AMD announces Ryzen 7000 processors. Intel looks even further ahead to the Core i-14000. Nvidia feels strong when it comes to auto chips, but sells few.
AMD has now announced the Ryzen 7000, but doesn’t want to deliver samples until the end of September, which we can measure in the c’t laboratory. Then the Ryzen 7000 will probably meet Intel’s Core i-13000 – it will be exciting, especially in the middle price range. Because against the six-core Ryzen 5 7600X with a list price of 299 US dollars, Intel is said to be using a Core i5-13600K with six performance and eight efficiency cores (6P + 8E). Hopefully suitable AM5 mainboards will be available for the new Ryzens in time. DDR5 RAM and SSDs shouldn’t fail, prices are falling here because demand has been sluggish so far.
Although the overall chip shortage is abating, certain types of devices remain in short supply. Among other things, there are still hardly any notebooks with the Ryzen 6000U, which AMD boss Lisa Su announced at the beginning of January at CES 2022. Although there are some mobile computers with the more powerful Ryzen 6000H, the more economical 6000U is more attractive. Because while Intel can also deliver eight cores in the “H” consumption class around 45 watts, the Ryzen 7 6800U is the strongest Intel opponent, the Core i7-1280P with six P cores – which also rarely appears.
Time flies, meanwhile it is hardly more than a third of a year until the CES 2023 in Las Vegas. Apparently Apple wants to have presented a MacBook Pro with M2 Pro by then.
Perhaps AMD and Intel will only bring their mobile processors for 2023 to Computex at the end of May. At Intel, the Core i-14000 “Meteor Lake” is on the agenda, for which the company revealed numerous details at the Hot Chips processor conference. According to this, the processor, which is made up of five chiplets or tiles, is already running in the laboratory. Intel only produces two of the five tiles itself, the rest are bought from TSMC.
Both AMD and Intel want to introduce new server processors this year. The Xeon-SP Gen 4 “Sapphire Rapids” should have a hard time against the AMD Genoa with up to 96 Zen 4 cores. Allegedly, AMD does not call the upcoming Epyc family 7004, but 9004. The family name 7004 would then be free for the “Bergamo” types expected in 2023 with many more but weaker Zen 4c cores.
The Ryzen 7000 mentioned at the beginning uses the same Zen 4 cores as the Epyc “Genoa” and is therefore the first AMD processor to get AVX 512 arithmetic units. This is a stair joke, because AVX-512 pioneer Intel deactivates this instruction set extension on the Core i-12000. Because the “super wide” arithmetic units are well suited for P cores, but bad for E cores. However, in order to move code between P and E cores, they must process the same instructions.
Profound
We’re still waiting for new graphics cards from AMD (Radeon RX 7000/Navi 31), Nvidia (GeForce RTX 4000/Ada Lovelace) and Intel (Arc Alchemist). In the run-up to the new products, prices are currently falling, especially for the previous top models. The price slide is also related to the fact that the mining of the cryptocurrency ether is being switched from the power-guzzling proof-of-work method to the more economical proof-of-stake method. But Proof of Work could continue if the cryptocurrency forks and a majority of miners follow suit.
Although the number of graphics cards sold fell sharply – as already reported in the bit noise from c’t 19/22 – Nvidia still made a profit of 656 million US dollars in the second calendar quarter of 2022. As a result, profit fell 59 percent year-on-year and gross margin fell from 65.5 to 43.5 percent.
Nvidia achieved significant growth in chips for cars: sales grew from 125 to 220 million US dollars. However, that is only 3 percent of Nvidia’s total sales. In the 2022 fiscal year, Nvidia sold automotive chips for a total of 566 million US dollars, making it a small fish among “automotive” specialists. NXP came in at around $5.5 billion, Infineon at around $4.8 billion, and STMicro sold for over $4 billion. Even Intel’s Mobileye took $1.4 billion and Qualcomm $975 million.
At the aforementioned Hot Chips conference, Nvidia provided more details on the “Orin” auto AI processor announced in 2019. It has 20 ARM cores, namely twelve Cortex-A78AE and eight Cortex-R52. The former are arranged in three quad-core clusters, the latter in four tandems. Safety-critical software runs redundantly on multiple cores. Computing-intensive algorithms use the Ampere GPU with over 10 TFlops and a deep learning accelerator.
There is also a regular podcast on bit noise.
Gas and oil are getting more and more expensive. In c’t 20/2022 we therefore draw attention to cheap and ecological alternatives with and without replacing the heating system. We’ll also show you how to protect yourself from trackers with the Raspi, test hacker tools, smartphones and graphics cards, and talk to Leica about cameras. You can read that and more in the current issue of c’t.
