This review makes it clear that unless Intel magically gets a process improvement they're entirely screwed.
This is precisely the same kind of design issue that hit with the latter end of the P4 era, where thermal limitations were so severe that they were crippling the chips. I'd have to do some digging, but I absolutely remember reading an interesting set of benchmarks that made it clear that you were 99% likely to thermally throttle those P4s even with proper thermal paste and an improved high-end heatsink/fan.
AMD will make gains for sure at this rate, but TSMC can't serve the whole market. Intel owns fabs, and these rocket lake chips will sell to the mainstream just fine.
I expect intel's fabs to be a big asset in these COVID times with sold out computers.
Their fixed costs & massive R&D requirements have to be paid for by shrinking revenue: Projected 1st quarter 2021 revenue is down about 12% over the same quarter in 2020. This isn't COVID-related: AMD's projected revenue for the same period jumped 80% year over year.
Intel is far from okay. They are far from having a safe path due to production bottlenecks by competitors: TSMC's 7nm capacity-- which is what AMD uses-- is on track to increase 18% in just the next quarter alone. I don't know how sustainable that production growth is, but it doesn't have to last long when they're bringing new fabs online and Samsung's fabs may be taking on some of Apple's M1 production, further freeing up TSMC capacity.
I don't think I'm saying anything particularly controversial or surprising or new when I say that Intel probably has about 2 years to figure out their own fab problems before they're well out of things for the next decade or so, having to claw their way back the way AMD has done.
Pretty much every Rocket-lake score is faster than Skylake across the board.
I'd definitely buy a Rocket Lake over any old Skylake based off of these reviews. Rocket Lake seems a wee-bit inferior to Zen3, but AMD Zen3 is pretty much sold out, so if you need a computer, Intel is still there.
Except for gaming, where rocket-lake is across the board slower. Which is important since gaming was Intel's last holdout prior to the arrival of Zen3. So if you're gaming this is worse, and if you're not gaming why would you go with this over a 3900x at basically the same price? Even verse skylake if you're doing productivity stuff a 10920x seems likely to be consistently faster thanks to 50% more cores (and way way more pcie lanes if you're into that)
The only reason to get this seems to be if the unique combination of avx512, no ECC, and only up to 8 cores is somehow ideal for your use case.
https://semiaccurate.com/2020/10/29/intels-palpable-desperat...
Just filter out Charlie Demerjian's grudge against Intel.
Companies don’t backport because a core is designed for a process. It’s efficiency and architecture is based on the transistors that it will use from the design start, caches are sized based on the process too, and a lot of the architectural gains are due to the added transistor counts. If you backport a CPU you lose the efficiency of these new transistors so the energy use goes up and the clocks likely go down as well. Cores take up 2x the size, or at least a lot more than the older core did on the older process, so costs go up too. You can either cut out bits of the core and lose performance or eat it on area and therefor cost. Backporting a design not made for portability isn’t a lose/lose proposition, it is a lose/lose/lose/lose proposition. But Intel is desperate so…