Intel Has Finally Got Something To Market
CHIP NEWS
Intel finally pops out a small chip secretly, Arez is thankfully no more and tracing rays! Mark Williams covers some of this month's chip news CPU
INTEL DOES 10NM, SORT OF
After months of heartache in Intel’s labs trying to get its new
10nm node manufacturing up and running, Intel has finally got something to
market. But all isn’t well. Intel hasn’t made any fuss or even told anyone
about it, which immediately says a lot.
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| Intel Has Finally Got Something To Market |
It took some observant consumers looking at laptops to realize
that the Lenovo Idea pad 330 being sold in China was shipping with something
rather unique in it. The CPU within is a Core i3-8121U. Intel hadn’t even put
up its ark specs page for this CPU model at that time it was discovered, only
once the word started leaking did they add it.
The CPU is fairly average but has a couple of odd twists. It’s a
15W dual core hyper threaded CPU that clocks up to 3.2GHz. Nothing interesting
there.
It now supports LPDDR4 and LPDDR4X which is great for further
power savings over previous gen products. The twists that makes this CPU quite
oddball is that is supports AVX512, something only on offer in the desktop i9
series processors, and it has no iGPU which again is very Core i9-like and
extremely strange for a low powered laptop part. The Lenovo laptop in question
instead relies on AMD Radeon RX 540 discrete graphics.
It would appear Intel are just pushing out small quantities of as
small a CPU as they can to get some money – any money – for all the effort it’s
pumping into this stubborn 10nm node. The small chip size will reduce wafer
wastage on an obviously still immature node.
Don’t expect 10nm high end parts any time soon. Next year in all
likely hood. Baby steps is still progress after all, but chances are AMD with
its 7nm tech via Global Foundaries (said to be equivalent to Intel’s 10nm
process) may get to mass production irst, by this year even. For the irst time,
I believe ever, AMD may well lead Intel on the manufacturing technology front.
GPU
GPP IS DEAD, REJOICE!
Nvidia has capitulated to media and consumer pressure and put an
end to its potentially anticompetitive GeForce Partner Program (GPP).
Nvidia was claiming from the start that the GPP was about clarity
and transparency, to make sure that “gamers who want Nvidia tech get Nvidia
tech”. When Nvidia themselves remained quite tight lipped about the whole thing
even after it leaked (thanks to an AMD tip-off) to the HardOCP website, the
claims of transparency and clarity are rather hollow indeed.
With no oficial detail on what the GPP entailed, the leak was all
the wider community could go off and judging by the bifurcation of top tier
gaming brands like Asus’s Republic of Gamers (ROG) to only contain Nvidia parts
it was obvious Nvidia was demanding quite a bit for companies to remain
“partners”.
Nvidia cancelled the GPP amid “rumours, conjecture, and mistruths”
(strange for something supposed to be so transparent and clear, no?) and “to
avoid any distraction from the super exciting work we [are] doing”. With AMD
cards already being sold with the ROG branding again and Asus’s AMD only Arez
brand having disappeared seemingly overnight, I think we can call this
marketing nightmare over.
THE YEAR OF THE RAY
the API.
This is big news as it means Linux (and by extension Android) and
MacOS and iOS etc can all join in on the ray-tracing andwagon.
Certainly, ray-tracing won’t be coming to mobile devices any year
soon but this multi-vendor standard for ray-tracing starts the ball rolling for
GPU designers and game/application developers to start implementing it into
future products.
After some thirty plus years of rasterization in computer
generated real time graphics, it’s about time the industry takes a major step
forward in how we process scenes. The future on this front will be exciting to
watch unfold.
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| Asus’ Arez |
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