Yeah, but this is also about "enthusiast" CPUs, which is very much about eye popping top perf numbers, independent of efficiency, etc. We're talking sports cars, not commuter options.

It is. Depending on the consumer, these are just what the doctor ordered. Get a high quality motherboard, massive cooling solution, and eke out the maximum performance.

But this won't translate well into excellent laptop chips, so we'll continue to wait and see if Intel has something ready in time for their next mobile release.

And personally, I don't get enough benefit from the last few percentage points of performance to give up a quiet, cool-running, relatively power-sipping desktop system. That's just me, but that means I prefer to see advances in efficiency regardless of the market segment!

Lol how was a top-of-the-top end desktop release supposed to translate well into excellent laptop chips?

Something about your wording here seems to imply that it's not practically guaranteed that these don't translate into laptop results

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I honestly never get why the whole "quiet and cool" thing comes up for these top of the line CPUs.

My current personal system is near-silent and already drawing something like 450W peaks for GPU usage alone, which translates to a lot more than "a few percentage points of performance"

If you can pay, you can make just about anything short of server parts quiet and cool, and the power difference won't affect your CO2 footprint in any meaningful way. And when you're looking at $600 CPUs, generally speaking you can pay...

The whole point of big.little and having efficiency cores is to save power on mobile when you don't need all that performance.

The argument is made that in the same budget (die/power/heat) of a performance core you can fit multiple efficiency cores to help with threaded workloads, but this Intel CPU uses even more power, so wouldn't they have been better off with 100% performance cores on an "enthusiast" chip?

Intel didn't use 100% performance cores because apparently they felt they could get more performance from the little cores (which are literally smaller, you can fit more in a given area on the die)

Shouldn't that be obvious, it's practically a tautology

The anandtech benchmarks show that they have better performance in single-core benchmarks (that run on the performance cores) and Ryzen has the upper-hand in multi-threaded benchmarks (since it is all performance cores). So it seems like if the goal was to make an enthusiast chip they would have been better off stuffing their chip with their superior performance cores.

Obviously Intel wants to compete on mobile. It's the biggest market now, and they've been the worst at it. But a new platform is expensive so in the beginning you have to start with the high-margin enthusiast chips, so even if a platform is designed to have gains on mobile you have to start them at the enthusiast level. If they weren't planning on scaling this down to mobile there would be no reason for this architecture. But it doesn't look like it will actually end up any more efficient with their tech.

I honestly don't get what you're trying to say.

You don't work at Intel I presume. Even of the people who work at Intel I doubt there's any one person who could tell you why they decided on the given arrangement.

I expect this kind of baseless speculation on some more casual forums not one where most of us are aware of how insanely complex modern CPU design is.

In the end they came up with a design that is already performing top of class in the workloads that are most common, and it's unlikely we won't see improvements over time.

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I mean if your concern is productivity, here's what the people building systems for the worlds largest production houses have to say: https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/12th-Gen-Intel-Co...?

> Overall, the 12th Gen Intel Core CPUs are terrific across the board, providing a large performance boost over the previous 11th Gen CPUs, and in almost every single case, handily out-performed AMD's Ryzen 5000 series. Intel's lead is larger at the i5 and i7 level, but even with the Core i9 12900K, Intel consistently came out on top.

I don't know why you're acting like they gave something up here... because their synthetic benchmarks aren't up to snuff?

> Lol how was a top-of-the-top end desktop release supposed to translate well into excellent laptop chips?

See Zen 2. Zen 3. The desktop chips are very efficient. When you throw 105W at them, they compete at the very top of the desktop performance market. Previous to this Alder Lake release, they were beating much more power hungry Intel chips. Now they remain competitive at half the power.

Cut them down to 15W-45W chips, and they work great in laptops, with ample performance and excellent battery life.

If Intel has massively more efficient chip designs that they plan to use in mobile, why aren't they making use of them? They could have competitive performance without doubling the power consumption.

It's a similar story with Apple Silicon. They have chips that can do amazing things at 10W. Crank 60W through them and they are excellent performers.

If you have no choice but to consume massive amounts of power to get top performance, so be it. But given the choice...

Trying to draw conclusions about mobile parts from desktop parts is what people magazine racing CPUs do.

It's silly.

And it's doubly silly when you're talking about heterogeneous computing.

> If you have no choice but to consume massive amounts of power to get top performance, so be it. But given the choice...

I mean you have the choice? Don't get the top of the line halo part meant to break records at all costs?

The i5 is almost as fast as the i9, faster than the previous i5 and the 5800X, while using considerably less power than the i9.

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Top performance always equals "massive power draw"

A 5950X will draw over 300W if you OC, which, surprise surprise, a lot of people who are spending $800 on a CPU end up doing.

I guess I just figured by now people would understand that and focus on performance for the halo SKUs

You seem to have strong opinions about this, while also missing the past decade of desktop and laptop CPU history.

Intel based the entire Core line on the architecture they designed with laptop chips in mind (initially, Pentium M). They found that throwing more power at efficient chips works pretty well. So they switched gears from Netburst.

And while you just ignored my comments on Zen, they still apply. AMD designed Zen for efficiency, which allowed it to be excellent in high power, high performance applications, while also being excellent in low power, medium performance applications. While the chips have differences due to being used differently, the core architecture is used from 15W chips all the way up to 125W desktop chips and even 280W workstation chips.

It's not impossible that Intel designs completely different architectures for their next laptop chips than what they revealed with Alder Lake, but it's also unlikely, and the point of pairing efficiency cores with performance cores is to allow for flexibility in how they use the architecture. If Alder Lake is really just for 300W workstations, then Intel made a mistake bothering with efficiency cores.

What we didn't see today was evidence that Alder Lake is ready for mobile, because these chips are much less efficient when compared to alternatives. How can we expect this architecture to be efficient when you throw less power at it, when it's already proving to be inefficient and requiring lots of power in order to perform?

99% of this boils down to two words:

_heterogenous computing_

It means that they have exponentially more knobs to turn.

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And I stand by my point of ignoring insistence on speculating about unannounced hardware for no discernible benefit?

It's also weird that this is the second comment acting like outsiders know better than Intel when it comes to what mix of cores was best

Especially since this has proven to be an excellent workstation CPU:

> Overall, the 12th Gen Intel Core CPUs are terrific across the board, providing a large performance boost over the previous 11th Gen CPUs, and in almost every single case, handily out-performed AMD's Ryzen 5000 series. Intel's lead is larger at the i5 and i7 level, but even with the Core i9 12900K, Intel consistently came out on top.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/12th-Gen-Intel-Co...?

It's almost like people confused 7zip and Cinebench for actual productivity results?

intel is competing on 10nm (now called intel 7) against TMSC's 7nm process.

>If Intel has massively more efficient chip designs that they plan to use in mobile, why aren't they making use of them? They could have competitive performance without doubling the power consumption.

I'd guess they're aimed at making competitive enthusiast class desktop chips with their existing process size from foundries they already have made many many chips from so there's much less investment, and saving any smaller process capacity for laptops chips.

“Enthusiast” CPUs seem pointless. My CPU is never above 20% in AAA games as it’s all on the GFX card now.

Good to see CPUs going through the great decoupling that software did.

IMO Steamdeck is the future of home desktops. Both my kids are into science; I’m excited to have a drone remote, sensor base station, generic pc, etc, in a high quality package versus something like Pine phone.

Valve and Apple are pushing hardware forward. Hopefully they can obsolete needing data centers of generic CPUs and tons of Byzantine software by making hardware with the best logic for a task built in, available to home users.

Just a question about gaming. I haven't really seen any good AAA games worth playing anymore. The GPUs and CPUs have great capabliities but I don't see any good games anymore that make buying the hardware worth it anymore. Most of the games that are good I am interested in don't need good hardware. Do you feel the same trend when you play games?

I don’t know whether it applies to you, and don’t even know whether it’s true, but I think that may have less to do with new games being worse than with you being older and/or having seen more games. Getting older makes people less inclined to be obsessed with games, and having seen more games decreases the chance of a new game being an outlier, and outliers attract attention.

I think this applies to other fields, too. Watch your umptieth Super Bowl, and chances are you will think back to the ‘better’ one you saw when you were young. Twenty years from now, the kids watching their first one now will say the same about this one.

I don't completely disagee, but the point is that games haven't really gotten better, gameplay hasn't improved for many games (look at Cyberpunk 2077), there are more and more HD remakes since they aren't making new good games that excite people (SC2 was never as loved as SC1 same with Diablo 2 vs 3), and graphics have improved but gameplay has not. I think Nintendo is the most consistent with good new games but thats not really relevant to PC gaming.

Well Nintendo titles usually receive the best kind of HD upgrades on PC. Modders have even created a PC only DLC for Breath of the Wild.

"Best HD upgrades" is just because the default is upscaled, older consoles like the Dreamcast had amazing HD PC upgrades too (probably since the default resolution was 640 x 480, the emulated BoTW on the Wii U was 720p). Very interesting DLC, is it just the WiiU verison or switch version?

Yeah I think that’s a side effect of knowing how the sausage is made.

I have written my own ECS loops, rendering pipelines; all naive but after that it’s optimizing to product fit, and product emotional themes are pretty copy-paste to satisfy social memes.

They still occasionally come out but it’s rare. I haven’t been happy with an AAA game aside from Prey recently (2017 as “recent”) and Cyberpunk 2077 was all hype and no substance. I think they’re running out of new interesting games (Paradox, and Arkane are still good studios though) and many games I’m intrigued by are just remakes.

Starcraft Remastered, AoE II HD, System Shock, the Halo collection for instance, the Homeworld remake didn’t even interest me since I heard it was worst in some ways with hit boxes. They also don’t need new graphics cards. It’s so different from when PC hardware upgrades and games were so much more closely coupled.

Sony has started to port prestige first party PlayStation games like Horizon Zero Dawn to pc. If you like that sort of thing it's worth checking out...

Feels like we've hit a plateau in terms of graphics for nearly a decade now in terms of "good enough" or "realistic enough."

I haven't been excited for graphics since Crysis in 2008, nothing after that was very impressive in comparison.

> My CPU is never above 20% in AAA games

That just means your GPU is the bottleneck, not that the CPU couldn't be utilized more.

Basically all of my favorite games get worse simulation performance (FPS or UPS) the longer you play as the simulation becomes more complex (Factorio, RimWorld, Oxygen Not Included, Kerbal Space Program, Stellaris) so the performance is absolutely desired.

There are plenty of games that actually use CPU: Microsoft Flight Simulator, Factorio, Stellaris, Total War, pretty much any city simulator game, etc. Sure, your average dumb AAA action game won't, but that doesn't mean a good CPU is worthless.

Factorio isn't stressing 8 core CPUs. Stellaris can be played on a laptop. You are confirming his conclusion that they don't need a strong CPU to play.

lol! Stellaris can be played on a laptop, but try ramping the Galaxy size up to 1000 and/or increase the habitable planet multiplier. You get a couple hundred years in and the game just crawls even on nice hardware. Its not unplayable, its a strategy game, but the pace definitely slows down a lot, and space battles aren't as fun to watch.

By the same token you can play virtually any game on a cheap gaming rig. Just put all the graphics on low, run it at 720p and be happy with 20 fps.

Most games don't need the latest or greatest hardware to run well, there's a lack of good AAA games that make the value proposition of new hardware much less appealing versus the days of wanting to build a computer to play Crysis.

Endgame Factorio stresses CPUs because rocket-per-minute bases are a thing.

1 RPM is where a mega base starts. Stronger players can do 20 RPM (yes, a rocket every 3 seconds).

In those conditions, your CPU becomes the limit to the RPM as your game starts to slow down

> Stellaris can be played on a laptop. You are confirming his conclusion that they don't need a strong CPU to play.

Movies can be watched on phones. Does that mean theater screens are pointless?

Just look at the attendance of movies or how often phones are used for videos.

With different software pipelines they could run right on a GPU

It’s all state in a machine, and ML is showing us recursion + memory accomplish a lot; why all the generic structure in x86 if we can prove our substrate works just as well with better power efficiency if it’s structured specifically?

Chips aren’t concepts, they’re coupled to physics; simplify the real geometry. I think that’s what Apple is really proving with its chips, and why Intel is trying to become a foundry; they realize their culture can only extend x86 and x86 comes from another era of manufacturing.

I got into tech designing telecom hardware for mass production in the late-90 and early-00s. I just code now but still follow manufacturing, and have friends that work in fabs all over; this is just sort of a summary of the trends we see shrug emoji

Is that a realistic goal to run all on GPU? Nvidia wants ARM to make GPU/CPUs together. The idea is as intriguing as making games that are OS independent and just run bare metal by making them with ISAs. I don’t think there’s games that do that.

If it's all on the GFX card, why is there a performance difference in games between Intel and AMD CPUs?

When testing games, CPU reviews tend to test reduced resolutions and quality settings with the highest-end GPU they have, as a means of highlighting the differences between the CPUs.

While there aren't any nefarious intentions on behalf of the reviewer, this approach runs into the following problems:

- People buying high-end GPUs are unlikely to be running at resolutions of 1080p or below (or at lower quality settings), and won't see as much (if any) performance difference between CPUs as what reviewers show.

- People buying lower-end GPUs are going to be GPU-bottlenecked, and won't see as much (if any) performance difference between CPUs as what reviewers show.

- Each frame being rendered needs to be set up, animated, sent to the GPU for display, etc., and like all workloads, there's going to be portions that can't be effectively parallelized. As such, the higher the frame rate, the more likely the game is to be bottlenecked by single-threaded performance, which is an area where Intel CPUs have traditionally been strong relative to AMD's. However, as frames get more complex and take longer to render, the CPU has more of an opportunity to perform that work in parallel, and raw computational throughput is an area where AMD's modern CPUs have been strong relative to Intel's. So just because a CPU has leading performance in games today, doesn't necessarily mean that will hold in the future as game worlds become more complex (and reviewers revisiting the performance of 2017-era AMD Zen 1 vs. Intel Kaby Lake in recently-released titles have already started seeing this).

In short, the way that reviewers test CPU performance in games results in the tests being artificial and not really reflective of what most end users would actually experience.

After all, a graph showing nearly identical CPU performance across the lineup and the reviewer concluding, "yep, still GPU-limited," doesn't make for an interesting article/video.