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Intel Rocket Lake Desktop CPUs Will Launch in March, Gigabyte Confirms - ExtremeTech:
Gigabyte has confirmed that Intel will launch its Rocket Lake CPU refresh in March, as part of an announcement touting its own PCIe 4.0 support. Gigabyte announced today that if you own a Z490 motherboard, you'll be getting a UEFI update to support Rocket Lake CPUs with full PCIe 4.0 support.
The rest of the PR goes into detail on how Gigabyte engineered their motherboards to handle the higher heat output of PCIe 4.0, and the fact that addressable BAR support is coming to the company's motherboards as well. Addressable BAR is the same feature AMD debuted as Smart Access Memory earlier this year.
The March 2021 date confirms what we've heard previously — late March is more likely than early March. It's going to be genuinely interesting to see how Cypress Cove performs against AMD's Zen 3. Generally speaking, based on leaked benchmarks and early data, we're looking at impressive gains for Intel in single-thread performance. Multi-thread performance estimates for the Core i9-11900K have varied. In some cases, the 11900K is almost a match for the 10-core Core i9-10900K. In a few leaked results, it's actually been faster on eight cores than Comet Lake was on 10.
Are any of my fellow Soylentils doing PC builds right now, and if so what are you building? Let us know in the comments!
takyon writes: Intel announced more details about Rocket Lake at CES 2021. While dropping the top core count from 10 to 8, Intel estimates a 19% IPC increase for Rocket Lake-S. It also adds AVX-512 and "Deep Learning Boost" support. The integrated graphics should be about 50% faster, and can be used for stream encoding while discrete graphics is being used for gaming. AV1 video decode is supported. New Z590, B560, and H510 motherboards will support both Rocket Lake and Comet Lake. Intel's comparison of the 8-core i9-11900K to AMD's 12-core Ryzen 9 5900X shows the former performing 2-8% faster at several games at 1080p.
Also at Tom's Hardware and Wccftech.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday January 15 2021, @01:27AM (10 children)
I'm all about laptops and love my Thinkpad, but someday when life settles down and I'm somewhere safe I'll build a desktop PC. I really like the Fractal Node 202 case and would love to build with the highest-performing 65W Zen4/5 CPU when they come out in it. Mini ITX, Noctua low-profile cooler, one big NVMe SSD, and a single low-profile GPU just for display duty. Basically make it small and cute, but still powerful :)
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Friday January 15 2021, @02:23AM (2 children)
I want to do the same thing, pretty much 100%.
1. Laptops are great but managing the battery can be a hassle. And you can have a wimpy laptop connect to a beefy desktop remotely to get more performance.
2. It seems like the smaller cases tend to forgo the tempered glass bullshit. Case in point, this: https://slickdeals.net/f/14768968 [slickdeals.net] All metal, please. I don't need to marvel at RGB LEDs or steampunk cable management or whatever.
3. From what I've gathered from the rumor mill, Zen 4 will have at least a 50% core count uplift, i.e. 24-core mainstream Ryzen (I've heard 32 cores is possible but it seems unlikely). It could also have an RDNA 3 graphics chiplet (would probably also be used for "Computer Vision and Machine Learning" (CVML) acceleration as seen on leaked roadmaps). So some number of 8-core or 12-core chiplets, a graphics chiplet, and an I/O die. Then they will put 1 GB or more of L4 cache stacked on top of the I/O die. I would consider getting a higher core count chip just to get more L4 cache, if they decide to segment it that way. If some of this stuff doesn't appear on Zen 4, it should be on Zen 5. There will be an easy upgrade path where you could get one of the lower core count Zen 4 CPUs and swap it out for the highest core count Zen 5.
4. I would probably TDP-down the chip to 65 Watts or even 35 Watts if it wasn't there already. I'm used to potato performance, so I'd rather boost efficiency and system longevity, while lowering any fan noise.
5. I would use integrated graphics, assuming that is included on Zen 4/5, and then add a 75 Watt RDNA 4/5/6/whatever GPU years later. Or maybe an Intel discrete GPU. I don't care about gaming enough to blow 3x $$$ on a GPU that uses 4x the power.
The only downside I see is that the smaller form factors tend to have less DIMM slots (2 instead of 4). This could become more important with DDR5, which apparently supports 2 memory channels per module [rambus.com]. We need to understand the implications of this (and the effectiveness of DDR5 on-die ECC [semiengineering.com]) before making any decisions. We need to know more (or anything) about the AM5 socket.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday January 15 2021, @04:03PM (1 child)
You've not looked at enough cases, then. https://www.newegg.com/white-in-win-a1-plus-mini-itx-tower/p/2AM-001H-001M2 [newegg.com]
Though, there is this kind of thing too: https://www.newegg.com/asrock-deskmini-x300w/p/N82E16856158068 [newegg.com] (Tiny, all metal, about the size of a regular PSU.) Limited to APUs, but could stick one of these in it: https://www.newegg.com/p/1FR-0001-000N0 [newegg.com] (Ryzen 7 PRO 4750g, capable of playing fairly recent games on low to medium settings at 1080p.) For under $1k should be able to put together a very nice, very tiny computer. Just don't expect it to be a serious gaming machine. It might be okay for some VR games, but I'd guess the experience would leave something to be desired.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday January 15 2021, @05:02PM
I'm not in the market for a while, so I don't really look at a lot of cases. But what I do notice is a lot of tempered glass, especially on full towers.
There are rumors that AMD will start including graphics across the whole desktop CPU lineup (which would make them all APUs, but chiplet-based instead of monolithic with lower core counts like Renoir 4750G). For example, Zen 4 + RDNA 3. I think the decision to not include graphics on the original Zen CPUs was so that AMD could focus on CPU performance and core counts while keeping costs low. Today, the chiplet approach offers some flexibility, CPU and graphics cores will be tiny on TSMC's "5nm" node, and there is a need for an iGPU that can also be used for machine learning acceleration (every new pre-built system will be advertised as having this capability in the near future).
I would rather get something that can fit a graphics card (maybe low profile), but aim for the case to be smaller. I might even get a standard ATX motherboard, depending on the memory situation.
VR gaming will not be much less demanding in the long run, unless foveated rendering lowers the performance needed dramatically. VR gaming will be a major driver of resolution and frame rates. 8K gaming is a meme unless you strap it to your face.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Friday January 15 2021, @09:12PM (4 children)
I actually just got done building my first new PC in longer than you'd believe...not small and cute ;). Went with a Fractal Design Meshify C case, an AMD RYZEN 7 3700X 8-Core CPU, an ASRock X570 PHANTOM GAMING 4 motherboard, 64 GB of RAM, a Radeon RX 5500 XT 8-GB GPU. I'm one of those who just can't totally warm up to the limited lifetime of SSD (even though I know they'd actually last a long time) and went with a ton of SATA disk. Installed Gentoo with everything I need compiled into the kernel (no modules). Everything about it is insanely fast (with the possible exception of the lifeform behind the keyboard :D)..I'm like a kid at Christmas. Gentoo compiles are of no consequence at all with 8 cores x 2 threads per core...builds my kernel from scratch in 1 minute 13 seconds. Loving everything about this. Sprung for a 32" LG 4K monitor to celebrate.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday January 19 2021, @04:43PM (3 children)
I would highly recommend an SSD, but with a HDD as a Storage drive. You can generally, easily re-install programs, if necessary. For everyday activity, an SSD is super awesome. You don't trust SSD, that's just fine. Just think of it as non-volatile RAM that you use for your OS and programs. Just make sure to backup the stuff you really care about to an HDD. Things that really matter and can't just be replaced. I.E. things you have created, Photos of your kids, Artwork you've created, papers or books you may have written, Music you've created, or anything that took you a boat load of time to organize/process. Things you can replace that just don't matter at all. I.E. Your Operating System and Programs. *With a caveat, if you have specialty software that would be tricky to re-setup. It would be best to set everything up the way you need it. Make a backup, test the backup, store the backup in 2 different places, and then continue like normal.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Wednesday January 20 2021, @03:35PM (2 children)
Thanks! Yea...maybe I'll consider it at some point. But frankly everything (including disk IO) is so fast on this thing (especially compared to what I'm used to) I'm not sure I'd notice all that much difference. Hell...the BIOS/EFI part of booting the system is already several times the few seconds it takes me to boot to a graphical UI and to open the programs I frequently use. Love this thing.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday January 20 2021, @04:10PM (1 child)
The BIOS/UEFI part of booting the system could possibly be reduced even further, there are fast boot options in most Motherboards. Even on my several years old B350 motherboard, the motherboard initialization process is no more than a few seconds.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Wednesday January 20 2021, @08:44PM
Actually yes...this one has a fast boot for sure. I had that set for a while and it was faster, though not really all that much. The fact is however that this machine is generally up 24/7 most of the time so it's a little moot. Launching programs and other OS related stuff on this machine is literally instantaneous for me despite the spinning disks, which is the important thing.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday January 17 2021, @12:56PM (1 child)
Interested in a box with a
24-code ARM processor [96boards.org]?
Each core is fourfold multithreaded, which makes 96 hardware threads.
There's a two-year-old video [youtu.be] made while it was under development. I wonder what happened to it since..
(It *looks* as if it has two ethernet ports, but they say one of them is used for the "interconnect fabric", whatever that is, so they're marketing it as having only one.)
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday January 17 2021, @02:49PM
The board seems to come from Linaro.