That prediction didn’t work out so well…
ROUGHLY A YEAR AGO, I predicted 18 months of awesomeness for the PC. “A rapid-fire product assault is coming from AMD, Intel, and Nvidia, the likes of which we’ve rarely seen,” were my exact words. There’s still one major launch to come, but with four out of five reveals under our belts, it hasn’t worked so well. Am I disappointed? Yup. But let’s keep some perspective.
The five launches are, of course, new CPU families from Intel and AMD respectively, graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia, and Intel’s long-awaited entry into the gaming GPU market. As I write this, we’ve had at least partial launches of everything bar AMD’s upcoming Radeon RX 7000 series graphics. And it’s been pretty patchy so far.
So, what happened—apart from me simply being wrong? There hasn’t been a single overarching theme. It’s a mix of failure to execute, unrealistic expectations, unusual market conditions, and cynical production planning. It’s just unfortunate that it has all come together at the same time.
The failure to execute obviously applies to the dumpster fire that is Intel’s Arc graphics launch. Had those GPUs rolled out on time, they would have been merely disappointing. But arriving a year late has compounded Arc’s woes. The hardware isn’t awful, which gives me hope for the future. But Intel needs to get a grip of its graphics drivers to have any hope of competing with AMD and Nvidia.
As for the unrealistic expectations, those apply to AMD’s Zen 4 architecture and the Ryzen 7000 CPU family. In terms of headline features, including 5nm production tech and 5GHz-plus clocks, Zen 4 delivers. But its underlying architecture is only a minor tweak compared to Zen 3. And AMD didn’t up the core count. So, it’s an incremental improvement rather than a revolutionary step forward.
Moving on to Nvidia’s new GeForce RTX 40 graphics cards, Nvidia pretty much delivered on my expectation that certain SKUs would be capable of double the performance of the RTX 3000 series. The new RTX 4090 is a monster. But Nvidia positively screwed the pooch with the RTX 4080 boards and I await further horrors with the rest of the 40 Series. That’s at least in part down to market conditions. Nvidia has a mountain of old 30 series graphics cards it needs to shift, just as demand for GPUs is cratering thanks to a sudden implosion of crypto mining demand and an increasingly sickly world economy.
Of all the launches so far, Intel’s Raptor Lake has probably come closest to meeting expectations. As you can read in our reviews of both the Core i9-13900k and Core i5-13600K this issue, by ramping up both the core counts and clock speeds, Raptor Lake packs a serious punch. But I’m uneasy about the power consumption.
I suspect both Raptor Lake and its Alder Lake predecessor were originally intended for Intel’s 7nm node rather than 10nm. Consequently, they’re both hot and hungry architectures. That’s a problem I’m not expecting to disappear when Meteor Lake arrives on 7nm next year. If Alder Lake and Raptor Lake were meant to be on 7nm, Meteor Lake was probably intended for 4nm. It’s going to take a while before Intel’s production nodes and architectures fully align again.
All of which leaves AMD’s RDNA 3 graphics architecture. By the time you read this, AMD will have pulled the wraps off the top few members of the family. I’m not expecting to be as infuriated by RDNA 3 as I was by Nvidia’s RTX 40 Series graphics. But if the latest rumors are accurate, even RDNA 3 won’t be as thrilling as we’d hoped.
If all that makes for a downbeat read, here’s the thing. The RTX 4080 is annoying and Intel messed up Arc. However, there’s still some great new technology available for the PC and plenty more to come soon. If you love the PC, it’s too easy to get carried away by product launches and road maps. If that’s my bad, the immediate future of the PC is far from gloomy. It’s just not quite as stellar as I’d hoped.
If the latest rumors are accurate, even RDNA 3 won’t be as thrilling as we’d hoped.
Six raw 4K panels for breakfast, laced with extract of x86... Jeremy Laird eats and breathes PC technology.