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The high-end Alder Lake parts - particularly the 12900K - are terrible energy hogs. But as you move down the stack, efficiency improves a lot while performance

The high-end Alder Lake parts - particularly the 12900K - are terrible energy hogs. But as you move down the stack, efficiency improves a lot while performance remains very competitive with AMD parts in the same price bracket.

jeffbee 5y ago
My 12700K has core power usage under 1W and package power under 4W when it's just sitting there, which is does a heck of a lot of. When it's running flat out compiling C++ projects on all performance cores, package power is ~90W. Single-threaded performance is much better than any Ryzen and even beats my M1 Pro. I'm not really seeing the energy argument for desktop/workstation usage. For datacenter TCO AMD is probably still the champ.
- monocasa 5y ago
  I guess I weight datacenter workloads much higher for perf/watt because the higher margins there is what funds next gen's R&D. Cranking up power to get perf under load is a move that cuts off funding streams in one of the most capital intensive industries.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    Intel still sells 85% of the server market including 75% of the megascale cloud market, so at this point it does not appear to me that Intel has been strategically wounded. I'm sure they have more than enough cash to fund R&D at this time.
    - monocasa 5y ago
      It was 98% of the datacenter market in 2017, and apparently the rate of decrease is accelerating, and that's even before taking into account that the datacenter chip equivalent to your 12700k doesn't come out until later this year and that's where you'd expect to see the real fall off in DC marketshare. That money can dry up very quickly.
      - jeffbee 5y ago
        By no means do I imagine that Intel has everything right where they want it. Clearly, they'd prefer to be the "machine of the day" at Google, instead of AMD having that honor. But, it's also not the first time they've been in this position. I would argue they were in much more serious trouble in 2008 or so, when it was Itanium and NetBurst vs. Opteron, and everyone bought Opteron.
        monocasa 5y ago
        Intel still had leading edge node supremacy at that point, and everyone go caught with their pants down with the end of Dennard scaling. AMD simply lucked out that they weren't designing a core to hit 10Ghz in the first place (because what would become GloFo didn't have the node chops to even pretend that they could hit that in the first place even ignoring Dennard scaling issues). AMD therefore didn't have to pull slower mobile core designs off of the back burner like Intel had to which took time to readjust. Intel's in a much worse position now. Their process woes aren't issues that the rest of the industry will hit in a year or so like the end of Dennard scaling was.

jeffbee 5y ago

My 12700K has core power usage under 1W and package power under 4W when it's just sitting there, which is does a heck of a lot of. When it's running flat out compiling C++ projects on all performance cores, package power is ~90W. Single-threaded performance is much better than any Ryzen and even beats my M1 Pro. I'm not really seeing the energy argument for desktop/workstation usage. For datacenter TCO AMD is probably still the champ.

monocasa 5y ago
I guess I weight datacenter workloads much higher for perf/watt because the higher margins there is what funds next gen's R&D. Cranking up power to get perf under load is a move that cuts off funding streams in one of the most capital intensive industries.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Intel still sells 85% of the server market including 75% of the megascale cloud market, so at this point it does not appear to me that Intel has been strategically wounded. I'm sure they have more than enough cash to fund R&D at this time.
  - monocasa 5y ago
    It was 98% of the datacenter market in 2017, and apparently the rate of decrease is accelerating, and that's even before taking into account that the datacenter chip equivalent to your 12700k doesn't come out until later this year and that's where you'd expect to see the real fall off in DC marketshare. That money can dry up very quickly.
    - jeffbee 5y ago
      By no means do I imagine that Intel has everything right where they want it. Clearly, they'd prefer to be the "machine of the day" at Google, instead of AMD having that honor. But, it's also not the first time they've been in this position. I would argue they were in much more serious trouble in 2008 or so, when it was Itanium and NetBurst vs. Opteron, and everyone bought Opteron.
      - monocasa 5y ago
        Intel still had leading edge node supremacy at that point, and everyone go caught with their pants down with the end of Dennard scaling. AMD simply lucked out that they weren't designing a core to hit 10Ghz in the first place (because what would become GloFo didn't have the node chops to even pretend that they could hit that in the first place even ignoring Dennard scaling issues). AMD therefore didn't have to pull slower mobile core designs off of the back burner like Intel had to which took time to readjust. Intel's in a much worse position now. Their process woes aren't issues that the rest of the industry will hit in a year or so like the end of Dennard scaling was.