THE NEWS
Processor war kicks off again
Zen 4 lands, with Raptor Lake hot on its heels
© INTEL
THIS FALL WILL see new CPU designs from AMD and Intel, heralding a renewed fight for desktop processor supremacy. AMD’s offering hopes to repeat its predecessor’s feat by thrashing Intel and being crowned the best gaming chip. Intel responded with its Alder Lake family and the forthcoming 7000-series Ryzen uses the new Zen 4 core architecture, so we start with a decent instructions per cycle bump (about eight to ten percent) before we even get to the other improvements, such as some impressive frequencies.
We’ve seen a 16-core v ersionrunning at 5.5GHz, and another being run at a peak of 5.7GHz. We also get a new RDNA 2-based integrated graphics engine, PCIe 5.0, and DDR5 memory. In time we’ll get a V-Cache version, with a slab of extra L3 cache on top.