Specs of Top Intel 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake-S" Processors Surface

[ThrashZone]

cannot wait to see how an old 10900K CPU will trash this i9 garbage of 8 Cores + 8 Useless Cores... Specially in games or render apps.

Hi,
If the cinebench r20 score was/ is true it passed a 10980xe score by a few hundred points

Default configuration 10900k really does sux it takes a few bios setting changes to become better at anything Intel power saving crapola.

Single core is what this platform is all about which is 200 points above 10900k just on the 11900k

 

[AusWolf]

..if 8 stripped down 'small cores' only use, as an example, 20-30% of the power of 8 'big' cores but have the equivalent processing power of 3 or 4 'big cores' then its the only way to do it.

I imagine this must be the only logical reasoning behind big.LITTLE on desktop (which nobody asked for).

Silicion Die shrinkage is going at a slower pace than the ability/need to put more cores on them, so new ways have to be found to keep increasing processing power whilst keeping thermal & power requirements at a sane level.

Is it really a need, though? Or is it more like a pointless race between Intel and AMD like the gigahertz war used to be back in the single-core age?

 

[BorisDG]

Is it really a need, though? Or is it more like a pointless race between Intel and AMD like the gigahertz war used to be back in the single-core age?

I'd say, no. I still know people having Sandy Bridge CPU (2700K) which are streaming + playing modern titles at the same time with no issues.

p.p. I was using 6+ years 4930K with no problems and was champ. Of course that day came when the system started shutting down/reboot itself, so I had to switch the platform entirely, but to be honest If I had zero issues, I was seeing myself rocking it few more years. I loved the X79. Same now with X299, but I'm curious for the future HEDT.

 

[dj-electric]

E for Economy? P for Premium Economy?

I'll know for sure 30 days from now. No idea what those letters represent.

 

[bug]

I thought it had already been confirmed that unless you're on Windows 11, the Atom cores brings zero performance to the system, as Windows 10 doesn't seem to use them for anything.
Obviously other operating systems aren't supported as yet so...

You want to know what t can do, you don't look at Windows, you look at Linux
Seriously, Intel is really good at providing support for their CPUs.

 

[RedelZaVedno]

Paying Intel to be it's lab rat is not in my interest. I stopped thinking of getting this chip the moment I've read you'll need windows 11 to run Alder Lake's little cores and hyper threading properly. Now thinking about all the old game titles I didn't have time to play yet, but would still like to try... Will 10 yo game even be compatible with this new design? If yes, will Window 11 have to run some kind of emulator in the background hammering games performance? Nah, I'll wait for Zen 3+ to come out and buy 5800X if AMD lowers it's price or get 10700F if not. New arch designs are usually riddled with bugs, just remember core duo quadro and Zen 1 in the year of release and they weren't even completely new design concepts like Alder Lake is.

 

[BSim500]

or better yet, use the weak cores by accident in old old games, limiting max frame rate possibilities for 240hz monitors.

As someone who tends to play more older games than new I have zero intention of "upgrading" to this for exactly that reason. Let's be honest, these minor "Atom" class cores are mostly useful for handling Windows background service bloat. And you can accomplish the same thing on any CPU without screwing up older games simply by debloating Windows 10-11. The other day I watched someone take a W10 rig with a lowly Athlon 200GE (the slowest dual-core CPU you can buy these days) and debloat it. The CPU, RAM, Disk & Network usage and Thread / Process / Handle count reduction speaks for itself. That's where it's really at for performance optimization / reduced stutter in games, and by the time Microsoft have taken W11 (needed to schedule hybrid CPU cores properly) and finished bloating that out, you'll probably need extra big-cores anyway just to handle Windows 2025's background crap...

 

[Makaveli]

The 8 big cores have Hyper Threading...so there will be 16 high performance threads plus an additional 8 low power threads, giving 24 threads in total.

A 10900K will not be faster.

Was just going to write this for that i9

its 8 cores(Golden Cove) + 8 threads(HT) + 8 cores(Gracemount)

Will definetly be faster than the 10 core coffee lake chip. The user that posted that is not thinking about the arch changes from RL then ADL.

 

[BorisDG]

its 8 cores(GraceM) + 8 threads(HT) + 8 cores(low Power)

You mean 8x (Golden Cove) + HT + 8x (Gracemont) which are the low power.

 

[GoldenX]

Intel, we don't want 228W PL2...

 

[5 o'clock Charlie]

Wouldn't that depend on the application? Not all things will be able to take advantage of the Atom cores.

Has it been explained what determines which core type is to be used? Is it the CPU, OS or is it the application? Thanks in advance.

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

I wonder if this is the upper limit, or just some average number than Intel pulled out. To be honest, it is very hard to take their word for it nowadays. We've seen too many numbers from Intel of late, that don't really reconcile with the actual product. The TDP number is by far the most misleading number because the actual product requires between 2 to 3.5x that amount of power to reach that kind of performance that Intel is tooting.


I doubt that will happen. Even with the current Rocket Lake, the IPC gain is noticeable over Comet Lake. And if you take Tiger Lake H vs the older Comet Lake H, the gains is even more pronounced in games and in rendering software. While the Alder Lake is capped at 8 performance Golden Cove cores, the efficient cores from what I heard is almost as fast as Skylake (not sure if this is true until we hear more about it closer to launch). So if you have 8 efficient cores helping to make up for the 2 missing high performance cores in the 10900K, I think it is highly possible that Alder Lake will be quite a bit faster. The only hurdle for Intel is AMD's Ryzen 9 series.

And rocket lake cannot consistently meet comet lake's gaming performance, let alone exceed it.

 

[TheLostSwede]

Has it been explained what determines which core type is to be used? Is it the CPU, OS or is it the application? Thanks in advance.

Not that I'm aware of, no. But as someone pointed out here earlier it's a bit like when HyperThreading arrived, most programs couldn't make use of it. Now we're looking at two different types of cores and SMT for some of those cores, which is likely to cause some issues if the OS isn't aware of the difference and the same goes for most software. My guess is that the Atom cores would just be ignored in a case like that.

 

[AusWolf]

Not that I'm aware of, no. But as someone pointed out here earlier it's a bit like when HyperThreading arrived, most programs couldn't make use of it. Now we're looking at two different types of cores and SMT for some of those cores, which is likely to cause some issues if the OS isn't aware of the difference and the same goes for most software. My guess is that the Atom cores world just be ignored in a case like that.

My guess is that it's going to be leveraged the same way as "preferred cores" and turbo boost 3.0 on present-day CPUs. But my guess is as good as anyone else's.

 

[Minus Infinity]

I'm no Intel fanboy, heck I've been stoked AMD has been kicking their butt for so long, but I think Alder Lake will be a surprise and will be very competitive with Zen3 in multi-threaded apps and win back the single thread crown for sure. Zen 4 is 18 months away and unless they have a Zen3+ refresh won't have it all their way next year. Zen 4 will be a bigger update than Zen 3 by all reports 25%+ PIC uplift and DDR5 support, but Zen3+ would only be 5-7% uplift in performance. Intel will get gaming crown back for sure, not that I give two figs about 1080p benchmarks.

A competitive Intel is good news for us all and keeps AMD on their toes.

 

[Makaveli]

I think AMD knows what to expect from ADL and are already sitting on an answer. The fact that Zen 4 is pushed back so far leads me to believe they are not worried.

But time will tell...

 

[Anarchy0110]

I guess I'll wait for the i5 12400 or the i3 12100 then.

 

[HenrySomeone]

cannot wait to see how an old 10900K CPU will trash this i9 garbage of 8 Cores + 8 Useless Cores... Specially in games or render apps.

You are clueless and obviously ignorant of the IPC improvements; this will likely blow everything out of the water, save for 5950x in purely multi-threaded tasks.

 

[AusWolf]

You are clueless and obviously ignorant of the IPC improvements; this will likely blow everything out of the water, save for 5950x in purely multi-threaded tasks.

That.

Plus, we're talking about 8 cores that run at nearly 4 GHz. Sure, they're weaker than the other 8, but "useless" is a huge overstatement. If the only thing they do is run system services in the background while I'm playing games on the 8 big cores, I'm ok (not that I would ever plan on upgrading from 11th to 12th gen, but for future reference).

Another thing is that no game as of today needs 8 cores to run, let alone 10.

 

[95Viper]

Stay on topic... and the topic is "Specs of Top Intel 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake-S" Processors Surface"; it is not pointing out the state of another member's knowledge, especially, in a rude way.

 

[ThrashZone]

E for Economy? P for Premium Economy?


Wouldn't that depend on the application? Not all things will be able to take advantage of the Atom cores.

Hi,
Just right now 11900k is beating 10900k on many benchmarks
atm 10900k only has rendering power seeing it has 10 cores.

So you add 8 little cores even at lower frequency "think this will be able to be pushed to" and 16 high frequency threads and 10900k will be slaughtered in rendering lol

Issue is this 12900k will not be cheap by any means even 11900k is stupid priced still.