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Put another way, Intel is supposed to be launching its first tile-based CPU next year, aka Meteor Lake. This is the company’s first disaggregated CPU, with different tiles built on differing processes. The CPU tile is supposed to be the result of a node jump, going from Intel 7 (10nm) to Intel 4 (7nm). It’s a watershed product for the company as it transitions away from monolithic and hybrid designs to tiles. However, though Meteor Lake has already been delayed many times, it’s now rumored to be cancelled. At least, the desktop parts are believed to be on the chopping block. Therefore, it might still launch at some point, but only for mobile.
The bad news for Chipzilla comes from Twitter user Raichu, a reliable leaker of confidential information, who says Meteor Lake for desktop is “maybe” cancelled because Intel sees it as uncompetitive. Intel had planned on offering only six performance cores, along with 16 efficiency cores. That was laid out in a previous leak of Intel’s plans. As you recall, its current Raptor Lake flagship has eight performance cores, and 16 efficiency cores, so Meteor Lake would be a step backward. It could be true that Intel doesn’t think it’s competitive, and it could also be true it’s delayed once again. It’s not clear the specific reason for the alleged cancellation. However, it is now planning a Raptor Lake refresh in 2023, as we noted previously.
The leaked roadmap for 2023 above doesn’t mention Meteor Lake. Instead, Intel will be offering a Raptor Lake refresh on a refined 10nm process. That should allow it to squeeze a few hundred megahertz out of the chips, and improve its efficiency a bit. The good news for Intel fans is it will use the same LGA 1700 socket it’s currently offering. There were rumors that Meteor Lake would come out after Raptor Lake on a new LGA 1851 socket. That would give LGA 1700 only two generations of CPUs. Now it appears it’ll be three: Alder Lake, Raptor Lake, and the Raptor Lake refresh.
Intel’s previous roadmap might have changed just a tad. (Credit: Intel)
As you recall, Raptor Lake only exists because Intel realized over two years ago that Meteor Lake was not hitting its development targets. That was confirmed by Intel, so it’s not hearsay. Fast forward to now in 2022, and nobody would be surprised if it’s still having trouble with it. Almost every article we’ve written about Meteor Lake has concerned delays. There were rumors it was cancelling the 3nm GPU tile from TSMC due to delays. Instead, it would use the company’s existing 5nm node. It was also reported in July that Meteor Lake was delayed to the end of 2023. If you scroll up and look at those roadmaps, you can see Meteor Lake has disappeared from the 2023 timeline.
(Credit: Intel)
Now it seems like Intel feels Raptor Lake will be more competitive than Meteor Lake against AMD’s upcoming offerings. That’s expected to be more Zen 4 CPUs along with several V-Cache SKUs. Also, perhaps its current tile-based plans will be better for efficiency than outright horsepower. That would explain Meteor Lake being a mobile platform instead of for desktop. So Arrow Lake would take up the mantle on the desktop. That’ll happen sometime in 2024 on Intel’s 20A process. Arrow Lake is alleged to resume the 8/16 core count it’s using currently.
In an October earnings call, CEO Pat Gelsinger made the following statement, according to Wccftech: “On Intel 4, we are progressing towards a high-volume manufacturing and will tape out the production stepping at Meteor Lake in Q4. Intel 4 and 3 are our first nodes deploying EUV and will represent a major step forward in terms of transistor performance per watt and density.”
If that’s true, that means Intel is already producing early versions of Meteor Lake right now. We’ll have to wait and see if that’s the case, but Intel doesn’t usually respond to allegations like these.
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By this point late in the year, I really expected there to be more 13th-gen Intel Chromebooks in the works. Last year around this time, I was tracking 13 total 12th-gen Intel-based Chromebooks in some form of development. At this point in 2022 – before this post – I only had eyes on the main development board for 13th-gen Intel Chromebooks: ‘Skolas’.
Today, we’re adding our first device to the list and I think there could be a good reason our running tally of 13th-gen Chromebooks is so short. We’ll get into that in a second, but first let’s meet our latest Chromebook in development, code name ‘Zydron’.
‘Zydron’ was only added a few weeks ago, so there’s not a ton we can tell about this particular Chromebook at the moment. The main thing to note is the fact that it is based on ‘Skolas’ and will come bearing 13th-gen Intel Raptor Lake internals. And for a couple of reasons, I think this one is being built by Acer.
First up, we have the appearance of David Wu on quite of few of these early commits. He’s been on Acer hardware of late, including the Acer Chromebook 516 GE (‘Osiris’) and the Acer Chromebook Spin 714 (‘Kano’). That second inclusion is a double clue as ‘Zydron’ is developed side-by-side with ‘Kano’. We’ll get into why that is in a moment, but the fact that a new Chromebook in development is getting updates in lock-step with an existing Acer device is pretty compelling proof that Acer is behind ‘Zydron’.
Why the close relation to Alder Lake exists
So, why are we seeing so many references to both ‘Skolas’ and ‘Zydron’ right alongside existing Alder Lake Chromebooks? The answer is simple enough when you realize the small difference we’re seeing between 12th-gen Intel SoCs and these new 13th-gen ones. Raptor Lake is the final 10nm chip from Intel, so the differences between Alder Lake and Raptor Lake are pretty minimal from a development standpoint. This is made quite plane in the repositories from the beginning of Raptor Lake development.
I wouldn’t go as far as saying 12th-gen and 13th-gen Intel baseboards are copy/paste, drag-and-drop in their similarities, but it feels closer to that than we’ve seen in the past. With that in mind, it makes a bit more sense that we don’t yet have a ton of these boards in development.
This could be for a couple reasons. First, if a manufacturer is looking to make a Raptor Lake Chromebook, they can likely reference the existing devices they have with Alder Lake inside and will be able to make things work in relatively-quick succession. If the bulk of things work already, Chromebook makers can go from development to shipping a device pretty fast.
Second, if Raptor Lake isn’t a massive improvement over Alder Lake, there could be some manufacturers who skip this round of Intel chips and aim for Meteor Lake on the next go-round. We likely won’t get into any of those devices until late 2023 or early 2024, however, so this will be intersting to watch.
There are still tons of Alder Lake Chromebooks that haven’t been released, so my bet is we’ll continue seeing those devices trickle out as we see a few updates to existing Chromebooks with a simple bump in the internal hardware. We’ve had this before, watching devices get small refinements from 10th-gen Intel processors to 11th-gen, and Acer comes to mind with this immediately.
The beloved Acer Chromebook Spin 713 had a solid 10th-gen Intel version and was basically a tiny refinement for the 11th-gen version. Some of the outer pieces were improved, but largely those were the same device, iterated to make things a bit better for the newer version but not radically overhauled. I could see all the major Chromebook makers doing this with their existing Alder Lake Chromebooks over the next year.
But for now, I can’t find any other signs of life in the 13th-gen Intel Chromebook world. While I’d love to see one at CES 2023, I’m not hopeful at all that this will be the case. Instead, I’d wager we won’t start seeing Raptor Lake Chromebooks until the summer, and even then we won’t be seeing a ton of them. And when you look at performance, battery life, and general productivity with current Chromebooks, I think that is perfectly fine. Refinement is the goal at this point, and it looks like that could be on the radar for much of 2023.
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When Intel released its Alder Lake “hybrid” platform on the all-new LGA 1700 socket in 2021, it promised two generations of CPUs would be supported. But according to a new leak of Intel’s roadmap, Intel might be squeezing in a third generation as well. The leaked slides look quite legit; they note a new platform named Raptor Lake-S Refresh is due in Q3 2023. The slides also point to a return to the High-End Desktop (HEDT) market for Intel, which most assumed it abandoned forever many years ago. The architecture falls under “Entry Workstation” utilizing Raptor Lake CPUs.
The leaked slides come from noted tipster @9550Pro on Twitter via Videocardz. Though they appear real, these things can always be faked, so take it with a grain of salt. This is the first time we’ve heard of a Raptor Lake refresh. It was originally supposed to replace Alder Lake, and then Intel would launch Meteor Lake. The 14th-generation platform has already been delayed many times, though, so it wouldn’t be a surprise if it was delayed once again.
In fact, Raptor Lake only exists in the first place due to Meteor Lake being delayed, according to Intel. As far as the refresh goes, it’s unclear what it will entail. Intel notably added more efficiency cores to Raptor Lake, along with a tuned performance core and more cache. In general, though, it’s just more Alder Lake. That has worked out quite well for Intel, as it’s been able to challenge AMD’s Zen 4 without necessitating an overhaul of its architecture.
It’s unclear if the Raptor Lake-S Refresh will suddenly become the 14th-generation platform, or if that’s still Meteor Lake. Intel has done that before, most notably with its 8th and 9th Gen Coffee Lake platforms. The slide notes it will use the Intel Z790 chipset, at least for the 125W K SKUs, which is the same as the current platform. It does appear to be a top-to-bottom replacement, as it also mentions non-K consumer SKUs and commercial chips.
Just as notable as the desktop chips are the “Entry Workstation” chips for HEDT. Intel seemed to abandon its HEDT lineup in 2020 or so, with its Core X 10000 lineup being its last. AMD eventually ended up doing something similar with its Threadripper lineup. It had seemed that desktop chips had become so fast, with so many cores, those specialty CPUs were no longer necessary for the average gamer. However, AMD is expected to reintroduce Threadripper again with its Zen 4 architecture. Therefore, it’s reasonable to assume Intel wants to have a competitor for it ready to go.
Intel lists the W680 chipset as being compatible with the Raptor Lake-S Refresh workstation platform. This is the same chipset that was used for Alder Lake workstations as well. It’s very similar to Z690, but it adds support for overclocking and ECC memory.
Intel’s older roadmap shows no indication of any Raptor Lake refresh. (Image: Intel)
Intel also lists a new “mainstream workstation” category with 250W CPUs. One of those is named Sapphire Rapids-64L, which seems to be a cut-down version of its Sapphire Rapids data center platform. The 64L might refer to the number of PCIe Gen 5 lanes instead of CPU cores, as the full platform offers 112 lanes. It’s also unclear if it’ll be branded Core X like previous HEDT chips, or something else. According to TechSpot, it’ll likely have fewer DDR5 memory channels but still more than Raptor Lake-S Refresh offers.
Either way, this could be exciting news for folks with an Alder Lake CPU who might be able to stuff a “refresh” CPU into their socket in late 2023. The platform was seen as DOA at launch by some, as it would only support two generations of chips. That’s in the context of AMD offering multiple generations of chips for its previous AM4 platform, which lasted five years.
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Samsung has just confirmed its next-gen GDDR7 memory technology that will feature up to 25% more power efficiency over its GDDR6 standard and oh-so-much more.
The next-gen Samsung GDDR7 memory will feature PAM3 (Pulse-Amplitude Modulation) signaling, with 25% more efficiency over NRZ (Non-Return to Zero), which is used inside of the current-gen GDDR6 memory standard. Another huge benefit of Samsung's next-gen GDDR7 memory is it will rock bandwidth of up to 36Gbps, which is a huge jump over the 18Gbps (double) that we see inside of current-gen GPUs.
Samsung's next-gen GDDR7 memory standard (source: Samsung + Ian Cutress)
AMD's next-gen RDNA 3-based Radeon RX 7900 series GPUs will use 20Gbps GDDR6 memory, while NVIDIA is still tapping Micron's high-end GDDR6X memory across its previous-gen GeForce RTX 30 series "Ampere" GPUs and current-gen GeForce RTX 40 "Ada Lovelace" GPUs.
We should expect next-gen GPUs using GDDR7 memory on a 384-bit memory bus featuring a huge 1728GB/sec of memory bandwidth, and GDDR7 memory on a 256-bit memory bus will hit 1152GB/sec memory bandwidth. That's a huge upgrade in memory bandwidth, yet Samsung wasn't clear on when the GDDR7 memory will appear and which partners will be using it.
- Read more: Samsung announces next-gen GDDR7 memory, with insane 36Gbps bandwidth
- Read more: Samsung teases next-gen GDDR7 memory: insane 32Gbps (GDDR6X = 21Gbps)
- Read more: NVIDIA's next-gen GeForce RTX 4090 rumored to use new GDDR7 memory
We did hear rumors months ago that NVIDIA could be using next-gen GDDR7 memory on its new GeForce RTX 40 series GPUs, but it didn't happen... however, the GDDR6X memory on the GeForce RTX 4090 and GeForce RTX 4080 graphics cards is plenty enough for gaming today at 4K and beyond.
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GDDR7 is expected to be 25% more power efficient than GDDR6
Published: 5th December 2022 | Source:Dr. Ian Cutress | Author: Mark Campbell
Samsung shares new information about their planned GDDR7 DRAM modules
The next-generation of high speed memory will soon be here, with GDDR7 offering users much more bandwidth than today's GDDR6 memory and higher levels of power efficiency.
Samsung has released a slide that details some of the technology used within their planned GDDR7 memory modules, confirming that they can deliver users 36 Gbps speeds. Today, 18Gbps GDDR6 memory modules are commonplace in many of today's high-end graphics cards, with 20Gbps GDDR6 memory finding use within AMD's Radeon RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX graphics cards.
With speeds of 36 Gbps, GDDR7 is 2x faster than today's mostly commonly used GDDR6 memory modules, and much faster than what GDDR6X memory can deliver. GDDR7 is confirmed to used PAM3 signalling, (Pulse-Amplitude Modulation) a change over the NR (Non-Return to Zero) signalling used by GDDR6. This change reportedly gives GDDR7 memory a 25% power efficiency advantage of GDDR6.
GDDR7 memory will allow graphics card manufacturers to offer users higher levels of peak memory bandwidth using smaller memory bus sizes and fewer DRAM modules. With GDDR7, 1152 GB/s of bandwidth can be offered using a 256-bit memory bus, and 1728 GB/s of bandwidth can be delivered using a 384-bt memory bus.
Bandwidth limitations have become a major limiting factor for modern graphics cards, forcing both AMD and Nvidia to invest heavily in cache related technologies (like AMD's Infinity Cache), or large chip cache sizes to make modern GPUs less reliant on their connected GDDR6/GDDR6X memory. With GDDR7, new GPU designs will see an explosion in usable memory bandwidth, allowing GPU manufacturers to focus on other areas of GPU design.
You can join the discussion on Samsung's 36Gbps GDDR7 memory on the OC3D Forums.
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05-12-2022, 10:21:08
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