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Intel's Alder Lake big.LITTLE CPU Design, Tested: It's a Barn Burner

posted by martyb on Thursday November 04 2021, @08:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the hot-and-toasty dept.

Freeman writes:

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

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday November 05 2021, @03:54AM (2 children)

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Friday November 05 2021, @03:54AM (#1193579) Journal

    However, you still haven't countered my original claim that intel compilers optimize for intel chips, and do nothing to enhance AMD performance.

    I'm not sure why that would be a surprise, if it is true. What compiler does Folding@home use?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 05 2021, @04:55AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 05 2021, @04:55AM (#1193591)

    Folding@Home is commercial software. They probably disable signatures and strip everything not absolutely necessary out of the binary. Or maybe not because they don't really care what they are paid to put on your machine. If they didn't and you really cared, might be able to FLIRT the executable or disassemble it and figure it out yourself.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 05 2021, @07:21AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 05 2021, @07:21AM (#1193626)

      Oops. That last sentence should start with "If they did and..." because FLIRT or disassembly is only really necessary if the executable doesn't identify its compiler.