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.
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.
> 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...
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?
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.
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.
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!