CPU, APU & Chipsets News - Page 1

Intel's Panther Lake is still a good way off - if the rumor-mongers are right, Arrow Lake might even be further off than we hoped - but that hasn't stopped the leak machine churning out speculation about Panther Lake CPUs.

Mind you, this latest Panther Lake leak, which comes from X (formerly Twitter) as flagged up by VideoCardz, should be treated with more skepticism than normal, as we're not familiar with the source - a certain Prakhar Verma.

So, fistfuls of salt in hand, the contention is that Panther Lake will be mobile chips only - with no desktop offerings. Theoretically we will get Panther Lake U series CPUs, efficient variants to follow Lunar Lake (which should debut late this year), and Panther Lake H chips to succeed Arrow Lake high-end mobile processors.

AMD's Zen 5 desktop processors - which should be Ryzen 9000, based on previous leaks - might end up with a generational increase in performance that'll disappoint many folks, or that's the conclusion some are drawing given fresh chatter from the grapevine.

Wccftech flagged up this rumor which comes from Weibo - add extra seasoning because of that, but then again, we are told that this is a post from Lenovo China's manager.

According to that manager, we can expect Ryzen 9000 desktop to bring forth an IPC increase of 10% compared to Ryzen 7000 chips - and that's a much lower figure than we've heard from other sources. Although it's worth noting that the source does observe that gains are higher than this in Cinebench single-threaded benchmarks (without mentioning any exact figure).

Intel has been in a spot lately regarding its flagship high-end 13th and 14th Gen Core i9 desktop processors, with widespread reports of instability. The extent and detailed causes of the crashes are still unknown. Still, many believe it to be due to the increased power requirements of high-end Intel CPUs and motherboard profiles and official specs and guidelines bypassing proper voltage regulation.

Various motherboard makers have released BIOS updates to address the issue, implementing new 'Intel Baseline Profiles' to improve stability at the cost of performance. The band-aid approach was simple: reign everything in, and the issues will disappear.

In a new statement for its customers and partners, Intel states that the new 'Intel Default Settings' represent a range of power delivery profiles based on a motherboard's capabilities. In fact, Intel wants customers to continue pushing the new CPUs as it "recommends customers implement the highest power delivery profile compatible with each individual motherboard design."

AMD has shared some data on its CPU shipments courtesy of Mercury Research's first quarter (Q1 2024) report. And it's good news for Ryzen and AMD's growing server market, with Unit Share and Revenue Share increasing year-over-year - with Desktop and Server products leading the charge.

AMD cites growing demand for 4th Gen EPYC and Ryzen 8000 Series processors for the growth in the Client sector. Its server share (compared primarily to Intel) is now 23.6% compared to 18% a year ago. For Desktop processors, aka Ryzen, AMD's share has increased to 23.9% compared to 19.2% a year ago.

Mobile CPUs, which are Ryzen chips for laptops, mini PCs, and PC gaming handhelds, also saw their share increase in Q1 2024 to 19.3% compared to 16.2% a year ago. However, this figure presents a slight dip from the previous quarter - chalked up to a decline in overall shipments for low-end PCs.

Intel's next-gen flagship CPU could be dialing back clock speeds considerably - by a whole lot, in fact, at least if this leak turns out to be correct.

Upfront, let's arm ourselves with the usual helping of seasoning, and indeed a heavier dose than normal here, as this is a rumor that comes from Weibo, not exactly our favored source for reliability (though it does get some things on the money).

At any rate, Wccftech noticed that user 'MebiuW' posted about how Intel's Arrow Lake range - which could be revealed in Q3 - will witness clock speeds being reined in considerably.

The global client-based CPU market showed impressive growth in Q1 2024, with John Peddie Research reporting that shipments hit 62 million units - a 33% increase compared to Q1 2023. However, compared to the previous quarter, this figure represents a 9.4% decrease.

Even though the dip compared to the previous quarter bucks the recent growth trend, the report notes that the Q1 dip, when viewed with the context of year-over-year growth, "is an indication that the market has stabilized and has returned to its traditional cyclic behavior."

Looking into the numbers more closely, Notebooks and Laptops are driving the growth as desktop market share has declined. A year ago, the split between Notebooks and Desktops was 68% and 32%, with this figure changing to 73% Notebooks and 27% Desktops in Q1 2024. With integrated graphics being a key part of the mobile CPU space, iGPU shipments increased by 30% year-over-year.

Apple has announced the latest iteration of its custom processor, the new M4 chip, which will power the new iPad Pro line-up. The M4 chip is the second generation of Apple's 3-nanometer technology (28 billion transistors), and the company is touting a brand-new display engine that will utilize the Ultra Retina XDR OLED display on iPad Pro.

The new M4 CPU features up to 10 cores (4 performance cores and 6 efficiency cores), with a next-gen 10-core GPU that "builds on the next-generation GPU architecture introduced in M3" with new caching tech called Dynamic Caching, hardware-accelerated ray tracing, and hardware-accelerated mesh shading. It's the most powerful GPU ever to hit the iPad, so it will be interesting to see how it fares with modern games.

Of course, AI is a vital component of the new M4 chip - it's "Apple's fastest Neural Engine ever," sporting an AI performance of 38 TOPS, higher than Intel's current Core Ultra and AMD's current Ryzen offerings. The M4 also features faster memory bandwidth to help push AI performance even further.

It looks like we could be in for a huge naming scheme change for AMD's upcoming "Strix Point" APUs, with the new ASUS VivoBook S16 laptops featuring an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 170 processor.

We've never heard of the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 170 processor, but ASUS lists it as a 12-core, 24-thread CPU that clocks at up to 5.1GHz with 36MB of cache and Ryzen AI performance of up to 77 TOPS. Until now, no "AI" wording has made it into any processor from AMD like this, so it looks like we could see the Ryzen AI 5, Ryzen AI 7, and Ryzen AI 9 series CPUs in the near future.

ASUS will unveil the new VivoBook S16 laptops at Computex 2024 next month, and I'm sure we're going to get the official naming from AMD at their Computex 2024 press conference. The new Strix Point CPUs aka Ryzen AI 9 HX 170 processor will deliver up to 77 TOPS of AI performance from its beefed-up XDNA2-based Ryzen AI NPU and newer RDNA 3.5 GPU. The NPU on its own will provide 45 TOPS of AI workload performance.

Last month, Intel launched an investigation into the recent reports of game crashes for owners of the company's high-end CPU.

A report from BenchLife via VideoCardz, claims that Intel has sent guidance to motherboard partners to roll out the Intel Default Settings on Z789 motherboards. These new default settings will restrict a PL2 of 188 watts, which is the maximum boost power that the CPU can draw sparingly during heavy loads. For context, PL1 is the base power the CPU can sustain for longer periods of time.

The report claims Intel's guidance is to restrict the performance of its high-end CPUs, particularly the Core i9-14900K, which appeared to be the CPU getting the most reports of instability issues. Notably, GIGABYTE has already rolled out its update for PL2, being restricted to 188W on the Core i9-13900K and Core i9-14900K, and according to testing conducted by Hardware Unboxed, it resulted in an overall 20% performance reduction for both CPUs.

Someone has purchased an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D processor with 3D V-Cache stacks on both Zen4 core dies, which is 64MB more L3 cache than a retail 7950X3D chip.

A user posted on Bilibili, with their purported Ryzen 9 7950X3D featuring 192MB of L3 cache, which is 64MB more L3 cache than retail Ryzen 9 7950X3D. The obvious red flags: this could be an error with CPU-Z which lists 192MB, it could be a modification, or something else.

This could be an engineering sample Ryzen 9 7950X3D with 3D V-Cache stacks on both Zen 4 core dies, as the Ryzen 9 7950X3D (and Ryzen 9 7900X3D) feature just one 3D V-Cache stack. Maybe this is a bigger discovery, an engineering sample 7950X3D with 192MB of L3 cache that never hit the market... very cool. Or, to spoil the party, this could just be a simple error.