AMD Announces Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5000 WX-Series: Zen 3 For OEM Workstations

In 2020, AMD released a new series of workstation-focused processors under its Threadripper umbrella, aptly named the Threadripper Pro series. These chips were essentially true workstation versions of AMD’s EPYC server processors, offering the same massive core counts and high memory bandwidth as AMD’s high-performance server platform. By introducing Threadripper Pro, AMD carved out an explicit processor family for high-performance workstations, a task that was previously awkwardly juggled by the older Threadripper and EPYC processors.

Now, just under two years since the release of the original Threadripper 3000 Pro series, AMD is upgrading that lineup with the announcement of the new Threadripper Pro 5000 series. Based on AMD’s Zen 3 architecture, the newest Threadripper Pro chips are designed to up the ante once more in terms of performance, taking advantage of Zen 3’s higher IPC as well as higher clockspeeds. Altogether AMD is releasing five new SKUs, ranging from 12c/24t to 64c/128t, which combined with support for 8 channels of DDR4 across the entire lineup, will offer a mix of chips for both CPU-hungry and bandwidth-hungry compute tasks.

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The ASUS Vivobook Pro 15 OLED Review: For The Creator In All Of Us

ASUS has been building notebooks for the creator market for several years now, and today we are looking at the Vivobook Pro 15 OLED. The name kind of gives away the special feature of this device but including a 15.6-inch OLED display adds a major punch to the offering. Although OLED has not taken over the PC industry like it has the smartphone world, there is really nothing like the stunning contrast ratio OLED provides, as well as the wider color gamut most OLED devices support.

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ASRock Industrial’s NUC1200 BOX Series Brings Alder Lake to UCFF Systems

Intel recently updated their low-power processors lineup with the Alder Lake U and P Series 12th Gen Core mobile SKUs. With support for a range of TDPs up to 28W, these allow ultra-compact form-factor (UCFF) PC manufacturers to update their traditional NUC clones. Similar to the Tiger Lake generation, ASRock Industrial is again at the forefront – launching the NUC1200 BOX Series within a few days of Intel’s announcement.

The new NUC1200 BOX Series retains the chassis design and form-factor of the NUC1100 BOX Series. The NUC BOX-1165G7 left a favorable impression in our hands-on review, and the NUC1200 BOX Series seems to be carrying over all those aspects. The company is launching three models in this series – NUC BOX-1260P, NUC BOX-1240P, and NUC BOX-1220P. The specifications are summarized in the table below.

ASRock Industrial NUC 1200 BOX (Alder Lake-P) Lineup
Model
NUC BOX-1260P
NUC BOX-1240P
NUC BOX-1220P
CPU
Intel Core i7-1260P
4C + 8c / 16T
(C) 2.1 – 4.7 GHz
(c) 1.5 – 3.4 GHz
20 – 64W (28W)
Intel Core i5-1240P
4C + 8c / 16T
(C) 1.7 – 4.4 GHz
(c) 1.2 – 3.3 GHz
20 – 64W (28W)
Intel Core i3-1220P
2C + 8c / 12T
(C) 1.5 – 4.4 GHz
(c) 1.1 – 3.3 GHz
20 – 64W (28W)
GPU
Intel® Iris Xe Graphics (96EU) @ 1.4 GHz
Intel® Iris® Xe Graphics (80EU) @ 1.3 GHz
Intel® UHD Graphics for 12th Gen Intel® Processors (64EU) @ 1.1 GHz
DRAM
Two DDR4 SO-DIMM slots
Up to 64 GB of DDR4-3200 in dual-channel mode
Motherboard
4.02″ x 4.09″ UCFF
Storage
SSD
1x M.2-22(42/60/80) (PCIe 4.0 x4 (CPU-direct))
DFF
1 ×  SATA III Port (for 2.5″ drive)
Wireless
Intel Wi-Fi 6E AX211
2×2 802.11ax Wi-Fi (2.4Gbps) + Bluetooth 5.2 module
Ethernet
2 × 2.5GbE port (Intel I225-LM)
USB
Front
1 × USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A
2 x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C (USB4 Certification Pending)
Rear
2 × USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A
Display Outputs
1 × HDMI 2.0b
1 x DisplayPort 1.4a
2 × DisplayPort 1.4a (using Front Panel Type-C ports)
Audio
1 × 3.5mm audio jack (Realtek ALC233)
PSU
External (19V/90W)
Dimensions
Length: 117.5 mm
Width: 110 mm
Height: 47.85 mm
MSRP
?
?
?

According to the products’ datasheet, ASRock Industrial plans to get the two Type-C ports in the front panel certified for USB4. Since the certification plan is still pending, they are being advertised as USB 3.2 Gen 2 for now. Going by our experience with the NUC-BOX1165G7, at least one of the front Type-C ports should be able to support Thunderbolt 4 peripherals.

The key updates over the NUC1100 BOX series seem to be the integration of dual 2.5GbE ports (compared to 1x 1GbE + 1x 2.5GbE), addition of 6GHz Wi-Fi support, and the presence of Alder Lake processors with their hybrid architecture comprising of both performance and efficiency cores.

Since the units target the embedded market also, they have the usual bells and whistles including an integrated watchdog timer and an on-board TPM. Pricing is slated to be announced in the coming months.

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The Intel Core i3-12300 Review: Quad-Core Alder Lake Shines

Just over a month ago Intel pulled the trigger on the rest of its 12th generation “Alder Lake” Core desktop processors, adding no fewer than 22 new chips. This significantly fleshed out the Alder Lake family, adding in the mid-range and low-end chips that weren’t part of Intel’s original, high-end focused launch. Combined with the launch of the rest of the 600 series chipsets, this finally opened the door to building cheaper and lower-powered Alder Lake systems.

Diving right in, today we’re taking a look at Intel’s Core i3-12300 processor, the most powerful of the new I3s. Like the entire Alder Lake i3 series, the i3-12300 features four P-cores, and is aimed to compete in the entry-level and budget desktop market. With prices being driven higher on many components and AMD’s high-value offerings dominating the lower end of the market, it’s time to see if Intel can compete in the budget desktop market and offer value in a segment that currently needs it.

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SPEC Updates SPECviewperf 2020 v3.0 Benchmark with Linux Edition

The SPEC Graphics Performance Characterization (SPECgpc) group updated the Windows version of the workstation GPU benchmark suite – SPECviewperf 2020 – twice last year. The intent of the benchmark is to replay GPU workload traces from real-world professional applications (Maya for media and entertainment, Catia, Creo, NX, and Solidworks for CAD/CAM, OpendTect for the energy industry, and the Tuvok visualization library for rendering medical images). Version 3.0, released in December 2021, updated the Solidworks viewset to better reflect the OpenGL API calls in the latest version of the software. Version 2.0 had enabled selective downloading of the viewsets.

While the Windows version of the benchmark had been through three versions, the Linux community was left out, having to rely on the SPECviewperf 13 released almost a decade ago. That is changing today with the availability of the Linux edition of SPECviewperf 2020 v3.0. The benchmark updates the viewsets with traces from the latest versions of the relevant applications and also updates the models to match the Windows version. Since the benchmarks wrapper framework (even for the Windows version) is based on Node-Webkit (now NW.js), the creation of a Linux edition had to mainly deal with the actual viewset processing. Automation and results processing are identical between the Windows and Linux versions.

Unlike SPECviewperf 13 Linux Edition which was distributed as a compressed tar archive, the SPECviewperf 2020 v3.0 Linux Edition is a .deb package. The benchmark requires Canonical Ubuntu Linux 20.04, 16GB or more of RAM, and 80GB of fixed disk drive space. Viewsets are processed at two resolutions – 1080p and 4K, with 1080p being the minimum. The GPU drivers are required to support OpenGL 4.5, and the GPU itself needs to have 2GB minimum VRAM.

The benchmark is available for download free of cost for everyone other than vendors of computers and related products / services who are not members of SPEC/GWPG. Such vendors can purchase a license for $2500.

Linux has a much greater market share in the workstation segment compared to consumer desktops. It is heartening to see SPECgpc update the aging SPECviewperf 13 Linux edition. The latest viewsets and models in the SPECviewperf 2020 v3.0 Linux Edition bring it on par with the benchmarking capabilities of the Windows edition.

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Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) Announced: Setting Standards For The Chiplet Ecosystem

If there has been one prominent, industry-wide trend in chip design over the past half-decade or so, it has been the growing use of chiplets. The tiny dies have become an increasingly common feature as chip makers look to them to address everything from chip manufacturing costs to the overall scalability of a design. Be it simply splitting up a formerly monolithic CPU in to a few pieces, or going to the extreme with 47 chiplets on a single package, chiplets are already playing a big part in chip design today, and chip makers have made it clear that it’s only going to grow in the future.

In the meantime, after over 5 years of serious, high-volume use, chiplets and the technologies underpinning them seem to finally be reaching an inflection point in terms of design. Chip makers have developed a much better idea of what chiplets are (and are not) good for, packaging suppliers have refined their ultra-precise methods needed to place chiplets, and engineering teams have ironed out the communications protocols used to have chiplets talk amongst each other. In short, chiplets are no longer experimental designs that need to be proven, but instead have become proven designs that chip makers can rely on. And with that increasing reliance on chiplet technology comes the need for design roadmaps and stability – the need for design standards.

To that end, today Intel, AMD, Arm, and all three leading-edge foundries are coming together to announce that they are forming a new and open standard for chiplet interconnects, which is aptly being named Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express, or UCIe. Taking significant inspiration from the very successful PCI-Express playbook, with UCIe the involved firms are creating a standard for connecting chiplets, with the goal of having a single set of standards that not only simplify the process for all involved, but lead the way towards full interoperability between chiplets from different manufacturers, allowing chips to mix-and-match chiplets as chip makers see fit. In other words, to make a complete and compatible ecosystem out of chiplets, much like today’s ecosystem for PCIe-based expansion cards.

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Lenovo Announces The ThinkPad X13s Laptop, Powered By Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3

During the MWC 2022 trade show in Barcelona, Lenovo unveiled the first laptop powered by Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 chip, the ThinkPad X13s. Using a passively-cooled design, Lenovo is claiming that the ThinkPad X13s has a long battery life with up to 28 hours of video playback, as well as boasting plenty of wireless connectivity, including support for 5G mmWave, Wi-Fi 6E, and is all housed in a 90% recycled magnesium chassis.

Over the last couple of months, we’ve dedicated a number of column inches to Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3. It uses four Arm Cortex-X1 prime cores at 3.0 GHz, four smaller A78 efficiency cores operating at 2.4 GHz, and it also includes the company’s latest Adreno graphics.

The biggest challenge for Qualcomm with the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 and the Windows on Arm project has been application compatibility. Qualcomm has been working closely with Microsoft and software vendors to allow its Arm-based processors to work with x86 apps, and last year’s launch of Windows 11 added x86-64 application compatibility as well. So these days it’s less a matter of what will work on WoA laptops, and more about how quickly x86 applications will run.


Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 SoC Marketing from Snapdragon Tech Summit Dec 2021

For more details on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 processor, as well as our interviews with Qualcomm SVP Alex Katouzian and VP For Windows and Chrome PCs at Qualcomm, Miguel Nunes, check out the links below:

Qualcomm’s 8cx Gen 3 for Notebooks, Nuvia Core in 2022/2023
Interview with Alex Katouzian, Qualcomm SVP: Talking Snapdragon, Microsoft, Nuvia, and Discrete Graphics
AnandTech Interview with Miguel Nunes: VP For Windows and Chrome PCs, Qualcomm

Focusing on Lenovo’s big announcement at MWC 2022, it has launched several new notebooks for 2022, but all eyes are on the ThinkPad X13s. Lenovo, of course, is a large and respected name in the productivity laptop space, so their willingness (or unwillingness) to adopt new CPUs/SoCs is often a good barometer of overall OEM interest in new chips.

Aside from being the first consumer-based notebook powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 processor, the ThinkPad X13s has a wide variety of features for users on the go, both focusing on productivity and longevity, all housed inside a 0.53-inch thick frame.

A big talking point surrounds the battery life of the ThinkPad X13s, with Lenovo claiming an impressive 28-hours of usage between charges. While this sounds impressive on paper, the onus is on the types of workloads being used, with Lenovo quoting video playback figures with its 49.5-Wh Li-ion Polymer battery. It has dimensions of 11.76 x 13 x 0.53-inches (WxDxH), is constructed from 90% certified recycled magnesium, and weighs just 2.35 lbs making it ultra-portable and lightweight.

Lenovo offers the ThinkPad X13s with three different display types: an IPS AG 300-nit panel, an IPS touch AG 300-nit panel, and a low-power IPS AG display with 400-nits of brightness. All three display types include a 13.3-inch screen with an aspect ratio of 16:10 and an output resolution of 1920 x 1080p. 

Housing within the central section of the top bezel, the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s can be equipped with two different webcams, one of which has 5MP RGB, while the other is a 5MP IR camera with support for Computer Vision presence detection. In terms of connectivity, the ThinkPad X13s has two USB 3.2 G2 Type-C ports, with one 3.5 mm audio jack and a SIM card slot. The SIM card slot allows users to access either 5G sub6 or 5G mmWave depending on the configuration. At the same time, Lenovo also offers users the choice of Wi-Fi 6 or Wi-Fi 6E wireless networking.

Lenovo ThinkPad X13s Specifications
Component
Surface Laptop Studio
CPU
Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3
GPU
Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 Adreno
Display
13.3″ WUXGA (16:10) 300-nit IPS AG (1920×1080)
13.3″ WUXGA (16:10) 300-nit IPS Touch AG (1920×1080)
13.3″ WUXGA (16:10) Low Power 400-nit IPS AG (1920×1080)
RAM
Up to 32 GB LPDDR4x (soldered) Dual-Channel
Storage
Up to 1 TB PCIe SSD
Networking
Wi-Fi 6/6E
5G sub6 eSIM
5G mmWave eSIM
I/O
2 x USB Gen 3.2 Type-C
1 x Audio Jack
SIM Card Slot
Battery
Up to 28 hours
49.5 Wh Li-ion Polymer Battery
Camera
5MP RGB Camera
5MP IR Camera /w Computer Vision
Operating System
Windows 11
Dimensions (inches)
11.76 x 13 x 0.53
Weight
2.35 lbs
Starting Price (USD)
$1,099

Lenovo has stated that the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 powered ThinkPad X13s will be available in May, with prices starting at $1099. It also states that in the US, the ThinkPad X13s will be available on carriers including AT&T and Verizon sometime in 2022.

Source: Lenovo

Related Reading

Qualcomm’s 8cx Gen 3 for Notebooks, Nuvia Core in 2022/2023
Interview with Alex Katouzian, Qualcomm SVP: Talking Snapdragon, Microsoft, Nuvia, and Discrete Graphics
AnandTech Interview with Miguel Nunes: VP For Windows and Chrome PCs, Qualcomm
Qualcomm Shows Off Snapdragon Dev Kit for Windows on Arm Development

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AMD’s Ryzen 9 6900HS Rembrandt Benchmarked: Zen3+ Power and Performance Scaling

Earlier this year, AMD announced an update to its mobile processor line that we weren’t expecting quite so soon. The company updated its Ryzen 5000 Mobile processors, which are based around Zen3 and Vega cores, to Ryzen 6000 Mobile, which use Zen3+ and RDNA2 cores. The jump from Vega to RDNA2 on the graphics side was an element we had been expecting at some point, but the emergence of a Zen3+ core was very intriguing. AMD gave us a small pre-brief, saying that the core is very similar to Zen3, but with ~50 new power management features and techniques inside. With the first laptops based on these chips now shipping, we were sent one of the flagship models for a quick test.

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Intel’s Arctic Sound-M Server Accelerator To Land Mid-2022 With Hardware AV1 Encoding

Rounding out Intel’s direct GPU-related announcements from this morning as part of the company’s annual investor meeting, Intel has confirmed that the company is also getting ready to deliver a more traditional GPU-based accelerator card for server use a bit later this year. Dubbed Arctic Sound-M, the forthcoming accelerator is being aimed in particular at the media encoding and analytics market, with Intel planning to take full advantage of what should be the first server accelerator with hardware AV1 video encoding. Arctic Sound-M is expected to launch in the middle of this.

The announcement of Arctic Sound-M follows a hectic, and ultimately sidetracked set of plans for Intel’s original GPU server hardware. The company initially commissioned their Xe-HP series of GPUs to anchor the traditional server market, but Xe-HP was canceled in November of last year. Intel didn’t give up on the server market, but outside of the unique Ponte Vecchio design for the HPC market, they did back away from using quite so much dedicated server silicon.

In the place of those original products, which were codenamed Arctic Sound, Intel is instead coming to market with Arctic Sound-M. Given the investor-focused nature of today’s presentation, Intel is not publishing much in the way of technical details for their forthcoming server accelerator, but we can infer from their teaser videos that this is an Alchemist (Xe-HPC part), as we can clearly see the larger Alchemist die mounted on a single-slot card in Intel’s teaser video. This is consistent with the Xe-HP cancellation announcement, as at the time, Intel’s GPU frontman, Raja Koduri indicated that we’d see server products based on Xe-HPG instead.

Arctic Sound-M, in turn, is being positioned as a server accelerator card for the media market, with Intel calling it a “media and analytics supercomputer”. Accordingly, Intel is placing especially heavy emphasis on the media processing capabilities of the card, both in regards to total throughput and in codecs supported. In particular, Intel expects that Arctic Sound-M will be the first accelerator card released with hardware AV1 encoding support, giving the company an edge with bandwidth-sensitive customers who are ready to use the next-generation video codec.

Interestingly, this also implies that hardware AV1 encoding is a native feature of (at least) the large Alchemist die. Though given the potential value of the first hardware AV1 encoder, it remains to be seen whether Intel will enable it on their consumer Arc cards, or leave it restricted to their server card.

Meanwhile in terms of compute performance for media analytics/AI inference, Intel is quoting a figure of 150 TOPS for INT8. There aren’t a ton of great comparisons here in terms of competing hardware, but the closest comparison in terms of card size and use cases would be NVIDIA’s A2 accelerator, where on paper, the Arctic Sound-M would deliver almost 4x the inference performance. It goes without saying that the proof is in the pudding for a new product like Intel’s GPUs, but if they can deliver on these performance figures, then Arctic Sound-M would be able to safely occupy a very specific niche in the larger server accelerator marketplace.

Past that, like the rest of Intel’s Arc(tic) products, expect to hear more details a bit later this year.

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Intel Meteor Lake Client Processors to use Arc Graphics Chiplets

Continuing with this morning’s spate of Intel news coming from Intel’s annual Investor meeting, we also have some new information on Intel’s forthcoming Meteor Lake processors, courtesy of this morning’s graphics presentation. Intel’s 2023 client processor platform, Meteor Lake was previously confirmed by the company to use a chiplet/tile approach. Now the company is offering a bit more detail on their tile approach, confirming that Meteor Lake will use a separate graphics tile, and offering the first visual mock-up of what this tiled approach will look like.

First revealed back in March of 2021, Meteor Lake is Intel’s client platform that will follow Raptor Lake – the latter of which is Alder Lake’s successor. In other words, we’re looking at Intel’s plans for their client platform two generations down the line. Among the handful of details revealed so far about Meteor Lake, we know that it will take a tiled approach, and that the compute tile will be built on the Intel 4 process, the company’s first EUV-based process.

Now, thanks to this morning’s investor presentation, we have our first look at the graphics side of Meteor Lake. For Intel’s 2023/2024 platform, Intel isn’t just offering a compute tile separate from an IO/SoC tile, but graphics will be their own tile as well. And that graphics tile, in turn, will be based on Intel’s Arc graphics technologies – presumably the Battlemage architecture.

In describing the significance of this change to Intel’s investor audience, GPU frontman Raja Koduri underscored that the tiled approach will enable Intel to offer performance more along the lines of traditional discrete GPUs while retaining the power efficiency of traditional integrated GPUs. More pragmatically, Battlemage should also be a significant step up from Intel’s existing Xe-LP integrated GPU architecture in terms of features, offering at least the full DirectX 12 Ultimate (FL 12_2) feature set in an integrated GPU. Per this schedule, this will put Intel roughly a year and a half to two years behind arch-rival AMD in terms of integrated graphics feature sets, as AMD’s brand-new Ryzen 6000 “Rembrandt” APUs are launching today with a DX12U-capable GPU architecture.

Past that, we’re expecting that Intel may have a bit more information on Meteor Lake this afternoon, as the company will deliver its client (Core) and server (Xeon) updates to investors as part of their live session later today. Of particular interest will be whether Intel embraces the tiled approach for the entire Meteor Lake family, or if they’ll hit a crossover point where they’ll want to produce a more traditional monolithic chip for the lower-end portion of the product stack. The Foveros technology being used to package Meteor Lake is cutting-edge technology, and cutting-edge tech often has cost drawbacks.

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