6 ms·

Disappointingly, despite the big.little design adding efficiency cores, this release focuses on performance, and is still far behind AMD (and of course Apple) o

Disappointingly, despite the big.little design adding efficiency cores, this release focuses on performance, and is still far behind AMD (and of course Apple) on efficiency.

meepmorp 5y ago
Yeah, but this is also about "enthusiast" CPUs, which is very much about eye popping top perf numbers, independent of efficiency, etc. We're talking sports cars, not commuter options.
- neogodless 5y ago
  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!
  - BoorishBears 5y ago
    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 - 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...
    - neogodless 5y ago
      > 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...
      - BoorishBears 5y ago
        Trying to draw conclusions about mobile parts from desktop parts is what people magazine racing CPUs do. It's silly. And it's doubly silly when you're talking about heterogeneous computing. > If you have no choice but to consume massive amounts of power to get top performance, so be it. But given the choice... I mean you have the choice? Don't get the top of the line halo part meant to break records at all costs? The i5 is almost as fast as the i9, faster than the previous i5 and the 5800X, while using considerably less power than the i9. - Top performance always equals "massive power draw" A 5950X will draw over 300W if you OC, which, surprise surprise, a lot of people who are spending $800 on a CPU end up doing. I guess I just figured by now people would understand that and focus on performance for the halo SKUs
        neogodless 5y ago
        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?
- notTheAuth 5y ago
  “Enthusiast” CPUs seem pointless. My CPU is never above 20% in AAA games as it’s all on the GFX card now. Good to see CPUs going through the great decoupling that software did. IMO Steamdeck is the future of home desktops. Both my kids are into science; I’m excited to have a drone remote, sensor base station, generic pc, etc, in a high quality package versus something like Pine phone. Valve and Apple are pushing hardware forward. Hopefully they can obsolete needing data centers of generic CPUs and tons of Byzantine software by making hardware with the best logic for a task built in, available to home users.
  - jbboehr 5y ago
    Basically all of my favorite games get worse simulation performance (FPS or UPS) the longer you play as the simulation becomes more complex (Factorio, RimWorld, Oxygen Not Included, Kerbal Space Program, Stellaris) so the performance is absolutely desired.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - omni 5y ago
    There are plenty of games that actually use CPU: Microsoft Flight Simulator, Factorio, Stellaris, Total War, pretty much any city simulator game, etc. Sure, your average dumb AAA action game won't, but that doesn't mean a good CPU is worthless.
    - GhettoComputers 5y ago
      Factorio isn't stressing 8 core CPUs. Stellaris can be played on a laptop. You are confirming his conclusion that they don't need a strong CPU to play.
      - omni 5y ago
        > Stellaris can be played on a laptop. You are confirming his conclusion that they don't need a strong CPU to play. Movies can be watched on phones. Does that mean theater screens are pointless?

Disappointingly, despite the big.little design adding efficiency cores, this release focuses on performance, and is still far behind AMD (and of course Apple) on efficiency.

meepmorp 5y ago

Yeah, but this is also about "enthusiast" CPUs, which is very much about eye popping top perf numbers, independent of efficiency, etc. We're talking sports cars, not commuter options.

neogodless 5y ago
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!
- BoorishBears 5y ago
  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 - 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...
  - neogodless 5y ago
    > 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...
    - BoorishBears 5y ago
      Trying to draw conclusions about mobile parts from desktop parts is what people magazine racing CPUs do. It's silly. And it's doubly silly when you're talking about heterogeneous computing. > If you have no choice but to consume massive amounts of power to get top performance, so be it. But given the choice... I mean you have the choice? Don't get the top of the line halo part meant to break records at all costs? The i5 is almost as fast as the i9, faster than the previous i5 and the 5800X, while using considerably less power than the i9. - Top performance always equals "massive power draw" A 5950X will draw over 300W if you OC, which, surprise surprise, a lot of people who are spending $800 on a CPU end up doing. I guess I just figured by now people would understand that and focus on performance for the halo SKUs
      - neogodless 5y ago
        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?
notTheAuth 5y ago
“Enthusiast” CPUs seem pointless. My CPU is never above 20% in AAA games as it’s all on the GFX card now. Good to see CPUs going through the great decoupling that software did. IMO Steamdeck is the future of home desktops. Both my kids are into science; I’m excited to have a drone remote, sensor base station, generic pc, etc, in a high quality package versus something like Pine phone. Valve and Apple are pushing hardware forward. Hopefully they can obsolete needing data centers of generic CPUs and tons of Byzantine software by making hardware with the best logic for a task built in, available to home users.
- jbboehr 5y ago
  Basically all of my favorite games get worse simulation performance (FPS or UPS) the longer you play as the simulation becomes more complex (Factorio, RimWorld, Oxygen Not Included, Kerbal Space Program, Stellaris) so the performance is absolutely desired.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- omni 5y ago
  There are plenty of games that actually use CPU: Microsoft Flight Simulator, Factorio, Stellaris, Total War, pretty much any city simulator game, etc. Sure, your average dumb AAA action game won't, but that doesn't mean a good CPU is worthless.
  - GhettoComputers 5y ago
    Factorio isn't stressing 8 core CPUs. Stellaris can be played on a laptop. You are confirming his conclusion that they don't need a strong CPU to play.
    - omni 5y ago
      > Stellaris can be played on a laptop. You are confirming his conclusion that they don't need a strong CPU to play. Movies can be watched on phones. Does that mean theater screens are pointless?