Intel's Architecture Day 2021 was recently hosted by Raja Koduri and delivered a huge amount of news about both CPUs and GPUs, although Intel prefers to call them SoC (System on Chip). The key point that Intel stressed time and again is that Xe HPG, Sapphire Rapids and Ponte Vecchio are all due to launch in the near future while 12th Gen Alder Lake is expected to land in two months' time.

We already knew Alder Lake would combine Performance and Efficient cores but it came as a pleasant surprise to learn the Atom cores will have similar performance to a Skylake core, so even the Efficient cores will be relatively grunty.

Luke wrote up the news about Intel's CPUs which you can read HERE. Perhaps the most important thing we learned today is that Intel Thread Director will allow all the cores in Alder Lake to work simultaneously to maximum effect. It was strongly suggested this feature will work better with Windows 11 than with Windows 10.

Dominic covered the graphics news HERE and we are agreed that Intel has a huge opportunity to sell product, make money and help gamers with new graphics cards, provided they offer reasonable levels of performance.

Sapphire Rapids is a new type of Server chip that promises to leave monolithic Xeons in the dust with a rumoured core count up to 56-cores. The tiled SoC approach includes a number of specialist accelerators and when you add in support for PCIe 5 and DDR5 memory you can see why Intel thinks they will be able to take the fight to AMD EPYC in 2022.

The biggest news – quite literally – falls to Ponte Vecchio which is a colossal graphics SoC that aims to pull Intel into competition with Nvidia and AMD for Compute-on-GPU. This promises to be an even bigger upset than the success of Ryzen and EPYC, and that would be quite something to behold.

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KitGuru says: Intel held back a huge amount of information about these products and did not tell us anything about clock speeds, power draw or pricing, and precious little about delivery dates. We shall watch this space with keen interest. 

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