Intel Alder Lake-S unlocked processor prices leak

[HEXUS]

Opting for the 'KF' doesn't save you much, but they might still be an attractive choice.

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[Tabbykatze]

Interesting pricing for the first run of big.LITTLE from Intel.

Doesn't look like they're trying to undercut AMD, merely match them at pricing. But will an 8pc/8ec system match/exceed a 5950x? We'll have to see in the reviews.

[LSG501]

Interesting pricing for the first run of big.LITTLE from Intel.

Doesn't look like they're trying to undercut AMD, merely match them at pricing. But will an 8pc/8ec system match/exceed a 5950x? We'll have to see in the reviews.

I've seen a report (can't find it now) saying the efficiency cores are supposedly around haswell, maybe even skylake, performance but no idea how true that is. If it's true it might be closer than we're expecting.

Personally I'm expecting the 12900k to be competing with the 5900x with 12c/24t rather than the 5950x. It might be the usual AMD wins some, Intel wins some on benchmarks though and it could also change between windows 10 and windows 11 due the scheduler being updated etc.

[Tabbykatze]

I've seen a report (can't find it now) saying the efficiency cores are supposedly around haswell, maybe even skylake, performance but no idea how true that is. If it's true it might be closer than we're expecting.

Personally I'm expecting the 12900k to be competing with the 5900x with 12c/24t rather than the 5950x. It might be the usual AMD wins some, Intel wins some on benchmarks though and it could also change between windows 10 and windows 11 due the scheduler being updated etc.

I've seen people claiming the same and I did find it on one of Intels slides but it was layered with one of those dubious graph layouts and weird axis scaling.

However, clock for clock, Zen 3 is still over 20% better than a Skylake era core but then again we're looking at efficiency rather than pure grunt.

The other factor to consider is that Skylake era cores performance was normally in SMT configurations and the lost of SMT immediately dropped multi threaded performance by ~30% or so. So on an individual per core basis, they might be equivalent to Skylake/Zen+/Zen 2 but my concern lies in the thread management and multi threaded environment.

Skylake is not a Zen 3 equivalent by any measure, that and Skylake (and subsequent iterations) being competitive with AMD was largely down to pushing more and more boost performance out of the silicon so it can run at higher frequencies for longer in comparison to AMDs processors. So I do not expect the Alder Lake e-cores to be banging the drums out the gate.

[DanceswithUnix]

These will end up going up against AMD's 5000 series with 3D V-cache enabled. I presume Intel are scrabbling to create versions with an iris cache chip included to try and make some of that back up.