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Alder Lake-S leaks

Grim5

Grim5

Grim5

Soldato
Joined
6 Feb 2019
Posts
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Forget Rocket lake, that's old news; let's talk about Intel's next gen cpu coming at the end of this year.

Alder Lake-S has been spotted with photos too and specs

this sample has 16 cores and 24 threads with 1.8ghz base clock and 4ghz boost clock, 30mb L3 cache and was paired with DDR5 4800mhz memory for benchmarking

8 of the cores are "high performance" and have 8 hyper threads. The other 8 cores are "low performance" and have no hyper threads - that's why windows reports just 24 total threads


https://videocardz.com/newz/intel-a...6-cores-at-4-ghz-and-ddr5-4800-memory-spotted

 
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Agree, Rocket lake is old news. :p

Like most people, I'm wondering how those 8 baby cores are going to help on the desktop. But Intel have done this for a reason, it must be more than just power restricted mobile devices..
But we are talking beyond the CPU with DDR5 PCIE5 so a complete overhaul of a platform, maybe some other apps will see a solid uplift.. Just not sure we'll see it this year.
 
Can't see small low power cores being any help on desktop at all. Modern big cores can be super efficient in low power modes.
And headaches of having two different architectures, scheduling between different style cores... No thank you
 
alec said:
Can't see small low power cores being any help on desktop at all. Modern big cores can be super efficient in low power modes.
And headaches of having two different architectures, scheduling between different style cores... No thank you
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They help Intel's margins.
 
I don't get the reasons behind Big + Little core designed, other than to appear to have a high thread count on paper.

This is 8 big cores + HT + 8 small cores, which is better, that or 16 big cores?

For mobile they might make a little bit of sense, those smaller cores would no doubt use less power than the big ones, and if you can turn the big ones off at idle you could probably cut the idle power consumption drastically, maybe from 5 Watts to 1 Watt and with that improve battery life, but you're losing a chunk of performance vs if they were all big cores.
 
If you had those 8 little cores taking care of windows and all the various processes, it would free up the big cores to be able to focus purely on gaming or whatnot.

It’s interesting but the proof will be in the pudding. It’s the best of a bad situation for Intel who may not admit it but they would rather have the flexibility that Amd currently enjoys with its modular chiplet design.
 
Doobedoo said:
If you had those 8 little cores taking care of windows and all the various processes, it would free up the big cores to be able to focus purely on gaming or whatnot.

It’s interesting but the proof will be in the pudding. It’s the best of a bad situation for Intel who may not admit it but they would rather have the flexibility that Amd currently enjoys with its modular chiplet design.
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If you have 8 big cores i don't see why you would need another 8 small ones to do Windows stuff, i have 8 and have allsorts of applications running in the background while gaming and have never wanted more cores, not even with 6, its creating a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
 
humbug said:
If you have 8 big cores i don't see why you would need another 8 small ones to do Windows stuff, i have 8 and have allsorts of applications running in the background while gaming and have never wanted more cores, not even with 6, its creating a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
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But 16 cores looks betterer than 8 on the box ands it’s pretty much the only way for Intel to “compete” in the high core count segment.

I’ll wait though until we see performance figures.
 
Rocket lake DOA

Im intrigued to see how this pans out, though the idea of having effiency cores in a desktop seems pretty pointless to me. At least in consumer chips anyway
 
It will be interesting in how it works with speedstep tech though, could be much greener for those who leave their PC idling 24/7
 
WiGgLr said:
It will be interesting in how it works with speedstep tech though, could be much greener for those who leave their PC idling 24/7
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Idling doesn't need 8 efficient cores. Maybe one
But even then regular cores are already very efficient at their lowest p-state. It is the power delivery wasting energy, at least in desktops.
 
Microsoft better get busy updating their scheduler to handle this big.little nightmare.

I think Intel got carried away with what little promise Lakefield showed and are under the impression big.little would offer any kind of benefit on desktop. Or maybe they looked a the PS5, saw that a lot of the IO has dedicated processors and thought the generic computing devices that are PCs could benefit from similar.
 
alec said:
Idling doesn't need 8 efficient cores. Maybe one
But even then regular cores are already very efficient at their lowest p-state. It is the power delivery wasting energy, at least in desktops.
Click to expand...


We've had a long time where on pc cpus had one core or when they had multiple cores they were cores of equal value

now when alder lake arrives you have a cpu with some cores that are way faster than other, we're talking like double the performance or more. There is going to be a lot of teething problems and people having issues with single threaded applications and games getting put on one of the little cores etc even with multi thread it could be interesting since some cores will complete their task again well before other cores.


There is another alternative Intel and MS could use - like mobile phones, they could keep the little cores just for web browsing, sitting idle etc and the big cores only for data crunching, games and power hungry tasks - if you can switch cores on/off depending on load them you can avoid some of the potential scheduler issues. I believe this is what mobile phones do, only the Big cores are used during gaming, the Little cores get turned off to avoid confusing the OS.


But if they turn cores off based on load it creates another issue - what's the point of the product, desktop users don't care about 8 little cores for web browsing to save a few watts when those cores don't do crap while gaming. This big.little approach looks like it's made from the ground up for laptops, not desktops but desktop users will just get stuck with the same processors

And so from a gamers point of view, Alder Lake is in fact another generation of the 8 core CPu despite the move to 10nm. In fact I would not at all be surprised if you can permanently shut down the 8 little cores from the z690 BIOS to ensure maximum performance - just useless wasted die space
 
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4K8KW10 said:
It looks like that Alder Lake will also have problems to compete with Ryzen 5000, let alone Ryzen 6000 Zen 4...
Click to expand...

It looks like it'll just about be Zen2 levels, but even then I doubt it will when it comes to Multicore performance
 
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