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Alder Lake-S leaks

Soldato
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Also, DDR5 at 4800mhz doesn't sound like an improvement really
First release of a new memory tech is never exciting. How long did it take for DDR4 to surpass DDR3? DDR3 over DDR2? DDR2 over DDR? Happens every time.

This time though it's a bit different. DDR5 as a technology is a bit more advanced, notably with error correction as standard and it being ish-kinda dual channel on a single module.
 
Associate
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Igor managed to get some leaks on the socket dimensions and a rumour for some peltier-effect coolers:
https://www.igorslab.de/en/intels-a...eltier-element-exclusive-details-and-preview/
1pXxndV.png
and
o99f419.png
It's the first of April, so unsure what is going on.
There is no need to discuss the sense, or rather complete nonsense, of such a cooling solution here, it is just the way it is. The de facto doubling of the combined power consumption of CPU and cooler is simply impractical and the exact opposite of efficient working. The above drawing shows the areas in question and also the recommendation for an airtight cover. The picture below shows how something like this looks in practice with the Cooler Master MasterLiquid ML360 Sub-Zero.

Do Intel have a research site in the desert? As anywhere else the condensation will be asking for trouble? Airtight cover?
 
Soldato
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"leaks" from Moore's Law is Dead

Interesting points:

* Intel plans to stick with big.little design for a long time, so it's not going anywhere - anyone who believes big.little will fail on desktop therefore believes Intel will go out of business.
* The upcoming due to be announced new version of Windows includes an upgraded scheduler that brings compatibility for big.little CPU's (this new Windows is due to be launched a couple months before Alder Lake does)
* Intel is telling it's partners that Alder Lake delivers 100% improvement in multithreaded performance vs Rocket Lake and 20% improvement in single core performance.
* LGA1700 socket will be used for several generations starting with Alder Lake
* Alder Lake supports both DDR5 and DDR4 and PCIE5, but PCIE5 is only provided to the PCIE Slot, not M.2
* The updated iGPU is up to 32EU units (12900k)
* The maximum size core configuration is as follows: 8+8 for i9, 8+4 for i7 and 6+4 for i5. There are further variations depending on specific CPU model, thats the maximum (so the top i5 will have 6 big core and 4 little core)


 
Soldato
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"leaks" from Moore's Law is Dead
* The maximum size core configuration is as follows: 8+8 for i9, 8+4 for i7 and 6+4 for i5. There are further variations depending on specific CPU model, thats the maximum (so the top i5 will have 6 big core and 4 little core)

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 16/20/24 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?
 
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Soldato
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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)
 
Soldato
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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


I don't see the point, but maybe I'm just not getting it lol. It sounds like they couldn't do an extra 4 / 8 large cores, so settled for less powerful cores. Maybe Intel could help to make up for it by adding more smaller cores, so you'd have 8 big cores and 16 smaller cores.

8 cores is still a lot for laptops. They should run cooler, with longer battery life, so I think the majority of laptops sold will include 10nm Intel CPUs, at least until Zen 4 becomes available, but Zen 4 laptops may not even be available until 2023.

The thing about doubling multithreaded perf. (total for both the large and small cores I assume) is that it's easy if you can double the core count and improve the IPC of most of the cores. I barely think this matters at all in games, where CPU cache, clock rate and IPC per core are the main factors that affect performance.

If it were possible to run different operating systems simultaneously (completely isolated from each other) on different CPU cores, preferably natively for improved speed and compatibility, then I think the smaller cores could be quite useful.
 
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Associate
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anyone who believes big.little will fail on desktop therefore believes Intel will go out of business
maybe not so drastic, go out of relevance like AMD did in bulldozer era.
new version of Windows includes an upgraded scheduler that brings compatibility for big.little
that is the weak point of the whole enterprise.
Also if rumor is true that little cores do not support same instructions as big cores, it is just stupid.

Apple and Android can pull off big.little as they also control the OS AND software infrastructure. Good luck making Windows understand that my [RGB control software] must run on little cores.
 
Soldato
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It does seem possible that the successor to Alder Lake will launch in Q4 2022, to compete with Zen 4 CPUs. Perhaps Intel will 'technically' launch Alder Lake in December this year, but only sell the top DDR5 motherboards and K CPUs, with the rest of the series coming in the following months. If it's true, Alder Lake could be another short lived generation, like Rocket Lake.

I'm not sure I believe the rumours that Raptor Lake would use a max of 8 larger cores, instead of bumping this up a bit.

I don't believe anything that MLID says tbh, but the rumour here about Raptor Lake having a much improved memory controller sounds plausible to me.
https://www.techpowerup.com/img/VSELwdmzKk0hQkrR.jpg

If it's true, DDR5 is going to seem a bit pointless on an Alder Lake chipset, better to wait for Raptor Lake motherboards.
 
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Soldato
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I don't believe anything that MLID says tbh...
Despite the fact he's been pretty much correct about everything he's ever reported and leaked? The few times he has gotten something wrong is when everybody's gotten it wrong (Ampere RT performance for example).

Always take leaks with a bucket of salt, but of all the leakers out there, Tom's proven himself to be pretty reliable.
 
Caporegime
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Despite the fact he's been pretty much correct about everything he's ever reported and leaked? The few times he has gotten something wrong is when everybody's gotten it wrong (Ampere RT performance for example).

Always take leaks with a bucket of salt, but of all the leakers out there, Tom's proven himself to be pretty reliable.

Sure but he does what most politicians do, he talks a lot about his leaks and deliberately rambles in very broad terms, an example of this is Intel upcoming GPU, he has put its performance at different times in a one hour video at 3060TI, 3070, 3070TI and 3080, that's a very broad range and if any one turns out to be right he can claim to have leaked it, with a range that broad he does not know, what he's doing is take a likely guess. We can all do that.

And lately he seems to be going off the deep end, he keeps banging on about how he likes competition, which is fine and that's a perfectly rational thing to want and say. He did get some "WTF are you talking about????" moments from people when he said an RTX 3070 Intel GPU at RTX 3070 prices and that would be in 2022 he used it in a context of that being good competition, it isn't because Intel are not competing with an RTX 3070 at RTX 3070 prices in 2022, he was told this and in his next video he strangely switched Intel's GPU up to RTX 3070TI / RTX 3080 while at the same time doubling down that an Intel RTX 3070 in 2022 is good competition.
You get the sense that now he's just making up what he wants to be true.

He's started doing the same with CPU's, he's talking up Intel's Big Little like its the second coming these days and this completely insane blanket statement:

anyone who believes big.little will fail on desktop therefore believes Intel will go out of business.

Is his rebuttal to those who are more sceptical, people who he sees as haters.

The guy is starting to lose it.
 
Soldato
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If Alder Lake allows an upgrade to Raptor, then I'm assuming going Meteor Lake will allow an upgrade to Lunar. Probably a safe bet to do that if on a current chip. Raptor Lake might be tempting but not if it doesn't even allow a single upgrade, when we're looking at potential 15-20% uplift per generation now.
 
Soldato
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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.

Your CPU and schedule is more than likely switching out your game thread for other work at times. This incurs a cost. Not a massive one, but a cost, and obviously when the game thread is stalled waiting for other work to complete, it's not processing the next frame of your game.

If the windows scheduler will punt all of the windows processes off to the little cores, and leave the big cores to be completely uninterrupted running your game threads.....it's probably a fairly decent improvement.
 
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Your CPU and schedule is more than likely switching out your game thread for other work at times. This incurs a cost. Not a massive one, but a cost, and obviously when the game thread is stalled waiting for other work to complete, it's not processing the next frame of your game.

If the windows scheduler will punt all of the windows processes off to the little cores, and leave the big cores to be completely uninterrupted running your game threads.....it's probably a fairly decent improvement.

This might have been a valid point years ago when we had single core single thread cpu's.
 
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