Good testing from Phoronix, as usual. I do wish they’d focus more on practical benchmarks up front like kernel compiling instead of the more synthetic or obscure benchmarks like mining Monero.
Also interesting to see that they used a mid-tier air cooler with 92mm fans and it was fine:
> The Alder Lake processors were being tested with a Noctua NH-U9S heatsink with dual fan configuration while using the Noctua NM-i17xx-MP78 mounting kit. The Noctua U9S was also used for cooling the other processors under test. With the i9-12900K pulling close to a 200 Watt average during this demanding benchmark, the average core temperature on air cooling was 81 degrees with a peak of 98 degrees. The Core i5 12600K saw a 63 degree average and peak of 72 degrees during this NAMD run.
That 92mm Noctua cooler is good, but it performs significantly worse than the much larger 140mm fan, dual-tower coolers like the NH-D15 that enthusiasts will likely be using. Yet it worked just fine.
The CPU consumes a lot of power, but it’s not as big of a deal as many people make it out to be. If power consumption is a concern you could get the i5 version for a lower power consumption and thermals. It still performs very well and is a good value.
It’s actually not a problem. These modern CPUs will boost to high frequencies in the short-term and use quick thermal feedback loops to avoid damage.
The thermal feedback loops are so good that you can even put something like an AMD 5950X into a small case with low airflow and it will automatically adjust the clock rate down to a level it can sustain under load.
Lower temperatures will allow for higher frequencies for longer periods, though, so cooler is better. The potential for damage from excessive temperatures has been greatly exaggerated, though. Unless you’re planning to run the CPU at full load for a decade, it doesn’t really matter. A couple hours of gaming every day (which won’t produce temperatures seen in these synthetic 100% load benchmarks) is basically negligible.
For some perspective: Laptop CPUs routinely hit 90-100C because the fan curves are tuned for quietness. Those CPUs are built on the same processes. Some newer parts like the RAM on RTX3080 and RTX3090 have even higher thermal limits up to 110C. It’s not a big deal.
Higher temps means it will age faster though. I'm not sure of the factor, it's going to be hardware-dependent, so I'm not sure how big of a deal it is.
This is true, but the effect has been exaggerated.
In the consumer world, how often is a CPU pegged to 100% full load across all cores like in these benchmarks? It doesn't happen while gaming. Maybe someone who does video encoding or compiling large projects will spike their CPU usage to 100% for a couple hours per day at most. If a CPU only spends 1-5% of its time at these high temperatures, it doesn't really add up to much over even 5 years. And even if the CPU dies after 5 years, it's really cheap to buy a replacement at that point.
If you're running a server at 100% load 24/7, that's 1-2 orders of magnitude more time spent at the high temperatures. If you need high reliability and the most dependable lifespan for those servers, you'd want to choose a lower clocked CPU. That's one of the reasons why server parts are clocked lower than their consumer counterparts.
> Maybe someone who does video encoding or compiling large projects will spike their CPU usage to 100% for a couple hours per day at most.
Yeah that's sort of my situation, I do some large data conversion (not video but same idea) tasks that do run 24/7, sometimes up to a couple weeks long, but those tasks are infrequent and the box is idle the rest of the time. I do most of it on a Hetzner server that uses an old Intel desktop cpu. CPU has been fine all this time, but they did swap out the memory sticks for me due to suspected errors a while back.
So far it sounds like only AMD supports ECC memory for the desktop processors, and imho that is significant. I'm staying away from home PC's (other than my dinky laptop) but if I were to get one, I'd want ECC.
The last time I checked they didn't support it, they just didn't fuse it off on the die. If you want the reliability off ECC you probably also want that functionality verified and tested unless you are just buying it because it might help and it sounds cool.
I haven't seen any benchmarks how immune to radiation DDR-5 to DDR-4 with ECC is but DDR-5 has a kind of parity check build in.
> While Intel has been bringing up Alder Lake graphics for a while as covered in many Phoronix articles over the past year, up through the recently released Linux 5.15 kernel the Alder Lake graphics are not enabled by default.
The writing is on the wall: the day will come when Intel will not write accelerated Linux graphics drivers for their laptop GPUs and that's the day when Linux on notebooks just dies. They will do so because Windows 11 + WSL (now with wslg) provides all the Linux most need.
I would have worried about that much more 5 years ago. Now the best CPU+GPU option for Linux is arguably already AMD. The performance is better and AMD open-source drivers have improved quite a bit. Even the closed-source Nvidia drivers are finally getting the needed bits for proper Wayland support and there are people writing Linux drivers for Apple's GPU in the M1. Intel graphics were definitely great for Linux for a long time but options are actually improving for a change.
My understanding is that's not correct. It's possible to do general purpose computing on a GPU with things like CUDA, but your code has to be specifically designed that way and is tied to the drivers/hardware you implement it for. It's not going to automatically happen if you write some matrix code.
Server processors usually don't come with iGPUs. There are some Xeon variants that have them but it's not common.
You're right though, servers usually have some sort of very basic GPU for basic graphics. Sometimes from Matrox and others.
The parent comment makes no sense at all for a different reason. Intel wants to enter the top dGPU market and yes, Linux dominates the server landscape and yes, Intel probably wants to sell dGPUs to all the cloud providers and would have to continue to support Linux in that case.
Parent comment is simply FUD. It's sad it's been upvoted.
The only real threat to linux notebooks is microsoft. The day microsoft starts respecting its users, respecting thier time, thier privacy, then will I worry for linux on notebooks. But for the next few decades i think we are safe. Microsoft will never change.
I do not understand your comment. Could you expand on why Intel would stop developing Linux drivers for their iGPU?
My understanding is that Intel has very strong Linux drivers for all their hardware. For their entry in the discrete GPU market they will likely provide good Linux drivers to distance themselves from Nvidia.
Intel's 3D graphics drivers are in Mesa (Vulkan and OpenGL) and have been for more than a decade. The team at Intel (which I was a member of until I left a year ago) continues to develop and improve the drivers.
That's the past. wsl/wslg is a watershed moment though. Developers can use practically all the Linux tools there are while the IT department only needs to support Windows. This is a massive win for everyone involved and so I suspect this will be a default for most companies -- and business laptops are the bread and butter of Lenovo/HP/Dell. When there's no business case for upkeeping the built in GPU driver , Intel will not waste any more resources on it. There wasn't an answer on where developers should go if not native Linux (unless Mac but that's not relevant to this discussion, we are discussing PCs) now there is.
Especially now when Intel is entering the dGPU arena, there will be enormous pressure to reallocate people like you from Linux to the Windows driver team I bet.
there's a whole linux-only HPC market out there which requires dedicated GPU drivers. same reason why nvidia won't stop making Linux drivers for their hardware. API support may be limited, but then with Vulkan you can reimplement your own GL or DX or whatever you wish.
I promise you the value add of WSL is nowhere near the value of a pure linux/unix system, especially for developers. This is just yet another iteration of Microsoft's embrace/extend/extinguish pipeline.
WSL seems to be a way to prevent developers from abandoning Windows altogether and to make it more comparable to what a Mac offers (a Unix with a polished GUI).
Quite frankly, I prefer Gnome to Windows, but I can be happy with a Mac too.
Microsoft trying to make Linux more accessible to it's HUGE professional community of programmers that are content with their OS driver but want/need accessible Linux access. The company has a decades-long track record of positive contributions to the programming community.
It's game over for Intel and AMD. The Apple Silicon has changed the semiconductor game - like the iPhone did for smartphones. It took Android at least 5 years to catch up and. It will probably take 5-10 years for Intel and AMD.
Apple M1(X) is a beast, but if it will be restricted to Mac OS then x86 is here to stay for a long time. There are a lot of cases where Mac OS is a no go and actual x86/x64 CPUs, thanks to competition, are quite good, maybe not as good as M1(X), but changing architecture nowadays requires a lot more reasons than years ago. Also, thanks to its integration you just can't upgrade M1 notebooks.
Looks like based on the Asahi Linux, the fact that windows can't run on it is solely Microsoft's problem. If Hector Martin can get a Linux system to boot in a few months, I am sure Microsoft engineers can too.
I never said the first part wasn't an issue, I was addressing the second part. We all know Apple isn't going to sell their processors directly. The only way that changes maybe is if a bunch of data centers go begging them to, and they might be special chips priced out of normal desktop usage. I wish that wasn't that case, but unfortunately it is. Especially with outside of Raspberry Pis (and like SBCs) and Pinebooks, right now the M1 is the only viable desktop ARM processor. Wouldn't be such a big deal if we begin to see more laptop and desktop manufacturers dive into the ARM space (I hope so).
Apple silicon has been in Apple phones for many years. Worldwide iPhone market share has not increased and it has not beaten the competition. Desktop users will be even harder to convert due to more legacy software and bigger OS differences. Apple silicon has achieved an impressive breakthrough into the market but it is currently an also ran architecture with limited expansion potential.
It is cool to see Intel reclaim the performance crown with an innovative new architecture. After years of stagnation at the high-end, the intensified competition between Intel and AMD is a big win for the customer in terms of both performance and price.
However, I do wonder whether they are going for the wrong thing. They are not competing against AMD's Zen 3 desktops at anything but the very high end, and their power consumption numbers are pretty insanely high. In both the laptop and server market, the thing that matters most is performance per watt rather than performance per dollar, and they aren't ahead in that metric.
My sense is that Apple's M1 and other ARM-based designs are getting to the point where they are "good enough" for the vast majority of use cases, even if they are insufficient for a few high-end applications. This is classic disruptive innovation, and we are seeing it reach its logical conclusion. It's kind of interesting that Alder Lake's dominance is due to them adopting something very similar to ARM's big.LITTLE
> However, I do wonder whether they are going for the wrong thing. They are not competing against AMD's Zen 3 desktops at anything but the very high end, and their power consumption numbers are pretty insanely high
How so? The $289 i5-12600K (or $264 for the version without integrated graphics) looks to outperform the more expensive mid-range AMD parts in many tests. It's even at the top of the Performance-per-dollar chart on page two: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel-12... It also leads the performance-per-dollar average in the conclusion.
The i5-12600K also has lower average power consumption than everything but the low-end Ryzen 5600X, but it beats the power power-hungry AMD processors in most benchmarks. This is really impressive. I don't understand why everyone is convinced the Alder Lake is inefficient.
> In both the laptop and server market, the thing that matters most is performance per watt rather than performance per dollar, and they aren't ahead in that metric.
The i5-12600K is the performance-per-watt leader in many (maybe most) of these benchmarks. The "Per Watt Results" chart on page 12 is confusing, but the i5-12600K is the performance/watt winner in maybe half or more of the tests: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel-12...
I think the mid-range i5-12600K is the real star of this show, matching the performance of the AMD 5800X but at a significantly lower price. I think people are putting too much focus on the enthusiast-oriented i9-12900K which was designed to be a no-compromise performance chip without regard to efficiency.
There's a theme in the HN comments for any article talking about Alder Lake right now.
Comments implying the i9, a product that exists to gain max performance at all costs, should be put down for high power consumption. At the same time the same comments act like the rest of the range can be ignored because they're not the fastest of the bunch.
The CPU wars are starting to feel like sports teams for techies. Some people have picked a favorite team and they can't stand to see the other team win on game day (e.g. benchmark release day).
As a consumer, I love all of this competition. I have an M1 Max in my laptop, a 5950X in my homelab server, and I'll probably put this i5-12600K in my personal/gaming PC. They all have different strengths and I'm benefiting from it in every domain.
I agree, though, about all the competition, even if we don't agree on power consumption. But I think it's a use-case/personal preference thing. These are tools or toys, depending on use, and if you use a system as a tool, and a high-end CPU saves you time by doing things faster, overlooking power consumption makes sense.
Personally, I like to cut costs where possible, while also avoiding high power usage and fan noise, so I like efficient systems that do enough. The i5-12600K is enough, though it doesn't make sense in my personal situation where I could upgrade to a Ryzen 5000 chip without any other changes.
I also dislike Microsoft putting their latest and greatest CPU software in Windows 11, as I currently have no wish to change my gaming PC over to that system.
But the main thing is just that Intel has been cramming high power and heat into CPUs for quite a few years now, and I'm eager to see the other end of it, where top chips can manage what they're doing without 200W or more. We know it's possible, because AMD and Apple have efficient, performant chips.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I feel there's a lot of astroturf material in the comments (not that participants are bots or anything, just the same kind of comments you would get from such directly from a reputable user). I find this especially for large companies like Microsoft, Apple, or Amazon and I'd include Intel there too.
AMD and other smaller competitors seem to have a lot of "street cred" for being value-players. Strangely, so does Apple (at least on the computer front).
I agree i5-12600K is the best Intel desktop processor in it's price range for sale right now, this CPU would also force AMD to lower their prices. We should thank Intel for putting this out at this price, otherwise AMD/TSMC would have kept their prices higher.
If I had to guess, AMD is going to wait and see if there's any reasonable volume that goes into the channel.
If Intel manages to get a lot of I5s out in the wild, then AMD could decide to drop prices. That scenario could have an impact on negotiations with ODMs and System manufacturers too. Keep in mind that most quoted OEM prices you see for CPUs mean about as much as a quoted Invoice price on a car.
The i5-12600K leads performance-per-watt results in most tests.
They include power results for some tests, where you can even see the i5-12600K consuming less power while outperforming most of the AMD parts: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel-12... This doesn't hold for every test, but the power consumption issue has been greatly exaggerated.
If power consumption is a concern, do not buy the i9-12900K. It's a no-compromise chip that disregards power efficiency for the sake of peak performance. Buy the i5-12600K, which is actually decently efficient.
Somehow this heterogeneous architecture makes little sense to me since the i9 as a whole consumes lots of power - about 250W - significantly more than previous generation of Intel processors. This also introduces an irking complication with the thread scheduler. I thought the whole idea behind adding E cores was to save power and deliver good-enough performance.
Why even bother when you could just have fewer symmetrical cores like P10.
the i9 is a race car. nobody actually buys race cars to do real work unless your job is racing cars... or posting nice pictures of race cars. complaining that a race car is inefficient is missing the point.
The previous generation could use 250W at certain all core workloads, Intel just never marketed the difference between PL1 and PL2 for TDP. Most chips can only use that much power for a short time due to thermal limitation, so you need both adequate cooling and a suitable workload to use 250W, this haven't changed, the typical power consumption is however lower.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadIt's interesting to see the i5-12600K beating the AMD Ryzen 5800X in both performance and power consumption in the benchmark on page 2: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel-12... .
The i5-12600K also leads in many of the performance-per-watt tests on page 12: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel-12...
Also interesting to see that they used a mid-tier air cooler with 92mm fans and it was fine:
> The Alder Lake processors were being tested with a Noctua NH-U9S heatsink with dual fan configuration while using the Noctua NM-i17xx-MP78 mounting kit. The Noctua U9S was also used for cooling the other processors under test. With the i9-12900K pulling close to a 200 Watt average during this demanding benchmark, the average core temperature on air cooling was 81 degrees with a peak of 98 degrees. The Core i5 12600K saw a 63 degree average and peak of 72 degrees during this NAMD run.
That 92mm Noctua cooler is good, but it performs significantly worse than the much larger 140mm fan, dual-tower coolers like the NH-D15 that enthusiasts will likely be using. Yet it worked just fine.
The CPU consumes a lot of power, but it’s not as big of a deal as many people make it out to be. If power consumption is a concern you could get the i5 version for a lower power consumption and thermals. It still performs very well and is a good value.
The thermal feedback loops are so good that you can even put something like an AMD 5950X into a small case with low airflow and it will automatically adjust the clock rate down to a level it can sustain under load.
Lower temperatures will allow for higher frequencies for longer periods, though, so cooler is better. The potential for damage from excessive temperatures has been greatly exaggerated, though. Unless you’re planning to run the CPU at full load for a decade, it doesn’t really matter. A couple hours of gaming every day (which won’t produce temperatures seen in these synthetic 100% load benchmarks) is basically negligible.
For some perspective: Laptop CPUs routinely hit 90-100C because the fan curves are tuned for quietness. Those CPUs are built on the same processes. Some newer parts like the RAM on RTX3080 and RTX3090 have even higher thermal limits up to 110C. It’s not a big deal.
In the consumer world, how often is a CPU pegged to 100% full load across all cores like in these benchmarks? It doesn't happen while gaming. Maybe someone who does video encoding or compiling large projects will spike their CPU usage to 100% for a couple hours per day at most. If a CPU only spends 1-5% of its time at these high temperatures, it doesn't really add up to much over even 5 years. And even if the CPU dies after 5 years, it's really cheap to buy a replacement at that point.
If you're running a server at 100% load 24/7, that's 1-2 orders of magnitude more time spent at the high temperatures. If you need high reliability and the most dependable lifespan for those servers, you'd want to choose a lower clocked CPU. That's one of the reasons why server parts are clocked lower than their consumer counterparts.
Yeah that's sort of my situation, I do some large data conversion (not video but same idea) tasks that do run 24/7, sometimes up to a couple weeks long, but those tasks are infrequent and the box is idle the rest of the time. I do most of it on a Hetzner server that uses an old Intel desktop cpu. CPU has been fine all this time, but they did swap out the memory sticks for me due to suspected errors a while back.
So far it sounds like only AMD supports ECC memory for the desktop processors, and imho that is significant. I'm staying away from home PC's (other than my dinky laptop) but if I were to get one, I'd want ECC.
I haven't seen any benchmarks how immune to radiation DDR-5 to DDR-4 with ECC is but DDR-5 has a kind of parity check build in.
The writing is on the wall: the day will come when Intel will not write accelerated Linux graphics drivers for their laptop GPUs and that's the day when Linux on notebooks just dies. They will do so because Windows 11 + WSL (now with wslg) provides all the Linux most need.
That's a rather strong statement about the future of AMD as a going concern, don't you think!
Many run completely headless and have no GPU at all, either on PCIe or in the processor.
You're right though, servers usually have some sort of very basic GPU for basic graphics. Sometimes from Matrox and others.
The parent comment makes no sense at all for a different reason. Intel wants to enter the top dGPU market and yes, Linux dominates the server landscape and yes, Intel probably wants to sell dGPUs to all the cloud providers and would have to continue to support Linux in that case.
Parent comment is simply FUD. It's sad it's been upvoted.
My understanding is that Intel has very strong Linux drivers for all their hardware. For their entry in the discrete GPU market they will likely provide good Linux drivers to distance themselves from Nvidia.
Intel's 3D graphics drivers are in Mesa (Vulkan and OpenGL) and have been for more than a decade. The team at Intel (which I was a member of until I left a year ago) continues to develop and improve the drivers.
Especially now when Intel is entering the dGPU arena, there will be enormous pressure to reallocate people like you from Linux to the Windows driver team I bet.
Not this tired trope again.
Azure makes a lot of money off Linux, and Microsoft has been a pretty good open source participant the last several years. But it's still a business.
Quite frankly, I prefer Gnome to Windows, but I can be happy with a Mac too.
Microsoft trying to make Linux more accessible to it's HUGE professional community of programmers that are content with their OS driver but want/need accessible Linux access. The company has a decades-long track record of positive contributions to the programming community.
There are lots of reasons for success and failure. I would not count out two enormous chip makers full of skilled people and experience.
I'll be perfectly fine for that 5-10 years.
However, I do wonder whether they are going for the wrong thing. They are not competing against AMD's Zen 3 desktops at anything but the very high end, and their power consumption numbers are pretty insanely high. In both the laptop and server market, the thing that matters most is performance per watt rather than performance per dollar, and they aren't ahead in that metric.
My sense is that Apple's M1 and other ARM-based designs are getting to the point where they are "good enough" for the vast majority of use cases, even if they are insufficient for a few high-end applications. This is classic disruptive innovation, and we are seeing it reach its logical conclusion. It's kind of interesting that Alder Lake's dominance is due to them adopting something very similar to ARM's big.LITTLE
How so? The $289 i5-12600K (or $264 for the version without integrated graphics) looks to outperform the more expensive mid-range AMD parts in many tests. It's even at the top of the Performance-per-dollar chart on page two: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel-12... It also leads the performance-per-dollar average in the conclusion.
The i5-12600K also has lower average power consumption than everything but the low-end Ryzen 5600X, but it beats the power power-hungry AMD processors in most benchmarks. This is really impressive. I don't understand why everyone is convinced the Alder Lake is inefficient.
> In both the laptop and server market, the thing that matters most is performance per watt rather than performance per dollar, and they aren't ahead in that metric.
The i5-12600K is the performance-per-watt leader in many (maybe most) of these benchmarks. The "Per Watt Results" chart on page 12 is confusing, but the i5-12600K is the performance/watt winner in maybe half or more of the tests: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel-12...
I think the mid-range i5-12600K is the real star of this show, matching the performance of the AMD 5800X but at a significantly lower price. I think people are putting too much focus on the enthusiast-oriented i9-12900K which was designed to be a no-compromise performance chip without regard to efficiency.
Comments implying the i9, a product that exists to gain max performance at all costs, should be put down for high power consumption. At the same time the same comments act like the rest of the range can be ignored because they're not the fastest of the bunch.
As a consumer, I love all of this competition. I have an M1 Max in my laptop, a 5950X in my homelab server, and I'll probably put this i5-12600K in my personal/gaming PC. They all have different strengths and I'm benefiting from it in every domain.
I agree, though, about all the competition, even if we don't agree on power consumption. But I think it's a use-case/personal preference thing. These are tools or toys, depending on use, and if you use a system as a tool, and a high-end CPU saves you time by doing things faster, overlooking power consumption makes sense.
Personally, I like to cut costs where possible, while also avoiding high power usage and fan noise, so I like efficient systems that do enough. The i5-12600K is enough, though it doesn't make sense in my personal situation where I could upgrade to a Ryzen 5000 chip without any other changes.
I also dislike Microsoft putting their latest and greatest CPU software in Windows 11, as I currently have no wish to change my gaming PC over to that system.
But the main thing is just that Intel has been cramming high power and heat into CPUs for quite a few years now, and I'm eager to see the other end of it, where top chips can manage what they're doing without 200W or more. We know it's possible, because AMD and Apple have efficient, performant chips.
AMD and other smaller competitors seem to have a lot of "street cred" for being value-players. Strangely, so does Apple (at least on the computer front).
https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcsales/comments/qn4y1h/cpu_m...
If Intel manages to get a lot of I5s out in the wild, then AMD could decide to drop prices. That scenario could have an impact on negotiations with ODMs and System manufacturers too. Keep in mind that most quoted OEM prices you see for CPUs mean about as much as a quoted Invoice price on a car.
for cost of increased power consumption
Read the "Per Watt Results" chart on page 12: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel-12...
The i5-12600K leads performance-per-watt results in most tests.
They include power results for some tests, where you can even see the i5-12600K consuming less power while outperforming most of the AMD parts: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel-12... This doesn't hold for every test, but the power consumption issue has been greatly exaggerated.
If power consumption is a concern, do not buy the i9-12900K. It's a no-compromise chip that disregards power efficiency for the sake of peak performance. Buy the i5-12600K, which is actually decently efficient.
259 Watts max!!
focus on i5s and i7s.