launch event may prove to be more of a soft launch for Lunar Lake; we’ll have to see how things pan out in the coming weeks.

The AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 Review: Unleashing Zen 5 and RDNA 3.5 Into Notebooks

During the opening keynote delivered by AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su at Computex 2024, AMD finally lifted the lid on their highly-anticipated Zen 5 microarchitecture. The backbone for the next couple of years of everything CPU at AMD, the company unveiled their plans to bring Zen 5 in the consumer market, announcing both their next-generation mobile and desktop products at the same time. With a tight schedule that will see both platforms launch within weeks of each other, today AMD is taking their first step with the launch of the Ryzen AI 300 series – codenamed Strix Point – their new Zen 5-powered mobile SoC.

The latest and greatest from AMD, the Strix Point brings significant architectural improvements across AMD's entire IP portfolio. Headlining the chip, of course, is the company's new Zen 5 CPU microarchitecture, which is taking multiple steps to improve on CPU performance without the benefits of big clockspeed gains. And reflecting the industry's current heavy emphasis on AI performance, Strix Point also includes the latest XDNA 2-based NPU, which boasts up to 50 TOPS of performance. Other improvements include an upgraded integrated graphics processor, with AMD moving to the RDNA 3.5 graphics architecture.

The architectural updates in Strix Point are also seeing AMD opt for a heterogenous CPU design from the very start, incorporating both performance and efficiency cores as a means of offering better overall performance in power-constrained devices. AMD first introduced their compact Zen cores in the middle of the Zen 4 generation, and while they made it into products such as AMD's small-die Phoenix 2 platform, this is the first time AMD's flagship mobile silicon has included them as well. And while this change is going to be transparent from a user perspective, under the hood it represents an important improvement in CPU design. As a result, all Ryzen AI 300 chips are going to include a mix of not only AMD's (mostly) full-fat Zen 5 CPU cores, but also their compact Zen 5c cores, boosting the chips' total CPU core counts and performance in multi-threaded situations.

For today's launch, the AMD Ryzen AI 300 series will consist of just three SKUs: the flagship Ryzen AI 9 HX 375, with 12 CPU cores, as well as the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and Ryzen 9 365, with 12 and 10 cores respectively. All three SoCs combine both the regular Zen 5 core with the more compact Zen 5c cores to make up the CPU cluster, and are paired with a powerful Raden 890M/880M GPU, and a XDNA 2-based NPU.

As the successor to the Zen 4-based Phoenix/Hawk Point, the AMD Ryzen AI 300 series is targeting a diverse and active notebook market that has become the largest segment of the PC industry overall. And it is telling that, for the first time in the Zen era, AMD is launching their mobile chips first – if only by days – rather than their typical desktop-first launch. It's both a reflection on how the PC industry has changed over the years, and how AMD has continued to iterate and improve upon its mobile chips; this is as close to mobile-first as the company has ever been.

Getting down to business, for our review of the Ryzen AI 300 series, we are taking a look at ASUS's Zenbook S 16 (2024), a 16-inch laptop that's equipped with AMD's Ryzen AI 9 HX 370. The sightly more modest Ryzen features four Zen 5 CPU cores and 8 Zen 5c CPU cores, as well as AMD's latest RDNA 3.5 Radeon 890M integrated graphics. Overall, the HX 370 has a configurable TDP of between 15 and 54 W, depending on the desired notebook configuration.

Fleshing out the rest of the Zenbook S 16, ASUS has equipped the laptop with a bevy of features and technologies fitting for a flagship Ryzen notebook. The centerpiece of the laptop is a Lumina OLED 16-inch display, with a resolution of up to 2880 x 1800 and a variable 120 Hz refresh rate. Meanwhile, inside the Zenbook S 16 is 32 GB of LPDDR5 memory and a 1 TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD. And while this is a 16-inch class notebook, ASUS has still designed it with an emphasis on portability, leading to the Zenbook S 16 coming in at 1.1 cm thick, and weighting 1.5 kg. That petite design also means ASUS has configured the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 chip inside rather conservatively: out of the box, the chip runs at a TDP of just 17 Watts.

AMD Delays Ryzen 9000 Launch 1 to 2 Weeks Due to Chip Quality Issues

AMD sends word this afternoon that the company is delaying the launch of their Ryzen 9000 series desktop processors. The first Zen 5 architecture-based desktop chips were slated to launch next week, on July 31^st. But citing quality issues that are significant enough that AMD is even pulling back stock already sent to distributors, AMD is delaying the launch by one to two weeks. The Ryzen 9000 launch will now be a staggered launch, with the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X launching on August 8^th, while the Ryzen 9 9900X and flagship Ryzen 9 9950X will launch a week after that, on August 15^th.

The exceptional announcement, officially coming from AMD’s SVP and GM of Computing and Graphics, Jack Huynh, is short and to the point. Ahead of the launch, AMD found that “the initial production units that were shipped to our channel partners did not meet our full quality expectations.” And, as a result, the company has needed to delay the launch in order to rectify the issue.

Meanwhile, because AMD had already distributed chips to their channel partners – distributors who then filter down to retailers and system builders – this is technically a recall as well, as AMD needs to pull back the first batch of chips and replace them with known good units. That AMD has to essentially take a do-over on initial chip distribution is ultimately what’s driving this delay; it takes the better part of a month to properly seed retailers for a desktop CPU launch with even modest chip volumes, so AMD has to push the launch out to give their supply chain time to catch up.

For the moment, there are no further details on what the quality issue with the first batch of chips is, how many are affected, or what any kind of fix may entail. Whatever the issue is, AMD is simply taking back all stock and replacing it with what they’re calling “fresh units.”

AMD Ryzen 9000 Series Processors Zen 5 Microarchitecture (Granite Ridge)
AnandTech	Cores / Threads	Base Freq	Turbo Freq	L2 Cache	L3 Cache	Memory Support	TDP	Launch Date
Ryzen 9 9950X	16C/32T	4.3GHz	5.7GHz	16 MB	64 MB	DDR5-5600	170W	08/15
Ryzen 9 9900X	12C/24T	4.4GHz	5.6GHz	12 MB	64 MB		120W
Ryzen 7 9700X	8C/16T	3.8GHz	5.5GHz	8 MB	32 MB		65W	08/08
Ryzen 5 9600X	6C/12T	3.9GHz	5.4GHz	6 MB	32 MB		65W

Importantly, however, this announcement is only for the Ryzen 9000 desktop processors, and not the Ryzen AI 300 mobile processors (Strix Point), which are still slated to launch next week. A mobile chip recall would be a much bigger issue (they’re in finished devices that would need significant labor to rework), but also, both the new desktop and mobile Ryzen processors are being made on the same TSMC N4 process node, and have significant overlap due to their shared use of the Zen 5 architecture. To be sure, mobile and desktop are very different dies, but it does strongly imply that whatever the issue is, it’s not a design flaw or a fabrication flaw in the silicon itself.

That AMD is able to re-stage the launch of the desktop Ryzen 9000 chips so quickly – on the order of a few weeks – further points to an issue much farther down the line. If indeed the issue isn’t at the silicon level, then that leaves packaging and testing as the next most likely culprit. Whether that means AMD’s packaging partners had some kind of issue assembling the multi-die chips, or if AMD found some other issue that warrants further checks remains to be seen. But it will definitely be interesting to eventually find out the backstory here. In particular I’m curious if AMD is being forced to throw out the first batch of Ryzen 9000 desktop chips entirely, or if they just need to send them through an additional round of QA to pull bad chips.

It’s also interesting here that AMD’s new launch schedule has essentially split the Ryzen 9000 stack in two. The company’s higher-end chips, which incorporate two CCDs, are delayed an additional week over the lower-end units with their single CCD. By their very nature, multi-CCD chips require more time to validate (there’s a whole additional die to test), but they also require more CCDs to assemble. So it’s a toss-up right now whether the additional week for the high-end chips is due to a supply bottleneck, or a chip testing bottleneck.

The silver lining to all of this, at least, is that AMD found the issue before any of the faulty chips made their ways into the hands of consumers. Though the need to re-stage the launch still throws a rather large wrench into marketing efforts of AMD and their partners, a post-launch recall would have been far more disastrous on multiple levels, not to mention that it would have given the company a significant black eye. Something that arch-rival Intel is getting to experience for themselves this week.

In any case, this will certainly go down as one of the more interesting AMD desktop chip launches – and the chips haven’t actually made it out the door yet. We’ll have more on the subject as further details are released. And look forward to chip reviews soon – just not on July 31^st as originally planned.

Intel Addresses Desktop Raptor Lake Instability Issues: Faults Excessive Voltage from Microcode, Fix Coming in August

In what started last year as a handful of reports about instability with Intel's Raptor Lake desktop chips has, over the last several months, grown into a much larger saga. Facing their biggest client chip instability impediment in decades, Intel has been under increasing pressure to figure out the root cause of the issue and fix it, as claims of damaged chips have stacked up and rumors have swirled amidst the silence from Intel. But, at long last, it looks like Intel's latest saga is about to reach its end, as today the company has announced that they've found the cause of the issue, and will be rolling out a microcode fix next month to resolve it.

Officially, Intel has been working to identify the cause of desktop Raptor Lake’s instability issues since at least February of this year, if not sooner. In the interim they have discovered a couple of correlating factors – telling motherboard vendors to stop using ridiculous power settings for their out-of-the-box configurations, and finding a voltage-related bug in Enhanced Thermal Velocity Boost (eTVB) – but neither factor was the smoking gun that set all of this into motion. All of which had left Intel to continue searching for the root cause in private, and lots of awkward silence to fill the gaps in the public.

But it looks like Intel’s search has finally come to an end – even if Intel isn’t putting the smoking gun on public display quite yet. According to a fresh update posted to the company’s community website, Intel has determined the root cause at last, and has a fix in the works.

Per the company’s announcement, Intel has tracked down the cause of the instability issue to “elevated operating voltages”, that at its heart, stems from a flawed algorithm in Intel’s microcode that requested the wrong voltage. Consequently, Intel will be able to resolve the issue through a new microcode update, which pending validation, is expected to be released in the middle of August.

And while there’s nothing good for Intel about Raptor Lake’s instability issues or the need to fix them, that the problem can be ascribed to (or at least fixed by) microcode is about the best possible outcome the company could hope for. Across the full spectrum of potential causes, microcode is the easiest to fix at scale – microcode updates are already distributed through OS updates, and all chips of a given stepping (millions in all) run the same microcode. Even a motherboard BIOS-related issue would be much harder to fix given the vast number of different boards out there, never mind a true hardware flaw that would require Intel to replace even more chips than they already have.

Still, we’d also be remiss if we didn’t note that microcode is regularly used to paper over issues further down in the processor, as we’ve most famously seen with the Meltdown/Spectre fixes several years ago. So while Intel is publicly attributing the issue to microcode bugs, there are several more layers to the onion that is modern CPUs that could be playing a part. In that respect, a microcode fix grants the least amount of insight into the bug and the performance implications about its fix, since microcode can be used to mitigate so many different issues.

But for now, Intel’s focus is on communicating that they have fix and establishing a timeline for distributing it. The matter has certainly caused them a lot of consternation over the last year, and it will continue to do so for at least another month.

In the meantime, we’ve reached out to our Intel contacts to see if the company will be publishing additional details about the voltage bug and its fix. “Elevated operating voltages” is not a very satisfying answer on its own, and given the unprecedented nature of the issue, we’re hoping that Intel will be able to share additional details as to what’s going on, and how Intel will be preventing it in the future.

Intel Also Confirms a Via Oxidation Manufacturing Issue Affected Early Raptor Lake Chips

Tangential to this news, Intel has also made a couple of other statements regarding chip instability to the press and public over the last 48 hours that also warrant some attention.

First and foremost, leading up to Intel’s official root cause analysis of the desktop Raptor Lake instability issues, one possibility that couldn’t be written off at the time was that the root cause of the issue was a hardware flaw of some kind. And while the answer to that turned out to be “no,” there is a rather important “but” in there, as well.

As it turns out, Intel did have an early manufacturing flaw in the enhanced version of the Intel 7 process node used to build Raptor Lake. According to a post made by Intel to Reddit this afternoon, a “via Oxidation manufacturing issue” was addressed in 2023. However, despite the suspicious timing, according to Intel this is separate from the microcode issue driving instability issues with Raptor Lake desktop processors up to today.

Ultimately, Intel says that they caught the issue early-on, and that only a small number of Raptor Lake were affected by the via oxidation manufacturing flaw. Which is hardly going to come as a comfort to Raptor Lake owners who are already worried about the instability issue, but if nothing else, it’s helpful that the issue is being publicly documented. Typically, these sorts of early teething issues go unmentioned, as even in the best of scenarios, some chips inevitably fail prematurely.

Unfortunately, Intel’s revelation here doesn’t offer any further details on what the issue is, or how it manifests itself beyond further instability. Though at the end of the day, as with the microcode voltage issue, the fix for any affected chips will be to RMA them with Intel to get a replacement.

Laptops Not Affected by Raptor Lake Microcode Issue

Finally, ahead of the previous two statements, Intel also released a statement to Digital Trends and a few other tech websites over the weekend, in response to accusations that Intel’s 13^th generation Core mobile CPUs were also impacted by what we now know to be the microcode flaw. In the statement, Intel refuted those claims, stating that laptop chips were not suffering from the same instability issue.

Instead, Intel attributed any laptop instability issues to typical hardware and software issues – essentially claiming that they weren’t experiencing elevated instability issues. Whether this statement accounts for the via oxidation manufacturing issue is unclear (in large part because not all 13^th Gen Core Mobile parts are Raptor Lake), but this is consistent with Intel’s statements from earlier this year, which have always explicitly cited the instability issues as desktop issues.

The AMD Zen 5 Microarchitecture: Powering Ryzen AI 300 Series For Mobile and Ryzen 9000 for Desktop

Back at Computex 2024, AMD unveiled their highly anticipated Zen 5 CPU microarchitecture during AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su's opening keynote. AMD announced not one but two new client platforms that will utilize the latest Zen 5 cores. This includes AMD's latest AI PC-focused chip family for the laptop market, the Ryzen AI 300 series. In comparison, the Ryzen 9000 series caters to the desktop market, which uses the preexisting AM5 platform.

Built around the new Zen 5 CPU microarchitecture with some fundamental improvements to both graphics and AI performance, the Ryzen AI 300 series, code-named Strix Point, is set to deliver improvements in several areas. The Ryzen AI 300 series looks set to add another footnote in the march towards the AI PC with its mobile SoC featuring a new XDNA 2 NPU, from which AMD promises 50 TOPS of performance. AMD has also upgraded the integrated graphics with the RDNA 3.5, which is designed to replace the last generation of RDNA 3 mobile graphics, for better performance in games than we've seen before.

Further to this, during AMD's recent Tech Day last week, AMD disclosed some of the technical details regarding Zen 5, which also covers a number of key elements under the hood on both the Ryzen AI 300 and the Ryzen 9000 series. On paper, the Zen 5 architecture looks quite a big step up compared to Zen 4, with the key component driving Zen 5 forward through higher instructions per cycle than its predecessor, which is something AMD has managed to do consistently from Zen to Zen 2, Zen 3, Zen 4, and now Zen 5.

Troubled AI Processor Developer Graphcore Finds a Buyer: SoftBank

After months of searching for a buyer, troubled U.K.-based AI processor designer Graphcore said on Friday that it has been acquired by SoftBank. The company will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of SoftBank and will possibly collaborate with Arm, but what remains to be seen what happens to the unique architecture of Graphcore's intelligence processing units (IPUs).

Graphcore will retain its name as it will become a wholly owned subsidiary of SoftBank, which paid either $400 million (according to EE Times) or $500 million (according to BBC) for the company. Over its lifetime, Graphcore has received a total of $700 million of investments from Microsoft and Sequoia Capital, and at its peak in late 2020, was valued at $2.8 billion. Nigel Toon will remain at the helm of Graphcore, which will hire new staff in its UK offices and continue to be headquartered in Bristol, with additional offices in Cambridge, London, Gdansk (Poland), and Hsinchu (China).

"This is a tremendous endorsement of our team and their ability to build truly transformative AI technologies at scale, as well as a great outcome for our company," said Nigel Toon. "Demand for AI compute is vast and continues to grow. There remains much to do to improve efficiency, resilience, and computational power to unlock the full potential of AI. In SoftBank, we have a partner that can enable the Graphcore team to redefine the landscape for AI technology."

Although Graphcore says that it had won contracts with major high-tech companies and deployed its IPUs, it could not compete against NVIDIA and other prêt-à-porter AI processor vendors due to insufficient funding. In the recent years the company's problems were so severe that it had to lay off 20% of its staff, bringing its headcount to around 500. Those cuts also saw office closures in Norway, Japan, and South Korea, which made it even harder to compete against big players.

Graphcore certainly hopes that with SoftBank's deep pockets and willingness to invest in AI technologies in general and AI processors in particular, it will finally be able to compete head-to-head with established players like NVIDIA.

When asked whether Graphcore will work with SoftBank's Arm, Nigel Toon said that he was looking forward to work with all companies controlled by its parent, including Arm. Meanwhile, SoftBank itself is reportedly looking forward to build its own AI processor venture called Project Izanagi to compete against NVIDIA, whereas Arm is reportedly developing AI processors that will work in datacenters owned by SoftBank. Therefore, it remains to be seen where does Graphcore fit in.

For now, the best processor that Graphcore has is its Colossus MK2 IPU, which is built using 59.4 billion transistors and packs in 1,472 independent cores with simultaneous multithreading (SMT) capable of handling 8,832 parallel threads. Instead of using HBM or other types of external memory, the chip integrates 900 MB of SRAM, providing an aggregated bandwidth of 47.5 TB/s per chip. Additionally, it features 10 IPU links to scale with other MK2 processors. When it comes to performance, the MK2 C600 delivers 560 TFLOPS FP8, 280 TFLOPS FP16, and 70 TFLOPS of FP32 performance at 185W. To put the numbers into context, NVIDIA's A100 delivers 312 FP16 TFLOPS without sparsity as well as 19.5 FP32 TFLOPS, whereas NVIDIA's H100 card offers 3,341 FP8 TFLOPS.

Sources: Graphcore, EE Times, BBC, Reuters

The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Architecture Deep Dive: Getting To Know Oryon and Adreno X1

The curtains are drawn and it’s almost showtime for Qualcomm and its Snapdragon X SoC team. After first detailing the SoC nearly 8 months ago at the company’s most recent Snapdragon Summit, and making numerous performance disclosures in the intervening months, the Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus launch is nearly upon us. The chips have already shipped to Qualcomm’s laptop partners, and the first laptops are set to ship next week.

In the last 8 months Qualcomm has made a lot of interesting claims for their high-performance Windows-on-Arm SoC – many of which will be put to the test in the coming weeks. But beyond all the performance claims and bluster amidst what is shaping up to be a highly competitive environment for PC CPUs, there’s an even more fundamental question about the Snapdragon X that we’ve been dying to get to: how does it work?

Ahead of next week’s launch, then, we’re finally getting the answer to that, as today Qualcomm is releasing their long-awaited architectural disclosure on the Snapdragon X SoC. This includes not only their new, custom Arm v8 “Oryon” CPU core, but also technical disclosures on their Adreno GPU, and the Hexagon NPU that backs their heavily-promoted AI capabilities. The company has made it clear in the past that the Snapdragon X is a serious, top-priority effort for the company – that they’re not just slapping together a Windows SoC from their existing IP blocks and calling it a day – so there’s a great deal of novel technology within the SoC.

And while we’re excited to look at it all, we’ll also be the first to admit that we’re the most excited to finally get to take a deep dive on Oryon, Qualcomm’s custom-built Arm CPU cores. The first new high-performance CPU design created from scratch in the last several years, the significance of Oryon cannot be overstated. Besides providing the basis of a new generation of Windows-on-Arm SoCs that Qualcomm hopes will vault them into contention in the Windows PC marketplace, Oryon will also be the basis of Qualcomm’s traditional Snapdragon mobile handset and tablet SoCs going forward.

So a great deal of the company’s hardware over the next few years is riding on this CPU architecture – and if all goes according to plan, there will be many more generations of Oryon to follow. One way or another, it’s going to set Qualcomm apart from its competitors in both the PC and mobile spaces, as it means Qualcomm is moving on from Arm’s reference designs, which by their very nature are accessible Qualcomm’s competition as well.

So without further ado, let’s dive in to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X SoC architecture.

Report: MediaTek Working on Arm-Based Processor for Windows PCs

As Qualcomm's exclusivity for Arm-powered processors for Windows PCs is reportedly coming to its end, other chipmakers are getting ready to offer their Arm-based system-on-chips for Windows computers. And, according to a new report from Reuters, MediaTek will be among the companies jumping into the Windows-on-Arm field, with plans to launch their first PC processor late next year.

MediaTek's system-on-chip for Windows PCs will rely on Arm's 'ready-made designs,' according to Reuters. Which in turn hints that MediaTek would be using Arm's compute sub-system (CSS) for client PCs, a building block designed to significantly speed up development of SoCs.

With the vauge nature of the Reuters report, however, which version of Arm's IP MediaTek might be using remains unclear, and the answer to that will largely hinge on timing. Arm refreshes its client cores and IP offerings yearly – typically announcing them to the public in May – with finished chips rolling out as early as later in the year. So depending on just how late in the year MediaTek is planning to launch their chip, the company has a large enough window to potentially use either the current 2024 client designs, or next year's 2025 designs.

For reference, Arm's 2024 CSS for client systems is quite powerful on its own. It includes two ultra-high-performance Arm Cortex-X925 cores (each with up to 3MB L2 cache and clock speeds over 3.60 GHz, supporting SVE and SVE2), four high-performance Cortex-A725 cores, two energy-efficient Cortex-A520 cores, and an Immortalis-G925 graphics processor. And, of course, MediaTek has the expertise to skip Arm's CSS and build their own bespoke designs as well, if that's what they'd prefer.

Overall, the latest client designs from Arm can accommodate up to 14 CPU cores – Arm intentionally leaves headroom for designs to be scaled-up for laptops – which would make for quite a formidable chip. But the PC SoC market has no shortage of capable contenders with their own designs; besides Qualcomm's Snapdragon X processors, MediaTek would also be going up against the latest designs from Intel and AMD. All of whom are planning to make big plays for the mobile PC market in the next several months. So MediaTek will need to make a serious effort if their effort to jump into the PC SoC market are to succeed.

Since 2016, Microsoft has partnered with Qualcomm to bring Arm's processor architecture, which is widely used in smartphones, to Windows PCs. Qualcomm has an exclusive agreement to supply these chips for the next several months (the exact timing remains unclear), after which other designers like MediaTek can enter the market. Qualcomm, for its part, has benefited greatly from collaborating with Microsoft, so it will be interesting to see if Microsoft extends a similar hand out to other Arm chip makers.

Ultimately, the market for Arm PC SoCs has the potential to get crowded quickly. According to previous reports from Reuters, both AMD and NVIDIA are also developing Arm-based chips for Windows. So if all of those projects come to fruition, there could potentially be several Arm SoCs available to PC manufacturers around the same time. All of which would be a massive change from the past 20 years of the PC, where Intel and AMD have been the entire market.

Both MediaTek and Microsoft have declined to comment on the ongoing developments, the news agency states.

Update on Intel's Panther Lake at Computex 2024, Intel Powering Up Intel 18A Wafer Next Week

During the Intel keynote hosted by CEO Pat Gelsinger, he gave the world a glimpse into the Intel Client roadmap until 2026. Meteor Lake launched last year on that roadmap, and Lunar Lake, which we dived into yesterday as Intel disclosed technical details about the upcoming platform. Pat also presented a wafer on stage, Panther Lake, and he gave some additional information about Intel's forthcoming Panther Lake platform, which is expected in 2025.

We covered Intel's initial announcement about the Panther Lake platform last year. It is set to be Intel's first client platform using its Intel 18A node. Aside from once again affirming that things are on track for a 2026 launch, Pat Gelsinger, Intel's CEO, also confirmed that they will be powering on the first 18A wafer for Panther Lake as early as next week.

Intel CPU Architecture Generations
	Alder/Raptor Lake	Meteor Lake	Lunar Lake	Arrow Lake	Panther Lake
P-Core Architecture	Golden Cove/ Raptor Cove	Redwood Cove	Lion Cove	Lion Cove	Cougar Cove?
E-Core Architecture	Gracemont	Crestmont	Skymont	Crestmont?	Darkmont?
GPU Architecture	Xe-LP	Xe-LPG	Xe2	Xe2?	?
NPU Architecture	N/A	NPU 3720	NPU 4	?	?
Active Tiles	1 (Monolithic)	4	2	4?	?
Manufacturing Processes	Intel 7	Intel 4 + TSMC N6 + TSMC N5	TSMC N3B + TSMC N6	Intel 20A + More	Intel 18A + ?
Segment	Mobile + Desktop	Mobile	LP Mobile	HP Mobile + Desktop	Mobile?
Release Date (OEM)	Q4'2021	Q4'2023	Q3'2024	Q4'2024	2025

One element to consider from last year is that Lunar Lake is built using TSMC, with the Lunar Lake compute tile with Xe2-LPG graphics on TSMC N3B, and the I/O tile on TSMC N6. Pat confirmed on stage that Panther Lake will be on Intel 18A. Still, he didn't confirm whether the chip will be made purely at Intel, or a mix between Intel and external foundries (ala Meteor Lake). Intel has also yet to confirm the CPU cores to be used, but from what our sources tell us, it sounds like it will be the new Cougar Cove and Darkmont cores.

As we head into the second half of 2024 and after Lunar Lake launches, Intel may divulge more information, including the architectural advancements Panther Lake is expected to bring. Until then, we will have to wait and see.

AMD Announces Zen 5-based EPYC “Turin” Processors: Up to 192 Cores, Coming in H2’2024

With AMD’s Zen 5 CPU architecture only a month away from its first product releases, the new CPU architecture was placed front and center for AMD’s prime Computex 2024 keynote. Outlining how Zen 5 will lead to improved products across AMD’s entire portfolio, the company laid out their product plans for the full triad: mobile, desktop, and servers. And while server chips will be the last parts to be released, AMD also saved the best for last by showcasing a 192 core EPYC “Turin” chip.

Turin is the catch-all codename for AMD’s Zen 5-based EPYC server processors – what will presumably be the EPYC 9005 series. The company has previously disclosed the name in earnings calls and other investor functions, outlining that the chip was already sampling to customers and that the silicon was “looking great.”

The Computex reveal, in turn, is the first time that the silicon has been shown off to the public. And with it, we’ve received the first official confirmation of the chip’s specifications. With SKUs up to 192 CPU cores, it’s going to be a monster of an x86 CPU.

AMD EPYC CPU Generations
AnandTech	EPYC 5th Gen (Turin, Z5c)	EPYC 9704 (Bergamo)	EPYC 9004 (Genoa)	EPYC 7003 (Milan)
CPU Architecture	Zen 5c	Zen 4c	Zen 4	Zen 3
Max CPU Cores	192	128	96	64
Memory Channels	12 x DDR5	12 x DDR5	12 x DDR5	8 x DDR4
PCIe Lanes	128 x 5.0	128 x 5.0	128 x 5.0	128 x 4.0
L3 Cache	?	256MB	384MB	256MB
Max TDP	360W?	360W	400W	280W
Socket	SP5	SP5	SP5	SP3
Manufacturing Process	CCD: TSMC N3 IOD:TSMC N6	CCD: TSMC N5 IOD: TSMC N6	CCD: TSMC N5 IOD: TSMC N6	CCD: TSMC N7 IOD: GloFo 14nm
Release Date	H2'2024	06/2023	11/2022	03/2021

Though only a brief tease, AMD’s Turin showcase did confirm a few, long-suspected details about the platform. AMD will once again be using their socket SP5 platform for Turin processors, which means the chips are drop-in compatible with EPYC 9004 Genoa (and Bergamo). The reuse of SP5 means that customers and server vendors can immediately swap out chips without having to build/deploy whole new systems. It also means that Turin will have the same base memory and I/O options as the EPYC 9004 series: 12 channels of DDR5 memory, and 128 PCIe 5.0 lanes.

In terms of power consumption, existing SP5 processors top out at 400 Watts, and we’d expect the same for these new, socket-compatible chips.

As for the Turin chip itself, while AMD is not going into further detail on its configuration, all signs point to this being a Zen 5c configuration – that is, built using CCDs designed around AMD’s compact Zen 5 core configuration. This would make the Turin chip on display the successor to Bergamo (EPYC 9704), which was AMD’s first compact core server processor, using Zen 4c cores. AMD’s compact CPU cores generally trade off per-core performance in favor of allowing more CPU cores overall, with lower clockspeed limits (by design) and less cache memory throughout the chip.

According to AMD, the CCDs on this chip were fabbed on a 3nm process (undoubtedly TSMC’s), with AMD apparently looking to take advantage of the densest process available in order to maximize the number of CPU cores the can place on a single chip. Even then, the CCDs featured here are quite sizable, and while we’re waiting for official die size numbers, it would come as no surprise if Zen 5’s higher transistor count more than offset the space savings of moving to 3nm. Still, AMD has been able to squeeze 12 CCDs on to the chip – 4 more than Bergamo – which is what’s allowing them to offer 192 CPU cores instead of 128 as in the last generation.

Meanwhile, the IOD is confirmed to be produced on 6nm. Judging from that fact, the pictures, and what AMD’s doing with their Zen 5 desktop products, there is a very good chance that AMD is using either the same or a very similar IOD as on Genoa/Bergamo. Which goes hand-in-hand with the socket/platform at the other end of the chip staying the same.

AMD’s brief teaser did not discuss at all any other Turin configurations. So there is nothing else official to share about Turin chips built using full-sized Zen 5 CPU cores. With that said, we know that the full-fat cores going into the Ryzen 9000 desktop series pack 8 cores to a CCD and are being fabbed on a 4nm process – not 3nm – so that strongly implies that EPYC Zen 5 CCDs will be the same. Which, if that pans out, means that Turin chips using high performance cores will max out at 96 cores, the same as Genoa.

Hardware configurations aside, AMD also showcased a couple of benchmarks, pitting the new EPYC chips against Intel’s Xeons. As you’d expect in a keynote teaser, AMD was winning handily. Though it is interesting to note that the chips benchmarked were all 128 core Turins, rather than on the 192 core model being shown off today.

AMD will be shipping EPYC Turin in the second half of this year. More details on the chips and configurations will follow once AMD gets closer to the EPYC launch.

AMD Launching New CPUs for AM4: Ryzen 5000XT Series Coming in July

During their opening keynote at Computex 2024, AMD announced their intention to launch a pair of new Ryzen 5000 processors for their legacy AM4 platform. The new chips, both getting the XT suffix, will be the Ryzen 9 5900XT, a 16 core Zen 3 part, while the Ryzen 7 5800XT will be an 8 core Zen 3.

The new chips are intended to underscore AMD's ongoing commitment to supporting their consumer platforms over several years. And while the specification changes are rather minor overall – the Zen 3 CPU architecture has long since been taken as far as it can reasonable go – it does give AMD a chance to refresh the platform by slinging hardware at new price points. AMD did something very similar for the Ryzen 3000 generation with the late-model Ryzen 3000 XT chips.

AMD Ryzen 5000XT Series Processors (Zen 3)
AnandTech	Cores / Threads	Base Freq	Turbo Freq	L2 Cache	L3 Cache	TDP
Ryzen 9 5950X	16C / 32T	3.4 GHz	4.9 GHz	8 MB	64 MB	105 W
Ryzen 9 5900XT	16C / 32T	3.3 GHz	4.8 GHz	8 MB	64 MB	105 W
Ryzen 9 5900X	12C / 24T	3.7 GHz	4.8 GHz	6 MB	64 MB	105 W
Ryzen 7 5800XT	8C / 16T	3.8 GHz	4.8 GHz	4 MB	32 MB	105 W
Ryzen 7 5800X	8C / 16T	3.8 GHz	4.7 GHz	4 MB	32 MB	105 W

We've dedicated many column inches covering Zen 3 and the Ryzen 5000 series since they launched in late 2020, so there isn't anything new to add here. Zen 3 is no longer AMD's latest and greatest, but the platform as a whole is quite cheap to produce, making it a viable budget offering for new builds, or offering one last upgrade for old builds.

The Ryzen 9 5900XT is a 16 core part, and isn't to be confused with the Ryzen 9 5900X, which is a 12 core part. It ships with a peak turbo clockspeed of 4.8GHz, 100 MHz lower than the top-tier Ryzen 9 5950X. This makes it's XT designation somewhat of a misnomer compared to previous generations of XT chips, although it's clear that AMD has boxed themselves into a corner with their naming scheme, as they both need a way to designate that this is a new chip, and yet still place it below the 5950X.

Looking at the second chip, we have the Ryzen 7 5800XT. This is an 8 core part that does improve on its predecessor, offering a 4.8GHz max turbo clock that is 100MHz higher than the Ryzen 7 5800X's. Both chips otherwise share the same characteristics, including 6 MB of L2 cache and 32 MB of L3 cache, and all four of the chips – including the two new XT series and the corresponding X series chips – all come with a 105 Watt TDP.

In terms of motherboard compatibility, all of the AM4 motherboards that currently support the Ryzen 5000 series are also compatible with the Ryzen 5000XT series, although users are likely to need to perform a firmware update to ensure maximum compatibility; they are the same chips, but the microcodes are likely different.

AMD has provided some gaming performance figures comparing the Ryzen 9 5900XT to Intel's 13th Gen Core i7-13700K. It does offer very modest yet marginal gains in games by up to 4%; it's not mind-blowing, but the price could be the decisive factor here.

Regarding price, AMD hasn't disclosed anything official yet ahead of the expected launch of the Ryzen 5000XT series chips in July. It's hard to make a case for a pair of chips to be considered a fully-fledged series, but it does open up the doors for AMD to perhaps launch more 5000XT series chips in the future.

AMD Announces The Ryzen AI 300 Series For Mobile: Zen 5 With RDNA 3.5, and XDNA2 NPU With 50 TOPS

During AMD's opening keynote at Computex 2024, company CEO Dr. Lisa Su revealed AMD's latest AI PC-focused chip lineup for the mobile market, the Ryzen AI 300 series. Based on AMD's new Zen 5 CPU microarchitecture, the Ryzen AI 300 series – codenamed Strix Point – is intended to offer an across-the-board improvement in mobile SoC performance, with AMD proclaiming that the Ryzen AI 300 series will offer the fastest AI inference performance within the compact and portable PC market.

Under the hood, the new mobile SoC from AMD incorporates not only their new Zen 5 CPU architecture, but also their new RDNA 3.5-based integrated graphics, and the third generation XDNA2-based NPU, the latter of which is rated to deliver 50 TOPS of performance for AI-based workloads. As a result, the Ryzen AI 300 series represents a significant upgrade in AMD's mobile chip lineup, with all of the major aspects of the platform receiving a major upgrade versus their Zen 4-era Phoenix/Hawk Point SoCs. The one thing the new platform won't get, however, is a process node improvement; AMD is building Strix Point on a 4nm node, just like Phoenix/Hawk Point before it.

For this morning's announcement, AMD has unveiled the first two Ryzen AI 300 SKUs designed for notebooks. The first of these is the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, which features 12 Zen 5 cores with a maximum boost frequency of up to 5.1 GHz, and comes equipped with 36 MB cache (12 MB L2 + 24 MB L3). The other chip to be announced is the Ryzen AI 9 365, which has two fewer Zen 5 cores (10 cores) and operates with a 5,0 GHz boost frequency and a 10 MB L2 + 24 MB L3 cache allocation.

AMD Unveils Ryzen 9000 CPUs For Desktop, Zen 5 Takes Center Stage at Computex 2024

During AMD's Computex 2024 kick-off keynote, AMD's CEO, Dr. Lisa Su, officially unveiled and announced the company's next generation of Ryzen processors. Today marks the first unveiling of AMD's highly anticipated Zen 5 microarchitecture via the Ryzen 9000 series, which is set to bring several advancements over Zen 4 and the Ryzen 7000 series for desktop PCs, which will launch sometime in July 2024.

AMD has unveiled four new chip SKUs using its Zen 5 microarchitecture. The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X processor will be the new consumer flagship part, featuring 16 CPU cores and a speedy 5.7 GHz maximum boost frequency. The other SKUs include, 6, 8, and 12 core parts, giving users a varied combination of core and thread counts. All four of these initial chips will be X-series chips, meaning they will have an unlocked multipliers and higher TDPs/clockspeeds.

In regards to performance, AMD is touting an average (geomean) IPC increase in desktop workloads for Zen 5 of 16%. And with the new desktop Ryzen chips' turbo clockspeeds remaining largely identical to their Ryzen 7000 predecessors, this should translate into similar performance expectations for the new chips.

The AMD Ryzen 9000 series will also launch on the AM5 socket, which debuted with AMD's Ryzen 7000 series and marks AMD's commitment to socket/platform longevity. Along with the Ryzen 9000 series will come a pair of new high-performance chipsets: the X870E (Extreme) and the regular X870 chipsets. The fundamental features that vendors will integrate into their specific motherboards remain tight-lipped. Still, we do know that USB 4.0 ports are standard on the X870E/X870 boards, along with PCIe 5.0 for both PCIe graphics and NVMe storage, with higher AMD EXPO memory profile support expected than previous generations.

Computex 2024 Keynote Preview: The Great PC Powers Convene

The annual Computex computer expo kicks off in Taepei this weekend. And this year’s show is shaping up to be the most packed in years.

Computex rivals CES for the most important PC trade show of the year, and in most years is attended by not only the numerous local Taiwanese firms (Asus, MSI, ASRock, and others), but the major chip developers have been increasing their own presence as well. These days, while CES itself tends to land more high-profile announcements, in recent years it’s been Computex that has delivered on more substantial announcements. This is largely because tech firms have aligned their product schedules to roll out near gear in the second half of the year, when retail sales are stronger due to the back-to-school and holiday shopping periods.

This year’s show, in turn, is looking to be an especially big year for the PC ecosystem. All the major PC chip firms – AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, and the 4^th Musketeer, Qualcomm – are holding keynote addresses at this year’s show, where they’re expected to announce new slates of PC products to ship later this year. In a normal year there is typically only major announcements from one or two of the major chip firms, so having all four of them at the show delivering lengthy keynotes is setting things up for what should be an exceptional show.

Arm Unveils 2024 CPU Core Designs, Cortex X925, A725 and A520: Arm v9.2 Redefined For 3nm

As the semiconductor industry continues to evolve, Arm stands at the forefront of innovation for its core and IP architecture, especially in the mobile space, by pushing the boundaries of technology to deliver cutting-edge solutions for end users. For 2024, Arm's year-on-year strategic advancements focus on enhancing last year's Armv9.2 architecture with a new twist. Arm has rebranded and re-strategized its efforts by introducing Arm Compute Subsystem (CSS), the direct successor to last year's Total Compute Solutions (TSC2023) platform.

Arm is also transitioning its latest IP and Cortex core designs, including the largest Cortex X925, the middle Cortex A725, and the refreshed and smaller Cortex A520 to the more advanced 3 nm process technology. Arm promises that the 3 nm process node will deliver unprecedented performance gains compared to last year's designs, power efficiency and scalability improvements, and new front and back-end refinements to its Cortex series of cores. Arms' new solutions look to power the next-generation mobile and AI applications as Arm, along with its complete AArch64 64-bit instruction execution and approach to solutions geared towards mobile and notebooks, look set to redefine end users' expectations within the Android and Windows on Arm products.

One More EPYC: AMD Launches Entry-Level Zen 4-based EPYC 4004 Series

Ever since AMD re-emerged as a major competitor within the x86 CPU scene, one of AMD’s top priorities has been to win over customers in the highly lucrative and profitable server market. It’s a strategy that’s paid off well for AMD, as while they’re still the minority player in the space, they’ve continued to whittle away at what was once Intel’s absolute control over the market, slowly converting more and more customers over to the EPYC ecosystem.

Now as the Zen 4 CPU architecture approaches its second birthday, AMD is launching one final line of EPYC chips, taking aim at yet another Xeon market segment. This time it’s all about the entry-level 1P server market – small scale, budget-conscientious users who only need a handful of CPU cores – which AMD is addressing with their new EPYC 4004 series processors.

Within AMD’s various product stacks, the new EPYC 4004 family essentially replaces Ryzen chips for use in servers. Ryzen for servers was never a dedicated product lineup within AMD, but none the less it has been a product segment within the company since 2019, with AMD aiming it at smaller-scale hosting providers who opted to use racks of consumer-scale hardware, rather than going the high-density route with high core count EPYC processors.

With the upgrade to EPYC status, that hardware ecosystem is being re-deployed as a proper lineup with dedicated chips, and a handful of additional features befitting an EPYC chip. Consequently, AMD is also expanding the scope of the market segments they’re targeting by a hair, roping in small business (SMB) users, whom AMD wasn’t previously chasing. Though regardless of the name on the market segment, the end result is that AMD is carving out a budget-priced series of EPYC chips with 4 to 16 cores based on their consumer platforms.

Underlying the new EPYC 4004 series is AMD’s tried and true AM5 platform and Raphael processors, which we know better as the Ryzen 7000 series. Their new EPYC counterparts are an 8 chip stack that is comprised almost entirely of rebranded Ryzen 7000 SKUs, with all the same core counts, clockspeeds, and TDPs as their counterparts. The sole exception here being the very cheapest chip of the bunch, the 4 core 4124P.

AMD EPYC 4004 Processors
AnandTech	Core/ Thread		Base Freq	1T Freq	L3 Cache	PCIe	Memory	TDP (W)	Price (1KU)	Ryzen Version
4584PX	16	32	4200	5700	128MB (3D)	28 x 5.0	2 x DDR5-5200 UDIMM	120	$699	7950X3D
4484PX	12	24	4400	5600	128MB (3D)			120	$599	7900X3D
4564P	16	32	4500	5700	64MB			170	$699	7950X
4464P	12	24	3700	5400	64MB			65	$429	7900
4364P	8	16	4500	5400	32MB			105	$399	7700X
4344P	8	16	3800	5300	32MB			65	$329	7700
4244P	6	12	3800	5100	32MB			65	$229	7600
4124P	4	8	3800	5100	16MB			65	$149	New

Since these are all based on AMD’s consumer discrete CPUs, the underlying architecture in all of these chips is Zen 4 throughout. So despite being positioned below the EPYC 8004 Siena series, you won’t find any Zen 4c CPU cores here; everything is full-fat Zen 4 CCDs. Which means that while there are relatively few cores overall (for an EPYC processor), they are all high-performing cores, with nothing turboing lower than 5.1GHz.

Notably here, AMD is mixing in some of their 3D V-Cache chip SKUs as well, which are signified with the “PX” suffix. Based on the 7950X3D and 7900X3D respectively, both of these chips have 1 CCD with V-Cache stacked on top of them, affording the chip a total of 128MB of L3 cache. The remaining 6 SKUs all get the “P” suffix – indicating they’re 1 socket processors – and come with TDPs ranging from 65 Watts to 170 Watts.

This does mean that, by EPYC server standards, the 4004 series is not particularly energy efficient. This is a lineup that is intended to be cost-effective first and foremost. Instead, energy efficiency remains the domain of the EPYC 8004, with its modestly-clocked many-core Zen4c designs.

The reuse of Zen 4/AM5 means that the EPYC 4004 series comes with all of the features we’ve come to expect from the platform, including 28 lanes of PCIe 5.0, 2 channels (128-bits) of DDR5 memory at speeds up to DDR5-5200, and even integrated graphics. Since this is a server part, ECC is officially supported on the chips – though do note that like the Ryzen Pro workstation chips, this is UDIMM-only; registered DIMMs (RDIMMs) are not supported.

AMD isn’t disclosing the chipset being paired with the EPYC 4004 processors, and while it’s undoubtedly going to be AMD’s favorite ASMedia-designed I/O chipset, it’s interesting to note that it’s at the motherboard level where the new EPYC platform’s real server credentials are at. Separating itself from rank-and-file Ryzens, the EPYC 4004 platform is getting several additional enterprise features, including baseboard management controller (BMC) support, software RAID (RAIDXpert2 for Server), and official server OS support. To be sure, this is still a fraction of the features found in a high-end enterprise solution like the EPYC 9004/8004 series, but it’s some additional functionality befitting of a platform meant to be used in servers.

AMD’s new chips, in turn, are designed to compete against Intel’s entry-level Xeon-E family. Itself a redress of consumer hardware (Raptor Lake), the Xeon-E family is a P-core only chip lineup, with Intel offering SKUs with 4, 6, or 8 CPU cores. This leaves the EPYC 4004 family somewhat uniquely positioned compared to the Xeon-E family, as Intel doesn’t have anything that’s a true counterpart to AMD’s 12 and 16 core chips; after Xeon-E comes the far more capable (and expensive) Xeon-w family. So part of AMD’s strategy with the EPYC 4004 family is to serve a niche that Intel does not.

(As a side bonus, AMD’s core counts also end up playing well with Windows Server 2022 licensing. The Standard license covers up to 16 cores, so a top-end EPYC 4004 chip lets server owners max out their license, amortizing the software cost over more cores)

With regards to performance, Raptor Lake versus Zen 4 is largely settled by now. So I won’t spend too much time on AMD’s (many) benchmark slides. But suffice it to say, with a significant core count advantage, AMD can deliver an equally significant performance advantage in highly multi-threaded workloads (though in that scenario, it does come with a similar spike in power consumption compared to the 95 Watt Intel chips).

Wrapping things up, AMD is launching the new EPYC 4004 product stack immediately. With many of AMD’s regular server partners already signed up – and the core hardware readily available – there won’t be much of a ramp-up period to speak of.

Intel Teases Lunar Lake CPU Ahead of Computex: Most Power Efficient x86 Chip Yet

The next few weeks in the PC industry are going to come fast and furious. Between today and mid-June are multiple conferences and trade-shows, including Microsoft Build and the king of PC trade shows: Computex Taiwan. With all three PC CPU vendors set to present, there’s a lot going on, and a lot of product announcements to be had. But even before those trade shows start, Intel is looking to make the first move this afternoon with an early preview on its next-gen mobile processor, Lunar Lake.

While Intel hasn’t said too much about what to expect from their Computex 2024 keynote thus far, it’s clear that Intel’s next-gen CPUs – Lunar Lake for mobile, and Arrow Lake for Mobile/Desktop – are going to be two of the major stars of the show. At this point Intel has previously teased and/or demoed both chips (Lunar more so than Arrow), and this afternoon the company is releasing a bit more information on Lunar Lake even before Computex kicks off.

Officially, today’s reveal is a preview of Intel’s next Tech Tour event, which is taking place at the end of May. Unofficially, this is the exact same date and time as the embargo on Qualcomm Snapdragon X laptop announcements, which are slated to hit retail shelves next month. Lunar Lake laptops, by contrast, will not hit retail shelves until Q4 of this year. So although the additional technical details from today’s disclosure are great to have, looking at the bigger picture it’s difficult to interpret this reveal as anything less than a bald-faced effort to interdict the Snapdragon X launch (not that Qualcomm hasn’t also been crowing about SDX for the last 7 months). Which, if nothing else, goes to show the current tumultuous state of the laptop CPU market, and that Intel isn’t nearly as secure in their position as they have traditionally been.

Intel Core i9-14900KS Review: The Swan Song of Raptor Lake With A Super Fast 6.2 GHz Turbo

For numerous generations of their desktop processor releases, Intel has made available a selection of high-performance special edition "KS" CPUs that add a little extra compared to their flagship chip. With a lot of interest, primarily from the enthusiasts looking for the fastest processors, Intel's latest Core i9-14900KS represents a super-fast addition to its 14th Generation Core lineup with out-of-the-box turbo clock speeds of up to 6.2 GHz and represents the last processor to end an era as Intel is removing the 'i' from its legendary nomenclature for future desktop chip releases.

Reaching speeds of up to 6.2 GHz, this sets up the Core i9-14900KS as the fastest desktop CPU in the world right now, at least in terms of frequencies out of the box. Building on their 'regular' flagship chip, the Core i9-14900, the Core i9-14900KS is also using their refreshed Raptor Lake (RPL-R) 8P+16E core chip design with a 200 MHz higher boost clock speed and also has a 100 MHz bump on P-Core base frequency. 

This new KS series SKU shows Intel's drive to offer an even faster alternative to their desktop regular K series offerings, and with the Core i9-14900KS, they look to provide the best silicon from their Raptor Lake Refresh series with more performance available to unlock to those who can. The caveat is that achieving these ridiculously fast clock speeds of 6.2 GHz on the P-Core comes at the cost of power and heat; keeping a processor pulling upwards of 350 W is a challenge in its own right, and users need to factor this in if even contemplating a KS series SKU.

In our previous KS series review, the Core i9-13900KS reached 360 W at its peak, considerably more than the Core i9-13900K. The Core i9-14900KS, built on the same core architecture, is expected to surpass that even further than the Core i9-14900K. We aim to compare Intel's final Core i series processor to the best of what both Intel and AMD have available, and it will be interesting to see how much performance can be extrapolated from the KS compared to the regular K series SKU.

AMD Hits Record High Share in x86 Desktops and Servers in Q1 2024

Coming out of the dark times that preceded the launch of AMD's Zen CPU architecture in 2017, to say that AMD has turned things around on the back of Zen would be an understatement.  Ever since AMD launched its first Zen-based Ryzen and EPYC processors for client and server computers, it has been consistently gaining x86 market share, growing from a bit player to a respectable rival to Intel (and all at Intel's expense).

The first quarter of this year was no exception, according to Mercury Research, as the company achieved record high unit shares on x86 desktop and x86 server CPU markets due to success of its Ryzen 8000-series client products and 4^th Generation EPYC processors.

"Mercury noted in their first quarter report that AMD gained significant server and client revenue share driven by growing demand for 4th Gen EPYC and Ryzen 8000 series processors," a statement by AMD reads.

Desktop PCs: AMD Achieves Highest Share in More Than a Decade 

Desktops, particularly DIY desktops, have always been AMD's strongest market. After the company launched its Ryzen processors in 2017, it doubled its presence in desktops in just three years. But in the recent years the company had to prioritize production of more expensive CPUs for datacenters, which lead to some erosion of its desktop and mobile market shares.

As the company secured more capacity at TSMC, it started to gradually increase production of desktop processors. In Q4 last year it introduced its Zen 4-based Ryzen 8000/Ryzen 8000 Pro processors for mainstream desktops, which appeared to be pretty popular with PC makers.

As a result of this and other factors, AMD increased unit sales of its desktop CPUs by 4.7% year-over-year in Q1 2024 and its market share achieved 23.9%, which is the highest desktop CPU market share the company commanded in over a decade. Interestingly, AMD does not attribute its success on the desktop front to any particular product or product family, which implies that there are multiple factors at play.

Mobile PCs: A Slight Drop for AMD amid Intel's Meteor Lake Ramp

AMD has been gradually regaining its share inside laptops for about 1.5 years now and sales of its Zen 4-based Ryzen 7040-series processors were quite strong in Q3 2023 and Q4 2023, when the company's unit share increased to 19.5% and 20.3%, respectively, as AMD-based notebook platforms ramped up. By contrast, Intel's Core Ultra 'Meteor Lake' powered machines only began to hit retail shelves in Q4'23, which affected sales of its processors for laptops.

In the first quarter AMD's unit share on the market of CPUs for notebooks decreased to 19.3%, down 1% sequentially. Meanwhile, the company still demonstrated significant year-over-year unit share increase of 3.1% and revenue share increase of 4%, which signals rising average selling price of AMD's latest Ryzen processors for mobile PCs.

Client PCs: Slight Gain for AMD, Small Loss for Intel

Overall, Intel remained the dominant force in client PC sales in the first quarter of 2024, with a 79.4% market share, leaving 20.6% for AMD. This is not particularly surprising given how strong and diverse Intel's client products lineup is. Even with continued success, it will take AMD years to grow sales by enough to completely flip the market.

But AMD actually gained a 0.3% unit share sequentially and a 3.6% unit share year-over year. Notably, however, AMD's revenue share of client PC market is significantly lower than its unit share (16.3% vs 20.6%), so the company is still somewhat pigeonholed into selling more budget and fewer premium processors overall. But the company still made a strong 3.8% gain since the first quarter 2023, when its revenue share was around 12.5% amid unit share of 17%.

Servers: AMD Grabs Another Piece of the Market

AMD's EPYC datacenter processors are undeniably the crown jewel of the company's CPU product lineup. While AMD's market share in desktops and laptops fluctuated in the recent years, the company has been steadily gaining presence in servers both in terms of units and in terms of revenue in the highly lucrative (and profitable) server market.

In Q1 2024, AMD's unit share on the market of CPUs for servers increased to 23.6%, a 0.5% gain sequentially and a massive 5% gain year-over-year driven by the ramp of platforms based on AMD's 4^th Generation EPYC processors. With a 76.4% unit market share, Intel continues to dominate in servers, but it is evident that AMD is getting stronger.

AMD's revenue share of the x86 server market reached 33%, up 5.2% year-over-year and 1.2% from the previous quarter. This signals that the company is gaining traction in expensive machines with advanced CPUs. Keeping in mind that for now Intel does not have direct rivals for AMD's 96-core and 128-core processors, it is no wonder that AMD has done so well growing their share of the server market.

"As we noted during our first quarter earnings call, server CPU sales increased YoY driven by growth in enterprise adoption and expanded cloud deployments," AMD said in a statement.

Intel Issues Official Statement Regarding 14th and 13th Gen Instability, Recommends Intel Default Settings

Further to our last piece which we detailed Intel's issue to motherboard vendors to follow with stock power settings for Intel's 14th and 13th Gen Core series processors, Intel has now issued a follow-up statement to this. Over the last week or so, motherboard vendors quickly released firmware updates with a new profile called 'Intel Baseline', which motherboard vendors assumed would address the instability issues. 

As it turns out, Intel doesn't seem to accept this as technically, these Intel Baseline profiles are not to be confused with Intel's default specifications. This means that Intel's Baseline profiles seemingly give the impression that they are operating at default settings, hence the terminology 'baseline' used, but this still opens motherboard vendors to use their interpretations of MCE or Multi-Core Enhancement.

To clarify things for consumers, Intel has sent us the following statement:

Several motherboard manufacturers have released BIOS profiles labeled ‘Intel Baseline Profile’. However, these BIOS profiles are not the same as the 'Intel Default Settings' recommendations that Intel has recently shared with its partners regarding the instability issues reported on 13th and 14th gen K SKU processors.

These ‘Intel Baseline Profile’ BIOS settings appear to be based on power delivery guidance previously provided by Intel to manufacturers describing the various power delivery options for 13th and 14th Generation K SKU processors based on motherboard capabilities.

Intel is not recommending motherboard manufacturers to use ‘baseline’ power delivery settings on boards capable of higher values.

Intel’s recommended ‘Intel Default Settings’ are a combination of thermal and power delivery features along with a selection of possible power delivery profiles based on motherboard capabilities.

Intel recommends customers to implement the highest power delivery profile compatible with each individual motherboard design as noted in the table below:

Click to Enlarge Intel's Default Settings

What Intel's statement is effectively saying to consumers, is that users shouldn't be using the Baseline Power Delivery profiles which are offered by motherboard vendors through a plethora of firmware updates. Instead, Intel is recommending users opt for Intel Default Settings, which follows what the specific processor is rated for by Intel out of the box to achieve the clock speeds advertised, without users having to worry about firmware 'over' optimization which can cause instability as there have been many reports of happening.

Not only this, but the Intel Default settings offer a combination of thermal specifications and power capabilities, including voltage and frequency curve settings that apply to the capability of the motherboard used, and the power delivery equipped on the motherboard. At least for the most part, Intel is recommending users with 14th and 13th-Gen Core series K, KF, and KS SKUs that they do not recommend users opt in using the Baseline profiles offered by motherboard vendors.

Digesting the contrast between the two statements, the key differential is that Intel's priority is reducing the current going through the processor, which for both the 14th and 13th Gen Core series processors is a maximum of 400 A, even when using the Extreme profile. We know those motherboard vendors on their Z790 and Z690 motherboards opt for an unrestricted power profile, which is essentially 'unlimited' power and current to maximize performance at the cost of power consumption and heat, which does exacerbate problems and can lead to frequent bouts of instability, especially on high-intensity workloads.

Another variable Intel is recommending is that the AC Load Line must match the design target of the processor, with a maximum value of 1.1 mOhm, and that the DC Load Line must be equal to the AC Load Line; not above or below this recommendation for maximum stability. Intel also recommends that CEP, eTVB, C-states, TVB, and TVB Voltage Optimizations be active on the Extreme profile to ensure stability and performance are consistent.

Given Intel is essentially recommending users not to use what motherboard vendors are offering to fix, we agree that when motherboards come out of the box, they should operate at 'Default' settings until asked otherwise. We understand that motherboard vendors have the desire to showcase what they can do with their wares, features, and firmware, but ultimately there is some real lack of communication between Intel and its partners regarding this issue.

Following Intel's statement, they do recommend customers implement the highest power delivery profile which is compatible with the caliber of motherboard used by following the specification and design. According to Intel, this isn't open for interpretation despite what motherboard vendors have offered so far, and we do expect that there is likely to be more to come in this saga of constant developments regarding the instability issue.

Upcoming AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 170 Processor Leaked By ASUS?

In what appears to be a mistake or a jump of the gun by ASUS, they have seemingly published a list of specifications for one of its key notebooks that all but allude to the next generation of AMD's mobile processors. While we saw AMD toy with a new nomenclature for their Phoenix silicon (Ryzen 7040 series), it seems as though AMD is once again changing things around where their naming scheme for processors is concerned.

The ASUS listing, which has now since been deleted, but as of writing is still available through Google's cache, highlights a model that is already in existence, the VivoBook S 16 OLED (M5606), but is listed with an unknown AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 170 processor. Which, based on its specificiations, is certainly not part of the current Hawk Point (Phoenix/Phoenix 2) platform.

The cache on Google shows the ASUS Vivobook S 16 OLED with a Ryzen AI 9 HX 170 Processor

While it does happen in this industry occasionally, what looks like an accidental leak by ASUS on one of their product pages has unearthed an unknown processor from AMD. This first came to our attention via a post on Twitter by user @harukaze5719. While we don't speculate on rumors, we confirmed this ourselves by digging through Google's cache. Sure enough, as the image above from Google highlights, it lists a newly unannounced model of Ryzen mobile processor. Under the listing via the product compare section for the ASUS Vivobook S 16 OLED (M5606) notebook, it is listed with the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 170, which appears to be one of AMD's upcoming Zen 5-based mobile chips codenamed Strix Point.

So with the seemingly new nomenclature that AMD has gone with, it has a clear focus on AI, or rather Ryzen AI, by including it in the name. The Ryzen AI 9 HX 170 looks set to be a 12C/24T Zen 5 mobile variant, with their Ryzen AI NPU or similar integrated within the chip. Given that Microsoft has defined that only processors with an NPU with 45 TOPS of performance or over constitute being considered an 'AI PC', it's likely the Xilinx (now AMD Xilinx) based NPU will meet these requirements as the listing states the chip has up to 77 TOPS of AI performance available. The HX series is strikingly similar to AMD's (and Intel's) previous HX naming series for their desktop replacement SKUs for laptops, so assuming any of the details of ASUS's error are correct, then this is presumably a very high-end, high-TDP part.

AMD Laptop Roadmap from Zen 2 in 2019 to Zen 5 on track for release in 2024

We've known for some time that AMD plans to release AMD's Zen 5-based Strix Point line-up sometime in 2024. Given the timing of Computex 2024, which is just over four weeks away, we still don't quite have the full picture of Zen 5's performance and its architectural shift over Zen 4. AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su also confirmed that Zen 5 will come with enhanced RDNA graphics within the Strix Point SoC by stating "Strix combines our next-gen Zen 5 core with enhanced RDNA graphics and an updated Ryzen AI engine to significantly increase the performance, energy efficiency, and AI capabilities of PCs,"

While it's entirely possible as we lead up to Computex 2024 that AMD is prepared to announce more details about Zen 5, nothing is confirmed. We do know that the CEO of AMD, Dr. Lisa Su is scheduled to deliver the opening keynote of the show, Dr. Lisa Su unveiled their Zen 4 microarchitecture at Computex 2022 during AMD's keynote and even unveiled their 3D V-Cache stacking, which we know today as the Ryzen X3D CPUs back at Computex 2021.

With that in mind, AMD and Dr. Lisa Su love to announce new products and architectures at Computex, so we just have to wait until the beginning of next month. How AMD denotes the nomenclature for the upcoming Zen 5 mobile and desktop processors remains to be seen, but hopefully, all will be revealed soon. Regarding the ASUS Vivobook S 16 OLED (M5606), we currently don't know any of the other specifications at this time. Still, we expect them to be available once AMD has updated us with information on Zen 5 and Strix Point.

Apple Announces M4 SoC: Latest and Greatest Starts on 2024 iPad Pro

Setting things up for what is certainly to be an exciting next few months in the world of CPUs and SoCs, Apple this morning has announced their next-generation M-series chip, the M4. Introduced just over six months after the M3 and the associated 2023 Apple MacBook family, the M4 is going to start its life on a very different track, launching alongside Apple’s newest iPad Pro tablets. With their newest chip, Apple is promising class-leading performance and power efficiency once again, with a particular focus on machine learning/AI performance.

The launch of the M4 comes as Apple’s compute product lines have become a bit bifurcated. On the Mac side of matters, all of the current-generation MacBooks are based on the M3 family of chips. On the other hand, the M3 never came to the iPad family – and seemingly never will. Instead, the most recent iPad Pro, launched in 2022, was an M2-based device, and the newly-launched iPad Air for the mid-range market is also using the M2. As a result, the M3 and M4 exist in their own little worlds, at least for the moment.

Given the rapid turn-around between the M3 and M4, we’ve not come out of Apple’s latest announcement expecting a ton of changes from one generation to the next. And indeed, details on the new M4 chip are somewhat limited out of the gate, especially as Apple publishes fewer details on the hardware in its iPads in general. Coupled with that is a focus on comparing like-for-like hardware – in this case, M4 iPads to M2 iPads – so information is thinner than I’d like to have. None the less, here’s the AnandTech rundown on what’s new with Apple’s latest M-series SoC.

Apple M-Series (Vanilla) SoCs
SoC	M4	M3	M2
CPU Performance	4-core	4-core 16MB Shared L2	4-core (Avalanche) 16MB Shared L2
CPU Efficiency	6-core	4-core 4MB Shared L2	4-core (Blizzard) 4MB Shared L2
GPU	10-Core Same Architecture as M3	10-Core New Architecture - Mesh Shaders & Ray Tracing	10-Core 3.6 TFLOPS
Display Controller	2 Displays?	2 Displays	2 Displays
Neural Engine	16-Core 38 TOPS (INT8)	16-Core 18 TOPS (INT16)	16-Core 15.8 TOPS (INT16)
Memory Controller	LPDDR5X-7500 8x 16-bit CH 120GB/sec Total Bandwidth (Unified)	LPDDR5-6250 8x 16-bit CH 100GB/sec Total Bandwidth (Unified)	LPDDR5-6250 8x 16-bit CH 100GB/sec Total Bandwidth (Unified)
Max Memory Capacity	24GB?	24GB	24GB
Encode/ Decode	8K H.264, H.265, ProRes, ProRes RAW, AV1 (Decode)	8K H.264, H.265, ProRes, ProRes RAW, AV1 (Decode)	8K H.264, H.265, ProRes, ProRes RAW
USB	USB4/Thunderbolt 3 ? Ports	USB4/Thunderbolt 3 2x Ports	USB4/Thunderbolt 3 2x Ports
Transistors	28 Billion	25 Billion	20 Billion
Mfc. Process	TSMC N3E	TSMC N3B	TSMC N5P

At a high level, the M4 features some kind of new CPU complex (more on that in a second), along with a GPU that seems to be largely lifted from the M3 – which itself was a new GPU architecture. Of particular focus by Apple is the neural engine (NPU), which is still a 16-core design, but now offers 38 TOPS of performance. And memory bandwidth has been increased by 20% as well, helping to keep the more powerful chip fed.

One of the few things we can infer with a high degree of certainty is the manufacturing process being used here. Apple’s description of a “second generation 3nm process” lines up perfectly in timing with TSMC’s second-generation 3nm process, N3E. The enhanced version of their 3nm process node is a bit of a sidegrade to the N3B process used by the M3 series of chips; N3E is not quite as dense as N3B, but according to TSMC it offers slightly better performance and power characteristics. The difference is close enough that architecture plays a much bigger role, but in the race for energy efficiency, Apple will take any edge they can get.

Apple’s position as TSMC’s launch-partner for new process nodes has been well-established over the years, and Apple appears to be the first company out the door launching chips on the N3E process. They will not be the last, however, as virtually all of TSMC’s high-performance customers are expected to adopt N3E over the next year. So Apple’s immediate chip manufacturing advantage, as usual, will only be temporary.

Apple’s early-leader status likely also plays into why we’re seeing the M4 now for iPads – a relatively low volume device at Apple – and not the MacBook lineup. At some point, TSMC’s N3E production capacity will catch up, and then-some. I won’t hazard a guess as to what Apple has planned for that lineup at that point, as I can’t really see Apple discontinuing M3 chips so quickly, but it also leaves them in an awkward spot having to sell M3 Macs when the M4 exists.

No die sizes have been quoted for the new chip (or die shots posted), but at 28 billion transistors in total, it’s only a marginally larger transistor count than the M3, indicating that Apple hasn’t thrown an excessive amount of new hardware into the chip. (ed: does anyone remember when 3B transistors was a big deal?)

M4 CPU Architecture: Improved ML Acceleration

Starting on the CPU side of things, we’re facing something of an enigma with Apple’s M4 CPU core design. The combination of Apple’s tight-lipped nature and lack of performance comparisons to the M3 means that we haven’t been provided much information on how the CPU designs compare. So if M4 represents a watershed moment for Apple’s CPU designs – a new Monsoon/A11 – or a minor update akin to the Everest CPU cores in A17, remains to be seen. Certainly we hope for the latter, but absent further details, we’ll work with what we do know.

Apple’s brief keynote presentation on the SoC noted that both the performance and efficiency cores implement improved branch predication, and in the case of performance cores, a wider decode and execution engine. However these are the same broad claims that Apple made for the M3, so this is not on its own indicative of a new CPU architecture.

What is unique to Apple’s M4 CPU claims however are “next-generation ML accelerators” for both CPU core types. This goes hand-in-hand with Apple’s broader focus on ML/AI performance in the M4, though the company isn’t detailing on just what these accelerators entail. With the NPU to do all of the heavy lifting, the purpose of AI enhancements on the CPU cores is less about total throughput/performance and more about processing light inference workloads mixed inside more general-purpose workloads without having to spend the time and resources firing up the dedicated NPU.

A grounded guess here would be that Apple has updated their poorly-documented AMX matrix units, which have been a part of the M series of SoCs since the beginning. However recent AMX versions already support common ML number formats like FP16, BF16, and INT8, so if Apple has made changes here, it’s not something simple and straightforward such as adding (more) common formats. At the same time if it is AMX, it’s a bit surprising to see Apple mention it at all, since they are otherwise so secretive about the units.

The other reasonable alternative would be that Apple has made some changes to their SIMD units within their CPUs to add common ML number formats, as these units are more directly accessible by developers. But at the same time, Apple has been pushing developers to use higher-level frameworks to begin with (which is how AMX is accessed), so this could really go either way.

In any case, whatever the CPU cores are that underpin M4, there is one thing that is certain: there are more of them. The full M4 configuration is 4 performance cores paired with 6 efficiency cores, 2 more efficiency cores than found on the M3. Cut-down iPad models get a 3P+6E configuration, while the higher-tier configurations get the full 4P+6E experience – so the performance impact there will likely be tangible.

Everything else held equal, the addition of two more efficiency cores shouldn’t massively improve on CPU performance over the M3’s 4P+4E configuration. But then Apple’s efficiency cores should not be underestimated, as even Apple’s efficiency cores are relatively powerful thanks to their use of out-of-order execution. Especially when fixed workloads can be held on the efficiency cores and not promoted to the performance cores, there’s a lot of room for energy efficiency gains.

Otherwise, Apple hasn’t published any detail performance graphs for the new SoC/CPU cores, so there’s little in the way of hard numbers to talk about. But the company is claiming that the M4 delivers 50% faster CPU performance than the M2. This presumably is for a multi-threaded workload that can leverage the M4’s CPU core count advantage. Alternatively, in their keynote Apple is also claiming that they can deliver M2 performance at half the power, which as a combination of process node improvements, architectural improvements, and CPU core count increases, seems like a reasonable claim.

As always, however, we’ll have to see how independent benechmarks pan out.

M4 GPU Architecture: Ray Tracing & Dynamic Caching Return

Compared to the CPU situation on the M4, the GPU situation is much more straightforward. Having just recently introduced a new GPU architecture in the M3 – a core type that Apple doesn’t iterate on as often as the CPU – Apple has all but confirmed that the GPU in the M4 is the same architecture that was found in the M3.

With 10 GPU cores, at a high level the configuration is otherwise identical to what was found on the M3. Whether that means the various blocks and caches are truly identical to the M3 remains to be seen, but Apple isn’t making any claims about the M4’s GPU performance that could be in any way interpreted as it being superior to the M3’s GPU. Indeed, the smaller form factor of the iPad and more limited cooling capabilities means that the GPU is going to be thermally constrained under any sustained workload to begin with, especially compared to what the M3 can do in an actively-cooled device like the 14-Inch MacBook Pro.

At any rate, this means the M4 comes with all of the major new architectural features introduced with the M3’s GPU: ray tracing, mesh shading, and dynamic caching. Ray tracing needs little introduction at this point, while mesh shading is a significant, next-generation means of geometry processing. Meanwhile, dynamic caching is Apple’s term for their refined memory allocation technique on M-series chips, which avoids over-allocating memory to the GPU from Apple’s otherwise unified memory pool.

GPU rendering aside, the M4 also gets the M3’s updated media engine block, which coming from the M2 is a relatively big deal for iPad uses. Most notably, the M3/M4’s media engine block added support for AV1 video decoding, the next-generation open video codec. And while Apple is more than happy to pay royalties on HEVC/H.265 to ensure it’s available within their ecosystem, the royalty-free AV1 codec is expected to take on a lot of significance and use in the coming years, leaving the iPad Pro in a better position to use the newest codec (or, at least, not have to inefficiently decode AV1 in software).

What is new to the M4 on the display side of matters, however, is a new display engine. The block responsible for compositing images and driving the attached displays on a device, Apple never gives this block a particularly large amount of attention, but when they do make updates to it, it normally comes with some immediate feature improvements.

The key change here seems to be enabling Apple’s new sandwiched “tandem” OLED panel configuration, which is premiering in the iPad Pro. The iPad’s Ultra Retina XDR display places two OLED panels directly on top of each other in order allow for a display that can cumulatively hit Apple’s brightness target of 1600 nits – something that a single one of their OLED panels is apparently incapable of doing. This in turn requires a display controller that knows how to manipulate the panels, not just driving a mirrored set of displays, but accounting for the performance losses that would stem from having one panel below another.

And while not immediately relevant to the iPad Pro, it will be interesting to see if Apple used this opportunity to increase the total number of displays the M4 can drive, as vanilla M-series SoCs have normally been limited to 2 displays, much to the consternation of MacBook users. The fact that the M4 can drive the tandem OLED panels and an external 6K display on top of that is promising, but we’ll see how this translates to the Mac ecosystem if and when the M4 lands in a Mac.

M4 NPU Architecture: Something New, Something Faster

Arguably Apple’s biggest focus with the M4 SoC is the company’s NPU, otherwise known as their neural engine. The company has been shipping a 16-core design since the M1 (and smaller designs on the A-series chips for years before that), each generation delivering a modest increase in performance. But with the M4 generation, Apple says they are delivering a much bigger jump in performance.

Still a 16-core design, the M4 NPU is rated for 38 TOPS, just over twice that of the 18 TOPS neural engine in the M3. And coincidentally, only a few TOPS more than the neural engine in the A17. So as a baseline claim, Apple is pitching the M4 NPU as being significantly more powerful than what’s come in the M3, never mind the M2 that powers previous iPads – or going even farther back, 60x faster than the A11’s NPU.

Unfortunately, the devil is (once again) in the details here as Apple isn’t listing the all-important precision information – whether this figure is based on INT16, INT8, or even INT4 precision. As the precision de jure for ML inference right now, INT8 is the most likely option, especially as this is what Apple quoted for the A17 last year. But freely mixing precisions, or even just not disclosing them, is headache-inducing to say the least. And it makes like-for-like specification comparisons difficult.

In any case, even if most of this performance improvement comes from INT8 support versus INT16/FP16 support, the M4 NPU is slated to deliver significant performance improvements to AI performance, similar to what’s already happened with the A17. And as Apple was one of the first chip vendors to ship a consumer SoC with what we now recognize as an NPU, the company isn’t afraid to beat its chest a bit on the matter, especially comparing it to what is going on in the PC realm. Especially as Apple’s offering is a complete hardware/software ecosystem, the company has the advantage of being able mold their software around using their own NPU, rather than waiting for the killer app to be invented for it.

M4 Memory: Adopting Faster LPDDR5X

Last, but certainly not least, the M4 SoC is also getting a notable improvement in its memory capabilities. Given the memory bandwidth figures Apple is quoting for the M4 – 120GB/second – all signs point to them finally adopting LPDDR5X for their new SoC.

The mid-generation update to the LPDDR5 standard, LPDDR5X allows for higher memory clockspeeds than LPDDR5, which topped out at 6400 MT/second. While LPDDR5X is available at speeds up to 8533 MT/second right now (and faster speeds to come), based on Apple’s 120GB/second figure for the M4, this puts the memory clockspeed at roughly LPDDR5X-7500.

Since the M4 is going into an iPad first, for the moment we don’t have proper idea of its maximum memory capacity. The M3 could house up to 24GB of memory, and while it’s highly unlikely Apple has regressed here, there’s also no sign whether they’ve been able to increase it to 32GB, either. In the meantime, the iPads Pro will all either come with 8GB or 16GB of RAM, depending on the specific model.

2024 M4 iPad Pros: Coming Next Week

Wrapping things up, in traditional Apple fashion, prospective tablet buyers will get the chance to see the M4 in action sooner than later. The company has already opened up pre-orders for the new iPad Pros, with the first deliveries slated to take place next week, on May 15^th.

Apple is offering two sizes of the 2024 iPad Pro: 11 inches and 13 inches. Screen size aside, both sizes are getting access to the same M4 and memory configurations. 256GB/512GB models get a 3P+6E core CPU configuration and 8GB of RAM, meanwhile the 1TB and 2TB models get a fully-enabled M4 SoC with a 4P+6E CPU configuration and 16GB of RAM. The GPU configuration on both models is identical, with 10 GPU cores.

Pricing starts at $999 for the 256GB 11-inch model and $1299 for the 256GB 13-inch model. Meanwhile a max-configuration 13-inch model with 2TB of storage, Apple’s nano-texture matte display, and cellular capabilities will set buyers back a cool $2599.

AMD Zen 5 Status Report: EPYC "Turin" Is Sampling, Silicon Looking Great

As part of AMD's Q1'2024 earnings announcement this week, the company is offering a brief status update on some of their future products set to launch later this year. Most important among these is an update on their Zen 5 CPU architecture, which is expected to launch for both client and server products later this year.

Highlighting their progress so far, AMD is confirming that EPYC "Turin" processors have begun sampling, and that these early runs of AMD's next-gen datacenter chips are meeting the company's expectations.

"Looking ahead, we are very excited about our next-gen Turin family of EPYC processors featuring our Zen 5 core," said Lisa Su, chief executive officer of AMD, at the conference call with analysts and investors (via SeekingAlpha). "We are widely sampling Turin, and the silicon is looking great. In the cloud, the significant performance and efficiency increases of Turin position us well to capture an even larger share of both first and third-party workloads."

Overall, it looks like AMD is on-track to solidify its position, and perhaps even increase its datacenter market share with its EPYC Turin processors. According to AMD, the company's server partners are developing a 30% larger number of designs for Turin than they did Genoa. This underscores how AMD's partners are preparing for even more market share growth on the back of AMD's ongoing success, not to mention the improved performance and power efficiency that the Zen 5 architecture should offer.

"In addition, there are 30% more Turin platforms in development from our server partners, compared to 4th Generation EPYC platforms, increasing our enterprise and with new solutions optimized for additional workloads," Su said. "Turin remains on track to launch later this year."

AMD's EPYC 'Turin' processors will be drop-in compatible with existing SP5 platforms (i.e., will come in an LGA 6096 package), which will facilitate its faster ramp and adoption of the platform both by cloud giants and server makers. In addition, AMD's next-generation EPYC CPUs are expected to feature more than 96 cores and a more versatile memory subsystem.

In Light of Stability Concerns, Intel Issues Request to Motherboards Vendors to Actually Follow Stock Power Settings

Across the internet, from online forums such as Reddit to various other tech media outlets, there's a lot of furor around reports of Intel's top-end 14th and 13th Gen K series of processors running into stability issues. As Intel's flagship chips, these parts come aggressively clocked in order to maximize performance through various implementations of boost and turbo, leaving them running close to their limits out of the box. But with high-end motherboards further goosing these chips to wring even more performance out of them, it would seem that the Intel desktop ecosystem has finally reached a tipping point where all of these efforts to boost performance have pushed these flagship chips to unstable conditions. To that end, Intel has released new gudiance to its consumer motherboard partners, strongly encouraging them to actually implment Intel's stock power settings, and to use those baseline settings as their out-of-the-box default.

While the underlying conditions are nothing new – we've published stories time and time again about motherboard features such as multi-core enhancement (MCE) and raised power consumption limits that seek to maximize how hard and how long systems are able to turbo boost – the issue has finally come to a head in the last couple of months thanks to accumulating reports of system instability with Intel's 13900K and 14900K processors. These instability problems are eventually solved by either tamping down on these motherboard performance-boosting features – bringing the chips back down to something closer to Intel's official operating parameters – or downclocking the chips entirely.

Intel first began publicly investigating the matter on the 27th of February, when Intel's Communications Manager, Thomas Hannaford, posted a thread on Intel's Community Product Support Forms titled "Regarding Reports of 13th/14th Gen Unlocked Desktop Users Experiencing Stability Issues". In this thread, Thomas Hannaford said, "Intel is aware of reports regarding Intel Core 13th and 14th Gen unlocked desktop processors experiencing issues with certain workloads. We're engaged with our partners and are conducting analysis of the reported issues. If you are experiencing these issues, please reach out to Intel Customer Support for further assistance in the interim."

Since that post went up, additional reports have been circulating about instability issues across various online forums and message boards. The underlying culprit has been theorized to be motherboards implementing an array of strategies to improve chip performance, including aggressive multi-core enhancement settings, "unlimited" PL2 turbo, and reduced load line calibration settings. At no point do any of these settings overclock a CPU and push it to a higher clockspeed than it's validated for, but these settings do everything possible to keep a chip at the highest clockspeed possible at all times – and in the process seem to have gone a step too far.

From "Why Intel Processors Draw More Power Than Expected: TDP and Turbo Explained"

We wrote a piece initially covering multi-core enhancement in 2012, detailing how motherboard manufacturers try to stay competitive with each other and leverage any headroom within the silicon to output the highest performance levels. And more recently, we've talked about how desktop systems with Intel chips are now regularly exceeding their rated TDPs – sometimes by extreme amounts – as motherboard vendors continue to push them to run as hard as possible for the best performance.

But things have changed since 2012. At the time, this wasn't so much of an issue, as overclocking was actually very favorable to increasing the performance of processors. But in 2024 with chips such as the Intel Core i9-14900K, we have CPUs shipping with a maximum turbo clock speed of 6.0 GHz and a peak power consumption of over 400 Watts, figures that were only a pipe dream a decade ago.

Jumping to the present time, over the weekend Intel released a statement about the matter to its partners, outlining their investigation so far and their suggestions/requests to their partners. That statement was quickly leaked to the press, with Igorslab.de and others breaking the news. Since then, we've been able to confirm through official sources that this is a real and accurate statement from Intel.

This statement reads as follows:

One subtle undertone in this statement is that everything seems to revolve around motherboards, specifically their default settings. Looking to clarify matters, Intel has told me today that they aren't blaming motherboard vendors in the above statement to partners and OEMs. However, having had experience with multiple Z790 motherboards with Intel's Core i9-14900K, we know each vendor has a different idea of what the word 'default' means – and that none of them involve strictly sticking to Intel's own suggested values. These profiles within the firmware unlock power constraints to a very high level and go above and beyond what Intel recommends. One example is ICCMAX, which Intel recommends at 400A or below, whereas multiple Z790 motherboards will greatly exceed this value out of the box.

Impressing buyers and outperforming the competitors has become integral to every motherboard manufacturer's strategy, thanks to the highly competitive and commoditized nature of the motherboard market. As a result, the user experience is sometimes relegated to a low-priority goal. And while this focus on performance and overclocking features plays well in reviews and to overclockers and tinkerers looking to push their CPU to its very limit, as we are now seeing, it seems to have come at the cost of out-of-the-box stability, with overly-aggressive settings leading to systems being unstable even at default settings.

Especially concerning here is what all of this means for a CPU's VCore voltage, which is another aspect of system performance that motherboard vendors have complete control over. With the need to quickly modulate the VCore voltage to keep up with the load on the processor – to keep it high enough for stability, but not allow it to spike so high as to risk damage – it's a careful balancing act for motherboard vendors even when they're not trying to squeeze out every last bit of performance from a CPU. And when they are trying to squeeze out every last bit, then VCore is something to minimize in order to improve how long and hard a CPU can turbo, pushing a chip further towards potential instability.

Pivoting to some real-world data highlighting these potential issues, when we reviewed the Intel Core i9-14900K, Intel's flagship Raptor Lake Refresh (RPL-R) processor, we tested with the default settings on both of our Z790 motherboards. From the above data, we can see the MSI MEG Z790 Ace Max was drawing up to 415 W when using Linx to place a very heavy workload on the chip. We also ran the same chip and workload on ASRock's Z790 Taichi Carrara to provide additional data points, where we found that it's power consumption maxed out at 375 W, around 10% lower than the MSI board.

In both cases, this is much higher than Intel's official PL2 limit for the Intel Core i9-14900K, which says that the chip should top out at 253 W for moderate periods of load. But, as we've seen time and time again, the official TDP ratings from Intel do not mean much to high-end motherboards, which almost universally default to higher settings. Motherboard vendors want to be competitive, and as such, higher default power settings allow vendors to claim that they deliver better performance than their rivals.

As further evidence of this, check out some of our recent motherboard reviews. I have assembled a small list of links to those reviews, where we've seen excessive CPU voltage or power consumption (or more often, both) when using the default settings on each motherboard, in each of the below reviews we see much higher power levels than Intel's official TDP values, which over the last several years we've come to expect. Still, some can be too high, especially with an already close-to-the-limit Core i9-14900K.

• ASRock Z790 Taichi Carrara Motherboard Review: ASRock Rocks With White Marble
• MSI MEG Z690 Unify (DDR5) Motherboard Review: The All-Black Option
• ASUS ROG Maximus XII Hero Wi-Fi Review: The Tale of Two Motherboards

We have been communicating with Intel for most of the day to get official answers to what's happening. To that end, we have received an official statement from Intel, which reads as follows:

Intel's official statement to us, which is likely their standpoint for the general public, highlights a list of recommended BIOS and software settings, such as those found in Intel's Extreme Tuning Utility (XTU). There's no mention of specific motherboard vendors or models, but the above settings should alleviate crashing and instability issues by preventing motherboards from pushing CPUs too hard.

It remains to be seen just how motherboard vendors will opt to address the issue, as all of the motherboard vendors we contacted today didn't have anything official to say about the matter. With that said, however, a few motherboard vendors have recently released a wave of new BIOSes, adding a new profile called "Intel Baseline" or similar. In all cases, these new BIOSes seem to do exactly what it says on the label, configuring the system to run at Intel's actual, suggested stock settings, and thus ensuring the stability of system in exchange for reduced performance.

With that said, these new Intel baseline settings are still not being used as the default settings for high-end motherboards. So the out-of-the-box user experience is still for MCE and other features to be enabled, pushing these processors to their performance limit. Users who actually want baseline performance – and the guaranteed stability it comes with – will still need to go into the BIOS and explicitly select this profile.

Ultimately, given the spec-defying state of high-end motherboards over the last decade, this is a badly-needed improvement. But still, as Intel has yet to wrap up their root cause investigation and issue formal guidance to consumers, we're not quite to the end of this saga just yet. There are still some developments to come, as we expect to hear more in May.

Qualcomm Intros Snapdragon X Plus, Details Complete Snapdragon X Launch Day Chip Stack

As Qualcomm prepares for the mid-year launch of their forthcoming Snapdragon X SoCs for PCs, and the eagerly anticipated Oryon CPU cores within, the company is finally shoring up their official product plans, and releasing some additional technical details in the process. Thus far the company has been demonstrating their Snapdragon X Elite SoC in its highest-performing, fully-enabled configuration. But the retail Snapdragon X Elite will not be a single part; instead, Qualcomm is preparing a whole range of chip configurations for various price/performance tiers in the market. Altogether, there will be 3 Snapdragon X Elite SKUs that differ in CPU and GPU performance.

As well, the company is introducing a second Snapdragon X tier, Snapdragon X Plus, for those SKUs positioned below the Elite performance tier. As of today, this will be a single configuration. But if the Snapdragon X lineup is successful and demand warrants it, I would not be surprised to see Qualcomm expand it further – as they have certainly left themselves the room for it in their product stack. In the meantime, with Qualcomm’s expected launch competition now shipping (Intel Core Ultra Meteor Lake and AMD Ryzen Mobile 8040 Hawk Point), the company is also very confident that even these reduced performance Snapdragon X Plus chips will be able to beat Intel and AMD in multithreaded performance – never mind the top-tier Snapdragon X Elite chips.

Qualcomm will be launching this expanded four chip stack at once; so both Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus tier devices should be available at the same time. The company’s goal is still to have devices on the shelf “mid-year”, although the company isn’t providing any more precise guidance than that. With Qualcomm’s CEO, Cristiano Amon, set to deliver a Computex keynote in June, I expect we’ll get more specific details on timings then, along with the company and its partners using the event to announce and showcase some retail laptop designs. So this is very much looking like a summer launch at the moment.

In the meantime, Qualcomm is already showing off what their Snapdragon X Plus chips can do with a fresh set of live benchmarks, akin to their Snapdragon X Elite performance previews from October 2023. We’ll dive into those in a bit, but suffice it to say, Qualcomm knows the score, and they want to make sure the entire world knows when they’re winning.

AMD Announces Ryzen Pro 8000 and Ryzen Pro 8040 Series CPUs: Commercial Desktop Gets AI

AMD is looking to drive the AI PC market with options across multiple product lines, which aren't limited to consumer processors. While primarily designed for the commercial sector, AMD has announced the Ryzen Pro 8000 'Phoenix' series of APUs for desktops, which AMD claims is the first professional-grade CPU to include an NPU designed to provide on-chip AI neural processing capabilities. AMD has also announced the Ryzen Pro 8040 'Hawk Point' series of mobile processors designed for commercial laptops and notebooks.

AMD's Ryzen Pro 8000 and Ryzen Pro 8040 series processors come with support from AMD's Pro Manageability and AMD Pro Business Ready suites and are built with AMD's current generation Zen 4 cores. The Ryzen Pro 8000 and Ryzen Pro 8040 series processors are similar to their consumer-level counterparts. However, they have additional security features such as AMD Memory Guard, AMD Secure Processor, and Microsoft Pluton.

Touching on the differentiating factors between the non-Pro-consumer chips and the Ryzen Pro series, there is plenty for the commercial and enterprise market regarding security. In what is a first, the Ryzen Pro 8000 series is the first desktop platform to integrate Microsoft Pluton security features designed to protect when connecting to the cloud. Other features include AMD Memory Guard, which encrypts login credentials, keys, and text files stored in the DRAM. AMD Pro Security ties the AMD Zen 4 shadow stack and other layers in directly with the software stack, which, in this case, is Microsoft Windows 11 OS security. 

Another notable feature that AMD is hammering home is the on-chip AI capabilities of the included Ryzen AI neural processor unit (NPU), which allows enterprises to run AI workloads locally to mitigate privacy concerns by transferring data to and from the cloud. Although the current generation of NPUs embedded into processors are limited in what they can do, Ryzen AI is a driving factor within the AI PC, as manufacturers and SDVs are looking to utilize AI-accelerated features built into software, such as Microsoft with their AI-powered Copilot tool.

Although there are requirements that now must be met to ensure a PC is considered an 'AI PC,' Microsoft announced that their AI PC requirement is 45 TOPS of performance from the NPU alone, which none of the current generation of chips from AMD and Intel currently meet. In the desktop space, AMD currently has the lead as Intel has presently no offerings with an NPU, although, in the mobile space, AMD with their Ryzen 8040 (Hawk Point) and Intel with their Meteor Lake processors provide plenty of choice for users.

AMD Ryzen Pro 8000 Series (Zen 4)
AnandTech	Cores Threads	Base Freq	Boost Freq	L3 Cache	iGPU	TDP
Ryzen 7 Pro 8700G	8C / 16T	4200	5100	16 MB	R780M (12 CUs)	45-65 W
Ryzen 7 Pro 8700GE	8C / 16T	3650	5100	16 MB	R780M (12 CUs)	35 W
Ryzen 5 Pro 8600G	6C / 12T	4350	5000	16 MB	R760M (8 CUs)	45-65 W
Ryzen 5 Pro 8500G	6C / 12T	3550	5000	16 MB	R740M (4 CUs)	45-65 W
Ryzen 5 Pro 8600GE	6C / 12T	3900	5000	16 MB	R760M (8 CUs)	35 W
Ryzen 5 Pro 8500GE	6C / 12T	3400	5000	16 MB	R740M (4 CUs)	35 W
Ryzen 3 Pro 8300G	4C / 8T	3450	4900	8 MB	R740M (4 CUs)	45-65 W
Ryzen 3 Pro 8300GE	4C / 8T	3500	4900	8 MB	R740M (4 CUs)	35 W

Looking at the AMD Ryzen Pro 8000 series, AMD has announced eight new processors that include the same specifications as the non-Pro Ryzen 8000G APU counterparts. Two primary types of Ryzen Pro 8000 processors are set to be available: four with a configurable TDP of between 45 and 65 W and four with a flat TDP of 35 W for lower-powered environments. Leading the line-up is the Ryzen 7 Pro 8700G, which is identical in core specifications to the Ryzen 7 8700G APU, and has an 8C/16T (Zen 4) configuration with a base frequency of 4.2 GHz and a boost frequency of up to 5.1 GHz.

Even the Ryzen 7 Pro 8700GE, which is the 35 W version, has a 5.1 GHz boost frequency, although it has a slower base clock of 3.65 GHz. Both models have 16 MB of L3 cache, including AMD's integrated Radeon 780M (12 CUs) mobile graphics. All of the eight Ryzen Pro 8000 series models range from 4C/8T offerings with 8 MB of L3 cache and 4.9 GHz boost clocks, 6C/12T models with 5.0 GHz boost clocks and 16 MB of L3 cache, and those as mentioned above 8700/8700GE with 8C/16T.

While we take all performance figures given by manufacturers and vendors with a pinch of salt, AMD claims their Ryzen Pro 8000 series offers up to 19% better performance than Intel's 14th-gen Core series processors. AMD's match-up is the Ryzen 7 Pro 8700G vs. the Intel Core i7-14700, with AMD claiming a 47% victory in the Passmark 11 benchmark and 3X the graphics performance in 3D Mark Time Spy. This isn't entirely surprising because the Ryzen 7 Pro 8700G benefits from integrated RDNA3 graphics and AMD's Zen 4 cores.

AMD Ryzen Pro 8040 Series (Zen 4)
AnandTech	Cores Threads	Base Freq	Boost Freq	L3 Cache	iGPU	TDP
Ryzen 9 Pro 8945HS	8C / 16T	4000	5200	16 MB	12	35-54 W
Ryzen 7 Pro 8845HS	8C / 16T	3800	5100	16 MB	12	35-54 W
Ryzen 7 Pro 8840HS	8C / 16T	3300	5100	16 MB	12	20-28 W
Ryzen 5 Pro 8645HS	6C / 12T	4300	5000	16 MB	8	35-54 W
Ryzen 5 Pro 8640HS	6C / 12T	3500	4900	16 MB	8	20-28 W
Ryzen 7 Pro 8840U	8C / 16T	3300	5100	16 MB	12	15-28 W
Ryzen 5 Pro 8640U	6C / 12T	3500	4900	16 MB	8	15-28 W
Ryzen 5 Pro 8540U*	6C / 12T	3200	4900	16 MB	4	15-28 W
*Ryzen 5 Pro 8540U is the only chip without AMD's Ryzen AI NPU

Moving onto AMD's latest Ryzen Pro 8040 processors for the mobile market, AMD has refreshed their Hawk Point family for the enterprise market. AMD has eight new processors, which are segmented into two families, the HS series and the U series. The HS series has five new chips, which range from 6C/12T up to 8C/16T, all with varying levels of clock speed and TDPs. At the top of the line-up is the Ryzen 9 Pro 8945HS, which is a direct replacement for the Ryzen 9 Pro 7940HS, and as such, it comes with the same 4.0 GHz base clock and 5.2 GHz boost clocks.

Pivitong to TDP, AMD offers the Ryzen 9 Pro 8945HS, Ryzen 7 Pro 8845HS, and Ryzen 5 Pro 8645HS with a configurable TDP of between 35 and 54 W. In contrast, the Ryzen 7 Pro 8840HS and the Ryzen 5 Pro 8640HS are designed for lower-powered laptops with a cTDP of 20-28 W. Regarding cache, all of the announced Ryzen Pro 8040 series models come with 16 MB of L3 Cache. At the same time, specifications such as the integrated graphics and clock speeds all correspond to the consumer line-up, the Ryzen 8040 series.

AMD's in-house performance figures show the Ryzen 7 Pro 8840U at 15 W performing better than Intel's Core Ultra 7 165H at 28 W. Still, as we always do with performance figures provided by vendors, take these with a pinch of salt. AMD claims a 30% combined increase in performance across the board in workloads, including Geekbench v6, Blender, PCMark 10, PCMark Night Raid, and UL Procyon. While there are plenty of different areas where performance gains and losses can be achieved, AMD does claim that their Ryzen 9 Pro 8945HS at 45 W vs. the Intel Core Ultra 9 185H at 45 W is 50% better in Topaz Labs Video AI Gaia 4X software; they did both use discrete graphics in this test according to AMD's slide deck.

The other notable thing is that all of the Ryzen Pro 8040 series processors, except the bottom SKU, the Ryzen 5 Pro 8540U, come with AMD's Ryzen AI NPU integrated into the silicon. While the AI PC ecosystem is still growing, AMD and over 150+ ISVs look to continue the trend that AI will power more software features in the future than we've seen so far. We are still in the infancy stage of the ecosystem despite much of the marketing targeting the AI functionality, but as we see higher-performing NPUs coming in the next generation of chips, at least ones that can match Microsoft 45 NPU TOPS requirement to run Copilot locally, much of the benefit of the NPU is currently down to how much power can be saved.

The introduction of the Ryzen Pro 8000/8040 series completes AMD's commercial client platform, along with the readily available Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7000-WX series for commercial and professional workstations. What sets these AMD Ryzen Pro series processors apart from the consumer (non-Pro) variants is support for the AMD Pro Manageability toolkit, which includes features such as cloud-based remote manageability to enable off-site IT technicians the ability to access devices remotely, as well WPA3 SAE encryption, which provides client-to-cloud protection for enterprises over shared networks.

AMD has not announced when the Ryzen Pro 8000 series APUs or the Ryzen Pro 8040 mobile chips will be available for purchase. However, we expect a wide array of OEMs, such as HP and Lenovo, to be already in the process of readying solutions that should hit the market soon.

Intel and Sandia National Labs Roll Out 1.15B Neuron “Hala Point” Neuromorphic Research System

While neuromorphic computing remains under research for the time being, efforts into the field have continued to grow over the years, as have the capabilities of the specialty chips that have been developed for this research. Following those lines, this morning Intel and Sandia National Laboratories are celebrating the deployment of the Hala Point neuromorphic system, which the two believe is the highest capacity system in the world. With 1.15 billion neurons overall, Hala Point is the largest deployment yet for Intel’s Loihi 2 neuromorphic chip, which was first announced at the tail-end of 2021.

The Hala Point system incorporates 1152 Loihi 2 processors, each of which is capable of simulating a million neurons. As noted back at the time of Loihi 2’s launch, these chips are actually rather small – just 31 mm² per chip with 2.3 billion transistors each, as they’re built on the Intel 4 process (one of the only other Intel chips to do so, besides Meteor Lake). As a result, the complete system is similarly petite, taking up just 6 rack units of space (or as Sandia likes to compare it to, about the size of a microwave), with a power consumption of 2.6 kW. Now that it’s online, Hala Point has dethroned the SpiNNaker system as the largest disclosed neuromorphic system, offering admittedly just a slightly larger number of neurons at less than 3% of the power consumption of the 100 kW British system.

A Single Loihi 2 Chip (31 mm²)

Hala Point will be replacing an older Intel neuromorphic system at Sandia, Pohoiki Springs, which is based on Intel’s first-generation Loihi chips. By comparison, Hala Point offers ten-times as many neurons, and upwards of 12x the performance overall,

Both neuromorphic systems have been procured by Sandia in order to advance the national lab’s research into neuromorphic computing, a computing paradigm that behaves like a brain. The central thought (if you’ll excuse the pun) is that by mimicking the wetware writing this article, neuromorphic chips can be used to solve problems that conventional processors cannot solve today, and that they can do so more efficiently as well.

Sandia, for its part, has said that it will be using the system to look at large-scale neuromorphic computing, with work operating on a scale well beyond Pohoiki Springs. With Hala Point offering a simulated neuron count very roughly on the level of complexity of an owl brain, the lab believes that a larger-scale system will finally enable them to properly exploit the properties of neuromorphic computing to solve real problems in fields such as device physics, computer architecture, computer science and informatics, moving well beyond the simple demonstrations initially achieved at a smaller scale.

One new focus from the lab, which in turn has caught Intel’s attention, is the applicability of neuromorphic computing towards AI inference. Because the neural networks themselves behind the current wave of AI systems are attempting to emulate the human brain, in a sense, there is an obvious degree of synergy with the brain-mimicking neuromorphic chips, even if the algorithms differ in some key respects. Still, with energy efficiency being one of the major benefits of neuromorphic computing, it’s pushed Intel to look into the matter further – and even build a second, Hala Point-sized system of their own.

According to Intel, in their research on Hala Point, the system has reached efficiencies as high as 15 TOPS-per-Watt at 8-bit precision, albeit while using 10:1 sparsity, making it more than competitive with current-generation commercial chips. As an added bonus to that efficiency, the neuromorphic systems don’t require extensive data processing and batching in advance, which is normally necessary to make efficient use of the high density ALU arrays in GPUs and GPU-like processors.

Perhaps the most interesting use case of all, however, is the potential for being able to use neuromorphic computing to enable augmenting neural networks with additional data on the fly. The idea behind this being to avoid re-training, as current LLMs require, which is extremely costly due to the extensive computing resources required. In essence, this is taking another page from how brains operate, allowing for continuous learning and dataset augmentation.

But for the moment, at least, this remains a subject of academic study. Eventually, Intel and Sandia want systems like Hala Point to lead to the development of commercial systems – and presumably, at even larger scales. But to get there, researchers at Sandia and elsewhere will first need to use the current crop of systems to better refine their algorithms, as well as better figure out how to map larger workloads to this style of computing in order to prove their utility at larger scales.

AMD Quietly Launches Ryzen 7 8700F and Ryzen 5 8400F Processors

AMD has recently expanded its Ryzen 8000 series by introducing the Ryzen 7 8700F and Ryzen 5 8400F processors. Initially launched in China, these chips were added to AMD's global website, signaling they are available worldwide, apparently from April 1st. Built from the recent Zen 4-based Phoenix APUs using the TSMC 4nm node as their Zen 4 mobile chips, these new CPUs lack integrated graphics. However, the Ryzen 7 8700F does include the integrated Ryzen AI NPU for added capabilities in a world currently dominated by AI and moving it directly into the PC.

The company's decision to announce these chips in China aligns with its strategy to offer Ryzen solutions at every price point in the market. Although AMD didn't initially disclose the full specifications of these F-series models, and we did reach out to the company to ask about them, they refused to discuss them with us. Their listing on the website has now been updated with a complete list of specifications and features, with everything but the price mentioned.

AMD Ryzen 8000G vs. Ryzen 8000F Series (Desktop) Zen 4 (Phoenix)
AnandTech	Cores/Threads	Base Freq	Turbo Freq	GPU	GPU Freq	Ryzen AI (NPU)	L3 Cache (MB)	TDP	MSRP
Ryzen 7
Ryzen 7 8700G	8/16	4200	5100	R780M 12 CUs	2900	Y	16	65W	$329
Ryzen 7 8700F	8/16	4100	5000	-	-	Y	16	65W	?
Ryzen 5
Ryzen 5 8600G	6/12	4300	5000	R760M 8 CUs	2800	Y	16	65W	$229
Ryzen 5 8400F	6/12	4200	4700	-	-	N	16	65W	?

The Ryzen 7 8700F features an 8C/16T design, with 16MB of L3 cache and the same 65W TDP as the Ryzen 7 8700G. Although the base clock speed is 4.1 GHz, it boosts to 5.0 GHz; this is 100 MHz less on both base/boost clocks than the 8700G. Meanwhile, the Ryzen 5 8400F is a slightly scaled-down version of the Ryzen 8600G APU, with 6C/12, 16MB of L3 cache, and again has a 100 MHz reduction to base clocks compared to the 8600G. Unlike the Ryzen 5 8400F, the Ryzen 7 8700F keeps AMD's Ryzen AI NPU, adding additional capability for generative AI. 

The Ryzen 5 8400F can boost up to 4.7 GHz, 300 MHz slower than the Ryzen 5 8600G. AMD also allows overclocking for these new F-series chips, which means users could potentially boost the performance of these processors to match their G-series equivalents.

Pricing details are still pending, but to remain competitive, AMD will likely need to price these CPUs below the 8700G and 8600G, as well as the Ryzen 7 7700 and Ryzen 5 7600. These CPUs offer, albeit very limited, integrated graphics and have double the L3 cache capacity, along with higher boost clocks than the 8000F series chips, so pricing is something to consider whenever pricing becomes available.