Reddit user allegedly gets hands on Intel i9 12900K

[leadeater]

 

lol what? Very interesting 

[StDragon]

4 hours ago, leadeater said:

 

lol what? Very interesting 

You could say he got 'screwed'.

[leadeater]

26 minutes ago, StDragon said:

You could say he got 'screwed'.

He might need to torque to a counselor

[Fnige]

On 10/25/2021 at 1:35 AM, leadeater said:

He might need to torque to a counselor

and get threadapy?

[CTR640]

On 10/22/2021 at 10:13 AM, Master Disaster said:

 

The dumb thing is bragging about it on the internet, someone will recognise him, track down his IRL details and he'll end up getting in deep dodo. Retailers who preorder stuff for a street date and generally under a contract to not sell them until that date and yes, its kind of an unwritten rule that some employees get early access for testing and reviewing but those employees usually don't take to reddit to brag about it.

What I would do:

 

have the cpu in my hands weeks//months before the actual official release date. Take the cpu with me somewhere else that no friend and family will recognize where the photos are taken and who got it. Then make benchmarks (if possible of course) or brag hardcore about it under a totally unknown name. Use a cheap smartphone and use public wifi to publish the photos on known websites like reddit and wait for them to go viral. Delete everything from the smartphone, destroy it to pieces and burn it to ashes. Go back home, wait a few days or even hours and watch yourself die from laughing reading all the comments from people who lost their shit.

[WolframaticAlpha]

This might be interesting:

 

The power draw is meh, but kind of too be expected from 10-16 core CPUs. This might be a good kick for AMD(prices fixed since Zen 3 launch). The multicore will be interesting.

[Rauten]

We need to wait for independent reviewers to not just get their hands on them, but also to test them using DDR4 because right now, we just have no idea how much of an impact DDR5 has on performance of various tasks; and you can bet your collective asses Intel has been showing performance using DDR5.
Guesses, yeah, but no actual hard, cold data (AFAIK, please slap me towards wisdom otherwise).

 

Which I guess is a really cool thing about Alder Lake, being DDR4 and DDR5 compatible, will give us a somewhat realistic view into what the performance difference between the two will actually be.

[porina]

3 minutes ago, Rauten said:

you can bet your collective asses Intel has been showing performance using DDR5.

Is it really a surprise to show performance of what will be the standard ram configuration? About the only reason I see for running DDR4 on Alder Lake is if you're a cheap OEM wanting to shave cost.

 

3 minutes ago, Rauten said:

Which I guess is a really cool thing about Alder Lake, being DDR4 and DDR5 compatible, will give us a somewhat realistic view into what the performance difference between the two will actually be.

IMO I don't think there'll be anything shocking, but of course would want that confirmation. Right now you can already overclock top end DDR4 to comparable speeds, adjust the latencies a bit, and you're going to be pretty close. At the end of the day you could simplify ram related performance into two dimensions: latency and bandwidth. Not exact, due to differences in channel width and other transfer mechanics, but we're really digging into detail there.

 

Oh, have a free prediction from me: Cinebench will be practically zero difference from the ram  The more interesting differences will be in workloads that actually stress ram.

[Rauten]

2 minutes ago, porina said:

Is it really a surprise to show performance of what will be the standard ram configuration? About the only reason I see for running DDR4 on Alder Lake is if you're a cheap OEM wanting to shave cost.

Well, no.

But it's also not a surprise that they're marketing themselves as being "THIS MUCH BETTER THAN OUR COMPETITORS WOOOH OU YEAH" when in reality their advantage might not be as impressive.

Not saying this is an Intel thing, though, this is a global "I hate marketing PR" thing.

 

Back to you, Steve.

[porina]

3 minutes ago, Rauten said:

But it's also not a surprise that they're marketing themselves as being "THIS MUCH BETTER THAN OUR COMPETITORS WOOOH OU YEAH" when in reality their advantage might not be as impressive.

Decide what you are comparing here. The end product will be best used with DDR5, and I'd expect it to be in most situations. If you're looking at a microarchitecture comparison, then fair enough you want to take out platform considerations. To do so in the past I would underclock and reduce core count, so that in effect the ram limitations don't choke the core operations. Alternatively there's always Cinebench. It has been seen even through to latest versions it is close to ideal scaling with CPU cores and clocks, with hardly any impact from ram settings. 

[WolframaticAlpha]

@Seby9123Z690 | Newegg.com

[Helpful Tech Witch]

5 hours ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

This might be interesting:

-snip-

 

The power draw is meh, but kind of too be expected from 10-16 core CPUs. This might be a good kick for AMD(prices fixed since Zen 3 launch). The multicore will be interesting.

Yeah, didnt mention benchmarks were done on W11

So I woulnt trust any of these numbers, not even for ballpark.

If they also cherrypicked, this diffrences in real world performance from these numbes could be large.

Say amd cpus lost 10% from W11 bugs and then the cherrypicking takes resaults 5% lower than average for amd and 5% higher for intel, thats a 20% preformance change.....

[leadeater]

2 hours ago, porina said:

Decide what you are comparing here. The end product will be best used with DDR5, and I'd expect it to be in most situations. If you're looking at a microarchitecture comparison, then fair enough you want to take out platform considerations. To do so in the past I would underclock and reduce core count, so that in effect the ram limitations don't choke the core operations.

I'm not sure I would say that is valid though, if the archecture has been optimized for how DDR5 works (because it's very different) then comparing with DDR4 may not show some of the archecture improvements. DDR5 has subchannels or just more channels, doesn't matter other than each DIMM is now 2 32bit rather than single 64bit and there is also double the number of bank groups and this all means the CPU can more often receive data and do things with it which does mean you have to make archecture improvements to make best use of that change.

 

So even though still flawed you'd have to test DDR4 vs DDR5 at the same effective bandwidth and latency, which may be impossible to have both.

[porina]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

So even though still flawed you'd have to test DDR4 vs DDR5 at the same effective bandwidth and latency, which may be impossible to have both.

I'm losing the direction of the discussion here. My reply was on the question about how much product level performance increases may be driven by the new ram coming in, and I proposed methods to defeature the ram from the performance equation. Your reply to that, seems to swing back to how DDR5 may behave differently to DDR4? Which I certainly agree there are differences we don't understand the impact of yet.

 

I suppose what we might need is something like CrystalDiskMark but for ram. "Sequential" would be like a peak transfer best case. Then we can come up with different types of "random" workload and that could show up latency effects more.

 

As for closest possible DDR4 vs DDR5 comparisons, I'm going through the just released info now but not read it in depth yet. Skimming it, it looks like even the DDR5 4800 initial rating is a best case, with 4400 actually being the official supported max for 4 slot mobos, and that drops further if you fill all 4 slots, especially with 2R modules. These kinds of speeds are well within the capability of high end DDR4, and the DDR4 timings can be relaxed to better match DDR5's. There will be enough overlap for someone to do some testing in that area.

 

I haven't decided yet if I'll get an Alder Lake system for testing. The tech in me say, get it. The sensible part of me says, I don't need another system, and I don't need to upgrade another system.

[leadeater]

2 hours ago, porina said:

I'm losing the direction of the discussion here. My reply was on the question about how much product level performance increases may be driven by the new ram coming in, and I proposed methods to defeature the ram from the performance equation. Your reply to that, seems to swing back to how DDR5 may behave differently to DDR4? Which I certainly agree there are differences we don't understand the impact of yet.

I'm just concerned that with an effort to try and eliminate DDR5 gains to purely look at the CPU cores only that it may give incorrect or incomplete overall architecture gains. I don't actually think it's fair to say that some of Intel's gains "are due to DDR5" without a good way to both prove that and also factor that in to any testing.

 

That's why I say such an effort would only work at as close to identical bandwidth and latency then you could compare if DDR5 is giving performance gains or not, namely how much percentage of gain in applications or games is due to DDR5.

 

We already have DDR4 that has higher bandwidth and lower latency than current DDR5 anyway and people actually use this so technically release day reviews will be performed on systems with regressions in both total bandwidth and latency. It's not the DDR4 ram used in basically any review benchmarks though.

[porina]

3 minutes ago, leadeater said:

I'm just concerned that with an effort to try and eliminate DDR5 gains to purely look at the CPU cores only that it may give incorrect or incomplete overall architecture gains.

I think architecture understanding is one key part towards overall understanding. Not all tasks will be impacted by ram performance. Many compute tasks can operate largely out of on-CPU cache, so they're more or less core bound. Maybe cache performance could then be another layer to poke into, but for my interests the two extremes of CPU perf and ram perf give a good enough picture.

 

 

3 minutes ago, leadeater said:

That's why I say such an effort would only work at as close to identical bandwidth and latency then you could compare if DDR5 is giving performance gains or not, namely how much percentage of gain in applications or games is due to DDR5.

So take out the rated speed/latency consideration, and see if the new arrangement of DDR helps out (or hinders?) relative to DDR4? Directly or indirectly, I think that will be tested.

 

That is different from my reading of the other question I responded to, which seemed to be suggesting that, on average DDR5 systems may well operate with "faster" ram than an average DDR4 system, and that is responsible for at least part of Alder Lake's uplift in performance.

 

 

 

In other news, I see pre-orders have gone up at one of my favoured suppliers. Pricing is higher than I hoped for both CPU and mobo, so I think I'm out of getting my own system to test. There isn't ram pricing that I can see yet, but they're 2x16GB kits and I don't really need that capacity for a test system. On the positive side I can order a Noctua mount kit for lga1700 so I don't need to buy another cooler. The total cost is more than I want to throw on a bench system right now. If I get one at all, I'll have to wait until lower models in the range exist, if Intel don't end up copying Zen 3 strategy and what we see is what we get.

[GDRRiley]

On 10/22/2021 at 1:18 AM, Master Disaster said:

Pro tip: Never believe anything you hear about a product until its in the hands of independent reviewers. Manufacturers have a habit of cherrypicking the good numbers and totally omitting the rest.

testing was on early windows 11 which AMD loss 10-15% performance on.

 

at least intels finally admitting turbo can be over 250W

[Falkentyne]

People trying to run ADL with DDR4 are going to run into the same drawbacks as Rocket Lake (10nm backport to 14nm) had with regards to CML cross compatibility and RKL's structure actually designed for dual memory controllers.

 

People ripped into RKL hard when it came out, not understanding that sacrifices had to be made for how it was designed, and RKL is still the MOST stable platform I've ever used.  ZERO random WHEA's, ZERO parity errors, ZERO L0 Cache errors.  ZERO.  If you're unstable you just hard lock or BSOD (or an application crashes with an internal error).

 

Now those same people want to run ADL on DDR4, thinking "Gear 1" will save them with latency.  Yikes... Complete utter Yikes...

[porina]

10 minutes ago, GDRRiley said:

at least intels finally admitting turbo can be over 250W

Picking at a detail perhaps, the stated "Max Turbo Power" for the top model is 241W. Having said that, it is unclear to me how they define that. Is this the maximum power the CPU can take under non-overclocked conditions, or is it an enforced limit and it could exceed that if unconstrained (without overclocking)?

[ARC1T3CT]

10 hours ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

This might be interesting:

 

The power draw is meh, but kind of too be expected from 10-16 core CPUs. This might be a good kick for AMD(prices fixed since Zen 3 launch). The multicore will be interesting.

 

 

 

[leadeater]

48 minutes ago, porina said:

So take out the rated speed/latency consideration, and see if the new arrangement of DDR helps out (or hinders?) relative to DDR4? Directly or indirectly, I think that will be tested.

My comments were more around what @Rautenwas saying and pointing that Intel's performance numbers being with DDR5 and "not knowing what gains were due to DDR5". Basically that's drawing on the assumption that DDR5 has higher bandwidth so gains may be from that, hence the test with DDR4 as well comment to try and show it.

 

It's just that DDR5 changes so much in the way it works such an endeavor is fraught with problems itself that one could end up "proving it's due to DDR5" when really it's a combination of both since Intel could have made archecturual changes on the basis of these changes in how DDR5 works.

 

For example Golden Cove can do 3x 256b (96 bytes) or 2x 512b (128 bytes) loads per cycle, DDR5 burst data per 32bit channel is 64 bytes so 128 bytes total where as DDR4 burst data for the single 64bit channel is 64 bytes. I don't think it's coincidence that these data sizes align like they do. So while in theory DDR5 latency is higher (for now) than good DDR4 it's the actual access latency as the memory systems in Golden Cove pull data in could be better aligned on a per cycle basis so there is less wasted cycles waiting for data to populate.

 

However the above should only matter, I believe, when you are stressing the memory and caches with such a workload that actual memory access becomes directly part of the workload performance.

[Mark Kaine]

So, how did it went? He drop it?

[MultiGamerClub]

On 10/27/2021 at 6:32 PM, WolframaticAlpha said:

@Seby9123Z690 | Newegg.com

That was quick..