Intel Razor Lake-AX Breaks Cover Ahead Of Showdown With Strix Halo
Okay, it's a little thin, but it's mostly an excuse for us to talk to you about Razor Lake-AX. See, a lot of people are very excited about AMD's Strix Halo and Gorgon Halo SoCs, better known as the Ryzen AI Max parts. Those same people are also usually very excited about NVIDIA's RTX Spark SoCs that are on the way later this year, to say nothing of the DGX Spark that came out last year. These chips aren't that powerful in the grand scheme of things, but they have the ability to hook up to silly amounts of memory which makes them uniquely capable as AI development platforms.
It's not really clear if machines based on Strix Halo are actually moving in volume, but there's certainly a lot of hype around them, and Intel clearly doesn't want to be left out of this growing market of "super APUs." That's why it has reportedly developed a new class of processor, the "AX" chip. You're likely familiar with at least some of Intel's processor suffixes; "S" is a standard desktop CPU, "K" means 'high power and overclockable', "H" means BGA, "U" means ultra-low voltage BGA, and so on. "X" has historically been used for "extreme" processors; chips meant for enthusiasts at the ultra high-end.
Razor Lake AX, then, is said to be rather similar to the other large SoCs that I mentioned. Key characteristics of the AMD Ryzen AI Max and NVIDIA "Spark" chips are that they have unusually large integrated GPUs and critically, a double-wide memory bus. So it goes that Razor Lake AX is said to have a 256-bit memory bus and a massive integrated GPU with a whopping 32 Xe3P-cores. To put that in perspective, one Xe3-core is broadly similar to one RDNA Workgroup Processor (WGP), at least in terms of what it represents structurally; AMD's Ryzen AI Max+ 495 has 20 WGPs, and the Radeon RX 9070 XT has 32 WGPs. Notably, these chips are also said to use on-package memory, which Intel said it wouldn't do, but then, that was before the CEO change-over last year.
According to the leaker who has shared the most details about these chips, YouTube channel Moore's Law is Dead, Razor Lake AX was in fact rebadged to be part of the Razor Lake family despite being originally named Nova Lake AX and intended to launch along with that family next year. That's why it's reportedly going to be based on the same Coyote Cove P-cores and Arctic Wolf E-cores as Nova Lake, and likely Xe3P instead of Xe4 as rumored previously; the rest of Razor Lake will reportedly move on to Griffin Cove P-cores and possibly Golden Eagle E-cores. The leaker claims that Razor Lake AX will still launch next year, though.
