Intel Announces 12th Gen Core Alder Lake: 22 New Desktop-S CPUs, 8 New Laptop-H CPUs (anandtech.com) 35
When Intel launched its 12th Generation Core family of processors late last year, it was only a small set of overclockable parts for desktops that came to market. Featuring Intel's new hybrid core design, the hardware proved competitive and cost effective, making it a very interesting time to be a consumer. However, the main battle for volume sales is typically in the mid-range and notebook segments which power millions of devices, and Intel is launching these processors today. From a report: These include the 35 W and 65 W desktop processors, new desktop coolers, and a handful of 45W+ laptop offerings for the creator and gaming markets. While all the glitz and the glamour goes to the high-profile overclockable processors in any given generation, the bulk of Intel's sales actually comes from the standard, run-of-the-mill hardware that gets put into the majority of commercial and pre-built hardware. To that end, Intel usually releases anywhere from 10 to 50+ new desktop processors to fill in the markets where needed. These processors usually come from anything up to four base physical designs, and parts of those chips are disabled depending on yield or market demand and sold accordingly.
For Alder Lake, Intel is launching 22 new desktop processors, from $42 dual core Celerons at 35W all the way up to $489 Core i9-12900 parts. Split down, here's what all the Core names mean:
Core i9: 8 Performance Cores + 8 Efficiency Cores
Core i7: 8 Performance Cores + 4 Efficiency Cores
Core i5: Either 6P+4E, or 6P only
Core i3: 4 Performance Cores only
Pentium: 2 Performance Cores only
Celeron: 2 Performance Cores only
Just putting Core i5 aside for a split second, what we have here is a scale of hardware that changes in performance cores, but only a select few have efficiency cores. This is because Intel is using two base physical designs for this hardware: either a large 8P+8E chip or a smaller 6P only chip. The smaller chip makes the economics of the lower core count processors work out better, but it does mean that one of the key features for Alder Lake, the hybrid CPU, will be limited to the high-end hardware only.
For Alder Lake, Intel is launching 22 new desktop processors, from $42 dual core Celerons at 35W all the way up to $489 Core i9-12900 parts. Split down, here's what all the Core names mean:
Core i9: 8 Performance Cores + 8 Efficiency Cores
Core i7: 8 Performance Cores + 4 Efficiency Cores
Core i5: Either 6P+4E, or 6P only
Core i3: 4 Performance Cores only
Pentium: 2 Performance Cores only
Celeron: 2 Performance Cores only
Just putting Core i5 aside for a split second, what we have here is a scale of hardware that changes in performance cores, but only a select few have efficiency cores. This is because Intel is using two base physical designs for this hardware: either a large 8P+8E chip or a smaller 6P only chip. The smaller chip makes the economics of the lower core count processors work out better, but it does mean that one of the key features for Alder Lake, the hybrid CPU, will be limited to the high-end hardware only.
This concept is interesting to me (Score:3, Interesting)
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For one, the cores are all on the same CPU die, meaning that they're a lot more integrated than if you try to split loads between discrete GPU and integrated graphics, which should make things easier for a scheduler to handle. But ultimately what you observed can still hold true, that you just don't need the efficiency cores, because the performance cores are already enough to handle everything sufficiently.
However what I suspect is that these high core trends may also lead to
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Performance vs Efficiency Cores (Score:2)
If, like me, you had no idea about what an "efficiency" core is, there is some information here [pcmag.com]
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Re: Performance vs Efficiency Cores (Score:1)
Re: Performance vs Efficiency Cores (Score:2)
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I don't think it's a case of poor code. Realtime audio needs really consistent, predictable performance to work. It's just the nature of the task. Things like hyperthreading and efficiency cores increase the overall performance but make performance for any one task far less predictable. That's a great tradeoff for most tasks, but there are tasks where those tradeoffs are a dealbreaker.
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" Turbo or Boost mode (I forget what they called it)"
Depending to processor model and generation, there are two or three turbo modes each with its own name.
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It's not just the OS, it's the software as well. These CPUs broke a whole lot of games because DRM saw the efficiency cores and went "what the fuck is this, nope, you don't get to run your game".
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That's some next level cope dude. There's already a tool available to disable the e-cores for those intentionally sabotaged games, and even without the e-cores the alderlake parts are more performant and more cost efficient than last generation. You also get a platform with full pcie4 support and limited pcie5, vs limited pcie4 from last generation.
Intel has made a lot of questionable choices in the past 5 years, but alderlake was a non-obvious and major improvement.
The 12400 is gooood (Score:5, Interesting)
Tom's got a very early review: https://www.tomshardware.com/n... [tomshardware.com]
tl;dr: It's great value at $185, almost as fast as the 12600 in games and about 20% slower in rendering etc. Also faster than comparable Ryzen CPUs.
Re:The 12400 is gooood (Score:4, Informative)
That isn't being entirely genuine. That is the case with their "FPS" and "Gaming" (1080p and 1440p, no 4k tests for some reason) benchmarks, but go down to the iGPU benchmarks especially, but also both the Single Threaded and Multi Threaded CPU Performance benchmarks, and you see Ryzen keeping its own or beating Intel, especially the Multi threaded
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cpu-hierarchy,4312.html
If you like toasters (Score:2)
That isn't being entirely genuine.
Er...not exactly. Keep reading their analysis in the first article you referenced. Seems to me the fuller picture is that the 12400 on the whole meets or beats the Ryzen offerings, except for one of the benchmarks. So it seems the Intel wins much more than the Ryzen, even on non-gaming benchmarks. But, the thing that I don't see anyone pointing out here, is power consumption to get there. Intel TDP != AMD TDP. On average AMD TDP is really a max power measure, and Intel's is less so. In fact, Intel h
So what? (Score:2)
Manufacturers can't even get their machines out the door because private industry screwed up the supply chain. I have orders from last April which still aren't filled. I'm supposed to care about new chips?
Re:So what? (Score:4, Informative)
https://recordtrend.com/hardwa... [recordtrend.com]
So it must be more the demand than the supply
I'm holding out... (Score:2)
Meh... 10nm (Score:2)
FFS, they are still selling 14nm devices. My toaster will have a 4nm CPU before Intel does.
GamersNexus videos (Score:2)
they've been releasing videos immediately after the CES presentations all day, and they're all good. [youtube.com]
Intel crap? Who cares. (Score:2)
Seriously. They have not had a good CPU in a long time.
In time to heat your house (Score:1)
What about security? (Score:4, Insightful)
Have they worked out all the security bugs in the architecture? Seriously, is Spectre and it's zillion variants finally dead? Did Intel fix the SGX flaws? Are the synchronous transfer instructions still flawed?
Intel really needs to address a bunch of design flaws if they haven't. On top of that, has Intel stopped lying about it's benchmarks? How about the anti-competitive behavior? Intel has a lot of things to work on and until they do, I'm not buying shit from them.
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They have encrypted memory - one encryption key for privileged OS code (OS/supervisor) and a single different one for client code.
As for the cartridge Pentium !!!, AMD had that too in the early K7 platform (and looked much better too).
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You may not remember original Pentium III processors with the daughter-board upright with a bigger fan attached.
You may not remember original Athlon processors which were sold in the same sort of form factor (and with the same connector [wikipedia.org]! but with different signaling.)
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interesting (Score:1)