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Intel's Alder Lake big.LITTLE CPU design, tested: It's a barn burner:
After spending several days with Intel's newest consumer CPU designs, we have some surprising news: they're faster than AMD's latest Ryzens on both single-threaded and most multithreaded benchmarks.
We suspect this will be especially surprising to some, since Intel's newest desktop CPUs feature a hybrid "big.little[sic]" design similar to those found in ARM CPUs. AMD's flagship Ryzen 9 5950x is a traditional 16 core, 32 thread design, with all cores being "big" high-performance types with symmetric multithreading (SMT, also known as "hyperthreading"). By contrast, the i9-12900K offers 16 cores and only 24 threads—with eight "performance" cores featuring SMT and eight lower-performance "efficiency" cores with no SMT.
As pointed out in the Ars Technica comments, the Cinebench multi-threaded benchmark saw Intel's best CPU with a less than 2.5% lead, but the caption reads "Intel trounces AMD". While the Passmark multi-threaded benchmark saw AMD's best CPU with a more than 18% lead, but the caption reads "outperform i9-12900k-but even here, by a much, much, lower margin than we're accustomed to seeing".
Also at Phoronix, AnandTech, and Tom's Hardware.
See also: More Linux Performance Benchmark Data For Alder Lake, Comparison Data Points
Intel UHD Graphics 770 / Alder Lake GT1 Linux Graphics Performance
Previously: Intel Alder Lake CPUs Launch November 4th, with Up to 8 Big and 8 Small Cores
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Thursday November 04 2021, @09:51PM (6 children)
https://www.anandtech.com/show/17047/the-intel-12th-gen-core-i912900k-review-hybrid-performance-brings-hybrid-complexity/4 [anandtech.com]
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/WmT6RhAp5h7bEgZ6qHKSuV-970-80.png.webp [futurecdn.net]
https://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/core_i9_12900k_review,5.html [guru3d.com]
Idle power is reasonable for what it is, around 76-78 Watts with an RTX 3090 (according to Guru3D, and the chart could be misleading). Pulling out the discrete GPU should lower that. Zen 3 is clearly more efficient overall, although I'm not sure about a comparison of Zen 3 vs. Alder Lake small cores only (in FLOPS/Watt).
12600K uses about 100 Watts less than the 12900K under load. Intel is now reporting base clock and turbo TDP separately. 12600K has a turbo TDP of 150W, vs. 241W for the 12900K.
I think more could be done about idle power, but maybe you don't need a desktop CPU. A mini PC with Alder Lake mobile or Cezanne/Van Gogh/Rembrandt will use less power. $400 Steam Deck = Van Gogh quad-core.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday November 04 2021, @10:18PM (5 children)
See, 15 years ago 100W was "reasonable for what it is" and they're still shoveling the same excrement in the name of "but it's a desktop performance chip!!!"
A mobile chip can handle 90% of most people's desktop workloads - when they're not running Crysis and similar, for the prices charged for these chips I would think that they could manage to bring "idle at the desktop" power draw down below 20W easily - 5W if they tried a little bit and maybe coordinated with Microsoft / Linux kernel developers. 250W TDP? Awesome, go for it, but 40% of TDP draw while doing little or nothing? Lame.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 4, Interesting) by istartedi on Thursday November 04 2021, @10:35PM (2 children)
Seriously. What am I doing now? Scrolling through the stories? Once you've rendered a web page, you could literally offload that on to the monitor and put the CPU totally to sleep. How much of that "idle" power usage is (on Windows) background processes, updaters, services and absolute crap that has no good reason to be running other than "that's how it's done"?
The cable modem is worse though. It's always concerned me. I'm doing nothing on the network and the thing is a nice little heater. It's sitting there looking at all the broadcast traffic, DHCP requests, and stuff from other machines. My PC is asleep. I haven't scheduled anything overnight. I don't want some updater I don't control using the network. There's no soft fix though, no way to tell the modem to sleep when the PC sleeps. I just have to make sure to un-plug the modem every night to avoid all that pointless power consumption.
Climate summit? Fix the crappy hardware. Sheesh!
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Friday November 05 2021, @01:55AM (1 child)
Lowest effort way to make that happen is to pull the plug. I customize Ubuntu for our product, in seventeen easy steps you too can turn off all automatic updating in Ubuntu. I thought I had it in 16 steps until, three weeks into testing, suddenly our video capture performance went to hell - dig in to "top" and what do I find? Automatic update still trying to do it's thing.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 05 2021, @02:00PM
Linux programmers copied shitty Microsoft. Much of what I liked about Unix (and its sloppy re-implemention, Linux) is effective gone now. Guess I should look at a BSD flavor.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday November 13 2021, @03:04PM (1 child)
Intel Raptor Lake’s Digital Linear Voltage Regulator (DLVR) could reduce CPU power up to 25% [videocardz.com]
You could look at this one of two ways. Improvements will be made or the current CPU is broken.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday November 13 2021, @06:29PM
Yeah, I believe if we look back over time, the current CPU is broken and this "progress" isn't even regaining the levels of power efficiency that were common 10-12 years ago.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end