Leo Says Episode 42 – All About CPUs!

Today Leo is back with another episode of Leo Says, with a big focus on CPUs. Our grumpy hero has a lot to discuss, starting with the news that the 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X has been delayed – but there is also discussion around the upcoming third generation of Threadripper processors, while Leo also does battle with Intel's naming convention for its 10th Gen mobile processors.

Timestamps:

00:15 Processors – the current state in 2019
01:13 AMD had delayed the 16 core Ryzen 9 3950X until November – TSMC issues
03:03 AMD will launch Zen 2 Threadripper with 24-cores in November along with TRX40 Motherboards
04:44 We expect Intel will launch Comet Lake-S on the desktop with a Z490 chipset
05:33 Israel with Intel Recap – 10nm Ice Lake
08:10 Nothing about 45w laptop parts from Intel
09:25 New 10 Series Intel Mobile Processors
10:49 Intels ‘Real World Performance’ Event – Der8auer snub? What did AMD do wrong?
15:44 Intel choose to ignore security issues in discussion
16:32 Core i9-9900KS and Cascade Lake-X will ship in October
17:57 Cascade Lake-X looks like Skylake-X with different pricing and 10-series numbers
19:23 AMD Threadripper rumour round up
21:11 AMD has announced EPYC 7H12 with 64 cores
22:34 LEO’s Closing thoughts on the CPU situation

Leo's Notes:
Chaos reigns in the CPU market which makes it horribly complicated to come up with a buying decision for a laptop, desktop PC or workstation.

AMD has delayed the 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X until November

AMD cannot get sufficient supplies of 7nm Zen 2 chiplets from TSMC to satisfy demand for EPYC, hence the delay for Ryzen 9

AMD will launch Zen 2 Threadripper with 24-cores In November along with TRX40 motherboards.

We expect Intel will launch Comet Lake-S (based on 14nm Skylake architecture)on the desktop with a Z490 chipset, perhaps pushing to 10-cores/20-threads

I travelled to Israel with Intel a couple of months ago and met the Ice Lake development team. There have been endless horror stories about the Intel 10nm process and it was noticeable the Israelis said absolutely nothing about feeds and speeds but despite that I fully expected the IFA show to be wall-to-wall Ice Lake laptops. I was wrong about that.

Instead we saw a handful of laptops with the basic G1 graphics with 32 Execution Units
(G4 parts have 48 EUs and G7 have 64 EUs)

10nm Ice Lake has a four digit part number that ends in G1, G4 or G7 while 14nm Comet Lake parts continue to use the Y and U naming series.
The maximum TDP, so far, for 10th Gen CPUs is 25W with a single 28W outlier. At present we know nothing about 45W CPUs that will replace models such as i9-9980HK is gaming laptops or 95W+ parts that will take over from Core i9-9900K. There is surely no way those 10th Gen parts will be based on Ice Lake.

Razer was showing a new Stealth 13 Mercury White with a Core i7-1065G7 that can be configured as 15W or 25W using Iris Pro graphics however Razer also has the Stealth 13 GTX model with Nvidia GTX 1650 graphics.

Core i7-10710U Comet Lake has a 25W TDP, 6 cores/12 threads and Max Turbo of 4.7GHz
Core i7-1065G7 Ice Lake has a 25W TDP, 4 cores/8 threads and a Max Turbo of 3.9GHz

Core i7-1065G7 Ice Lake
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/196597/intel-core-i7-1065g7-processor-8m-cache-up-to-3-90-ghz.html

Core i7-10710U Comet Lake
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/196448/intel-core-i7-10710u-processor-12m-cache-up-to-4-7-ghz.html

Jon Carvill and Ryan Shrout of Intel ran an event called Real World Performance to prove Intel is superior.
Der8auer was unimpressed that Intel used his reader poll on Zen 2 boost speeds without getting in touch. After all, Roman lives in Berlin and knew nothing about what Intel did until he heard reports.

Half of Ryzen 5 3600 users saw the correct single core Boost
Only 5.6 percent of Ryzen 9 3900X owners saw the correct maximum boost clock

There are now rumours about Ryzen 5 3500 and 3500X with 6 cores and 6 threads

My original premise was that desktop CPUs got the worst chiplets. The best go into EPYC. Ryzen 5 3600 must surely be the worst chiplets that come out of TSMC.
Intel made hay about the fact that AMD Zen 2 CPUs do not hit the advertised Boost speeds and suggested that AGESA updates after launch had slowed CPUs even further. The current view is that AMD has reduced the maximum Precision Boost 2 speed from 80 degrees C to 75C to help longevity but there is clearly other stuff going on.

For some reason Intel forgot to talk about security.

At the RWP event Intel stated that Core i9-9900KS and Cascade Lake-X will ship in October
The i9-9900KS Turbos to 5.0GHz all cores, apparently with a 127W TDP.

Cascade Lake-X looks like Skylake-X with different pricing and 10-series numbers such as i9-10980 XE and i9-10940X

32-core Sharktooth Threadripper has been seen in a leaked benchmark as 70 percent stronger than the 32-core 2990WX so 24-core Threadripper should demolish Cascade Lake-X
There will be an updated 4-channel Threadripper chipset called TRX40
WRX80 8-channel Threadripper chipset wil presumably support the anticipated 48-core (64-core?) Threadripper
24-core is 4×6 core. Assuming there is a 16-core that will be 4×4.
8-core chiplets are reserved for EPYC.

AMD has announced EPYC 7H12 with 64 cores, a higher base speed of 2.60GHz (EPYC 7742 is 2.25GHz) the TDP has increased from 225W to 280W.

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