Question Alder Lake - Official Thread

[Hulk]

With the release of Alder Lake less than a week away and the "Lakes" thread having turned into a nightmare to navigate I thought it might be a good time to start a discussion thread solely for Alder Lake.

 

[Abwx]

Yeah and over that boatload of mixed variety of workloads on Linux, 12900K is 10% faster than 5950x. While using on average maybe 20% more power, or 2W more if we consider that 5950X does not have IGP.

More than 50% of the benches have the 5700G more or less matching the 5950X, so that s softs that use at most 8 cores, not sure where is the optimisation since a Window equivalent app could eventually load more cores.

 

[Zucker2k]

It's funny how some insist every CPU workload must be up to 32 threads because......... Maybe in the very near future, thanks to the core wars, that number will magically rise to however much the CPU with the most cores has on desktop. 64 threads, anyone?

 

[Mopetar]

We can only hope. My aunt Maybelline is having her computing experience seriously hampered by the inability of Microsoft Solitaire to run across 64 cores.

Some people don't even need 8 cores. There are some who'd be hard pressed to use even 4. There is no ideal benchmark that perfectly describes everyone's use case.

Averaging everything into a single number isn't any better either or is likely to be misleading. Imagine if we did that for something like eye color. The average human would be described as having an eye color that no one person likely has.

 

[uzzi38]

It's funny how some insist every CPU workload must be up to 32 threads because......... Maybe in the very near future, thanks to the core wars, that number will magically rise to however much the CPU with the most cores has on desktop. 64 threads, anyone?

You're right. I hereby declare that 16 threads is the the ideal number for everyone, and any workload that utilises more than 16 threads should be discarded entirely.

Man does ADL-P suck compared to Rembrandt now.

This whole argument is absolutely stupid, and I mean both sides so far. Phoronix have their test suite and that's it, whatever takeaways you make from that test suite should factor in the tests in that test suite. That's it.

 

[jpiniero]

AT has a review, and so does NBC on the MSI Raider. Battery life is pretty bad, perhaps unsurprisingly with 110 W PL1 12900HK and a 175 W 3080 Ti.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/MSI-GE76-Raider-Laptop-Review-With-Alder-Lake-and-RTX-3080-Ti-to-gaming-heaven.595391.0.html

 

[naukkis]

Battery life is pretty bad

Understatement. Intel should be ashamed of itself for producing such a laptop cpu.

 

[jpiniero]

Understatement. Intel should be ashamed of itself for producing such a laptop cpu.

You should be blaming MSI more for setting the PL1 and PL2 that high. But that's why that model was the most popular sent to reviewers, I'm sure.

The previous model with Tiger Lake H was set to "only" 91 W PL1. This model is a good deal faster at least.

 

[coercitiv]

You should be blaming MSI more for setting the PL1 and PL2 that high.

PL1/PL2 don't affect web surfing battery life, not on the H platform.

 

[uzzi38]

PL1/PL2 don't affect web surfing battery life, not on the H platform.

Until you drop down to like 15W or so, they don't affect web surfing nor video playback battery life on any platform

 

[dullard]

Averaging everything into a single number isn't any better either or is likely to be misleading. Imagine if we did that for something like eye color. The average human would be described as having an eye color that no one person likely has.

The classic argument is this: Many people like hot coffee. Many people like iced coffee. Thus, the average person likes room temperature coffee.

 

[jpiniero]

PL1/PL2 don't affect web surfing battery life, not on the H platform.

You would think so, but the runtime is generally worse than the Tiger Lake H model. For web the screen power draw matters too.

 

[igor_kavinski]

7-zip decompression test is a weird anomaly. Why is 5900HX so great at that? And so bad at compression? Perplexing.

 

[igor_kavinski]

On Cinebench, the Alder Lake system scored 3.6 times higher than the Tiger Lake platform, while still achieving a transcode that was 1.37 times faster. It is very impressive.

Impressive, indeed

 

[dullard]

7-zip decompression test is a weird anomaly. Why is 5900HX so great at that? And so bad at compression? Perplexing.

My guess: Alder Lake has a higher branch misprediction latency penalty with it's 6-wide decoder. 7-zip decompression is highly likely to have a misprediction, and Alder Lake has a pretty big latency for having to go back and calculate the other path. 7-zip also doesn't use any special instructions that might help decompression speeds.

 

[Heartbreaker]

7-zip decompression test is a weird anomaly. Why is 5900HX so great at that? And so bad at compression? Perplexing.

Recent Ryzen chips always excelled at zip decompression.

 

[IntelUser2000]

Recent Ryzen chips always excelled at zip decompression.

Zen 3 has both a better branch predictor and lower pipeline stages than Golden Cove. Remember Golden Cove increases pipeline stages by one.

 

[Makaveli]

Recent Ryzen chips always excelled at zip decompression.

And thankfully so I had to unzip a 45GB 7zip file of Kali linux for the IT security course i'm doing last night. It was pretty quick.

 

[Abwx]

Recent Ryzen chips always excelled at zip decompression.

That date back from the FX8350, for some reason AMD CPUs were quite better at decompression than Intel chips.

AMD's FX-8350 processor reviewed

AMD has been going through some difficult times lately, with management changes, layoffs, and a steady drip of talent drain, as a host of familiar faces have fled for greener...

techreport.com

 

[IntelUser2000]

AT has a review, and so does NBC on the MSI Raider. Battery life is pretty bad, perhaps unsurprisingly with 110 W PL1 12900HK and a 175 W 3080 Ti.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/MSI-GE76-Raider-Laptop-Review-With-Alder-Lake-and-RTX-3080-Ti-to-gaming-heaven.595391.0.html

Regression in NBC's review isn't too bad. It goes from 328 minutes in the 11th gen GE76 to 306 minutes. Although both are a regression from Cometlake at 375 minutes.

We will see how the U and P does but it does show why Intel didn't say anything about battery life. Like I said Tigerlake doesn't improve things over Ice or Cometlake.

-H could have been better with the on package PCH but it didn't materialize. We will see if that's unique with this laptop.

 

[Mopetar]

7-zip decompression test is a weird anomaly. Why is 5900HX so great at that? And so bad at compression? Perplexing.

7-zip is mainly an integer-based workload and Zen has usually done well in that area. I think a big part of that just comes down to the wider design and being able to execute more of those per clock cycle.

The large L3 cache probably helps out a lot as well. If I'm recalling correctly, the original Zen and Zen+ CPUs weren't as good and that may have been due to the smaller and split cache layout.

 

[ondma]

Understatement. Intel should be ashamed of itself for producing such a laptop cpu.

And is anyone really going to use a high end gaming laptop for any extended time on battery? I dont really think Intel should be "ashamed" of building such a cpu. I one doesnt want such a power hungry cpu, they can certainly buy a different model. I guess in you mind choice is not a good thing?

 

[igor_kavinski]

If 6900HX improves on performance without sacrificing power efficiency, Intel's "victories" here would be short-lived.

 

[uzzi38]

And is anyone really going to use a high end gaming laptop for any extended time on battery? I dont really think Intel should be "ashamed" of building such a cpu. I one doesnt want such a power hungry cpu, they can certainly buy a different model. I guess in you mind choice is not a good thing?

This same chip will also be used in thin and light laptops too, in case you forgot. This is sending out bad signals for what's to come for that segment, especially considering that ADL-P will be compared to TGL-U and TGL-H35, both of which already had the chipset on package.

 

[uzzi38]

If 6900HX improves on performance without sacrificing power efficiency, Intel's "victories" here would be short-lived.

Sacrificing? It's the same CPU core and refined everything else. Of course power efficiency isn't being sacrificed lmao. The question has always been: how much does it improve, not does it improve

 

[eek2121]

And is anyone really going to use a high end gaming laptop for any extended time on battery? I dont really think Intel should be "ashamed" of building such a cpu. I one doesnt want such a power hungry cpu, they can certainly buy a different model. I guess in you mind choice is not a good thing?

Not that one, no. I have a gaming laptop I use to play games plugged in, and use for other work when unplugged. It has good battery life.

If 6900HX improves on performance without sacrificing power efficiency, Intel's "victories" here would be short-lived.

The 6900HX will IMPROVE power efficiency, not sacrifice it.

Sacrificing? It's the same CPU core and refined everything else. Of course power efficiency isn't being sacrificed lmao. The question has always been: how much does it improve, not does it improve

It's a refined CPU core. Mostly the same, but changes have been made. It is on a new process, for starters.