Intel "Ice Lake" (10 nm)

They have been heavily limited by bandwidth. The push for higher speed DDR4 and LPDDR4 is what enables these new integrated GPUs.

Cheers

 

Nah, Raven Ridge with the same 128bit DDR4 2400MT/s and similar TDP gets twice the performance.






Not to mention they developed Crystalwell to circumvent possible bandwidth limitations.


Intel's strategy in keeping the same tiny GT2 GPU over and over throughout the years was simply to keep the chips small to make them cheaper to produce.
Because they could, obviously.

 

Obviously.

Intel were binning SKUs across different segments. You have laptops, which often ships with LPDDR 1833, where a big GPU would be bandwidth limited. You have the business segment where a GT2 "is enough" and you have the gamer crowd where the GPU is just dark silicon anyway. A bigger integrated GPU for the mobile market would add cost across the other segments without any benefit.

I think you are right that AMD has forced Intel to up the ante in the GPU department. But I also think Intel's shift towards 10nm has helped. The production problems and the process characteristics means Intel is targeting mobile first with 10nm. Since they no longer bin similar dies across different segments, adding GPU resources doesn't incur a penalty to those segments.

Cheers

 

LPDDR4 at 3200MT/s has existed in the market since 2015 with the Snapdragon 810.
Intel has just shown they didn't need a drastic architecture or node change to support LPDDR4, since Comet Lake U supports LPDDR4X.

Higher GPU performance would have been welcome for mobile (most of the consumer market AFAIK) and NUC-sized solutions.

 

Thats because they back ported their 10nm LPDDR4x IP to 14nm.

 

Whatever the IP block is in there, Intel could have developed a LPDDR4 controller to launch in a late 2015 product. They're using one right now together on a 14nm SoC with SkyLake cores, which is what they already had back then.

 

<s> It's lovely to see a thread from 2015 for an Intel microarchitecture that's still in the future. Great to see Intel being so open about their future architectures. But I somehow can't find the thread for their 2025 microarchitecture here. Can somebody please guide me? </s>

 

You are looking at it!!

 

"Ice" seems very fitting.

 

Ice Lake confirmed for Surface Pro 7, Surface Laptop 3 13" and 15".


Though the most interesting Ice Lake product I've seen this week is the new HP Spectre X360 13" that sells with a 400nit 4K HDR AMOLED screen with the Core i7 G7, 16GB LPDDR4X and 512GB NVMe for $1500.
https://www8.hp.com/us/en/premium/laptops/spectre-x360-13.html

I think this might be the actual successor to my old Surface Pro 4.

 

I've seen everywhere that the 15" model has an AMD processor inside, not Ice lake.

 

https://3er1viui9wo30pkxh1v2nh4w-wp...s/562/2019/10/Surface-Laptop-3-Fact-Sheet.pdf

No LPDDR4X for AMD Ryzen.

 

Thanks, many places failed to mention that yesterday. I did thought it's an odd choice...

 

Yeah they're just higher binned Picassos, maybe with some more aggressive state transitions and cooling that let's them go up to 25W.

 

Weren't those rumored to feature AMD APUs? Or am I mixing up my Microsoft devices?

 

Which ones?

The one rumored to feature an AMD APU was the Surface Laptop 3 15".

 

Yes, I must have mixed up Surface Pro and Surface Laptop, thanks! That's too many surfaces for my tiny brain.