Intel Alder Lake-S Engineering Sample Spotted with DDR5-4800 Memory Running DOTA 2

[AleksandarK]

Intel's upcoming Alder Lake-S processors are going to be the company's first attempt at delivering heterogeneous core solutions, combining low-power and high-performance IPs in a single chip. Another important milestone that these processors will reach is DDR5 memory adoption, the first of its kind on consumer platforms. Today, thanks to CapFrameX, a monitoring tool that also hosts a database of benchmark runs, we have a piece of recorded information coming from a test system equipped with an Intel Alder Lake-S processor. The tested system spotted an engineering sample of the Alder Lake-S lineup, clocked at just 2.2 GHz. The core count and core configuration remained unknown.

Alongside the upcoming CPU, the system is composed of NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3080 GPU and DDR5 memory running at 4800 MHz. There were four sticks present, each having 8 GB capacity. The leaked system was running the DOTA 2 game at an average of 119.98 FPS, which doesn't mean much, given that we don't know which settings were applied and what was the resolution. There is a chart showing the gaming frame rate and frame time, which could be interesting to look at. However, the only new information we have come to know is that the Alder Lake-S is already capable of playing games and the ecosystem support should be very good at launch.


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[voltage]

OK, now your talking. If these get released with DDR5 support on the production boards I'm in. If not, no thanks.

 

[Zmon]

OK, now your talking. If these get released with DDR5 support on the production boards I'm in. If not, no thanks.

Pretty sure it's been clear for a while now that Alder Lake will launch with DDR5/PCIE5. Skylake launched with DDR4/DDR3L support, and apparently some boards did have DDR3 support but Intel warned people about using those boards. Considering 16gb DDR4 kits that were low speed at the time (2133) launched around $240ish, we can probably expect the same, or more, with DDR5. With part/substrate shortages and COVID, I expect them to be even more expensive.

 

[DAWMan]

It’s about time they bailed on the 14 nm designs.
Too many Watts, too much heat, and barely a change in performance.

Although Cinebench scores show changes in performance, my ancient 4790k’s, 5775C and 8086k show little change outside of extra cores.

Great News

 

[B-Real]

OK, now your talking. If these get released with DDR5 support on the production boards I'm in. If not, no thanks.

And what do you get with DDR5 you don't get with DDR4? Not even considering the possible 2x price.

 

[tfdsaf]

I don't get the slow and big cores solution, they are already having trouble even matching AMD is most programs, they have to push the frequency so high and at all times to even stay near AMD's offerings, which in turn skyrockets their power consumption. Small cores will reduce power consumption, but they will also suck at performance, how will it fare in multi core programs who already use 16+ cores. Most apps these days will use 8 cores, many are using 16+ cores.

And current processors already do that in a way, in that if you are not doing some demanding job, only some cores will be active and not even run at max frequency, the processor will boost to base core if it needs to and if there is need it will ramp it up to the max boost clock.

 

[Axaion]

Ugh... i really hope theres at least one good 2dimm board with ddr4 support, ddr5 is NOT ready

 

[watzupken]

I don't get the slow and big cores solution, they are already having trouble even matching AMD is most programs, they have to push the frequency so high and at all times to even stay near AMD's offerings, which in turn skyrockets their power consumption. Small cores will reduce power consumption, but they will also suck at performance, how will it fare in multi core programs who already use 16+ cores. Most apps these days will use 8 cores, many are using 16+ cores.

And current processors already do that in a way, in that if you are not doing some demanding job, only some cores will be active and not even run at max frequency, the processor will boost to base core if it needs to and if there is need it will ramp it up to the max boost clock.

Agree. I think I will just wait for official reviews when the product gets released later this year to see how well it will perform. I believe the performance cores will bring about a good bump in single core performance for sure, but will likely still trail AMD in the multicore results since the small cores will not contribute much to the multicore capability as compared to say adding 2 more performance cores. There may be more efficient cores, but they take a lot more time to complete a task as compared to a performance core. I am also not optimistic about Intel's 10nm in driving down power consumption drastically. From what I can see using Tiger Lake as an example, Intel is taking their 10nm down the same route as their 14nm, i.e. optimising for high clockspeed at the expense of power consumption. So for the next few years until 7nm is ready for desktop, we likely will see increasingly higher load power consumption with Intel's 10nm products.