Quote from: cyberstudio on March 17, 2020, 11:57:10
Right now, Intel is just holding back, because it does not want every patron to get Ice Lake. Intel sells a much larger volume and to avoid shortage some of the demand is diverted to Comet Lake. It is even reserving vPro for Comet Lake because businesses, unlike consumers, do not care about the process node. That's why Ice Lake could have beaten Comet Lake across the board, but didn't. 1065G7 has only got 4 cores. It has potential for higher core count in the future. In the meantime AMD has not switched GPU architecture yet, so for both sides, the best is yet to come.
That post is a true lesson in twisting reality to suit a certain view. Let's see:
-Intel isn't diverting demand to Comet Lake to avoid a shortage; there
is an ongoing 14nm shortage (the node CL is made on), which means that Intel is making anything and everything it can on 10nm to alleviate said shortage, not the other way around. Diverting production away from 10nm and onto the dramatically congested 14nm node would make no sense whatsoever unless they had to. That there's still a 14nm mobile lineup tells us two possible things, at least one of which must be true: 10nm yields are low enough that they can't cover even the entirety of the U-series mobile market with that node alone, and/or 10nm in its current revision scales voltage so poorly with clocks above ~3GHz that higher performing SKUs aren't feasible.
-Businesses absolutely care about nodes, as node shrinks typically means less power consumption, which again means TCO savings, or more productivity without increasing power consumption. However 10nm doesn't actually consume less power than 14nm currently, and performs worse to boot (outside of graphics). As such businesses are holding back to the tried and tested tech.
-Ice Lake could not have beaten Comet Lake across the board on the current 10nm node. Not a chance. There's a reason CL
outperforms ICL in both ST and MT performance
while consuming no more power. In other words, for ICL to perform better and beat CL, it would need to consume more power, thus not fitting in the 15W U-class TDP range.
-
4-core ICL has a much lower base frequency at 15W than 4c CL - low enough to alleviate its ~18% IPC advantage. An 18% IPC advantage doesn't help when the other chip clocks 38% faster. And the clock advantage grows for CL in cTDP-up mode at 25W - 2.3 vs. 1.5GHz, or a 53% advantage. Ice Lake is
less efficient than Coffee Lake, and has less potential to scale upwards.
Quote from: A on March 17, 2020, 15:20:07
@hfm - have you missed the AMD thinkpads with thunderbolt? With Thunderbolt being opened up for USB4, finding it on AMD laptops will be more common.
Yeah, it will also become more common as more high-end AMD-equipped laptops reach the market. Which is definitely happening with this generation of APUs. That's the main reason for the current absence, as there's nothing technical or licence-related actually prohibiting OEMs from using TB3 controllers on AMD devices (beyond Intel's likely reluctance to help in engineering and certifying such devices before they gave away the spec).