Intel 12th Gen Core Alder Lake for Desktops: Top SKUs Only, Coming November 4th +Z690 Chipset

[Mark Kaine]

3 hours ago, MageTank said:

Are you referring to the issue that was addressed with AMD's chipset driver?

Yeah, so its fixed? I didn't expect this to be done so fast tbh - I was expecting... years.

[leadeater]

 

Come on where are the reviews!.... Oh wait NZ, argh..... lol

[Alder Lake]

On 10/27/2021 at 4:28 PM, suicidalfranco said:

but why e cores on desktop cpus

2 main reasons

1. Money

more cores/more ghs = more better in most people's minds, so increasing those two numbers truly grabs people's attention, and intel is a company made for profit, so they will take advantage of that, as most people don't know about ipc

 

2. Actual usage

background tasks currently take up 1-5% of your CPU, which leads to a 1-5% loss in performance, windows 11 automatically pairs the e cores with the background tasks, meaning that your pc not only is more power-efficient, but it could also perform better, as it would generate less heat, allowing you to clock your CPU up to higher speeds

 

overall, it's a pretty good idea, mostly thanks to windows 11 taking advantage of e cores

[suicidalfranco]

2 hours ago, yesyes said:

1. Money

more cores/more ghs = more better in most people's minds, so increasing those two numbers truly grabs people's attention, and intel is a company made for profit, so they will take advantage of that, as most people don't know about ipc

but its not true and doesn't net better performance

2 hours ago, yesyes said:

2. Actual usage

background tasks currently take up 1-5% of your CPU, which leads to a 1-5% loss in performance, windows 11 automatically pairs the e cores with the background tasks, meaning that your pc not only is more power-efficient, but it could also perform better, as it would generate less heat, allowing you to clock your CPU up to higher speeds

literally linus made a test regarding the impact of background tasks in the most extreme of possible scenarios, only got 3% more cpu usage. the biggest impact was on ram usage

 

 

[RejZoR]

People still care about RAM usage? You people do realize ideal condition would be when RAM is always 100% utilized? Instead of sitting at 20% the entire time literally doing nothing. I actually haven't cared about RAM for years, somewhere since I still had Windows Vista. I believe I had 4GB RAM initially and then bought another 4GB stick. At 8GB back then I just didn't care. Then I had 12GB initially on X58 and upgraded to 18GB later on. Then I had 32GB on X99 from beginning to end and now on X570 platform I have 32GB and I'll have it till end I believe. It's not really necessity as much as RAM is so cheap for so long that there really is no reason to skimp on it.

 

Also no point in buying stupid expensive one with ridiculous speeds either. Good example was X99 platform. You could stick 4000MHz sticks in it. Or just have 2666MHz ones and it would often perform even better. Same with X570, no point in using 5000MHz extreme ones when 3600MHz to 3733MHz is the sweet spot where gains are observed in all cases. With faster ones it often performs worse. So, when you don't dump the costs into silly speeds that do nothing, you convert that in capacity. Because really that helps the most. It's better to have tons of slower RAM than insufficient amount of stupid fast one. Because when you run out of RAM, not even 50GHz speeds will help you as system will desperately page/swap to SSD or worse, HDD...

 

Quickly checking local shop that's nowhere near the cheapest and you can get decent 16GB 3600MHz kit from G.Skill for 72€ and FURY Renegade with tighter timings for 89€. Going up a notch in capacity and yet another G.Skill in 32GB kit at 3600MHz for 137€ and again FURY Renegade for 163€ with tighter timings. This is cheap. I remember when memory was so expensive you really considered lower capacities because of it. That hasn't been the case for many years now. You really need to be on a very strict tight budget to be deciding for less RAM or not. And even if you're in that situation, just always go with cheapest largest capacity you can get. You can't add capacity, but with some luck you can either lower timings and/or increase clocks and gain some performance back that you lost by going cheap on them. And then you just won't really care how much stuff it runs.

[Kisai]

On 10/27/2021 at 1:28 PM, suicidalfranco said:

but why e cores on desktop cpus

This is the same reason why video cards, sound cards, and network asic's all used to be separate cards. The CPU was at one point in time, not powerful enough to do everything in software. Now a lot of stuff get's done in software that used to have dedicated asic's, and "e core"'s are just good enough to handle those tasks rather than dedicate a full cpu core to it, or have the hardware get pre-empted (see how WiFi and Bluetooth drops when laptop's hit 100% CPU utilization.)

On 11/1/2021 at 5:04 PM, poochyena said:

Why do you think desktop and laptop CPUs aren't the same? If CPUs can just magically reduce their power, why not put desktop CPUs in laptops?

You do realize that "gaming" laptops, are effectively desktop parts that have been power-limited for the cooling solution right? No laptop out there can pull more than 240w, which is why you're never seeing performance improvements out of laptops. 12th gen laptop cpu and RTX 3080 will have the exact same performance as a non-K i7-12700 (at 2.5Ghz) and RTX 3060 desktop and 2060 Super desktop.

 

The only difference between a laptop and a desktop SKU is that Intel/AMD and AMD/NVidia bin's the products harder.

 

Same performance.

 

Same performance, and likely the 11th gen parts are the exact same die part. If you look down the list you'll see that the 9th, 10th and 11th gen parts are all around 2.5ghz, where as the 6th/7th gen parts are 2.9ghz. Yes, the CPU's have technically become slower, because that makes them use less energy.

 

Meanwhile, the desktop K SKU has essentially no performance ceiling. There is just a point at which you're burning far more energy than you're getting in peformance.

 

Intel even took advantage of that in a recent marketing stunt.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-was-rather-misleading-in-its-comparisons-between-the-Core-i9-12900K-and-Ryzen-9-5950X.576726.0.html

 

Quote

However, Intel left out numerous details about how it tested the processors, which it subsequently published. As the slides below show, Intel allowed the Core i9-12900K to consume 241 W at PL1, with the Ryzen 9 5950X restricted to 105 W, also PL1. Correspondingly, the Core i9-12900K could operate at significantly higher clock speeds than the Ryzen 9 5950X, influencing benchmark results. For some reason, Intel has not shared the PL2 consumption of either processor.

So Intel allowed their CPU to consume 2.4x the amount of power for this benchmark.

 

[Falkentyne]

2 hours ago, Kisai said:

This is the same reason why video cards, sound cards, and network asic's all used to be separate cards. The CPU was at one point in time, not powerful enough to do everything in software. Now a lot of stuff get's done in software that used to have dedicated asic's, and "e core"'s are just good enough to handle those tasks rather than dedicate a full cpu core to it, or have the hardware get pre-empted (see how WiFi and Bluetooth drops when laptop's hit 100% CPU utilization.)

You do realize that "gaming" laptops, are effectively desktop parts that have been power-limited for the cooling solution right? No laptop out there can pull more than 240w, which is why you're never seeing performance improvements out of laptops. 12th gen laptop cpu and RTX 3080 will have the exact same performance as a non-K i7-12700 (at 2.5Ghz) and RTX 3060 desktop and 2060 Super desktop.

 

The only difference between a laptop and a desktop SKU is that Intel/AMD and AMD/NVidia bin's the products harder.

 

Same performance.

 

Same performance, and likely the 11th gen parts are the exact same die part. If you look down the list you'll see that the 9th, 10th and 11th gen parts are all around 2.5ghz, where as the 6th/7th gen parts are 2.9ghz. Yes, the CPU's have technically become slower, because that makes them use less energy.

 

Meanwhile, the desktop K SKU has essentially no performance ceiling. There is just a point at which you're burning far more energy than you're getting in peformance.

 

Intel even took advantage of that in a recent marketing stunt.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-was-rather-misleading-in-its-comparisons-between-the-Core-i9-12900K-and-Ryzen-9-5950X.576726.0.html

 

So Intel allowed their CPU to consume 2.4x the amount of power for this benchmark.

 

Clevos and some MSI laptops can pull 330W....(CPU + GPU combined).  Just fyi.

[jre84]

• Falkentyne

so your from NBR eh.....same here

 

NBR needs to just die, owell...charles P jefferies was a terrible mod, banned even HMSCOTT....hopefully more people from nbr come to linus tech tips from there. I would appreciate all the knowledge those guys like mr fox and papusan have

[Falkentyne]

25 minutes ago, jre84 said:

• Falkentyne

so your from NBR eh.....same here

 

NBR needs to just die, owell...charles P jefferies was a terrible mod, banned even HMSCOTT....hopefully more people from nbr come to linus tech tips from there. I would appreciate all the knowledge those guys like mr fox and papusan have

Isn't HMscott an AMD employee?  Scott Hirkintson or something weird like that?

[Kisai]

2 hours ago, Falkentyne said:

Clevos and some MSI laptops can pull 330W....(CPU + GPU combined).  Just fyi.

Clevos  PC70HS is a RTX 3080 + 11th gen i7-11800H ships with a 170w PSU.

 

I don't believe there has been a 330w shipped since 2015 models.

 

Now consider that the supposedly equal parts in a desktop require a 750w PSU. What does that tell you about how much of a nerf the laptop is? You'll never run it at the desktop performance level.

 

[Falkentyne]

45 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Clevos  PC70HS is a RTX 3080 + 11th gen i7-11800H ships with a 170w PSU.

 

I don't believe there has been a 330w shipped since 2015 models.

 

Now consider that the supposedly equal parts in a desktop require a 750w PSU. What does that tell you about how much of a nerf the laptop is? You'll never run it at the desktop performance level.

 

My MSI GT73VR shipped *March 2017" and comes with both 230W and 330W options.  230W for GTX 1070 and 330W for GTX 1080.

The GTX 1080 in the MSI GT73VR and GT75VR is the full desktop GPU with 200W TDP.  My GTX 1070 is hardware modded to 230W TDP (I purchased the 330W PSU from my OEM for way too much money) and I've been able to pull about 340W maximum from the wall.

MSI has been shipping laptops with 460W of combined power for awhile now (2x230W PSU's).

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, Falkentyne said:

My MSI GT73VR shipped *March 2017" and comes with both 230W and 330W options.  230W for GTX 1070 and 330W for GTX 1080.

The GTX 1080 in the MSI GT73VR and GT75VR is the full desktop GPU with 200W TDP.  My GTX 1070 is hardware modded to 230W TDP (I purchased the 330W PSU from my OEM for way too much money) and I've been able to pull about 340W maximum from the wall.

MSI has been shipping laptops with 460W of combined power for awhile now (2x230W PSU's).

The heaviest configuration you can get from MSI is 280w which is RTX 3080 + i9-11980HK + 4K Panel.

 

And to be fair, 17" laptops are desktop replacements and not really meant to be used the same way you'd use a 14" laptop with a 90w PSU.

[Falkentyne]

59 minutes ago, Kisai said:

The heaviest configuration you can get from MSI is 280w which is RTX 3080 + i9-11980HK + 4K Panel.

 

And to be fair, 17" laptops are desktop replacements and not really meant to be used the same way you'd use a 14" laptop with a 90w PSU.

They had a 660W version too.

Remember the SLI models?  That came with two 330W power bricks with a dongle?

[leadeater]

15 minutes ago, Falkentyne said:

They had a 660W version too.

Remember the SLI models?  That came with two 330W power bricks with a dongle?

I remember that monster lol. Didn't LTT do a video with it as well? They def did a laptop that required 2 power bricks at some point I know that much.

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

I remember that monster lol. Didn't LTT do a video with it as well? They def did a laptop that required 2 power bricks at some point I know that much.

Yeah I recall that. When you're desperate for a gaming desktop replacement, that's what gaming laptops have always been. Generally desktop hardware crammed into a laptop chassis and then clocked down to the point where it won't overwhelm the cooling.

 

The problem has always been that fans in a laptop were a bad idea, and if your cooling system relies on fans (which are the only remaining moving parts), it's only a matter of months till they need replacement if you use it like a desktop. For all practical consideration you kinda get screwed when you buy a laptop.

12-14" laptop - insufficient GPU power, insufficient cooling, sufficient power supply

15-17" laptop - sufficient CPU power, insufficient cooling, insufficient power supply.

 

Where as desktop computational "power from the wall" has gone up, not the actual performance/mhz. I always find it funny when I see benchmarks, and actually wonder if anyone has tried to run any of these CPU's all at the same OC/UC frequency to see if all Intel is doing is increasing the TDP on paper to get that performance.

 

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

it's only a matter of months till they need replacement if you use it like a desktop

Fans are really not that susceptible to failure, especially the bigger ones on these large laptops. The really low profile ones tend to just get blocked and not spin, clean them and they work again. Honestly though I've never really had any problems with fail fans in laptops.

 

Most fans have a MTBF of 15+ years, really good ones 30+ years. More realistic rates are basically half these, so 7+ years and 15+ years. Depends how you actually measure and rate MTBF.

 

Also all cooling solutions require fans in the PC space, 100% passive is very rear.

[RejZoR]

43 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Fans are really not that susceptible to failure, especially the bigger ones on these large laptops. The really low profile ones tend to just get blocked and not spin, clean them and they work again. Honestly though I've never really had any problems with fail fans in laptops.

 

Most fans have a MTBF of 15+ years, really good ones 30+ years. More realistic rates are basically half these, so 7+ years and 15+ years. Depends how you actually measure and rate MTBF.

 

Also all cooling solutions require fans in the PC space, 100% passive is very rear.

And can be fixed with some lube. Relative had an HP laptop that was vibrating and rattling like crazy when fan spun up. So I opened it up, cleaned it and added a drop of machine oil on the sleeve bearing of the fan. It's probably over 6 years now since the repair and it's still whisper quiet. I've been servicing sleeve bearing fans this way for at least 10+ years, especially since most of mine ran in horrid conditions in tiny cases tuned for silence which means they were sitting in very warm conditions.

[LAwLz]

LTT accidentally posted their review too early and then quickly pulled it down.

I posted the results as a status update for those interested in seeing them a little bit early. The summary is basically, Alder Lake is really, really good. The i9 is kind of stupid but the i5 and i7 seems to be bangers.

 

 

 

 

[Arika]

Just now, LAwLz said:

The i9 is kind of stupid but the i5 and i7 seems to be bangers.

isn't that just intel's line up in general for the last few generations?

[LAwLz]

Just now, Arika S said:

isn't that just intel's line up in general for the last few generations?

Well, for a couple of generations it seems like AMD's offerings have been mopping the floor with the i5 and i7 processors as well.

Not so much anymore if LTT's video is accurate.

 

I am really excited for more reviews to come out. It seems like the i5 and i7 will just be straight up way better than the R5 and R7 from AMD, and at a lower price.

[Blademaster91]

I came across the leaked LTT benchmarks on Videocardz, nice to see Intel competitive again, significant improvement over 11th gen, but not quite the gain I was expecting over AMD. I'm not sure if I trust LTT's review, they don't always compare to other reviews, and i'm curious if they were using DDR5. Cheaper CPU's are nice, but Z690 boards are expensive and DDR5 has a price premium over DDR4.

[MageTank]

16 hours ago, RejZoR said:

People still care about RAM usage? You people do realize ideal condition would be when RAM is always 100% utilized? Instead of sitting at 20% the entire time literally doing nothing. I actually haven't cared about RAM for years, somewhere since I still had Windows Vista. I believe I had 4GB RAM initially and then bought another 4GB stick. At 8GB back then I just didn't care. Then I had 12GB initially on X58 and upgraded to 18GB later on. Then I had 32GB on X99 from beginning to end and now on X570 platform I have 32GB and I'll have it till end I believe. It's not really necessity as much as RAM is so cheap for so long that there really is no reason to skimp on it.

No, we realize that the ideal RAM condition would be "having enough to avoid swapping to disk". 100% utilization is a terrible idea for system memory.

 

16 hours ago, RejZoR said:

Also no point in buying stupid expensive one with ridiculous speeds either. Good example was X99 platform. You could stick 4000MHz sticks in it. Or just have 2666MHz ones and it would often perform even better.

X99 is a terrible example. First of all, neither Haswell-E nor Broadwell-E is going to run DDR4 at 4000mhz, they simply weren't refined to handle frequency that high. Here is a great source of what people were able to achieve with Haswell/Broadwell-E with various capacity configurations: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xwlVy-ZL1o_59Z7A8th6iHXtXEYnDgrseT-VxAapBWU/pubhtml?widget=true&headers=false#gid=1166569827. Let's remove the nonsensical part of your argument and say they were running 3200 vs 2666, the 3200 would absolutely dominate the 2666 configuration as far as bandwidth is concerned, and if they operate the 3200 at timings even remotely close to JEDEC, they would do so at lower latencies as well as far as round trip is concerned. This is ignoring the improvements gained over using tighter timings.

 

Also keep in mind that the memory straps on X99 was wonky, which is also what limited your frequency. If you loaded an XMP profile, the 100 strap would change to 133 and you'd end up OCing your CPU with an XMP profile. This is why manual overclocking was preferred on X99 when it came to memory and why so little people did it.

 

16 hours ago, RejZoR said:

Same with X570, no point in using 5000MHz extreme ones when 3600MHz to 3733MHz is the sweet spot where gains are observed in all cases. With faster ones it often performs worse.

You are comparing apples to donuts here my friend. The difference in memory performance on AMD isn't just due to the bandwidth/memory latency, but also the infinity fabric which is directly tied to memory speed (unless you unstrap it, which is where performance loss occurs). If you can have a stable FCLK without WHEA errors occurring, performance improvements have been noticed up to 4800mhz on the 5700G and its 7nm monolithic IMC... What your speaking here is simply ignorance and misinformation.

 

16 hours ago, RejZoR said:

So, when you don't dump the costs into silly speeds that do nothing, you convert that in capacity. Because really that helps the most. It's better to have tons of slower RAM than insufficient amount of stupid fast one. Because when you run out of RAM, not even 50GHz speeds will help you as system will desperately page/swap to SSD or worse, HDD...

EXACTLY! This is why we don't want our memory running with 100% utilization. Also, having more capacity than what you need does absolutely nothing for performance. It sits there, not being used. Having more memory than what your processing threads can handle is also worthless. Running 64GB on a Pentium is just madness. This advice of yours is not universally applicable, even if it were remotely accurate.

 

 

[Dracarris]

 

So. 33% higher productivity performance at 70% more power? No thank you, the 5900X looks pretty appealing to me.

Performance is good to have, but my power bill and room temperature in summer are more important to me.

 

Ignoring cost for better cooler, DDR5 and those ludicrous expensive mainboards.

[igormp]

Yay for competition, now I hope AMD does some price cuts in order to be competitive until their next release.

[RejZoR]

@MageTank

It's almost as if you don't understand memory management. Just because system would use 100% of RAM wouldn't mean it's not available to apps. Cached data can be discarded at any time without any issues. Win10 and Win11 are already doing this, but not to an extent one would want to really make great use of RAM.