Comet Lake Discussion Thread

[SteelCrysis]

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/31...se-why-not

The appropriately-named American Portwell Technologies has launched a motherboard with a whopping 20 USB 3.2 Gen 1 (aka USB 3.0) ports hung off the back of it. Granted, most people are going to be looking for a motherboard that’s a little more consumer-focused. But if you needed to hook up a heck of a lot of hardware, this board could handle it.

Well. It could sorta handle it for you. Meet the PEB-9783G2AR:

If you look at the motherboard, there’s a group of four chips on the south end of the board. I’m fairly certain these are repeaters, though I wasn’t able to determine which company built them or what ports are connected to which USB 3.0 lanes.

The motherboard documentation makes no mention of repeaters, but it does split seemingly identical USB 3.0 ports into two different groups:

Why split the ports into two sections like this? Presumably, because there are four ports wired up normally, and the rest of the controllers are split between USB repeaters.
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Here’s the important thing to know: The motherboard may have 20 USB ports, but it doesn’t have 20 USB 3.0 — excuse me, USB 3.2 Gen 1 — connections on it. According to Intel, the W840E/Q470E chipsets both offer a maximum of 10 USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports and 14 USB 2.0 ports (none of which seem to be in use here). There aren’t very many differences between these two chipsets at all, with the Q470E offering a total of six SATA 6.0Gb/s ports compared with eight on the W480E. The Q470E is part of the Intel Stable Image Platform Program (SIPP) while the W480E is not.

So why bother to highlight a motherboard like this? Mostly because it’s fun. We don’t talk much about the hardware you can find in the odd little corners of computing, but there’s almost always something interesting if you dig around a bit. If you actually had a use for it, you’d want to be careful about hooking up the proper USB ports to ensure maximum performance — assuming it mattered. If you just need to communicate with a lot of USB devices over low-bandwidth ports, even having USB 3.0 included might be overkill.

https://www.techpowerup.com/272489/intel...microscope

Currently, Intel's best silicon manufacturing process available to desktop users is their 14 nm node, specifically the 14 nm+++ variant, which features several enhancements so it can achieve a higher frequencies and allow for faster gate switching. Compare that to AMD's best, a Ryzen 3000 series processor based on Zen 2 architecture, which is built on TSMC's 7 nm node, and you would think AMD is in clear advantage there. Well, it only sort of is. German hardware overclocker and hacker, der8auer, has decided to see how one production level silicon compares to another, and he put it to the test. He decided to use Intel's Core i9-10900K processor and compare it to AMD's Ryzen 9 3950X under a scanning electron microscope (SEM).
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The results? Well, the Intel 14 nm chip features transistors with a gate width of 24 nm, while the AMD/TSMC 7 nm one has a gate width of 22 nm (gate height is also rather similar). While these are not much different, TSMC's node is still much denser compared to Intel's - TSMC's 7 nm produces chips with a transistor density around 90 MT/mm² (million transistors per square millimeter), which is comparable in density to Intel's 10 nm node used on recent mobile processors. Below you can see the SEM images and comparison made. For more information and details please head over to the source.

Another interesting thing to note here, the gate width is not following the naming scheme as you might have expected. The 14 nm transistor isn't 14 nm in width, and the 7 nm transistor isn't 7 nm wide. The naming of the node and actual size of the node have had a departure a long time ago, and the naming convention is really up to the manufacturer - it's become more of a marketing gimmick than anything else. This is the reason researchers have already proposed another density metric for semiconductor technology other than pure "nm" terms.