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Intel's Alder Lake CPUs May Not Work With Older Games

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And what's that good for, is that better than if they were all P cores?

It's the chinese strategy: "let some cores become faster so they can bring speed to them all".

Somewhat more seriously, sometimes good enough is all you need: this helps them in keeping a more or less acceptable power and thermal budget and open the way for more heterogenous architectures in the future.

As much as I can see your point, try to see it this way: it's a potential beta test for enterprise mixed architectures. Let consumer level apps work out all the kinks before moving it to the enterprise where the big margins are.
 
Caporegime
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It's the chinese strategy: "let some cores become faster so they can bring speed to them all".

Somewhat more seriously, sometimes good enough is all you need: this helps them in keeping a more or less acceptable power and thermal budget and open the way for more heterogenous architectures in the future.

As much as I can see your point, try to see it this way: it's a potential beta test for enterprise mixed architectures. Let consumer level apps work out all the kinks before moving it to the enterprise where the big margins are.

Its CPU cores on CPU cores for necessity rather than purposeful design.

Plunging specialised accelerators in to the CPU or a memory unified GPU on CPU to combine serial and paralleled tasks is Hetrogenous, like *cough* HSA enabled APU's *cough*

ADL isn't that, its just a CPU with mixed cores, because Intel's CPU cores are very inefficient and their monolithic architecture makes it difficult to get high core count CPU's at a reasonable wafer usage cost and power consumption, tho ADL still has high power consumption and it looks like a die that's much too large.

AMD's core complex is 8mm X 8mm, they are the size of your little fingernail, containing 8 hyper threaded cores, L1, L2 and an L3 that's larger than Intel's, those cores scale from 1 Watt to 12 watts each, they are E cores with the performance of a P core on a 4 year old process node that's been surpassed at this point by two generations.
 
Soldato
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Seriuosly you didn’t know Alderlake was using Atom cores. Have you been living under a bridge?

Alderlake uses 50% Atom cores. Probably the most interesting half TBH.

Be interesting to see how much IPC those atom cores now offer. Probably on par with zen2? If so id be interested in a pure E core CPU thats in the 10w tdp region.
 
Soldato
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It's the chinese strategy: "let some cores become faster so they can bring speed to them all".

Somewhat more seriously, sometimes good enough is all you need: this helps them in keeping a more or less acceptable power and thermal budget and open the way for more heterogenous architectures in the future.

As much as I can see your point, try to see it this way: it's a potential beta test for enterprise mixed architectures. Let consumer level apps work out all the kinks before moving it to the enterprise where the big margins are.

The scaling and thermal issues remain though. Big little is useful in terms of a mobile where you control the hardware and software, but those advantages are lost once you move outside that sand box and you’ll always have the spectre of scheduling hanging over you. Spool up a single thread on the wrong core and the performance hit will be hard.
 
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The scaling and thermal issues remain though. Big little is useful in terms of a mobile where you control the hardware and software, but those advantages are lost once move out side that sand box and you’ll always have the spectre of scheduling hanging over you. Spool up a single thread on the wrong core and the performance hit will be hard.

Of course they do, that's why I said more or less acceptable thermal budget.
They are banking on most tasks requiring high performance not needing lots of cores while shifting OS and other background tasks to the E cores.
 
Soldato
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Be interesting to see how much IPC those atom cores now offer. Probably on par with zen2? If so id be interested in a pure E core CPU thats in the 10w tdp region.

Its a bit hard to say without a all Atom chip to measure. My hunch is a 5700G would soundly beat any 8 core Gracemont Atom even with the power use dropped well back.
The 5700G is a super impressive chip.

Darkmont IIRC is supposedly the competition for Zen.
 
Soldato
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Of course they do, that's why I said more or less acceptable thermal budget.
They are banking on most tasks requiring high performance not needing lots of cores while shifting OS and other background tasks to the E cores.

If you deal with those issues you get both sets of characteristics from the core without any of the gotcha’s. Zen can be the Alpha and Omega and without the handholding.

The industry could reject Intel.
 
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If you deal with those issues you get both sets of characteristics from the core without any of the gotcha’s. Zen can be the Alpha and Omega and without the handholding.

The industry could reject Intel.

Do not underestimate inertia. Other than that, I appreciate Intel CPU design efforts in dealing with the lemonade their fabs delivered. That said, I will cautiously await for reviews (and AMD's Zen 3D), especially about compatibility with older titles.
I'm not in a rush with the current GPU shortage...
 
Caporegime
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Intel are doing what they can to keep up with the pace but its not objectively "Good" its still inefficient and its now also compromised.

Its the limits of what they can do right now and that is very much a compromise.

Zen 3D is not what it needs to worry about, that's just Lisa Sue "cleaning the pipes", her quote.
 
Soldato
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Do not underestimate inertia. Other than that, I appreciate Intel CPU design efforts in dealing with the lemonade their fabs delivered. That said, I will cautiously await for reviews (and AMD's Zen 3D), especially about compatibility with older titles.
I'm not in a rush with the current GPU shortage...

Intel have zero inertia especially for chip that is built from two previously failed products.
 
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We might have a pretty different perspective here, let's see if they will be able to pivot ADL in the datacenter market in the next 2 years...
 
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"May not work with older games"

Intel benches a full suite of old games

clickbaiters: Pikachu face

Intel have been entirely upfront and transparent about the issue with Denuvo. For games that still receive updates Intel are working with Denuvo and devs on a fix. For games that no longer get updates there is likely to be a problem if you don't disable e-cores or if another workaround is not found.
 
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I'm kind of wondering the opposite question... How bad could e-cores be for gaming? If the issue is older titles it might be less of an impact.
 
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