Rocket Lake is a Success for Intel 🚀💯

Intel’s 11th Gen Core Rocket Lake has been universally panned for Core i9 and Core i7. But in many ways, it was a massive success. Here’s why.

0:00 Intro
0:33 Reviews are in
1:31 Why Does Rocket Lake Exist
2:20 Gap in the Roadmap
3:00 Design vs Backport/Retrofit
5:29 Timing of Rocket Lake
6:03 Transistor Size Concerns
7:01 What it Takes to Backport/Retrofit
7:28 Roadmaps
8:03 Co-design
9:39 Licensing
10:32 Minimum Specification
10:46 Cat Tax

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#techtechpotato #intel11thgen #rocketlake
Rocket Lake is a Success for Intel: yolo epic swag

[Valk-Kilmer]

Way to defend a bad product you lunatic.

[thelegendaryklobb]

So basically Rocket Lake's success was the friends they made along the way

[AnonyMous-gtvq]

As someone who works in silicon design I would like to give a little correction or clarification on your design process. PDK actually has 2 parts. Analog and digital part. Analog part contains individual elments such as transistors, capacitors etc. The digital part contains standard cells. These are your AND gates, OR gates etc. I assume this is mostly what intel uses. And this is also where the pluses in 14++ come in. Better (faster standard cells). These cells contain both the silicon layout, functional model and timings. Timings also have corner values, best and worst case.
These go to front end design who make the design in a HDL programming language. Once the design is good it goes to back end team who implement the design on silicon using standard cells. Once the design is implemented actual timings are extracted and the front end team checks the design once again with exctacted timings. Once this is ok too the design is "taped out" which means it goes to manufacturing where prototypes (engineering samples) are made.

[thestrykernet]

Ah the joy of tech YT comments to remind me why I miss the heyday of tech reporting with largely reasoned discourse. Thanks for putting together this video to help explain the existence of RKL and why it matters despite it not being the end user game changer a lot of people seemed to expect.

[Speak_Out_and_Remove_All_Doubt]

I love you had to wait until a few minutes into 2nd April so that everyone doesn't assume the video title isn't an April Fool!!

[Wokiis]

5:42 I'm no expert but this right here *might* be the reason for Ice Lake's low clock speeds ;)

[NotAnonymousNo]

Intel has learned their lessons, expect a backport to 22nm next cycle.

[LuckynbOC]

Imagine making this in-depth look of another aspect of CPU Design just to have someone calling you out as 'a shill who defend a bad product', without actually understanding the video.

Keep up the good work Ian :D

[Adamant_IT]

Excellent video. While I've dunked on 11th Gen like everyone else, I recognise that a new microarch is always progress, and Intel would absolutely release it anyway because a "sidegrade" that gets panned by critics is still better than skipping the generation and getting panned by investors. However, I learned a lot today about co-design, and now Rocket Lake makes a great deal more sense too. 11th gen isn't about making a good CPU, it's about a CPU that anyone can make.

[conquerordie]

I appreciate Intel and their massive engineering capacity. Every Intel product that I've bought has always been rock solid and performed extremely well for me. I agree with you Ian, with so many semiconductor fabs concentrated in Asia and with manufacturing processes reaching their technological limits (not to mention Quantum computing and other exotic transistor materials being explored more and more), it is not so certain that the way things are right now is going to be this way all the time. I can foresee a day in the near future when AMD will leverage Intel Fabs for their own products. Having the infrastructure to do that right here in our backyards with Intel Fabs is so important not only for us as a country, but for the entire industry for balance and agility.

[jintsuubest]

Interesting.
Is this always the plan or Intel only starting to work on the co-design thing after they realized their 10nm/7nm are not arriving in time?
How about amd? Are they planning something similar too?
Or will all those work goes to waste because x86-64 simply cannot keep up with other architecture before they iron out all the problem? M1 chip comes into my mind.

[Trumanlol]

Love the breakdown of the design process of CPUs. Id love it if you put videos out similar to Linus Tech Tips 'Techquickie' videos, but at a much more technical level. I think that would be very compelling content.

[glenwaldrop]

I like this camera angle, looks like my office has for 20+ years.

I'll be sure to show this to my wife.

lol

[Zarcondeegrissom]

2019 they say, hmm, along with the hell that was 2020, that wasn't bad from no-draft to glass, also hints more at the 2023 dates I keep seeing floated around for some things. 2022 isn't impossible for some things, it would require a lot going better than planned unlike 10nm forcing all the pluses thrown at 14nm so far.

Great vid Dr. Ian Cutress. B)

[theripper]

TechTechPotato Chips and maybe a Thermal Paste dip might sell well.

[Phynellius]

if this is success I don't want to see failure. To be fair, backporting the 10nm architecture is a feat of engineering. In terms of performance improvements I would argue it isn't a success, since there are more than a few circumstances where the previous gen product matches/beats the new product. We haven't seen something like that since the jump from Phenom II to Bulldozer. I am glad they at least finally changed the architecture, it's just a hard pill to swallow when you're losing 2 cores off the top of the product stack and still charging the same kind of premium

[sonichedgehog]

Even if it was a learning experience in dealing with different process nodes, it was a danged if we do, danged if we don't kind of a situation. They hedged their bets, throwing some of them money into the now with a backport rather than throwing it into the future with later releases and potentially losing more money in the interim. If you view it through that lens of success where they are not throwing in the towel totally and are instead giving vendors and consumers a taste of what the future has in store, that can be understood as a "success." However, we will have to wait and see just how much damage it does to the brand's value perception. If you ran a Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count analysis on all the Rocket Lake-related article comment sections, forum threads, and customer reviews, I can already tell you now that you would see a significantly stronger negative sentiment compared to the outgoing Comet Lake. That is something that should not be ignored here because it has a much higher influence on sales than all the technical analyses in the world can muster.

[saikrishankumar]

Love this channel, this is my new favourite video on YT.

[stevemaxwell]

Wow, Intel got a new product out and that's the low bar you are judging success by! Too expensive/hot/power-hungry and underperforms the previous gen = total embarrassment in my book.

[unitedfools]

It'll probably be a good buy if it fails to sell and prices drop significantly.