While fanboys have a squabble over their preferred brands, Intel waving the white flag with uncompetitive products only hurts prospective consumers who are more than likely to be gouged by AMD with their upcoming Zen 5.
We already know that Intel have essentially given up with their 14th generation of Core processors, opting instead to provide a refresh of their previous generation Raptor Lake with minimal efficiency improvements and a slight frequency bump.
Despite a minimal improvement from 13th Gen to 14th Gen, Intel are still thoroughly competitive with AMD’s Ryzen 7000 series, at least when it comes to providing consumers with overpriced CPUs, as Raptor Lake’s refresh is highly likely to demand similar retail prices as Intel’s previous generation.
And it’s estimated that Intel’s refreshed 6GHz 14900K is on average 2% faster than the Ryzen 9 7950X3D in terms of 1080p gaming performance as leaked by HXL.
Alder Lake and Raptor Lake have been much awaited improvements made to Intel’s Core architecture who previously had been recycling the same Skylake core for half a decade, however just as they once again regain competitiveness Intel once again faulter and look to be stagnating once more.
With Meteor Lake being shelved in favor of mobility products such as Laptops and Notebooks, Intel fanatics are going to have to wait until near the end of 2024 before Intel actually provides a worthy continuation in the form of Arrow-Lake S for the desktop market.
Given Intel’s horrible track record of never being able to deliver anything on time I wouldn’t be surprised if Arrow Lake ends up “competing” against AMD’s Zen 6 which is rumored to have yet another 10% IPC bump.
Which by that time AMD will have already unleashed Zen 5, which is currently speculated from clowns such as Moore’s Law is Dead to be providing a 10-15% IPC improvement over Zen 4 (Ryzen 7000) alongside offering twice as many cores in yet another massive revision of the Zen architecture.
Given how both Raptor Lake and Zen 4 seemingly trade blows tit for tat depending on the games themselves, with Raptor Cove cores only being able to flex their muscles and reign supreme over AMD when properly fed with adequate 7200+ MHz DDR5 memory kits, Zen 5 being speculated to dramatically increase its IPC by another 10+ percent and offering doubled core count figures certainly does not bode well for opportunists looking to get swindled with Intel’s 14th Generation Core processors.
Or even their 15th Generation for that matter.
We’ve already had a theoretical small sampling of what we could expect out of the new LGA 1851 socket and Arrow Lake-S, which was leaked back in July to be anywhere from 6% to 21% faster than Raptor Lake across SPECrate2017, CrossMark, SYSmark 25, WebXPRT 4, Chrome Speedometer 2.1, and Geekbench 5.4.5 with median single core performance figures showing a 9% to 11% increase.
It also showcased the performance expected of Raptor Lake’s Refresh versus an i9-13900K as a baseline, with the 14th Gen refresh showcasing fractional 1% to 3% performance gains.
But that was back in July, it’s now October and we’ve got another taste of what’s shaping up to be a rather disappointing successor to Raptor Lake.
According to a post by uzzi38 on the AnandTech forums, this slide from Intel aligns closely with the existing information we have about Arrow Lake. It is noteworthy that uzzi38 obscured new and unknown details deliberately.
We have already witnessed performance estimations of Arrow Lake curtesy of igorsLab, and this slide serves as a harsh reality for Intel. Their own expectations for Arrow Lake-S are a dismal one, roughly targeting a 5% improvement to single threaded performance and around 15% gains in terms of multithreaded capabilities presumably in comparison to Raptor Lake Refresh.
The upcoming desktop and mobile platforms will introduce a fresh microarchitecture called “Lion Cove” for Performance Cores and “Skymont” for Efficient Cores, with Arrow Lake set to leverage Intel’s 20A processing node and integrate Xe-LPG integrated graphics for enhanced iGPU performance.
Arrow Lake-S is anticipated to have a core setup resembling that of Raptor Lake, featuring a maximum of 8 P-cores and 16 E-Cores. Additionally, Intel has revealed their intentions to introduce a Refresh version in the future, which will double the number of E-Cores along with the inclusion of separate Low-Power cores which are set to be debuted with Meteor Lake.
While Intel desperately try and tack on more and more “E-cores” that are vastly inferior to actual performance cores and aren’t all that efficient, it has to be stated yet again that AMD’s Zen 5 is speculated to incorporate a 16 core CCD which seems like a stretch, maybe we’ll see an iteration with “Zen 5c” cores.
If AMD were to double their effective core count on Ryzen once again, with Intel’s lackluster performance target of 5% in single threaded, even if Intel were to increase their E-core figures right out of the gate with Arrow Lake-S with a 8+32+2 configuration, it would ultimately pale in comparison to a maximum of 32 cores of full fledged Zen 5 power.
As much as it is fun to laugh at Intel’s own failures, if they are uncompetitive throughout 2024 this falls back onto the consumer as AMD are more than happy to gouge customers with inflated retail prices for Zen 5, just as they did previously with the Ryzen 5000 series when that first released, due to a long period of time with zero competition from Intel until they released Alder Lake, their 12th Generation Core processors.
But judging by these speculated performance improvements it would seem that Intel are only going to be competing against AMD in the vain of them launching a (inferior) product within the same quarterly window, time to wait for Nova Lake.
