[chx]

There are no rabbits in the hat until late 2021 when 7nm comes to market. The 10nm process is completely broken. Watch how the majority of the roadmap is still on 14nm into 2021, there never will be a desktop 10nm for example. The Rocket Lake desktop chips in 2021 still on 14nm will drop down to eight cores to cram the new GPU architecture into desktop chips at a truly ridiculous 125 W. The Ryzen 9 3900 today does 65W w/ 12 cores and and you can easily squeeze in a 1650 into the remaining 60W.

[kllrnohj]

> There are no rabbits in the hat until late 2021 when 7nm comes to market. The 10nm process is completely broken.

10nm products have "shipped" and put up a solid fight: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15092/the-dell-xps-13-7390-2i... It shows good performance and strong efficiency.

10nm desktop & server parts seem entirely MIA and dead. But it seems that Intel is able to at least struggle out small laptop parts on the process.

[tapland]

Now TDP isn't really reflecting output and can't be compared well across brands. But a 2x difference in TDP is a lot more than the different ways of calculating them between amd and intel

[davrosthedalek]

Especially since intel normally has a bigger spread between declared TDP and actual TDP.

[baybal2]

> There are no rabbits in the hat until late 2021 when 7nm comes to market. The 10nm process is completely broken. Watch how the majority of the roadmap is still on 14nm into 2021, there never will be a desktop 10nm for example.

From what I heard from a man close to Intel process crowd is that Intel will simply slap a 7nm marketing designation on their current 10nm process when they finally get it going.

They will then change design rules to deliver enough density change, comparable to a node shrink without any change in the process.

[HelloNurse]

Design rules don't change because marketing says so. It is reasonable to begin early processor development in a new process with conservative design rules (in order to be sure that everything works and yields are acceptable) and rework some components, pushing the envelope a little more, if tests allow it; but such improvements are going to be small "without any change in the process". Maybe the same specifications on a slightly smaller die to reduce costs or a slightly higher clock or lower power SKU. Or nothing at all because the tooling costs for marginally improved revised processors aren't justified.

[chx]

The 7nm is using EUV and the performance per watt would immediately tell if it were not using EUV...

[toast0]

Well from that roadmap, I see 6 core Comet Lake U (high end mobile) set for Q2 2020; we don't know how many cores AMD is planning for Zen2 mobile. If AMD sticks to 4, and Intel has 6, that's going to swing some buyers. The (leaked) Intel roadmaps tend to have more specifics than the AMD ones though.

[chx]

It's still 14nm, even the quad core KLR chips were a minor miracle and only brought 25-30% from the dual core KBL.

[sundvor]

Just about every 6 core mobile CPU laptop struggles with thermals. 7nm could conceivably upend that.

[wtallis]

For as long as the ultrabook design remains popular (and it shows no signs of waning), the high-end CPU options will be riding the edge of their thermal limits during sustained use. OEMs aren't going to suddenly start over-building their cooling solutions just to help out marginally with a niche use case. As long as we don't get back to the problems from a decade ago with dying mobile GPUs, there's not really anything wrong with having CPUs that boost up to the thermal limits of the system form factor.

If someone comes out with a laptop CPU that can't boost up to those thermal limits, it means the chip's undersized and that vendor will probably need a different microarchitecture for the desktop or server markets.

[baybal2]

> OEMs aren't going to suddenly start over-building their cooling solutions just to help out marginally with a niche use case.

A friend from a laptop engineering company has worked on this exact problem recently. Chinese OEMs are all trying to squeeze 35-45w chips into small chassis now.

To my big surprise, doing so in even thin bezel 13 inch models is not that big of a deal actually. Big OEMs simply were never bothered enough to try that before.

[sundvor]

I think my point is that a lot of laptops have been held back (throttled) by the thermal solutions not being able to cope with the heat.

More efficient design will give better perf.

[wtallis]

You have to take into consideration what kind of workloads lead to throttling. Laptops are usually not used for the kind of tasks that keep a CPU fully loaded for several minutes or hours at a time. People who do use laptops in that manner are a tiny fraction of the market, and when they experience throttling that does not have any bearing on whether the cooling system of an ultrabook is adequate for the kinds of more typical workloads it is actually designed for.

There have been some ultrabook-style designs that offered inadequate cooling even for fairly normal use cases, but that's a separate issue. Mainstream laptops will be designed around mainstream workloads, and heavier workloads will push them to their limits. Better cooling doesn't come free, and if it doesn't benefit mainstream workloads it's unreasonable to expect mainstream laptops to put more emphasis on cooling capabilities.

[adrianN]

> Laptops are usually not used for the kind of tasks that keep a CPU fully loaded for several minutes or hours at a time.

Web developers work hard to change this. Browsing without an adblocker and with Javascript enabled is often enough.

[sundvor]

Sorry, but if I buy a six core laptop, I'm not going to be in the casual notepad user category.

In many laptops, thanks to bad thermals I'd be better off with a 4 core where the thermals can keep up. That's where the 7nm stuff could really bring advantages.

I've been able to load up my desktop six core plenty using e.g Docker and a bunch of microservices. It has a fairly decent 360mm AIO water cooler so stays pinned at max perf. Had a bad cooler before, though, and it really impacted perf and stability.

[jotm]

It's sad that this is the norm. Aluminum is cheap, a bigger heatsink in a regular laptop (not Ultrabook) should cost what, a dollar more? Yet laptops are never designed for full load for hours. Just "mainstream" use. Even business "workstations" have the same problem. I've had to do hardware mods or undervolting on all laptops. WTF.

[karpodiem]

"You have to take into consideration what kind of workloads lead to throttling."

I'm driving four displays at work with Windows 10 (two 21.5' 1080p monitors, my laptop flipped open, and an iPad Pro 12.9 connected via USB C running Duet Display) and my idle desktop CPU utilization hovers around 15-20%. Having Outlook and Chrome open gets it into the mid 30s. This is a four core i7 Dell Latitude 7490 with 16GB memory and an NVMe drive that I was given in May 2019.

Yes, all the OS/applications I'm using are resource hogs but I'm not even doing software development - this is all business analyst work. Seeing that the general trend of applications/OS will continue to be resource hogs, let's hope that six core thermal chassis design for 14' ultrabooks is figured out in the next two or three years.

[ClumsyPilot]

"Mainstream laptops will be designed around mainstream workloads"

Games are a mainstream workload that will cause most laptops to throttle.

"Better cooling doesn't come free"

You could make the heatsink in a Macbook out of Pure Silver, and it would barely move the price.

Meanwhile aluminium costs $1.7 per kilo.

[navjack27]

Comet 6 core already exists and I bought one to review. 10710U