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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: 2) by Marand on Friday November 05 2021, @09:30PM
The real mistake with Bulldozer was the "cores" were integer cores with shared floating point units, so an "8 core" bulldozer only had 4 FPUs shared between core pairs. Both companies had their own idea for how to "fake" extra cores: Intel did SMT with "hyperthreading", while AMD tried a hybrid approach with more "real cores" that were only real for certain kinds of workloads. CPUs get designed years in advance and AMD made a bad prediction, apparently expecting integer performance to be king, when that didn't happen at all.
I think JavaScript may be partly to blame there since it doesn't have a real integer type. Bulldozer was being designed pre-Web2.0 when JS was a curiosity that just added minor features to websites, but was released into a world there JS-heavy sites were quickly becoming the norm and writing "native applications" with Electron quickly (and unfortunately) became popular. That put an unexpectedly high emphasis on floating point even in workloads that weren't as reliant on FP performance.
AMD gambled and lost, and nearly went out of business from it. With Ryzen they abandoned the failed experiment, adopted SMT like Intel did, and made other improvements, and it saved them.