Why 2020 Should Be a Particularly Competitive Year for CPUs

(AMD's Ryzen 4000 Series Mobile processor above)

2020 is looking to be the most competitive year for CPUs in a long time. Last year, a resurgent AMD introduced 7nm desktop and server chips, and really became a competitive player on the desktop for the first time in over a decade. This year, it hopes to do the same thing on the notebook side, with a new lineup of 7nm chips there. Meanwhile, at the end of the year, Intel finally got its first 10nm mobile chip out the door, but the bulk of the notebook line, as well as its complete desktop and server lines, were based on yet another crank of its now-venerable 14nm process. This year, it promises a much broader line of 10nm mobile chips with improved graphics, as well as its first 10nm server chips. (Note that Intel's 10nm process and the 7nm TSMC process that AMD uses are roughly equivalent. At this point, no part of the chip design is actually 10nm nor 7nm; they are just naming conventions.)

All this was prominently on display at CES, with AMD's announcement of its mobile Ryzen chips along with a 64-core Threadripper desktop processor and Intel's announcement of its upcoming Tiger Lake line of mobile processors.

Now that the dust is settling, it's easier to see the outlines of the market, as it should shape up, particularly in the second half of the year.

Mobile Processors

While AMD's 7nm parts last year made it much more competitive for gaming and enthusiast desktops., it's been a long time since its mobile chips have really mattered. In recent years, AMD offered lower prices and better graphics (and in the past year, better availability), but notably worse CPU performance and battery life compared to their competition from Intel.

The AMD Mobile Ryzen 4000 series, known as Renoir, should change that market dramatically in 2020. These will be 7nm chips, like their desktop counterparts, available in three lines: Initially, there will be both a 15-watt U-series aimed at ultrathin laptops (competing with Intel's own 15-watt U-series) and a 45-watt H-series aimed at gaming and creator laptops (competing with Intel's H-series). Later, expect a Pro Series to compete with the vPro versions of Intel's chips, which offer better manageability for corporate IT departments.

At the announcement AMD CEO Lisa Su said this would be the "best laptop processor ever built" and highlighted the Ryzen 7 4800U, a 15-watt processor with eight cores and 16 threads, a base speed of 1.8GHz capable of a turbo speed of 4.2GHz, and eight of the company's Radeon graphics cores.

She said this would have more than double the performance of AMD's previous generation, with slightly higher single-threaded performance, and 90 percent better multi-threaded performance than the top-end Intel 10nm Ice Lake processor, which has six cores. (As always, take any vendor-provided benchmark numbers with a large grain of salt.) Of course, we won't know real performance numbers until laptops with this processor ship—and one big question is how well AMD will do at scaling performance while aiming for great battery life—but this should finally bring some competition to ultrathin and executive notebooks and 2-in-1s.

For mobile gaming and content creation, the 45-watt parts will be more important. Here AMD talked about the Ryzen 7 4800H, again with eight cores and 16 threads, but a higher base speed of 2.9GHz, capable of a turbo speed of 4.2GHz. The kind of machines that get these processors typically come with discrete graphics, so AMD talked about its SmartShift technology, which provides frequency scaling between the CPU and its discrete GPU. AMD said a Dell G5 based on this process and Radeon 5600M graphics will be available in the second quarter, and overall has said it expects more than 12 laptops with Ryzen 4000 processors to be on sale in the first quarter, with more than 100 available by the end of the year. It wouldn't surprise me if AMD does better in this slice of the market than in the ultraportable segment, in part because while battery life is important, in this market, performance is more important.

I was interested that while the Ryzen 4000 mobile chips use the same TSMC 7nm manufacturing process as their desktop counterparts, they use a standard monolithic design rather than the "chiplet" design of multiple smaller chip dies connected together via a high-speed bus, as used in the desktop versions. It's also notable that the new chips use an older version of AMD's graphics, called Vega, as opposed to the newer Navi graphics and that they actually have fewer graphics cores than the previous generation, but AMD said they should run faster overall because of improved clock speed and other design changes.

However, Intel has its own ideas as well. Intel said it would start shipping its updated 10nm chip known as Tiger Lake (and likely to be called the 11th generation Core processor) to PC manufacturers this summer, meaning it will likely be on store shelves before the next holiday season.

Currently Intel offers both 10nm Ice Lake processors with up to four cores and better graphics; and 14nm++ Comet Lake processors, with up to six cores, but not as strong graphics. Both are now out in the 15-watt U-series, but Intel has said that high-end (45-watt H-series) versions of its 10th Generation Comet Lake CPUs should be appearing shortly.

Intel hasn't given any detailed specs for Tiger Lake, but in introducing it, Gregory Bryant, EVP and GM of Client Computing, said it would offer a double-digit increase in CPU performance over the Ice Lake processor. Perhaps more important, Tiger Lake will be one of the first processors to include Intel's new Xe Graphics. Later Lisa Pearce of Intel's architecture group said that the product will double the graphics performance over the current generation.

Other architectural differences in the Intel chips include some new AI features. At the conference, Adobe showed Photoshop running on Ice Lake making smart selections to remove the background, and to automatically crop and reframe video for different aspect ratios.

Intel really pushed its position as a "platform" provider, not just a processor maker, with Bryant talking about how it will support integrated Thunderbolt 4, which Intel claims offers four times the throughput of today's systems and is compatible with the new USB 4.0 specification; as well as Wi-Fi 6. Along with the chip, he held up a very tiny motherboard for the U-series (see photo above), and said that by making the motherboard about as small as a current M.2 solid state drive, you could theoretically make ultraportables even thinner or lighter. Intel claims it already has 25 verified "Project Athena" ultraportable laptops, which Intel says have over 9 hours of battery life in the real world, as well as fast charging and almost instant resume from standby.

Intel also showed the firm's upcoming Xe graphics, specifically a discrete version called the DG1, designed for larger laptops, which typically have used discrete cards from AMD or Nvidia.

Onstage, Bryant showed a demonstration of Tiger Lake running in a 17-inch foldable computer prototype called "Horseshoe Bend." It is one of a number of foldable prototypes at the show.

It will be interesting to see the real performance of both Tiger Lake and the Xe graphics. We really won't know performance on either Tiger Lake or Mobile Ryzen 4000 until systems with these chips actually ship, but it would be funny if AMD is now trading off some graphics performance for better CPU, while Intel may take fewer CPU cores, but go for better graphics, reversing the positions the two had just a year or two ago. But either way, we're likely to end up with both better CPU performance and better graphics performance compared to the 2019 chips from both vendors.

Desktop Processors

On the desktop side, we're waiting for desktop versions of the Intel 14nm++ Comet Lake chips (S-series, to go along with the H-series for larger laptops), which should primarily compete with the already shipping 7nm AMD Ryzen 3000 series. AMD isn't expected to do a major refresh of its desktop line anytime shortly.

However, AMD did announce a new flagship chip, the Ryzen 3990X Threadripper, with an astounding 64 cores and 128 threads. This is particularly aimed at things like video rendering, and AMD compared with to an Intel Dual Xeon Platinum 8280 . (Of course, these are the highest ends chips; the 3990X will sell for about $4,000, though that's cheaper than the existing Xeon, which costs about $20,000.) Effectively the 3990X doubles the cores of the existing Ryzen 3970X, but with somewhat lower frequencies and some interesting memory and scheduling issues.

The first of these chips are now out and being benchmarked, with interesting results. On some tests—those which really scale cores—the 3990X looks great, though only with the Pro and Enterprise versions of Windows. On other tests, the 32-core 3970X , which has higher clock speeds, does better. There are cases, where the more expensive Xeon system works. In general, it's hard to tell who the 3990X is best aimed at. You can make a case for it for rendering, but it's not the best choice for gaming (where its extra cores would be wasted) or for workstation apps. where you likely want the other benefits of using a server/workstation chip, whether Xeon or AMD Epyc.

Server Processors

Neither company spent a lot of time focusing on server chips at CES, but both have big plans for them later in the year.

AMD didn't focus on server chips at all, but is expected to replace its existing Epyc processors, known as Rome and running the Zen2 cores used in the desktop Ryzen 3000 and mobile Ryzen 4000 series with a new 7nm design called Milan that will run a new Zen3 core later in the year.

At CES, Intel focused on its larger data center business and on how its line of chips including CPUS, GPUs, FPGA, and dedicated ASICs provide "AI compute for every need from edge to cloud." The company has said it will introduce its next 14nm line of Xeon Processors, called Cooper Lake in the first half of the year, with support for higher memory bandwidth, bfloat16 for AI processing, as well as up to 56 cores. This is part of a platform called Whitley. By the end of the year, this is supposed to be joined by a 10nm Ice Lake-SP series of Xeon processors.

It would appear that we're heading for new competition in desktops, servers, and, most directly, laptops. Intel remains by far the larger vendor in all three areas, but AMD proved much more competitive in desktops last year, and we'll see if it can make further inroads in 2020. Intel is particularly dominant in servers (with about a 95 percent share of the market), and historically that has been a slower market to move, but higher core-count AMD server chips have the large companies looking. Then we get to notebooks, where Intel has had a lock on the most interesting designs, because AMD's chips weren't competitive. The Ryzen Mobile 4000 may change that, and if so, it could make 2020 a quite interesting year in that category as well.