With less than half a month to go until the opening of CES 2022, as an annual technology circle event, every CES show will receive enthusiastic attention from the majority of digital enthusiasts. According to tradition, the majority of hardware manufacturers at home and abroad will also release new products and display new technologies at CES.
In the PC field, many OEMs will also launch a new generation of thin and light books and game books at cess. Of course, upstream suppliers such as Intel, AMD, NVIDIA and other upstream suppliers have also paid more and more attention to the CES exhibition in recent years, launching the latest processors and graphics cards at this node to lead the industrial upgrading. According to the existing breaking news, CES 2022 show highlights are quite a lot, such as Intel's 12th generation Core processor mobile version, AMD's new generation Ofbrandt APU, NVIDIA's further enhanced mobile terminal display and so on. This article will provide a forward-looking outlook for these upcoming new products.
Intel – The 12th Generation Core Mobile Edition is finally here, and the performance improvement is worth looking forward to
In the fourth quarter of this year, Intel released the Alder Lake-S series of 12th generation Core processors for desktop platforms. Based on the Intel 7 process process (previously known as 10nm Enhanced SuperFin), hybrid architecture design, and two core microarchitectures - Golden Cove performance core and Gracemont energy efficiency core, Alder Lake-S compared to Rocket Lake-S has brought very large performance improvements and energy efficiency improvements, which has been well received by the media and players.
Not surprisingly, at this year's CES 2022 exhibition, Intel will officially launch the mobile terminal products of the 12th generation Core processor, introducing many advanced features into the notebook platform, including hybrid architecture design, specifications of up to 14 cores and 20 threads, DDR5 or LPDDR5 memory, GNA 3.0 independent acceleration unit, etc. In short, with the blessing of these advanced technologies, the game book and thin and light book in 2022 will get a new round of performance leaps!
In fact, thanks to the strong performance in the DIY market, the majority of players have high expectations for the mobile version corresponding to the 12th generation Core processor. Previously, the PConline evaluation room also manually debugged the Core i9-12900K, and tested and simulated the performance of the 12th generation Core processor mobile version by shutting down the core, locking the frequency, and limiting the power consumption wall, and the test results did live up to expectations, even in the case of limited power walls, the performance performance was very powerful, far stronger than the current 11th generation Core standard Pressure Tiger Lake-H series.
Reference article "Is it necessary to wait for the 12th generation Core standard stamping?" Analog performance measurement understood》
At the 2021 Architecture Day event, Intel mentioned that the Power Consumption of the Alder Lake Family ranges from 9W to 125W, and will include multiple packages, in addition to the first LGA 1700 interface Alder Lake-S desktop version, the mobile version will have two packages, namely BGA Type3 and BGA Type4 HDI, so the mobile version of the 12th generation Core processor will also include many product lines to cover multiple types of devices.
Based on the current exposures and the test data flowing out of the Geekbench 5 database, it is almost certain that Intel will release two product lines, Alder Lake-H and Alder Lake-P, during CES 2022.
First of all, let's talk about Alder Lake-H, from the naming, we can see that this is used to replace tiger Lake-H's product line, that is, the standard pressure series processors for high-performance game books and mobile workstations. At present, the test data of Core i9-12900HK, Core i7-12800H, Core i7-12700H, Core i7-12650H, Core i5-12500H, Core i5-12450H and other models have appeared in the Geekbench 5 database, and the specifications can also be basically confirmed. Among them, most of the cores of the Core i9 and Core i7 standard voltage models are 6 performance cores + 8 energy efficiency cores, and the specific models are distinguished according to the base frequency and turbo frequency.
Thanks to the new microarchitecture design, as well as the further optimization of the process process, of course, as well as the overall improvement of the number of cores and cache capacity, I believe that Alder Lake-H will achieve further performance improvement compared to the previous generation of Tiger Lake-H, becoming the preferred platform for the new generation of high-end game books in 2022, and it is no accident that product lines such as Lenovo Savior Y7000Y9000 series, HP OMEN Shadow Elf series and other product lines will also upgrade the new generation of standard voltage processors. PConline will also be fully tested after they are officially launched.
In addition to the Alder Lake-H for game books, Intel launched the Alder Lake-P series for thin and light books. Users who pay attention to these two young thin markets have found that the biggest regret of Intel's first two generations of Ice Lake-U and Tiger Lake-UP3 is that it only has a 4-core specification, which leads to a very bad loss in some market segments. It is expected that the Alder Lake-P series will solve this problem, the highest specification of its U28 family is also 6 performance core + 8 energy efficiency core, the mainstream Core i5 also provides 4 performance core + 8 energy efficiency core, in the number of cores to completely make up for the shortcomings, combined with the optimization of the process and microarchitecture, the performance is very worth looking forward to! It is believed that the majority of OEM manufacturers will also take this opportunity to launch some high-performance thin and light steel cannons to give full play to the potential of a new generation of processors, and the light and thin books with strong heat dissipation capabilities like Lenovo Xiaoxin Pro 14 are also more conducive to releasing the full blood performance of Alder Lake-P.
AMD – The core display of the new generation of APUs will be greatly upgraded
Looking back at the notebook market in the past two years, AMD's influence has become more and more powerful, and it can come up with products that compete head-on with Intel in the two major market segments of thin and light books and game books. On the stage of CES 2020, AMD officially released the Ryzen 4000 series mobile processor, codenamed Renoir, bringing the Zen 2 microarchitecture and TSMC 7nm process into the thin and light and game product lines, opening the way for AMD to recover on the mobile side. At the CES 2021 exhibition at the beginning of last year, AMD continued to exert efforts to launch the Ryzen 6000 series mobile processor equipped with Zen 3 microarchitecture, and the performance was further improved.
With multi-core and cost-effective features, AMD's two-generation mobile processors continue to attack the notebook market, and their share has steadily increased. At the upcoming CES 2022 show, AMD will also launch a new generation of products - the Ryzen 6000 series mobile processor codenamed Rembrandt. The biggest highlight of Rembrandt is the overall improvement of the platform, which comprehensively makes up for the shortcomings of the previous two generations of products and promotes the improvement of the comprehensive use experience of notebooks. Specifically, it includes support for advanced features such as USB4, PCIe 4 protocol, DDR5LPDDR5 memory, and RDNA 2 architecture nuclear display.
From the public information and roadmap, we can get a preliminary understanding of the relevant information of Rembrandt. Rembrandt will use TSMC N6 process, and equipped with Zen 3+ core, from the name can be seen that this is not a new microarchitecture, but should be a small improvement of Zen 3, and considering that the highest specification is still 8 cores and 16 threads, so if you only pay attention to the general computing performance of the processor core, then The improvement of Rembrandt is not particularly significant.
Specifically, the biggest upgrade highlight of the Rembrandt family is the new generation of Navi2 nuclear display equipped with RDNA 2 architecture, which is greatly improved compared to the Vega nuclear display that has lasted for many years; according to rumors, the Navi2 nuclear display equipped with Rembradnt can even have performance performance beyond gtX 1050 Ti. This is a great benefit for thin and light, perhaps next year with the full shipment of Rembrandt, the MX450 and other entry-level discrete graphics cards will be fully replaced, users have the opportunity to buy a better performance, more cost-effective nuclear display thin and light. In the face of the environment of the mining boom that has not receded, the strong nuclear display is obviously the just need of many users.
Finally, last year, AMD also brought the RDNA 2 architecture to the mobile platform, launching the RX 6000M series of discrete graphics cards, further injecting vitality into the game platform. According to foreign media exposure, AMD may also launch the RX 6000M Refresh series at CES 2022, and this small upgrade will use TSMC's N6 process to bring better performance. As for the new generation of AAA platform gamebook, what features can be brought with highlights? This is also very much worth looking forward to.
NVIDIA - RTX 3080 Ti Mobile Is Coming?
Whether it's a desktop or a game book, the performance of discrete graphics is decisive for the gaming experience. At last year's CES 2021, NVIDIA introduced the Ampere architecture to mobile platforms, introducing the RTX 30 series of laptop GPUs, from the RTX 3080 to the RTX 3050, covering product lines at all price points.
However, it is a little regrettable that it may be due to chip area, power dissipation and other reasons, RTX 30 series notebook GPU compared to RTX 30 series desktop graphics card, the scale has been reduced to a certain extent. For example, the RTX 3080 notebook GPU is equipped with only GA104 level core + GDDR6 video memory, rather than the desktop version of the RTX 3080 GA102 level core + GDDR6X video memory, which has a big gap in the number of CUDA units and the video memory frequency. Many players are looking forward to a higher specification and more powerful mobile flagship graphics card, and this desire is no longer a fantasy or speculation, and there is a high probability that it will be realized during CES 2022.
Recently, foreign media Videocardz found the parameter information of an HP OMEN notebook in the Geekbench 5 data, and the processor identified was configured as the Core i7-12700H, which is obviously a new product equipped with the 12th generation Core Alder Lake-H mobile version. Of course, the highlights of this new machine are not only the 12th generation Core, the database also recognizes that it is equipped with the NVIDIA RTX 3080 Ti laptop GPU.
It can be found that the RTX 3080 Ti laptop GPU has 58 groups of Compute Units, that is, 58 SM, which translates to 7424 CUDA, and the core size far exceeds the GA104 level. Not surprisingly, the RTX 3080 Ti laptop GPU should be equipped with a higher-level core, perhaps the rumored GA103, or it may be called GA103S, compared to the current mobile flagship RTX 3080 laptop GPU can have a greater performance improvement.
Under the same architecture, the performance of discrete graphics cards is basically positively correlated with the core size, so it can be expected that the performance of the RTX 3080 Ti laptop GPU can also be considerablely improved, combined with the latest 12th generation Core processor Alder Lake-H, to promote a comprehensive upgrade of the game experience.
Intel, AMD, NVIDIA three chip manufacturers will upgrade the mobile platform at CES 2022. Intel in the new year is committed to the 12th generation of Core to fully promote to various market segments, through the overall improvement of product strength to enhance competitiveness, recover the previously lost share; and AMD may be because of capacity constraints, resulting in some slowdown in the pace of product updates, the new generation of Zen 4 architecture Ryzen processor will not be released until the second half of 2022, the first half of the year also needs Zen 3 as the main force; NVIDIA will gradually improve the Ampere architecture of RTX in the first half of next year 30 series graphics card product line, from the next big architecture replacement also need to wait for a while...
It is believed that with the gradual intensification of market competition, in the next one to two years, whether it is a processor or a graphics card, these hardware will usher in a leapfrog upgrade, and consumers will also have the opportunity to buy more powerful products. CES 2022 is about to start, when PConline will be fully covered, interested players can continue to pay attention!