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Intel was once the undisputed king of high performance desktop (HPDT) CPUs.
Today, not so much.
Outdated fabrication technology meant that Intel has increasingly relied on simply winding up the clock speed and voltages on its processor cores in order to maintain its slim lead over AMD.
This worked for a while but eventually Intel's house of cards fell apart when it was discovered that the 13th and 14th generation Intel CPUs were failing prematurely due to too much voltage and too much heat. Despite hurridly rushing out a couple of bios and microcode updates, Intel's reputation has been significantly damaged.
So now they have announced a new family of processors with far more up-to-date fabrication technology behind them: Arrow Lake.
Unfortunately, even Intel themselves admit that these new processors may end up being slower than the previous generation. How's that going to go down in the marketplace?
The big claim to fame for Arrow Lake however, is that they will use a whole lot less power than the 13th and 14th generations that preceded them.
Also, in an "egg on face" acknowledgement, Intel has said that the new family of processors will use chiplet technology, just like their main competitor AMD. This is an embarassment because not so long ago Intel was deriding AMD for using "glued together dies" yet they appear to now be acknowledging that this is clearly the way forward.
Even more of a red-faced moment is the disclosure that Intel won't actually be making the dies themselves. Instead, they're using TSMC to make the silicon.
Oh the shame!
The top of the HPDT range will be the Core Ultra 9 285K (what's with the naming?) which has just eight "performance" cores and 16 "efficiency" cores with a max clock boost of 5.7GHz. Parts of this processor are using TSMC's N3B process which means the total package power requirement is down by an impressive 135 watts or so.
With a launch price of US$589 it will be very interesting to see if there's much demand later this month (October 24th) when the product is released.
Working against Intel is its mishandling of the 13th/14th generation fiasco and the fact that these CPUs will require entirely new motherboards. The cost of "upgrading" to the Arrow Lake generation could be pretty high and all you're going to get for your money is slightly less total system power consumption and "nearly" as much performance.
That's a hard deal to sell in today's marketplace where AMD has established a strong foothold and is rapidly growing its marketshare.
Perhaps the best way to describe the rate at which CPU performance is moving right now is "underwhelming". AMD's latest family launched to yawn reviews and I suspect Intel won't do much better.
My prediction is that when people decide to miss the next upgrade cycle because it doesn't really offer them much in the way of value, CPU makers will start throwing bigger and better NPUs (neural processing units) into their designs and splattering their marketing material with the phrase "artificial intelligence". The thrust of the pitch will be that regular cores and clocks are now nowhere near as important as NPUs because AI is the future of computing.
In fact, I would not be surprised if we start seeing NPU co-processors added to the product lineup, just as (back in the day) we had numeric coprocessors sitting alongside our CPUs in those early PCs (who remembers the 8087?). This would create a whole new market for Intel, AMD and NVIDIA, perhaps kick-starting the next upgrade cycle, as people rush out to replace motherboards with those that have provision for NPUs and processors with all the necessary NPU support silicon.
Carpe Diem folks!
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