With the release of Comet Lake-S by Intel, their competition with AMD in the CPU market has entered the next stage. Now, neither of them has clearly announced the next product trend, but it is necessary for you to sort out the two CPU roadmaps from this year to the next year, which is 2022.
This article is based on a variety of news and leaks.
Intel side: Rocket Lake and Tiger Lake will support next year
Due to the drag of the manufacturing process, Intel is currently in a clear competitive disadvantage. However, Intel, which is a big industry, will still be updated according to the original roadmap. The next-generation architecture currently disclosed is Tiger Lake on the mobile side.
Tiger Lake is the optimization step of Intel's three-step process-architecture-optimization (PAO) strategy. On the premature death of Cannon Lake, Intel actually completed the process upgrade, opened its own 10nm era, and also completed the core microarchitecture and The decoupling of the overall architecture of the CPU, the code name of the core micro-architecture is no longer the same as the code name of the CPU architecture, but has its own special name. For example, Ice Lake uses the core micro-architecture called Sunny Cove. Tiger Lake will use Sunny Cove's next generation, Willow Cove core.
At Intel's 2018 Architecture Day event, they disclosed the core microarchitecture roadmap for the next few years. We can see that Willow Cove will have three major changes compared to Sunny Cove: cache redesign, new transistor optimization, and security features. The first point we have seen in the identification of various test software, Tiger Lake's L2 and L3 are significantly larger, the single-core L2 cache is enlarged from 512KB to 1.25MB, and L3 has also grown to 3MB per core.
On the desktop side, Intel plans to launch a generation of Rocket Lake that still uses the 14nm process to complete the upgrade of the core microarchitecture. The long-stagnant IPC of the Intel desktop processor will finally be improved, but now for the specific use of the core micro There are two versions of the architecture. One is that it uses Sunny Cove, and the other is that it uses Willow Cove. Anyway, it is always good to improve.
According to the current leakage situation, the power consumption level of Rocket Lake-S will still be at a fairly high level. After all, whether it is Sunny Cove or Willow Cove, its core is more than one size, because of a single core Occupying a larger area, in order to ensure yield and yield, the desktop-level Rocket Lake-S will limit the maximum number of cores for a single processor to 8.
Tiger Lake will be officially launched later this year. It is expected that by the end of the year, we should be able to see many new notebooks using the Tiger Lake platform. And Rocket Lake-S will come out in the second quarter of next year without any surprises, replacing the current Comet Lake-S.
And then on ... Alder Lake will debut. Legend has it that it will use a configuration of 8 + 8 size core combinations. The large core uses the next generation of Willow Cove, the core microarchitecture code-named Golden Cove, and the small core should Will use Tremont's next generation, code-named Gracemont micro-architecture. It will bring ideas like big.LITTLE to the high-performance x86 platform, and its process should be replaced with 10nm.
Alder Lake, a generation of Meteor Lake has appeared in Intel's current driver files. It is believed that it will use the 7nm process.
AMD side: Zen 3 and various APUs
AMD's new products are still relatively clear. The product they are about to release soon should be Matisse Refresh, which is an upgraded version of the frequency of several currently selling Zen 2 processors. It is believed that they will have the XT model suffix. Then there is the desktop version of the Renoir processor, which may debut with Matisse Refresh, or it may be launched at some point later.
The above two series do not exist in AMD's official information. The only available information is the Zen 3 architecture and the schedule of the new generation of processors. It can be seen that AMD will launch a new generation of processors based on Zen 3 this year. Codenamed Vermeer, what can be learned from various channels is that Zen 3's single-threaded performance will be improved by double-digit levels, which means that it will definitely not be as simple as changing the CCX structure, and the core micro-architecture will also have Larger upgrade.
Let's talk about AMD's layout in the mobile market. A few days ago, there is a form of integration of AMD ’s future processor roadmap. Let ’s take a look. The data comes from @KOMACHI_ENSAKA:
What is more useful to us in this form is the layout on MSDT and APU next year. You can see that AMD has laid out an APU called Cezanne next year, and then there is a new APU codenamed Rembrandt, but the table does not mark them. What kind of architecture will be used, but we got the latest news from anonymous sources.
Cezanne will use a combination of Zen 3 + Vega 7 instead of the rumored RDNA 2, and it will continue to use TSMC's N7 process. Like Renoir, it will have both low-voltage and standard-pressure versions.
Rembrandt is a huge update. The CPU architecture will use Zen 3+, and the GPU will finally get rid of the Vega architecture and switch to RDNA 2. In terms of process, it will be updated to TSMC's 6nm, which is the optimized version of the N7 process. And will support DDR5, LPDDR5, in addition, USB4 and PCIe 4.0 two new buses will also be available on this generation of architecture.
AMD is also planning a processor called Van Gogh (Van Gogh) at ultra-low voltage. It is like a simplified version of the PS5 and Xbox Series X custom processors. It also uses the Zen 2 + RDNA 2 architecture, but TDP restrictions At 9W, for thin and light mobile devices.
If you use a road map to simply represent the layout of AMD on the desktop CPU and APU, this can be the case, but there is no guarantee that the time point will be correct.
Summary: CPU market changes
In the CPU market in the next two years, if nothing unexpected happens, Intel will experience a period of relatively weak, they are seriously dragged down by the process technology, they decided too late to put the new core on the desktop processor, resulting in their own desktop The processor has begun to dominate at the same frequency. How much Rocket Lake-S can recover is still unknown. In the mobile market, it is still a mystery whether Tiger Lake and the optimized 10nm + process can make the energy consumption better.
AMD ’s implementation of the roadmap is still relatively good. At the end of this year, we should see the Zen 3 processor. With Renoir ’s successful preparation, next year ’s mobile market, more manufacturers will choose to use APU .
