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Comment by adrian_b | Hacker News Reader

Even more significant is that it beats the newest Intel Tiger Lake by 6% at equal clock frequencies (at 4.8 GHz).

That means that AMD will enjoy a better IPC than anything Intel for at least 1 year, until the end of 2021, when Intel will launch Alder Lake.

Intel Rocket Lake, expected in March 2021, cannot have an IPC better than Tiger Lake, so it will also have an IPC slower by at least 6% than Zen 3.

Because Zen 3 tops at 4.9 GHz, Rocket Lake will have to reach at least 5.3 ... 5.4 GHz to match or maybe exceed Zen 3.

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Is Rocket Lake expected to scale up to 16 cores?

No, the top model of Rocket Lake will have only 8 cores & 16 threads.

Therefore, for multi-threaded tasks it will be much slower than Zen 3.

However, it is expected to have an IPC comparable with Ice Lake and Tiger Lake, so if it would reach 5.4 GHz, it might be a little faster than Zen 3 for single-threaded tasks and gaming.

Although everyone is saying that Intel is dead in single thread (which is definitely far more true than previously), I don't see 5.4GHz as infeasible for them - tenth gen goes up to 5.3GHz at the very high end and I would be surprised if they didn't reach at least 5.4GHz.

Looking historically, the 6700k reached 4.2GHz, the 7700k 4.5GHz, the 8700k 4.7GHz, the 9900k 5.0GHz, and the 10900k 5.3GHz - which would imply 5.5 or 5.6GHz for what will (presumably) be the 11900k.

Everyone here is missing the most important concept in semiconductor manufacturing: binning and yield [1]. They're interconnected.

It's not like Intel can make 5.4 GHz chips for days on. It doesn't work that way. Ofcourse they can manufacture processors capable of some ridiculous 6.0 GHz (not accounting for power consumption)... but that would be 0.1% yield. You cannot run a factory like this.

[1] https://www.techspot.com/article/2039-chip-binning/

Power consumption will probably curb that frequency hike above 5GHz.

Haven't people been saying that for a long time?

We've also been stuck at ~4GHz for a long time. The 10th gen Core only manages more because of their ridiculous 300W power consumption.

I'm after an 8/16 chip myself so that would work for me but Intel chips are DOA at this point.

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