THE SILICON WARS
AMD and Intel engaged in a war of words during CES 2021, and while Intel won the numbers game – in terms of products released – AMD looks set for a more successful 2021
Intel Evo vPro
Intel kicked off CES by announcing its Evo vPro system, promising better protection against real-time attacks via its “Hardware Shield”. The chips will start shipping in laptops this spring. The “Evo” in the name means Intel will only allow them to be used in laptops that meet its criteria for sleek and responsive machines; for instance, the machines must wake in less than a second and include Thunderbolt 4.
Intel Pentium Silver and Celeron
Designed for the education market – including parents buying for school-age children – the new generation of Intel Pentium Silver and Celeron chips use the same 10nm process we’ve already seen in 11th-generation Core chips. Intel promises a 35% increase in speed and better audio handling, with the idea that they’re better suited to Microsoft Teams calls and the like. Intel Core i9-11900K
Intel used CES to announce “the world’s fastest gaming processor” in the form of the i9-11900K. The hero product in a promised new series of desktop CPUs code-named Rocket Lake-S, it has eight cores to the 10900K’s ten, but in return promises 19% higher instructions per cycle (IPC). Intel was quick to back this up with graphs showing it was anything from 2% to 8% faster than the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X in games, but this is the more rounded chip thanks to 12 cores.
Intel Alder Lake
In a “one last thing” moment, Intel teased us with a big.little design for its 12th-generation Core processors code-named Alder Lake. Details are scant, but it’s due to land in the latter part of 2021 and will work across both laptops and PCs. It will still use the x86 architecture, but will use “big” cores similar to those we’ve already seen in Core chips and “little” cores from Intel’s Atom range of low-power chips. Interesting times.
AMD Ryzen 5000 goes mobile
No shocks here: AMD essentially announced more of the same at CES 2021, and why not? This time that meant rolling out its chart-topping Zen 3 architecture to laptops via its new 5000 Series of mobile chips. Weirdly, and to our minds stupidly, only ten out of its 13 new chips feature the Zen 3 architecture, with three of the lower-priced models using Zen 2. Despite this confusing decision, the Zen 3-powered chips look set to extend AMD mobile chips’ already decisive speed advantage in our tests.
Nvidia RTX 30 Series
The power behind the gaming throne, at least in terms of the 70-plus gaming laptops announced at CES 2021, Nvidia cemented its top-dog position with the release of its RTX 30 Series of mobile GPUs. Based on the Ampere architecture already proving so dominant in its desktop counterparts, gamers can now hope for 240fps, while the rest of us should enjoy higher-quality graphics and even smoother frame rates thanks to two dedicated ray tracing (RT) cores and improved deep learning super sampling (DLSS). In rather less exciting news, Nvidia also announced the RTX 3060 desktop graphics card to accompany its RTX 3070 and RTX 3080.