Alder Lake-S leaks

[Grim5]

If there's only 8 'big cores' on i9s / i7s (struggling to hit 5ghz still), I think high end Zen 4 CPUs will beat Alder Lake hands down, since 16/32 CPU cores could end up being what is offered to consumers. I wonder if the successors to Alder Lake will be Raptor Lake on the same LGA socket and a 7nm CPU on a new platform?, realising maybe in the same year?

LGA1700 seems to be around for a while, so Raptor Lake wil be on LGA1700 too - funny thing, the leaks for Raptor Lake says its top configuration is 8+16, as in 8 big cores and 16 little cores.

The little cores don't seem too weak though, MLID says they have the IPC of Skylake cores and they run at lower clock speeds than the skylake CPU's did (so potentially the little cores have the performance of an underclocked 6700k)

 

[Grim5]

Windows 11 has a noticeable performance improvement for big.little CPU's

https://hothardware.com/news/windows-11-gives-hybrid-architectures-a-single-threaded-boost

 

[Grim5]

12900k ES-3 pops up 3.9ghz base on big cores and 5.3ghz boost on big cores.

Performance takes a significant hit if you try to run it on windows 10, requires 11 with its upgraded scheduler to get full performance

https://videocardz.com/newz/intel-c...n-sample-allegedly-offers-5-3-ghz-turbo-clock

 

[Grim5]

This is fairly pointless

Yep - it shall be a marketing meme for Intel to claim they have the first PCIE5 system, but it will still be 3 to 5 years from now before any graphics cards reaches the max bandwidth of PCIE4

 

[Grim5]

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.

 

[Grim5]

The 12900k is 25% faster than the 5950x in single core

https://wccftech.com/intel-core-i9-...nchmarks-faster-than-amd-ryzen-9-5950x-rumor/

 

[Grim5]

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.

 

[Grim5]

benchmark makes no sense at all, even if the single is as powerful as it is, how on earth does it stack up that only 8 cores can pull that amount of multi

Because it has 16 cores, not 8. I dont' know why you thought it only has 8

 

[Grim5]

No, I get that, but only some do HT, and the others are little piles of poo, its more the progression.
810*16 is 12960, suggesting the weak cores can manage almost the equivalent of the output of the main cores.
If this is the case I'll be incredibly surprised, unless intel have done something funny to optimise purely for cinebench.
I'd like to see an r23 comparison.

We know the 8 little cores are not as fast as the big 8 cores. Leakers say the little cores are on the same level as a 8 core 6700k would be. So take a look at the 6700k's R20 multi, double it and that's how much the little cores add to the 12900k's score with the rest coming from the big cores.

Now off the top of my head I think the 6700k gets about 2300 so the little 8 cores on the 12900k contribute 4600 points with the remaining 7000 coming from the 8 big cores and for reference the 5800x gets 6000 points

 

[Grim5]

little cores are helping too
plus, CB run is so short, spends a lot of time in 228W PL2 mode

Yep with 16 cores the R20 test completes very fast - probably short enough to fit in the PL2 window. The 12900k benchmark above was tested with a 360mm AIO cooler

 

[Grim5]

This is interesting, and I ponder if correct, as given the alleged released bench of over 11000, one wonders if the main cores are giving the 8k, and the weak addon cores managing 3000, interesting, wonder will it equate to anything useful in real world, as the 11th gen certainly didn't.

Single thread numbers translate pretty well into games though and 810 ST is massive

 

[Grim5]

Alder Lake is hungry!

take the 11900k's peak and add 50 to 100w to it

Alder Lake CPUs have 50 to 100w higher peak power draw than Rocket Lake

https://www.tomshardware.com/amp/ne...mands-28-higher-peak-current-than-rocket-lake

 

[Grim5]

Boosty burst or bust!

All good news for power supply manufacturers. After the bursty behaviour of Ampere, they now get sell supplies designed for the bursty behaviour of Alder Lake!

So a rig which pulls 500W averaged per minute, might need a few milliseconds burst of 800W, or similar but the supply has to recognise this isn't a fault and not to trigger the over current protection. Sound like the percentage spent on PSU when budgeting a computer build just went up again. OEMs likes HP and Dell will probably just disable PL4!

The OEM are already facing higher power supply costs, due to new efficiency laws in the US, new pre Builth have to use a minimum of a gold certification PSU - power supplies is one area where OEM's have traditionally being able to cut costs to improve margins but not so much anymore as they have to use energy efficient units

 

[Grim5]

Ah, Intel must be behind as their Architecture Day seems to actually be talking about upcoming stuff:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16881/a-deep-dive-into-intels-alder-lake-microarchitectures

Intel Thread Director
We knew this, but they definitely are not going to wait for kernel schedulers to catch up.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16881/a-deep-dive-into-intels-alder-lake-microarchitectures/2

Instruction Sets: Alder Lake Dumps AVX-512 in a BIG Way
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16881/a-deep-dive-into-intels-alder-lake-microarchitectures/5
After all the AVX-512 hype we get this:


Anyway, haven't read all of it yet.
There's GPU coverage too.

Img hahah Intel has dumped AVX512

right now Dave2154 will be having a panick attack at this news

 

[Grim5]

What is really interesting is that Intel is going so all in on Little cores that it's future desktop gaming CPUs will see only those increase in count.

the 12900k is 8 big and 8 little

but leaked documents show that the 15900k will be 8 big and 32 little and 12th, 13th and 14th somewhere in between.

essential Intel won't be making gaming CPUs with more than 8 big cores for the next 4 generations at least l

 

[Grim5]

Nova lake is meant to be the empire strikes back moment.

How and why? Any explanation?

Nova Lake is a different architecture to the others and is currently being worked on in its early stages but due for release around 2025/2026 - the main goal of Nova Lake is to drastically improve the x86 efficiency and scalability so that you can still have a 5w x86 CPU that can compete with ARM.

So that is the main goal for it, ARM designs currently smash x86 CPUs for efficiency- look at the Apple M1, they nearly doubled battery life on their portables and gained extra performance from switching from x86 to ARM.

Nova Lake is meant to bring x86 back into line with ARM efficiency - that's the goal of the project

 

[Grim5]

You might have to spoonfed me then!

Because all I've seen from the Gigabyte leaks were power supply specs for AL-S and a bit more for Zen4.

Anyway, things are vastly different in 2021 than they were in 2006.

1. Intel lost its manufacturing lead and there's no indication they'll regain it.
2. Ergo: manufacturing is a level playing field.
3. ARM will licence to just about anyone. For now that means most of the big cloud players are rolling their own custom chips; smaller players might have to wait.
4. This means a lot of very lucrative markets no longer have to buy Intel or AMD.
5. AMD are no longer burdened by their own fabs or GF.
6. AMD have a good roadmap and so far have executed quite well.

Of course, none of this precludes another Conroe moment (although since Intel's answer to big.LITTLE is brand new it would be even more surprising than Conroe as there was no Pentium M type advanced warning).
So never say never.
However, even if Intel were to be totally dominate x86 for the next decade the lack of hefty margins from the cloud server market are gone.
Might not be a bad thing for Intel as it stops them squandering $billions on things like contra revenue, 5G modems etc.

As far as we know, Alder Lake continues the Core lineup, hence these names you'll still see for years to come like 12900k, 13900k, 14900k etc it's a modified architecture but the Core series building blocks are there - and as such you'll still see Intel making power hungry CPUs for a few years yet.

Nova Lake is something completely different, the Core series naming structure will be replaced because it won't share anything with it. Internally Intel calls it Project Royal Core - a brand new from the ground up architecture to give Intel's its next "Zen" like break through. It's early days but MLID says at this stage Intel is targeting +100% IPC and a better power efficiency , it might be too optimistic but it's so early into the project Intel doesn't actually know hat numbers it's going to get only time will tell, the only thing we know for sure is that it's a ground up new architecture that replaces the Core series architecture Intel has been using since 2008 and is due for production in 2025

 

[Grim5]

It sounds like it’s going to be expensive and not particularly worth adopting if anyone already has a 5800x and above system.

im possibly switching from 5950x 12900k.

main reason is system stability, ive had way too many crashes and system reboots over the last 6 months

 

[Grim5]

Have you tried to update the BIOS?


Anyways, if a 65-watt Intel CPU matches the 105-watt AMD CPU, then very hard times are coming for AMD.

AMD might be screwed.

Yep, I've tried every single bios update and chipset driver released until July 2021 for my board

 

[Grim5]

From MLID: The i5 12600k is a 5800x killer - you get more performance and cheaper price (as long as you have Windows 11)