GPU and CPU news and discussions

[weatheriscool]

Intel Adds New 1nm Node to Its Foundry Roadmap for 2027
It also says AI 'Cobots,' or collaborative robots, will work alongside humans in future foundries.
By Josh Norem February 28, 2024
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/i ... p-for-2027

Intel held its first big foundry event for media and analysts last week, and the headline was adding Intel 14A to its foundry roadmap. That's essentially the company's 1.4nm process, though it didn't announce when it would arrive. Now that the show is over, it's modifying that announcement by giving it a launch date in 2026 and adding one more node just beyond it by stating that 1nm, or Intel 10A, will come right after in 2027.

Intel gave a briefing to the media about Intel 10A at the show, but due to some confusion about when the embargo over the news would lift, it hasn't come to light until now. Tom's Hardware has posted about the presentation, which shows Intel will continue to pursue a very aggressive node progression strategy even after its "five nodes in four years" campaign theoretically ends in 2025 when Intel 18A arrives. Assuming 1.8nm launches next year, the company will follow it up with 1.4nm in 2026, then leap to 1nm in 2027. If this transpires, the company will likely be ahead of its rival TSMC, which is expected to be on 2nm by 2025 or 2026, with 1.4nm following after that.

[Tadasuke]

Intel will continue to pursue a very aggressive node progression strategy even after its "five nodes in four years" campaign theoretically ends in 2025 when Intel 18A arrives. Assuming 1.8nm launches next year, the company will follow it up with 1.4nm in 2026, then leap to 1nm in 2027.

From what read yesterday, it seems, that Intel just arbitrary sets a "new node", when it's between 14 and 15% better than the previous node. "Intel 4" is supposedly "~15% better" than "Intel 7". Whatever that means. I find those names rather illusory and deceptive. Wouldn't treat them too seriously.

If 10A is 14.5% better than 14A, which is supposedly 14.5% better than 18A, which is 14.5% better (?) than 20A, which is 14.5% (?) better than "Intel 3", which is 14.5% (?) better than "Intel 7" (the legacy name was "10nm") <-- that is being used in current products, like Intel "Raptor Lake" and "Emerald Rapids" ("Xeon Scalable 5th Gen"), then Intel 10A (1nm) would possibly be 96.8% "better" overall, than current "Intel 7" (or "10nm"). Perhaps in 2027, 2028 or 2029, Intel products could be ... about 2 times better I guess? 2x would be nicer than what they offer now...

i3-12100 (Golden Cove cores) at 3.9 GHz probably uses about half the energy of i7-7700K (January 2017) at 5.0 GHz, with very similar performance in most tasks. And PlayStation 5 "Slim" on "TSMC 6nm" uses ~180 watts, while having somewhere between 5 and 7x performance of ~120 watts "28nm" PlayStation 4 (and being significantly less noisy).

Sheer performance is not enough. More concerning are problems like Windows backup still being difficult to set up, cloud storages for some unknow reason deleting your files permanently (in tens of GBs), search engines not getting any better or bots prowling the web and spamming.

[weatheriscool]

Snapdragon X Elite Dethrones Intel Meteor Lake in Pre-Launch Tests
Hopes are high for the first really powerful Arm-based processor for Windows.
By Josh Norem March 13, 2024

Intel announced its upcoming Snapdragon X Elite SoC in late 2023, and it's promising to shake up the Windows processor landscape in 2024 by being a serious competitor to mobile chips from both AMD and Intel. The Qualcomm SoC will be targeting the ultra-thin laptop market when it debuts later this year, and new pre-launch benchmarks show it can already beat Intel's latest Meteor Lake CPUs in some tests.

A few weeks ago at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, a YouTuber ran some benchmarks at a Qualcomm event, but only now uploaded a video showing the company's newest SoC going head-to-head with Intel's latest processor. The chips involved are a 12-core Snapdragon X Elite with the bizarre name of X1E80100, and an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, which has 16 cores (6+8+2). Both chips are rated as having a 28W TDP, and though the Qualcomm laptop is shown as having 64GB of memory, it's assumed the Windows machine has a similar configuration.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/s ... unch-tests

[weatheriscool]

Intel Announces 6.2GHz Core i9-14900KS 'Special Edition' CPU
Intel ups the ante once again in the clock speed wars.
By Josh Norem March 14, 2024

https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/inte ... dition-cpu

Today, Intel is officially unveiling the flagship CPU for its 14th Generation chips—the Core i9-14900KS Special Edition. This is the final CPU to arrive for the 14th Generation family, aka Raptor Lake Refresh. Like the rest of the chips in the family, it ups the single-core boost clock by 200MHz over its predecessor, so as expected it can reach 6.2GHz right out of the box. It's the highest-clocked CPU ever made and will cost around $699 when it goes on sale today.

The specs for the 14900KS are almost exactly the same as its predecessor, the Core i9-14900K, but with a 6.2GHz single-core boost clock instead of 6GHz. It's still a 24-core, 32-thread CPU on the LGA 1700 socket and is probably the final chip on that platform before Intel moves to LGA 1851 later this year. The E-core Turbo Max clock has also been nudged upwards by 100MHz to 4.5GHz. All this CPU juicing has raised the PL1 power rating from 125W in the previous chip to 150W for the KS version. The PL2 rating, which is maximum turbo power, is unchanged at 253W, but as we've seen already, that number can get up to 400W or so.

[weatheriscool]

Cerebras Unveils CS-3 Wafer-Scale AI Chip With 900,000 Cores and 4 Trillion Transistors
The company takes an entire TSMC wafer and sells it as one huge chip instead of cutting it into individual dies.
By Josh Norem March 14, 2024
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/c ... 4-trillion

If you thought a chip like AMD's MI300A was big at 146 billion transistors, you ain't seen nothing yet. AI company Cerebras announced its third-generation AI chip, CS-3, a "wafer-scale" silicon monstrosity designed for AI training. It's basically an entire TSMC 5nm wafer sold as a single chip. The CS-3 is 56 times the size of Nvidia'a H100 and features over 4 trillion transistors, making it the biggest "chip" in the world by a wide margin. The company says it is the world's fastest AI chip, breaking the record set by its predecessor, the CS-2.

[weatheriscool]

Intel Core i9-14900KS Is Already Breaking Records, Overclocked to 9.1GHz on Liquid Helium
As expected, Intel's highest-clocked chip ever is already setting world records even though it's just one day old.
By Josh Norem March 15, 2024

Intel launched the swan song for its LGA 1700 platform on Thursday with the Core i9-14900KS. This "Special Edition" CPU is a binned version of the 14900K, plucked from obscurity due to its ability to overclock to 6.2GHz right out of the box. Now, an overclocking team has taken Intel's newest flagship CPU past 9.1GHz and set a new world record. The team had to use liquid helium to accomplish this task, which is slightly more effective than liquid nitrogen and represents the pinnacle of cooling technology.

An Asus overclocking team led by the esteemed clock-tickler Elmor is responsible for the new CPU world record at an Asus Republic of Gamers overclocking event. Elmor and his crew were able to push the Core i9-14900KS to 9117.75 MHz on an Asus ROG Maximus Z790 Apex motherboard, which costs around $650. To achieve this clock frequency, the CPU had to be chilled to sub-zero temperatures with liquid helium, and the video shows the elaborate setup required to get it to work correctly. The chip ran at a frosty -230C for the final run at 9.117GHz.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/i ... d-to-91ghz

[Tadasuke]

9.1 doesn't seem like something significantly different than what we have already seen so far (seems about the same). Upcoming Intel architectures might achieve lower clock by the way, not higher, according to some people. I guess by 2030 overclockers will get to 10 or maybe even 11 GHz.

Here's what PS5 Pro with its newer 4nm SoC will be capable of, according to multiple leaks which seem to verify each other:
• larger GPU with faster memory, providing 45% improved performance in rasterized rendering
• massively improved ray tracing architecture that should deliver 2-3x speedup over the regular PS5 with peaks of 4x
• custom machine learning architecture, that supports 300 TOPS (Trillions of Operations Per Second) at 8-bit precision
• the ML architecture was built to enable the so-called PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) upscaling technique, the leaked document describes it as Sony's version of Multi Frame Super Resolution based on the PlayStation Machine Learning (PSML) algorithm, according to the leaked info PSSR currently supports up to 4K, but there are plans to add 8K support
• PSSR is an ML-enhanced version of Temporal Anti-aliasing Upscaling (TAAU) that requires similar inputs to NVIDIA DLSS or AMD FSR and fully supports High Dynamic Range (HDR) pipelines and no per-game training is required just like with the latest version of DLSS
• PSSR requires just 250MB of the PS5 Pro's memory, with a current rendering cost of 2 milliseconds to upscale from Full HD to 4K, although optimization is still ongoing
• the document also includes an image comparison with TAAU and AMD FSR 2, reportedly showing that PSSR offers superior image quality

[weatheriscool]

[Tadasuke]

Here's what our IT professor told us at university many years ago:
• AI will never really work, it will never really understand human language or the world, it might be useful in faking understanding or in some special cases using expert systems
• CPUs are the driving force of computing and software
• depending on the use case, somewhere between 4 and 64 cores might be the useful practical limit, multi-threading won't be useful beyond 2 threads per core
• CPUs might get to 1 THz sometime in the 2030s and they might get to 1 PHz by around 2100, but they will never get past that, as laws of physics won't allow for higher clockspeeds
• future CPUs might contain a few gigabytes of integrated fast cache as that is very possible
• C++ and Perl will be around and used for decades to come
• single board computers will be much more popular in the future
• GPUs are for video games, pre-rendering graphics and might be useful for some simulations
• quantum computers will never work
• open-source Linux is the future, also for mobile
• Apple company is a joke and Microsoft is evil
• Dennis Ritchie >> Steve Jobs

Seems like he wasn't 100% correct.

[erowind]

Here's what our IT professor told us at university many years ago:
• AI will never really work, it will never really understand human language or the world, it might be useful in faking understanding or in some special cases using expert systems
• CPUs are the driving force of computing and software
• depending on the use case, somewhere between 4 and 64 cores might be the useful practical limit, multi-threading won't be useful beyond 2 threads per core
• CPUs might get to 1 THz sometime in the 2030s and they might get to 1 PHz by around 2100, but they will never get past that, as laws of physics won't allow for higher clockspeeds
• future CPUs might contain a few gigabytes of integrated fast cache as that is very possible
• C++ and Perl will be around and used for decades to come
• single board computers will be much more popular in the future
• GPUs are for video games, pre-rendering graphics and might be useful for some simulations
• quantum computers will never work
• open-source Linux is the future, also for mobile
• Apple company is a joke and Microsoft is evil
• Dennis Ritchie >> Steve Jobs

Seems like he wasn't 100% correct.

• Remains to be seen on AI. Understanding in a philosophical sense requires consciousness and this prediction might turn out true at least for a few centuries. In a practical sense though I think that narrow AI will get there 99.9% and be useful in a broad array of applications and trick a lot of people into thinking it's alive.

• GPUs, FPGA's and ASICS are all driving forces too.

• We all know what happened here 256 core CPUs are probably coming there are already 128 core ones.

• Interesting, he seems to have favored the core clock scaling path over the core count scaling path we've been taking. Both will probably mature to their limits eventually.

• GB+ cache CPUs are certainly coming.

• This prediction turned out true.

• GPUs are for a lot more than video games.

• Quantum computers do work!

• Kinda, I wish, but no sadly, not for most desktop users at least.

• Yes

• Yes