News Intel Demos Tiger Lake's Xe Graphics on Early Laptop Sample with Battlefield V

[jeremyj_83]

The 10nm issues at Intel provided a golden opening for AMD - which was unable to significantly capitalize on those issues.

You seem to think that as soon as a superior product hits the market it will automatically dislodge the competition. That isn't how things work at all. Zen 1 was a good product and rewrote a lot of how CPUs are now marketed. It also got the entire market away from 4c/8t on the high end for a standard desktop to that being the low end. For AMD Zen 1, much like 1st Gen Epyc, was a way to once again show the market that they can execute and provide a competitive product. 3.5 years later we are at Zen 2, soonish Zen 3, and AMD has been able to execute their roadmap very well. This has caused the enthusiast market to make AMD have 6 of 10 top selling CPUs on Amazon with 1-5 all being AMD. Getting this mindshare of the enthusiast market will pay dividends in the OEM market as well. This happens because General User asks his/her enthusiast friend to either build or recommend a computer and that person will recommend the AMD system. If some of these enthusiasts are also the decision makers for enterprise they could shift their company away from Xeon to Epyc. I am the decision maker on what to buy for servers, desktops, & laptops where I work and I have moved us away from Intel over the last 3 years. With the most current upgrade we are doing we will finally retire the last of our Intel VMware hosts and be 100% AMD in our data center. We will have 2x Gen 1 Epyc and 8x Gen 2 Epyc hosts at our primary data center and 3x Gen 2 Epyc at our DR site. For a small company the cost/benefit ratio for the density provided is nothing that Intel can come close to getting. On top of that the performance of the Gen 2 Epyc is better than Gen 2 Xeon Scalable. Overall it is decisions like this that will continue the increase of market share over the next years.

 

[Deicidium369]

I'm sure Intel will source us some Xe Graphics stuff for testing once they launch. Everything before that, they'll put under NDA and even if we got one, we couldn't report on it without getting in legal trouble. We'd have to get drivers as well as hardware, which is another hurdle. But Ryan Shrout's demo of BFV on TGL was quite surprising to me, compared to ICL doing the same test. It definitely gives me hope that the dedicated Xe cards won't completely suck -- but pricing on those will be key, and Intel is clearly more interested in the compute space for Xe than it is consumer GPUs.

The difference between the Gen 9.5 630 and Gen 11 was night and day. some saying 2x the performance, and Xe LP being 2x faster than Gen 11.

Maybe won't be a huge launch event for Intel - looks like the demo system was an Acer Swift of some sort, and was most likely the 1165G7 - since no mention of a dGPU. At any rate - I don't game on laptops, so the BF5 demo was interesting, but not anything other than a demo of potential of the coming desktop GPU parts.

Coming from a previous gen (the Dell 13 2-in-1 I replaced would be about 30 months old this month) the Ice Lake 1065G7 version was noticeably more responsive, the memory, m.2, and video were all alot faster - we opted for the 1920x1200 panel, and was noticeably faster. The main metric for us is battery life - My wife routinely gets a full day of usage, and usually puts it on the charger at around 25%.

I am waiting on the Tiger Lake NUCs - I have close to 70 NUCs deployed as desktops, from 3 separate generations - we are not CPU bound by any means. The oldest gen (40% of installed base) can do a single 4K no problem, but dual 2560s are at the edge of usability, The graphics in TGL will allow everyone to use the monitor configurations of their choice - with most opting for dual monitors... Will be a big upgrade.

Not sure Intel will be supplanting Nvidia, especially the GeForce line, but can't imagine Intel shooting for Pascal level performance with their Xe HP line - and with hints at a 16,384 core monster - Nvidia should be nervous. No one else has the resources to dislodge Nvidia/CUDA from their throne, other than Intel.

Getting interesting again.

 

[Deicidium369]

You seem to think that as soon as a superior product hits the market it will automatically dislodge the competition. That isn't how things work at all. Zen 1 was a good product and rewrote a lot of how CPUs are now marketed. It also got the entire market away from 4c/8t on the high end for a standard desktop to that being the low end. For AMD Zen 1, much like 1st Gen Epyc, was a way to once again show the market that they can execute and provide a competitive product. 3.5 years later we are at Zen 2, soonish Zen 3, and AMD has been able to execute their roadmap very well. This has caused the enthusiast market to make AMD have 6 of 10 top selling CPUs on Amazon with 1-5 all being AMD. Getting this mindshare of the enthusiast market will pay dividends in the OEM market as well. This happens because General User asks his/her enthusiast friend to either build or recommend a computer and that person will recommend the AMD system. If some of these enthusiasts are also the decision makers for enterprise they could shift their company away from Xeon to Epyc. I am the decision maker on what to buy for servers, desktops, & laptops where I work and I have moved us away from Intel over the last 3 years. With the most current upgrade we are doing we will finally retire the last of our Intel VMware hosts and be 100% AMD in our data center. We will have 2x Gen 1 Epyc and 8x Gen 2 Epyc hosts at our primary data center and 3x Gen 2 Epyc at our DR site. For a small company the cost/benefit ratio for the density provided is nothing that Intel can come close to getting. On top of that the performance of the Gen 2 Epyc is better than Gen 2 Xeon Scalable. Overall it is decisions like this that will continue the increase of market share over the next years.

"That isn't how things work at all. Zen 1 was a good product and rewrote a lot of how CPUs are now marketed." Really? so were sold only at car washes and bars before Zen 1? I agree, out of the AMD lineup Zen 1 was quite impressive

" It also got the entire market away from 4c/8t on the high end for a standard desktop to that being the low end" Debatable - how many programs, other then benchmarks, make use of much more than 4/8 cores? To say that Intel would have never gotten to 8 cores is ridiculous.

"Getting this mindshare of the enthusiast market will pay dividends in the OEM market as well " Cool buzzword - but will have little to zero impact on the OEM market - fact is no one is clamoring for AMD desktops in the enterprise or smaller companies. OEMs will make and sell whatever their customers want - and OEMs like Dell and HPE aren't seeing a big demand for AMD. IF tomorrow ARM became the new hot and there was serious demand, OEMs would have multiple models out within a quarter.

"For AMD Zen 1, much like 1st Gen Epyc, was a way to once again show the market that they can execute and provide a competitive product. 3.5 years later we are at Zen 2, soonish Zen 3, and AMD has been able to execute their roadmap very well" Whole Opteron fiasco and then being virtually absent from the Server and desktop markets are what people remember - and quite a few of them are now making decisions as to what goes into the data center.

"I am the decision maker on what to buy for servers, desktops, & laptops where I work and I have moved us away from Intel over the last 3 years" Good for you.

"decisions like this that will continue the increase of market share over the next years" and even if the increase their market share 10x - they will still be in single digits. How many machines are we talking about you replacing/recommending? Hundreds? Thousands?

With Epyc being limited to 2 sockets - and Ice Lake SP being shipped to OEMs, and at 2 CPUs - both have 128 PCie4 lanes and 8ch DDR4 ECC - and the core advantage really isn't much of an advantage. Ice Lake SP will be a extremely high volume part - and MOST operators will replace their Intel servers with Intel servers - Intel is a known and reliable supplier - and does not have any gaps where they disappeared for close to a decade.

Cool story, thanks for sharing.

 

[jeremyj_83]

Debatable - how many programs, other then benchmarks, make use of much more than 4/8 cores? To say that Intel would have never gotten to 8 cores is ridiculous.

Rendering, encoding, etc... all use more than 8 threads. Before Zen 1 Intel made > 4c/8t CPUs, but they were HEDT or server only. Once Zen 1 made 8c/16t mainstream Intel needed to respond. Without Zen 1 doing that, it might not have been until now or 5 years from now that even 6c/12t would be mainstream.

even if the increase their market share 10x - they will still be in single digits. How many machines are we talking about you replacing/recommending? Hundreds? Thousands?

If the market share goes up 10x then the will have 50% or more of the market share. While I am only purchasing a small number of systems, word of mouth advertising is still the cheapest and most effective advertising. I go to a VMUG and talk with other decision making Admins and plug Epyc then they look into it and purchase it. They like it and then recommend it to other Admins. Doesn't take long and the recommendations go up exponentially.

With Epyc being limited to 2 sockets - and Ice Lake SP being shipped to OEMs, and at 2 CPUs - both have 128 PCie4

Dual socket Epyc can have 160 PCIe 4.0 lanes for the IO, so it still has an advantage over Intel.