Custom PC – November 2021
English | 118 pages | pdf | 52.4 MB
Welcome at Custom PC Magazine November 2021 Issue
Intel dropped a silicon bomb on the PC gaming community in August when it announced its new Arc GPU architecture (see p14). We knew Intel had been working on improving its lacklustre graphics tech, but we’d also seen its x86-based graphics project, Larrabee, crash and burn, and the first demonstrations of its Xe DG1 GPU were hardly awe-inspiring. We just weren’t expecting Intel to suddenly announce Alchemist, a proper GPU complete with hardware ray tracing and AI-based super sampling.
It’s a situation that should seriously worry AMD. Back in 2006, AMD bought ATi, and focused hard on integrating decent GPUs into its CPUs. The first consumer desktop product, Llano, might have had a poor CPU architecture, but its integrated GPU was way better than what Intel could offer at the time.
It didn’t take off massively on the PC at the time, but AMD’s ability to build a CPU and GPU into the same die worked a treat with the new consoles. It took a long time to develop though – designing a combined CPU and GPU clearly wasn’t easy. Since then, the firm’s development of CPUs with integrated graphics has also dropped down the priority list.
Now that AMD has both its Zen 3 CPU and RDNA2 GPU architectures, you would think it’s a good time to launch an incredible product that combined both, but instead we have a great 8-core CPU backed by a comparatively feeble Radeon RX Vega 8 GPU. AMD has just about got away with this launch, as the move to eight CPU cores, coupled with short supply of affordable graphics cards, means there’s still a market for the Ryzen 7 5700G (see p20). It’s still a worthy component in our £625 PC build this month (see p76) for people who don’t prioritise gaming, but it could have been so much better.
If Intel really does have decent GPU tech in the works, then it potentially also has the ability to make CPUs with potent gaming graphics abilities in the future. There are rumours that AMD’s forthcoming Zen 4 CPUs will have integrated GPUs as standard – let’s hope they’re good, as AMD now has to watch its back.
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