More Intel 12th Gen Core performance numbers emerge

[Tabbykatze]

Totally agree it's shady mind and I am not defending Intel. AMD/Nvidia et al are all at similar things though, which is why we need the independent benchmarks

It's irrelevant who is doing similar or not, it must be called out and dealt with no matter who does it. Intel have already had numerous FCC and the equivalent in the UK complaints over how they present their benchmarking data and have been pulled up on it in the past by legal and federal bodies.

Intel can walk happily away from this one though and say "well the patches weren't out when we did our testing" and they will get away with this again. Intels methodologies for showing results vs competitors are the worst of the big three and should garner criticism just as much as their competition (if not more so due to their anti-competitive history).

[Corky34]

You can probably just assume that its flat even performance with a 5950x then. That still isn't bad at the top end given a 12900k is ~£150 cheaper than a 5950x....but not quite as impressive as the slides show.

What was the performance degradation of Ryzen before they patched it, was it roughly the same as how much faster they're claiming to be over Ryzen.

Sorry for not looking it up myself.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

It's irrelevant who is doing similar or not, it must be called out and dealt with no matter who does it. Intel have already had numerous FCC and the equivalent in the UK complaints over how they present their benchmarking data and have been pulled up on it in the past by legal and federal bodies.

Intel can walk happily away from this one though and say "well the patches weren't out when we did our testing" and they will get away with this again. Intels methodologies for showing results vs competitors are the worst of the big three and should garner criticism just as much as their competition (if not more so due to their anti-competitive history).

Intel hasn't even paid the EU fine for its activities over a decade ago:
https://www.crn.com/news/components-...or-against-amd

Like with all the very big companies,even if they are found guilty they will just delay it in courts for years. There are too many legal loopholes which enable them to get away with these sorts of things.

[Tabbykatze]

Intel hasn't even paid the EU fine for its activities over a decade ago:
https://www.crn.com/news/components-...or-against-amd

Like with all the very big companies,even if they are found guilty they will just delay it in courts for years. There are too many legal loopholes which enable them to get away with these sorts of things.

It frustrates me that the legal system can't just say "no, enough is enough, pay the fine". In 2020 Intel had a net income of 6.2 billion USD, it's not exactly like Intel is would suffer greatly from being ordered wholly to pay the sum. Their dividends for 2020 were 1.4 billion USD alone.

Because of this hubris is why Intel will always be in my black books when they were found categorically to be in breach of anti-compete laws.

Edit: Funnily enough, the consent decree from Intels 2010 settlement with the FTC (why with the FTC and not to AMD) expired in 2020...

[KultiVator]

It could likely be designed to mix arm, efficiency and/or performance cores, all they'd really need to change on the design is the 'control' part to account for the mix of cores.

I know AMD have looked at x86/arm hybrid (I'd guess intel have too) in the past so who knows where they might go now windows can support arm and x86/x64. It could actually work quite well if they could assign 'lesser tasks' to the arm cores etc, especially on a mobile cpu. Samsung seems to be trying to add a radeon gpu to an arm cpu too.

AMD also talked about adding in 'AI' type cores so I'd guess the the modular design had some future proofing in it's conception.

Assuming AMD get the same sort of 'support' from MS as intel did with the scheduler they could completely surprise Intel again with a 'hybrid' design.

At the same time, I'm not sure AMD really needs to go down the efficiency core route, they're not trying to set records for the most power draw like Intel lol

Interesting times ahead - the inclusion of ARM-based cores could really change the landscape... especially with Microsoft beginning to roll-out the new Android layer to Windows 11 users. Doubtful there's any provisions right now for the Android subsystem to exploit mixed x64/ARM cores yet - but doesn't seem like a huge stretch to imagine an enhanced Process/Thread Manager that could actively identify x86/x64/ARM instruction sets in each process and allocate threads to whichever CPU core if appropriate and least 'loaded' at any given moment.

Apple have, for some time, demonstrated just how capable ARM cores can be for specialised tasks (e.g. rendering high-res video, in particular, is a smooth and swift process on M1 Macs and even on pre-M1 iPads too) - certainly wouldn't hurt future Windows PCs to be able to harness the lean efficiency of ARM cores in a similar way... and save creative people from carrying around hulking great gaming laptops to get video/animation projects done on the move.

Imagine that, video-editing & rendering on a cool-running, responsive, thin and light Windows laptop/tablet without a CUDA-enabled GPU and no deafening fans or thermal throttling. Sort of what the Surface Pro 9 should be to take the fight to Apple - especially given Microsoft's increasingly Apple-esque price tags on Surface devices. All without scuppering the native x86/x64 support that remains so intrinsic to the Windows experience.

[DanceswithUnix]

I know AMD have looked at x86/arm hybrid

Have they? AMD chips all contain an ARM core and have for ages, but nothing you can run user code on. Just seems to be to control security stuff like secure boot and the ftpm.

[sykobee]

I see they are using Windows 11 for the gaming benchmark. Is this with the AMD CPPC & L3 cache (performance) bugs still in place?

Other sites have suggested it is. So the numbers without, and then next year's v-cache (15% gaming increase allegedly) will keep AMD competitive.

Any release where there's a lot of hype, and then pre-orders before reviews, has to be treated suspiciously.

The DDR5 speeds aren't exactly inspiring either (especially as you add more DIMMs), and I hope the cost premium is taken into account in reviews.

Right now the 12600K is looking like it could be good value compared to the 5600X, but we'll see how the reviews pan out.

[Corky34]

The DDR5 thing has me curious as i know at first glance and on paper the latencies are higher but does the fact that DDR5 uses two 32bit buses, versus DDR4's single 64bit, makeup for those higher latencies?

Or are the latencies like they normally are with new versions of DDR and something that will come down over time, because until they get closer to DDR4 latencies there not that appealing to me personally.

[LSG501]

Have they? AMD chips all contain an ARM core and have for ages, but nothing you can run user code on. Just seems to be to control security stuff like secure boot and the ftpm.

I do remember reading about but it never got outside of the labs as far as I know, it was a fair few years back though.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

It frustrates me that the legal system can't just say "no, enough is enough, pay the fine". In 2020 Intel had a net income of 6.2 billion USD, it's not exactly like Intel is would suffer greatly from being ordered wholly to pay the sum. Their dividends for 2020 were 1.4 billion USD alone.

Because of this hubris is why Intel will always be in my black books when they were found categorically to be in breach of anti-compete laws.

Edit: Funnily enough, the consent decree from Intels 2010 settlement with the FTC (why with the FTC and not to AMD) expired in 2020...

The laws need changing,but it makes you wonder how much lobbying these firms are doing behind the scenes to keep the status quo going?

[bae85]

I find it funny how Intel will start selling their next gen cores, and all AMD needs to do to stay competitive is release the same architecture with the new 3d v-cache for a 15% boost. AMD are toying with Intel right now and when Zen 3+ or Zen 4 comes out Intel will be playing catch up straight away again!

[DanceswithUnix]

I do remember reading about but it never got outside of the labs as far as I know, it was a fair few years back though.

There was lots of guesswork for what turned out to be the security processor.

I don't really see a win for mixed ISA chips tbh. The Android stuff for example, well most of that is Java and amd64 can run that just fine. Including ARM cores with any muscle on a PC chip would use up silicon that could be otherwise spent on making the amd64 cores faster, which would benefit all programs including stuff that emulates ARM (Amdahl's law). The same goes the other way around, hence Nvidia seemed to want to make big wide ARM cores to software emulate an AMD64 ISA (much like the old Transmeta CPUs from way back). There was even a point when the DEC Alpha could emulate an Intel CPU faster than any actual x86 silicon that Intel was making.

[Richh]

Writing this on a Maximus VIII Hero running an 8700K that's been absolutely bullet proof and done a fantastic job as my prime desktop since, well, 2016. It even installed Win11 without a murmur once the TPM card went in.

Finally thinking it's time to move it sideways - but, sheesh, I swear I didn't pay more than about £180 for the motherboard. >£500 for its Z690 equivalent says a lot - and more than cancels Intel's relatively keen CPU pricing out!

[Tabbykatze]

Intel was up to their malicious marketing and benchmarking again, apparently. According to hardware times and the benchmark config slide, the benchmarks were done with AMD in PL1 at 105w TDP while the Alder Lake 12900k was at 241w PL1 TDP.



Effectively meaning the "30% perf leadership" was while the AMD CPU was configured to run at less than half the wattage rating of its competitor.

I though Alder was lake was meant to be efficient and powerful.

This just feels like Skylake 2.0...

[Tabbykatze]

So according to Igors Lab, Intel has pushed mobo manufacturers to move PL2 values into PL1 so the processors will operate at full power at all times: https://www.igorslab.de/en/get-into-...yet-wherefore/

Before it was mobo manufacturers naughtily turning on MCE meaning out of the box, the layman wouldn't know why they were getting better/worse performance than another motherboard. But now intel is pushing a Power Limit release and making the PL1 value reported in marketing be utterly meaningless.

[Domestic_Ginger]

So, what time is the NDA lifted? I know its today.