MSI has just confirmed Intel Alder Lake CPU launch date (November 4th)

[Lightwreather]

Would this be considered a trusted news site?

Summary

According to the MSI LGA1700 upgrade kit promo, Intel’s 12th Gen Core launch date is November 4th.

 

Quotes

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MSI today announced a free upgrade kit for Intel LGA1700 CPUs and their Coreliquid CPU coolers. The press release did not mention any dates, but the form, which must be used to apply for a free upgrade kit, will only be available on November 4th, which made us curious why. We have quickly reached out to our sources who confirmed that Intel Alder Lake-S will be available on November 4th. This date is attached to the sales and review embargo.

Usman Pirzada (Wccftech) adds that preorders will go live a week sooner right after the Intel Innovation event. Intel Alder Lake-S embargoes are then as follows:

• October 27th: Announcement and preorders
• November 4th: Sales and reviews (product launch)

t is worth noting that this date is attached to CPU embargoes, we are not aware when compatible motherboards will go on sale. However, it is very likely that they will either already be available or the same date applies to Z690 motherboards as well.

 

My thoughts

 Now, this is interesting. It should be noted that this is still very much just speculation, and should be taken with a grain of salt. November 4th is a bit sooner than previously rumored November 19th, which might have been the previous date. Either Intel decided to launch Alder Lake CPUs sooner or the originally rumored date was incorrect or this is incorrect. but either way, we'll have to wait for another month and see. This year is shaping up to be pretty interesting for the tech space, barring ofc, the shortages.

Sources

Videocardz.com

[Moonzy]

nice, gonna wait for the reviews to see if im going for it

[porina]

This puts it around the mid range of what I consider reasonable launch windows. Early Oct could sync with Win11. Late Nov would be interrupted by US thanksgiving. 

 

The tech in me wants to personally bench one as it is the most radical thing in desktop x86 space for a long time. The sensible part says I have too many systems, and they're not selling easily.

 

 

Can we also assume AMD will finally "launch" their high cache Zen 3 desktop CPUs around then too?

[chrome_wheels]

I read the reviews for the new Intel CPU's. If their all going to be true then Intel will be competing with AMD. Time will show.

[Stahlmann]

It'll be really interesting to see how the first non-Skylake CPU will perform. This should finally give a notable generational improvement.

 

The next few years should be really interesting with 2 entities fighting for the crown.

[Lightwreather]

34 minutes ago, chrome_wheels said:

reviews

I would like to correct you on this....

so far, it has been just rumours iirc.

But correct me If I'm wrong

[Vanderburg]

Title: “…confirmed…”

Post: “…just speculation…”

[Lightwreather]

2 minutes ago, Vanderburg said:

Title: “…confirmed…”

Post: “…just speculation…”

Yup, that's irony....

But seriously, according to the main article it IS confirmed according to their sources

but I'd still consider it speculation nonetheless since no official word has come out

[Tan3l6]

But when is DDR5 price becoming reasonable.

I mean on launch it might not be.  As most DRAM generations have had quite high prices at launch and DDR4 prices are hovering. 
But no point building DDR4 Alder Lake system if possible..

[Taf the Ghost]

13 minutes ago, Tan3l6 said:

But when is DDR5 price becoming reasonable.

I mean on launch it might not be.  As most DRAM generations have had quite high prices at launch and DDR4 prices are hovering. 
But no point building DDR4 Alder Lake system if possible..

Not for a while and DDR5 likely won't be much of a performance upgrade for a while, except in edge case stuff. You'll see an advantage if you do something like load up all of the AVX512 units. (Though it'll still be bandwidth starved, lol)

[Lightwreather]

1 minute ago, Taf the Ghost said:

if you do something like load up all of the AVX512 units

Wasn't intel removing AVX512 from ADL?

[porina]

4 hours ago, Stahlmann said:

It'll be really interesting to see how the first non-Skylake CPU will perform.

We already know. The first Intel consumer architecture beyond Skylake was Ice Lake in 2019 with a then claimed average 18% IPC increase over Skylake. If you narrow it down to desktop, that's Rocket Lake. Rocket Lake is about 19% higher IPC in Cinebench R23 than Comet Lake, which is the last Skylake architecture CPU.

 

If you want to see ADL as moving on for Intel, you could say it is Intel's first beyond 14nm desktop CPU.

 

14 minutes ago, Tan3l6 said:

But when is DDR5 price becoming reasonable.

Define reasonable. If you mean, as cheap as DDR4 per capacity ignoring speed, it might be far off or never. If you compare like for like speeds, it might be a lot more interesting. DDR4 only runs at higher speeds in the form of highly binned overclocked modules. This will be a baseline speed for DDR5 that any system can run at.

 

2 minutes ago, J-from-Nucleon said:

Wasn't intel removing AVX512 from ADL?

It is disabled on consumer ADL at least, but believed to remain in future server equivalent.

 

I saw what was claimed to be a screenshot of a benchmark review of ADL that has since been taken down. The claim in that was that AVX2 performance in ADL was significantly increased, which helps offset the loss of AVX-512. Time will tell if that is indeed the case. In my personal testing with Prime95 like workloads, which love AVX, RKL was ~40% better IPC than CML. RKL doesn't actually have more FP execution resource than CML, unlike SKX which doubled it (for around 80% IPC increase to SKL). That perf boost must come from optimisations elsewhere in the pipeline other than direct execution. 

[Taf the Ghost]

18 minutes ago, J-from-Nucleon said:

Wasn't intel removing AVX512 from ADL?

Pretty sure they'll still be there for the Big Cores. They won't be the larger units we see on Server parts, but they should be there. Intel wants to add AVX512 as a standard-ish going forward.

[Tan3l6]

19 minutes ago, porina said:

Define reasonable.

Spoiler

 

Depends when. As it has to compared retrospectively, though to its own price.

At launch the prices are always a bit high, though compared to previous generation, especially considering much higher performance it yields the "next gen" RAM has been good.

In these times it's difficult to predict how quickly prices stabilize.

 

 

TL:DR - i don't know.

[LAwLz]

6 minutes ago, Taf the Ghost said:

Pretty sure they'll still be there for the Big Cores. They won't be the larger units we see on Server parts, but they should be there. Intel wants to add AVX512 as a standard-ish going forward.

Sadly, AVX-512 is not supported on Alder Lake.

It's physically there on the die, but it is disabled because the Windows scheduler is not prepared to handle cores having different ISA support. They thought it was a better idea to just flat out disable AVX-512 than to run the risk of some AVX-512 instruction being sent to the E-core and crashing the system.

[NinJake]

52 minutes ago, comander said:

I want one. 

I'm not going to buy one, but I want one. I could buy one. I could buy 5.

I still haven't found anything that my 3900x isn't overkill for based on my performance needs and desires. 

I'm close to the same boat as you... except I'm still rocking the 6700k. The urge to build a new rig is getting stronger each and every day. My main question is do I go AMD or Intel this time around... Or just whatever I can get my hands on really. (looking at you, newegg shuffle...)

[Taf the Ghost]

9 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Sadly, AVX-512 is not supported on Alder Lake.

It's physically there on the die, but it is disabled because the Windows scheduler is not prepared to handle cores having different ISA support. They thought it was a better idea to just flat out disable AVX-512 than to run the risk of some AVX-512 instruction being sent to the E-core and crashing the system.

Been really busy lately, so I'd missed that tidbit. The units were always going to be there, since they'll be in all designs going forward, but this'll do a good job of murdering the adoption of it for code usage outside of Servers.

 

Still, we're only a few weeks for the run of hilarious issues with the Windows Scheduler and Alder Lake processors.  I can already feel Adobe products imploding from here. (This won't be an Intel issue but a Microsoft one. But it'll still be funny for a few months.)

[Lightwreather]

42 minutes ago, NinJake said:

I'm close to the same boat as you... except I'm still rocking the 6700k. The urge to build a new rig is getting stronger each and every day.

Look like we're practically in the same boat then

[tim0901]

6 hours ago, porina said:

Can we also assume AMD will finally "launch" their high cache Zen 3 desktop CPUs around then too?

I think the high-cache Zen 3 update isn't expected until early 2022.

[WolframaticAlpha]

7 hours ago, Stahlmann said:

It'll be really interesting to see how the first non-Skylake CPU will perform. This should finally give a notable generational improvement.

 

The next few years should be really interesting with 2 entities fighting for the crown.

More than 2. x86 is not the only kid in the town.

 

 

We are in exciting times.

[WolframaticAlpha]

2 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Sadly, AVX-512 is not supported on Alder Lake.

It's physically there on the die, but it is disabled because the Windows scheduler is not prepared to handle cores having different ISA support. They thought it was a better idea to just flat out disable AVX-512 than to run the risk of some AVX-512 instruction being sent to the E-core and crashing the system.

I am not that shocked by AVX 512. It was niche, and in the consumer market, for the uses AVX 512 targeted, cuda and it's toolkits is and will be much more prevalent than Intel's oneAPI and it's associated toolkits.

 

Not saying that AVX512 was bad, but I can see why they sacrificed it.

[leadeater]

3 hours ago, Taf the Ghost said:

Pretty sure they'll still be there for the Big Cores. They won't be the larger units we see on Server parts, but they should be there. Intel wants to add AVX512 as a standard-ish going forward.

AVX-512 is in the Golden Cove cores correct but they are disabled in the microcode of desktop Alder lake. The reason for this is the Gracemont cores do not feature AVX-512 so this would introduce extreme difficulty in thread scheduling and placement as you'd have to introduce instruction checking for everything so you don't try and place an AVX-512 workload on a Gracemont core and then hard crash out the process at the OS layer.

 

Having to do this would impact everything, not just AVX-512, and increase pipeline latency so Intel chose to outright disable AVX-512 support on desktop Alder Lake.

 

Intel has put on hold AVX-512 in the consumer market, at least until next generation Gracemont features AVX-512 capable FP units.

[MultiGamerClub]

Something that can make AMD look even smaller than it already is? Oh why not.

 

Maybe the LGA1200 becomes cheaper and i switch to I9-11900K in my lifetime.

[leadeater]

3 hours ago, porina said:

I saw what was claimed to be a screenshot of a benchmark review of ADL that has since been taken down. The claim in that was that AVX2 performance in ADL was significantly increased, which helps offset the loss of AVX-512. Time will tell if that is indeed the case. In my personal testing with Prime95 like workloads, which love AVX, RKL was ~40% better IPC than CML. RKL doesn't actually have more FP execution resource than CML, unlike SKX which doubled it (for around 80% IPC increase to SKL). That perf boost must come from optimisations elsewhere in the pipeline other than direct execution. 

 

It's quite possible similar performance increases are coming in Golden Cove as well:

 

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Although the cache itself is unchanged, Golden Cove can now fetch 32 bytes each cycle, doubling the fetch bandwidth versus all prior cores (I believe all the way back to the original P6). The higher bandwidth was necessitated by the largest change in the code – the decoders. Golden Cove is now 50% wider than all previous cores, adding 2 additional decoders for a total of six.

To complement that higher fetch and decode bandwidth from the MITE path, the DSB path was also enlarged. Intel nearly doubled the micro-op cache to 4K and increased the delivery bandwidth by a third – from 6 μOPs/cycle to 8 μOPs/cycle.

Some very important changes here, biggest change to x86 decoding in decades.

 

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The back end of Golden Cove was enhanced alongside the front end. As with the fetch bandwidth and decode bandwidth, the allocation stage on Golden Cove was also widened to a 6-wide allocation. Intel also added two new execution ports to the scheduler for a total of 12 ports.

Note: 5-wide in Sunny Cove (Rocket Lake on desktop) and 4-wide on "Skylake" and it's derivatives

 

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On the floating-point side, Intel added new fast adders (FADD) on ports 1 and 5. The new FADDs have 3-cycle latency with a 2-cycle latency bypass for back-to-back FP add operations. Intel says that previously, those operations were 4 cycle when executed on port 0 and 1 and 6 cycle when executed on port 5.

 

Quote

On the memory subsystem side of Golden Cove, Intel added a new Port 11 with a third load AGU. Golden Cove now supports up to 3 loads per cycle and up to 3 256b loads/cycle while maintaining the previous 2x512b loads for 512b operations.

So for Sunny Cove and previous these supports 2 loads per cycle for 256b (AVX2)

 

https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/6111/intel-details-golden-cove-next-generation-big-core-for-client-and-server-socs/

 

With all the changes above, plus others, this is why Intel is claiming that some workloads get 60% performance increase over 11th Gen (So I assume Sunny Cove/Rocket Lake).

 

 

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Testing as of May 28, 2021.

 

Intel® Core™ i9-11900k, 4x16GB 1R DDR4 UDIMM 2DPC 3200 Max Memory Frequency, Samsung 980 Pro 500GB PCIe SSD, WIN 10 20H2 19042.ent.rx64.789, High Performance Power Plan, 1920x1080 display resolution

 

Alder Lake Desktop S801 , RVP board with 2x16GB 1R DDR5 UDIMM 1DPC, 4400 Max Memory Frequency, Samsung 980 Pro 500GB PCIe SSD, WIN 10 20H2 19042.ent.rx64.508_update.906, High Performance Power Plan, 1920x1080 display resolution

 

Based on overall scores and individual subcomponent scores on: SYSmark 25, CrossMark, PCMark 10, SPEC CPU 2017, WebXPRT 3, Geekbench 5

https://edc.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/performance/benchmarks/architecture-day-2021/

[leadeater]

29 minutes ago, MultiGamerClub said:

Maybe the LGA1200 becomes cheaper and i switch to I9-11900K in my lifetime.

Why would you switch to an 11900K when it's more likely the 10900K is actually faster for you, never mind that Ryzen 5000 is faster than both as well. Regardless if you play games and that's what you really care about then you don't want an 11900K since you can do better and for less money.

 

If you want to stick to Intel and are going to choose something that isn't current generation when Alder Lake is out then your best pick is a 10700K with MCE enabled and remove turbo time and power limits (which all of these is probably motherboard default anyway on Z series).