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Alder Lake-S leaks

Don
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This might have been a valid point years ago when we had single core single thread cpu's.
No but they certainly aren't all pegged at 100% while playing any games, there's more than enough spare cpu resources to slot in background processes.

Context switches still incur a performance cost - and that occurs twice (once to switch away from your game thread, and again to switch back). Yes it's likely in the order of 0.1 microseconds, but these all add up when contributing to frame times etc.
(It's also part of the reason why people have said that Ryzen chips have appeared "smoother" at times - their context switches are noticably faster at ~0.04 microseconds)

https://techreport.com/forums/viewt...Hz processor (not,and 0.1 microseconds (Intel).
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=3900x-9900k-400&num=7
 
Soldato
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Finland
Context switches still incur a performance cost - and that occurs twice (once to switch away from your game thread, and again to switch back). Yes it's likely in the order of 0.1 microseconds, but these all add up when contributing to frame times etc.
And actually that 0.1 microseconds is long time in scale of CPU.
For 5 GHz CPU clock cycle lasts 0.2 ns.
So that would be 1000 cycles + execution time of background thread down the drain and out from running game.

Having guaranteed exclusive use of CPU cores is the reason why console games can be optimized to squeeze out such high amount of performance in comparison to hardware.
 
Soldato
OP
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6 Feb 2019
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The leakers are claiming the 12900k beats the 5950x in multithread benchmarks.

But it's difficult to ascertain if its accurate and also if its an apples to apples comparison. I suspect not because the 12900k system is using DDR5 memory which in many cases would give it a leg up against DDR4 system like the 5950x is limited to.

It is possible that's Windows 11 and Intel's new scheduler combined with this big.little architecture has in fact made a massive improvement to multithreaded system performance but it could just as easily just be the DDR5 that's doing it - only time will tell.

Either way it's still impressive. The 11900k has about half the multithread performance of the 5950x, so if by adding 8 little cores clocked at 3.7ghz along with a new scheduler, some IPC improvements and DDR5 has allowed it to more than double it's multithreaded performance then that's amazing.
 
Permabanned
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I do not want big/little cores outside my phone and the reason it has them is it is battery powered, Intel may get it right once again by 2025 till then I stay on my 4970k (I gave up buying each new Gen Mopo/CPU back in 2013).
 
Soldato
Joined
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7,875
Small cores might be useful if you could do all your non essential/ background tasks, like running browsers, playing music, running apps etc on those cores.

And save the large cores solely for playing games / demanding tasks. It does seem pretty niche though for desktop users, not sure why we would need more than 3-4 small cores for background stuff.

I hope the next CPU generation after Alder Lake just moves onto 12-16 larger cores instead.

Windows 10/11 update service will probably be setup to run constantly on the smaller cores :p
 
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Soldato
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You would've thought the 12900K should beat AMD's last gen (16 core 5950x), or it would be a bit of a fail.

With Intel these days assuming their latest processor can beat their own (nevermind a competitors) last generation chip isn't a safe bet!

You'd hope with Alder Lake (and the move to DDR5 plus all the other platform/process changes) it'll make for the largest performance jump we've seen in several years as I'm sure it'll come with a noticeable hike in pricing.
 
Permabanned
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So you want to see 1000w cooling solutions?

By allowing some parts of the package to use lower powered more efficient cores, it frees up some of the total package constraints to allow the higher performance cores to use extra power and that cooling budget.

It is just Intel not be able to make anything new these days, so this time instead of rehashing once again they try this approach, cores do not always run at 100%, they have steps even mine does and a core hitting 100% when opening browser or AV scan is not same as 100% running prime95.

Not sure where you got 1000w cooling from, nearly every Gen ran cooler than the last (even though smaller surface area) till recently and that is partly the crap TIM and now so called new solder (if it was proper solder like SB it would not delid via a tool and if you did try it would kill the CPU).
 
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Soldato
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I think we'd ideally need to see the difference with both CPUs clocked at say 4Ghz or 4.6Ghz to get a real idea of the performance difference.
 
Soldato
OP
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I think we'd ideally need to see the difference with both CPUs clocked at say 4Ghz or 4.6Ghz to get a real idea of the performance difference.

The 12900k has a top boost frequency of 5.3ghz, so I think we can compare it to the 11900k at least as that chip also has a top boost of 5.3ghz.

So it's not like Intel has suddenly got a crap load of extra frequency out of their architecture that's allowing this large performance boost.
 
Associate
Joined
29 Jun 2016
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529

That is quite the IPC uplift, if true. I'm currently putting it in the possible but unlikely pile of rumours.

I would love for it to be the case though, all this competition is forcing innovation on several fronts.

EDIT: Do we have any idea of the die size and transistor count? Maybe Intel have chucked a shed load of transistors into improving branch prediction and widened the pipeline?
 
Associate
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11 Dec 2016
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Oxford
Knowing Intel, improvement in Cinebench is not a good IPC measure.
There was a nice uplift in CB single thread between Intel 10 and 11 gen, but in games and real world the improvement was less. And when coupled with lower average clocks of 11 gen, almost no difference.
Whereas between Zen 2 and Zen 3, improved CB matched reported IPC across a range of apps (and of course game performance was even higher)
 
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