Intel Core 12th Gen Alder Lake Preview

[Vayra86]

The pre-Zen 3 CCX architecture was the worst choice for gaming, that's all that I said. This isn't philosophy, if you choose a CPU for gaming and that choice becomes hopelessly obsolete in < 1 year then you made a bad choice. The main thing that saved the Zen 2 gaming thing from being in everyone's face was COVID and the GPU price jump / scarcity.

Recent benchmarks don't even list Zen 2 on the charts anymore - gen 9 is usually bottom of the list. And here's why -

The difference is not margin of error, that's something people who can't read a chart repeated until they all believed it (feedback loop).

This is with a 3080, the contemporary of Zen 2 CPU was the gen 9 and gen 10, here you have 15% higher FPS with a 9900K vs 3900X and almost 20% with a 10900K.

Zen 2 was mostly fine with 2XXX series Nvidia cards but that fell apart in the space of 12 months. Again, Zen 1 and Zen 2 were demonstrably two of the worst CPUs one could have bought for gaming in the past 3-4 years.

View attachment 222766
T

Ah yes. A 3080 that is unobtanium. I see.

And even then, turn on RT and you are back at square one. Go anywhere beyond 1080p and you are in a similar place...

15% is nothing if the averages are already royally above 60 and most of the time in beyond 100 FPS territory. 15% is also far from obsolete anytime soon, and again, only if you arent necked by GPU.

 

[Valantar]

Pice of shit, self builder get again only a 32EU IGP but now with 1450MHz and not 1300 like Rocket Lake.

In SFF and Notebooks there are 80-96 EU

im too dont buy a R5 5600G for 260€ if i can get a GTX 970 for 130€


What would be faster a config of:
I5 12600K/5600G, B450 Board, IGP, 16GB of RAM for 420€
A8 5500, A68H Board, 16GB and a GTX 970 for about 300€ (in my way a GTX 970 for 130€)

Intel has never cared about desktop iGPUs, and has barely started caring about mobile iGPUs. Besides, laptops are far more likely to live their entire life with no dGPU, so the prioritization makes perfect sense. If you want more power than that but insist on an Intel CPU, buy a GPU. Or just buy an AMD APU, as they're fantastic.

Also, the bottom conifiguration would be fater, as you can't run a 12600K on a B450 socket AM4 board On a more serious note though, that bottom config would run into some very serious CPU bottlenecks. It might be faster in average FPS, but it won't be a good experience in current games. Something like a Ryzen 5 1600AF and a cheap B350 or B450 board? That would be killer.

That's true insofar as my choice of showing the games and settings Tom's used. It's not true on newer / higher end games though.

To illustrate - Cyperpunk 2077 is a heavily threaded game, at a setting I would think is common for fairly dedicated games. This should be ideal for all Zen, but it isn't quite. You've got 10600K 10700K and 10900K all beating the top Zen 2 3950X by wide margins. Interestingly the 9900K ties it. Again, this should be an ideal game for high thread count Zen and the test is at a very reasonable 1440P medium that many gamers will expect :

View attachment 222772

From that chart, the 3900XT is barely behind the 9700K and 9900K, so ... it looks to have aged fine? It's not as good, but definitely not a dramatic loss, even for the lower performing 3800XT. The 3600XT is keeping up fine with the 9600K. Describing it as picking

CPU for gaming and that choice becomes hopelessly obsolete in < 1 year

is ... well, your data does not support your conclusions. Have the Intel chips aged better? That's entirely possible. Is it enough to really matter, or to render one or the other obsolete or even meaningfully slower? Not at all.

 

[Vayra86]

You are the one that posted something about nebulous 'productivity' when the subject was gaming. Now we get the stereotypical 'I do rendering and encoding'.

Its not a battle, soldier.

 

[Makaveli]

That's true insofar as my choice of showing the games and settings Tom's used. It's not true on newer / higher end games though.

To illustrate - Cyperpunk 2077 is a heavily threaded game, at a setting I would think is common for fairly dedicated games. This should be ideal for all Zen, but it isn't quite. You've got 10600K 10700K and 10900K all beating the top Zen 2 3950X by wide margins. Interestingly the 9900K ties it. Again, this should be an ideal game for high thread count Zen and the test is at a very reasonable 1440P medium that many gamers will expect :

View attachment 222772

This example still proves my previous point though.

The 10600K is 74 low's and 96 avg
The 10700K is 79 low's and 103 avg
The 10900K is 84 low's and 110 avg

The 3950X is 70 low's and 91 avg

Without a fps counter there won't be a noticeable difference on any of these machines.

I would consider the Core i3-9100 as the baseline for playable in that graph.

And if one wants higher lows then up that to the Core i3-10100 or 2700X

Anyone on a zen 2 chip playing this game will have no issues based on the results there. yes the intel chips are faster but this is all academic since those differences won't really be noticed.

For me having my games being playable is the most important the back and forth over 10fps here 20fps when we are already in playable territory I don't really find a priority. And I think that would be the same mind set of people buying zen 2 years ago when looking at graphs.

Not you specifically but I find too many people online obsess over these graphs and the small differences when at the end of the day they don't really matter. Just buy what you like and what fits your budgets, and gives you playable performance, you want to play games not be stuck on these metrics.

 

[Vayra86]

That's true insofar as my choice of showing the games and settings Tom's used. It's not true on newer / higher end games though.

To illustrate - Cyperpunk 2077 is a heavily threaded game, at a setting I would think is common for fairly dedicated games. This should be ideal for all Zen, but it isn't quite. You've got 10600K 10700K and 10900K all beating the top Zen 2 3950X by wide margins. Interestingly the 9900K ties it. Again, this should be an ideal game for high thread count Zen and the test is at a very reasonable 1440P medium that many gamers will expect :

View attachment 222772

You are linking medium settings at 1440p. Stop dodging. I ran high on 3440x1440 on a bloody 1080...

Nobody is disagreeing that Intel offered and might soon offer a faster gaming chip. We can read charts, contrary to what you think. The point is, we are past that fact because anything games just fine so we can look at other unique selling points to get more perceived value for money.

That is also the point with ADL running DDR5.

 

[RandallFlagg]

You are linking medium settings at 1440p. Stop dodging. I ran high on 3440x1440 on a bloody 1080...

Nobody is disagreeing that Intel offered and might soon offer a faster gaming chip. We can read charts, contrary to what you think. The point is, we are past that fact because anything games just fine so we can look at other unique selling points to get more perceived value for money.

Who is 'we'? Half this thread is full of people talking about the gaming fps. I've already noted a few times that if you have gen 10, Zen 3, or RKL higher end SKU chip already then this is meaningless in the current environment without forking up north of $1300 for a high end GPU. So if 'we' are talking about 'we' meaning postings generally, this is just more goalpost shifting. One day, it is FPS, the next it is rendering. Are we fighting eurasia or eastasia this year, I forgot.

But having said that, RTX 4000 is about 1 year away now. Comet Lake / Skylake will probably show its age in games at that point, since its knickers are already showing with a 3090. Zen 3 may as well, we'll see.

That is also the point with ADL running DDR5.

That's highly questionable. I suspect DDR5 will prove better in productivity, and worse in games, when using JEDEC settings. I bet we have lot of contradictions in review results that will be attributable to the config used (beyond just using DDR4 vs DDR5).

 

[Vayra86]

Who is 'we'? Half this thread is full of people talking about the gaming fps. I've already noted a few times that if you have gen 10, Zen 3, or RKL higher end SKU chip already then this is meaningless in the current environment without forking up north of $1300 for a high end GPU. So if 'we' are talking about 'we' meaning postings generally, this is just more goalpost shifting. One day, it is FPS, the next it is rendering. Are we fighting eurasia or eastasia this year, I forgot.

But having said that, RTX 4000 is about 1 year away now. Comet Lake / Skylake will probably show its age in games at that point, since its knickers are already showing with a 3090. Zen 3 may as well, we'll see.



That's highly questionable. I suspect DDR5 will prove better in productivity, and worse in games, when using JEDEC settings. I bet we have lot of contradictions in review results that will be attributable to the config used (beyond just using DDR4 vs DDR5).

The thing is, CPU demands for gaming progress slooooooooow. And the top end of GPU is not only unobtanium right now, its also out of reach for 95% of the gaming market in any regular situation.

You say gen 10... I'm not even remotely close to seeing the end of my 8700K here going by what I'm playing, which is anything from new to indie to legacy. And this goes for any Zen chip beyond the first gen too. They're all fine. And its not likely any game anytime soon will demand anything more, as these chips can handily meet what the console mainstream presents which is not changing anytime soon. Also, RT is the elephant in the room here. Turn it on and you can make do with anything as it cripples every GPU out today.

People are indeed talking about gaming FPS because, I guess, its something they do on the CPUs. But in general everyone just wants the best allrounder, with sufficient performance.

But then we really aren't in disagreement at all, are we. Purely from an enthusiast perspective chasing the top performance, sure your metrics apply, but everyone talking about gaming in any other way is literally saying they don't give a shit because everything's fast enough. So the focus does shift to other things CPUs do or even things people can do on the CPU they couldn't do before.

 

[Makaveli]

But having said that, RTX 4000 is about 1 year away now. Comet Lake / Skylake will probably show its age in games at that point, since its knickers are already showing with a 3090. Zen 3 may as well, we'll see.

This is an interesting question as we know power consumption is going up alot for the next high end models of gpu's so I wonder what kinda of cpu bottlenecks we will see with the extra performance.

 

[RandallFlagg]

The thing is, CPU demands for gaming progress slooooooooow. And the top end of GPU is not only unobtanium right now, its also out of reach for 95% of the gaming market in any regular situation.

You say gen 10... I'm not even remotely close to seeing the end of my 8700K here going by what I'm playing, which is anything from new to indie to legacy. And this goes for any Zen chip beyond the first gen too. They're all fine. And its not likely any game anytime soon will demand anything more, as these chips can handily meet what the console mainstream presents which is not changing anytime soon. Also, RT is the elephant in the room here. Turn it on and you can make do with anything as it cripples every GPU out today.

People are indeed talking about gaming FPS because, I guess, its something they do on the CPUs. But in general everyone just wants the best allrounder, with sufficient performance.

But then we really aren't in disagreement at all, are we. Purely from an enthusiast perspective chasing the top performance, sure your metrics apply, but everyone talking about gaming in any other way is literally saying they don't give a shit because everything's fast enough. So the focus does shift to other things CPUs do or even things people can do on the CPU they couldn't do before.

We really aren't as far as games go. I'm not going to upgrade GPU unless the prices crater for some reason. But I was responding to someone who professes to care about gaming fps.

Big things I look at are browser performance including things like java and render speed (this actually matters, it's palpable vs newer gens), IO speed, office apps, team/video conferencing app performance, some on virtualization and compilers. It's very common these days to do all of that at the same time, I do, like 10+ hours a day. So what tests these? Well, PCMark 10 does most of that. And it's pretty good at testing it it too.

But nobody pays attention to that stuff we all do like 98% of the time

I think you would notice a difference in heavy web browsing vs your 8700K with a Zen 3, RKL, or Tiger Lake. So I personally am interested to see Alder Lake web / java / compiler and PCMark 10 performance. I want to know about gaming performance to see how much head room it will have with upcoming GPUs. I hope that someday new GPUs will not require a 2nd mortgage to afford.

This is an interesting question as we know power consumption is going up alot for the next high end modes of gpu's so I wonder what kinda of cpu bottlenecks we will see with the extra performance.

Yep that is something I'm interested in. Headroom didn't matter much before RTX 2000 because there was plenty on all but the lowest CPUs. The big jumps in GPU performance made it matter starting with RTX 3000 series. Best you can usually do to see into the future is look at low settings performance though (the proverbial 720p low run), but that kind of test gets borked by PCIe bandwidth limitations.

 

[r9]

It's written 4 times in the article

That's lazy reporting. We demand that every fact to be rephrased min of 5 times also at least one instance should flash different colors too.

 

[WhoDecidedThat]

Here's a thought -

Hypothesis

Golden Cove has 27% greater IPC - 1.27x Gracemont
Golden Cove can clock 5 GHz/3.9 GHz = 1.28x Gracemont
Golden Cove has Hyper Threading which results in let's say = 1.25x performance v/s without HT (and Gracemont doesn't have HT)

1.27 * 1.28 * 1.25 = 2.03x

So 1 Golden Cove = 2 Gracemont in multi threaded tasks

Inference

If you have a lightly threaded task, what you want is 6 to 8 very fast cores. In Alder Lake, that is Golden Cove cores.

If you have a multi threaded task, what you want is numerous, power efficient cores. Ideally, we would have 24 power efficient cores for multi threaded tasks. In Alder Lake, we have E cores for muti threaded tasks.

But since we need to have very fast cores for lightly threaded tasks, what we get is not 16 E cores + 8 E cores. What we get 8 P cores capable of Hyper Threading + 8 E cores.

Another Advantage

If you have a lightly threaded task that needs high performance, another thing you can do to improve performance is remove all the non-high priority tasks off the fast P cores to the slower E cores. The challenge here will be determining which task to move to the E cores.

I don't think Intel has E cores to increase the battery life of laptops. Because if that were the case, they wouldn't require 1 P core to be always active at minimum.

 

[RandallFlagg]

Here's a thought -

Hypothesis

Golden Cove has 27% greater IPC - 1.27x Gracemont
Golden Cove can clock 5 GHz/3.9 GHz = 1.28x Gracemont
Golden Cove has Hyper Threading which results in let's say = 1.25x performance v/s without HT (and Gracemont doesn't have HT)

1.27 * 1.28 * 1.25 = 2.03x

So 1 Golden Cove = 2 Gracemont in multi threaded tasks

Inference

If you have a lightly threaded task, what you want is 6 to 8 very fast cores. In Alder Lake, that is Golden Cove cores.

If you have a multi threaded task, what you want is numerous, power efficient cores. Ideally, we would have 24 power efficient cores for multi threaded tasks. In Alder Lake, we have E cores for muti threaded tasks.

But since we need to have very fast cores for lightly threaded tasks, what we get is not 16 E cores + 8 E cores. What we get 8 P cores capable of Hyper Threading + 8 E cores.

Intel has something like that coming for cloud and some kind of HPC uses. It's called Sierra forest and the rumor is it is 128 / 256 / 512 cores on a 7500ish pin package.

And no I'm not kidding, there are references to it out there. ETA is 2023.

 

[WhoDecidedThat]

Intel has something like that coming for cloud and some kind of HPC uses. It's called Sierra forest and the rumor is it is 128 / 256 / 512 cores on a 7500ish pin package.

And no I'm not kidding, there are references to it out there. ETA is 2023.

If your workload can be parallelized, it makes sense to use more numerous, smaller cores. It's the reason why 3D Graphics Processors have thousands of cores. Hell, the 3080 Ti/3090 have over 10k cores.

I do think that even with GPUs we are running into limits of how much we can parallelize. That's why AMD chose to leverage the tech CPUs use to clock higher in their GPUs so that RDNA2 can reach 2.8+ GHz clock speed. I think Nvidia will follow suit in whatever comes after Ampere.

 

[R-T-B]

When someone writes something like this: "We highly recommend you wait until November 4th for independent performance reviews of 12th Gen Core desktop processors before making up your mind on whether to buy or pre-order one. ", you know this product will fail.

Why? That's pretty much the advice for ANY product launch.

 

[Valantar]

Why? That's pretty much the advice for ANY product launch.

Entirely agree. @B-Real, that statement is pure nonsense. When someone writes something like that, you can assume they want to provide accurate information rather than blindly pass on PR spin as if it were fact. Asking people to wait for reviews is sensible, good consumer advice, and the journalist doing their job - providing a valuable service to readers. If you're reading something more into that sentence, you're looking far too hard.

 

[jaszy]

The pre-Zen 3 CCX architecture was the worst choice for gaming, that's all that I said. This isn't philosophy, if you choose a CPU for gaming and that choice becomes hopelessly obsolete in < 1 year then you made a bad choice. The main thing that saved the Zen 2 gaming thing from being in everyone's face was COVID and the GPU price jump / scarcity.

Recent benchmarks don't even list Zen 2 on the charts anymore - gen 9 is usually bottom of the list. And here's why -

The difference is not margin of error, that's something people who can't read a chart repeated until they all believed it (feedback loop).

This is with a 3080, the contemporary of Zen 2 CPU was the gen 9 and gen 10, here you have 15% higher FPS with a 9900K vs 3900X and almost 20% with a 10900K.

Zen 2 was mostly fine with 2XXX series Nvidia cards but that fell apart in the space of 12 months. Again, Zen 1 and Zen 2 were demonstrably two of the worst CPUs one could have bought for gaming in the past 3-4 years.

View attachment 222766

20/30 FPS min/max difference across 9 games at 1080p medium preset at 200 FPS average. Much wow. Unplayable.

For the sake of the argument: 10900k came out half a year after 3900x. 9900k was priced in the same bulk price $488-499 segment as 3900x. The 3000 series as a whole had massive price cuts to combat the 10th gen release cycle which made it's value appealing in early 2020.

Regardless of that, gamers shouldn't be "future proofing" with the highest core count options unless they need rendering power for other things.

If you're trying to jerk off to your 9900k, congrats, no one cares. People typically replace things when they feel they need better. The only situation where this doesn't happen is kids begging their parents for money.

 

[RandallFlagg]

Entirely agree. @B-Real, that statement is pure nonsense. When someone writes something like that, you can assume they want to provide accurate information rather than blindly pass on PR spin as if it were fact. Asking people to wait for reviews is sensible, good consumer advice, and the journalist doing their job - providing a valuable service to readers. If you're reading something more into that sentence, you're looking far too hard.

I would agree with that underlined part 100% normally. However there is a very very good chance that the only people getting a part are the ones who are preordering this week. Best Buy preorders ran out within a few hours looks like, Microcenters did as well here where I live, and Newegg looks like it is down to just two SKUs this morning. So at this moment I can't preorder anything but a 12700K and a 12600K. All KF models and all 12900s are gone.

I don't think they will have anything left when the reviews hit.

 

[Valantar]

I would agree with that underlined part 100% normally. However there is a very very good chance that the only people getting a part are the ones who are preordering this week. Best Buy preorders ran out within a few hours looks like, Microcenters did as well here where I live, and Newegg looks like it is down to just two SKUs this morning. So at this moment I can't preorder anything but a 12700K and a 12600K. All KF models and all 12900s are gone.

I don't think they will have anything left when the reviews hit.

So ...wait until it comes back into stock? This isn't a GPU, they won't be sold out for years. Unless you're sitting on a decade-old chip, waiting really ought to be perfectly fine. (And if you are sitting on a decade-old chip, either of the available options will be a massive upgrade, so don't worry.) "But they might sell out" is not a valid argument to join the pile-on unless you have a concrete, actual need for a chip. If you're just itching to upgrade from something that's actually still pretty good, you can stand to wait a bit. That's healthy for your psyche as well.

 

[RandallFlagg]

So ...wait until it comes back into stock? This isn't a GPU, they won't be sold out for years. Unless you're sitting on a decade-old chip, waiting really ought to be perfectly fine. (And if you are sitting on a decade-old chip, either of the available options will be a massive upgrade, so don't worry.) "But they might sell out" is not a valid argument to join the pile-on unless you have a concrete, actual need for a chip. If you're just itching to upgrade from something that's actually still pretty good, you can stand to wait a bit. That's healthy for your psyche as well.

Would you be saying that if it were zen 3d? Based on what you're saying I and most everyone here would probably be doing fine with a jazzed up Haswell rig. Life is short and you don't see a completely new architecture on a new node with all new standards (PCIe 5, DDR5, Wifi 6E) hit all at once very often. If this is what gets someone going then they probably shouldn't wait.

For the record, I'm waiting, will probably give myself a booby prize like a new SSD or something since they seem to be cheap but anyone who is going to upgrade may not want to wait. I think there are a ton of people who have been sitting on gen 8/9 waiting for something like AL.

 

[Valantar]

Would you be saying that if it were zen 3d? Based on what you're saying I and most everyone here would probably be doing fine with a jazzed up Haswell rig. Life is short and you don't see a completely new architecture on a new node with all new standards (PCIe 5, DDR5, Wifi 6E) hit all at once very often. If this is what gets someone going then they probably shouldn't wait.

For the record, I'm waiting, will probably give myself a booby prize like a new SSD or something since they seem to be cheap but anyone who is going to upgrade may not want to wait. I think there are a ton of people who have been sitting on gen 8/9 waiting for something like AL.

Yes. Yes I would, no matter what it was. Perhaps especially Zen3+/3D/whatever they end up calling it, given that it's just Zen3 with more cache. That doesn't mean it won't be better (though we don't know, and should thus wait for reviews!), but ... waiting to choose until you know is sensible. Haswell is getting long in the tooth, and I would expect anyone still on that to either not care much or be very eager for an upgrade. And who knows, this might be the generation they've been waiting for, even if Zen3/11th gen is already miles faster. That's fine. But how many people are that? For anyone on anything newer than a 6700K or Zen1 chip, I would indeed argue for them to hold off. Upgrade mania is a habit that this hobby trains us into thinking is somehow not irrational and wasteful, and the community largely revolves around tech fetishism. Holding off and making informed decisions is a good way of tempering that.

I mean, I held off on upgrading my old Core2Quad setup until Zen1 came around, as nothing had really seemed worth it past Sandy Bridge with the parade of <10% IPC increases (and often meagre clock increases too). Zen was new and interesting, but it was also 7 years later. There really weren't many enthusiast C2Q users left by then. Just like I don't expect there to be many enthusiast Haswell users today.

 

[R-T-B]

Would you be saying that if it were zen 3d?

Yes.

I mean if impatient then buy whatever I guess. But there is no substitute for a review, even if you have to join some queue to get it.

 

[atomsymbol]

Since there are two 3-way x86 decoders in an E-core, is the E-core capable of predicting 2 branches per cycle, irrespective of whether the branches are taken or not taken, assuming that the number of instructions in each of the two fetch units is at most 3?

 

[mechtech]

@W1zzard

The only thing I want to see in your Alder Lake review is it’s ipg gaming vs 5700G ipg gaming. Since no dgpus.

 

[W1zzard]

@W1zzard

The only thing I want to see in your Alder Lake review is it’s ipg gaming vs 5700G ipg gaming. Since no dgpus.

It's the same IGP as 11th gen, VERY slow, unusable for gaming

AMD Ryzen 5 5600G Review - Affordable Zen 3 with Integrated Graphics

The Ryzen 5 5600G is AMD's most affordable entry to the Zen 3 architecture. Priced at $260, this six-core, twelve-thread processor achieves excellent performance that rivals older eight-core processors from both Intel and AMD. The integrated Vega graphics cores are much more powerful than even...

www.techpowerup.com

 

[RandallFlagg]

Yes.

I mean if impatient then buy whatever I guess. But there is no substitute for a review, even if you have to join some queue to get it.

I agree with the general sentiment but you're not factoring in availability.

Wednesday I had put a 12700KF and an Asus Prime Z690M into my wish list on newegg, both available for preorder.

They are no longer available, leaving a 12700K and 12600K available for pre-order. There were 3 Z690 mATX motherboards that I could preorder Wed when I made the list, yesterday two, today - none.

So basically we are 1 week from launch and the only thing available to me is a 12700K and a couple of Mini-ITX motherboards that cost $290 and $400.

Betchya that is gone by Monday.

Edit:
To be fair, I figured we'd have stock for most of the first week after launch as is the pattern for Intel.
Not this time.