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Intel 12th Generation Alder Lake Platform Reportedly Brings 20% Single-Threaded Performance Uplift

Mussels

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So intels focused on AVX performance this time around?
 
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I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume you live South Africa or Australia because those cpu's are selling in the US, UK, Canada and Germany.

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt here and assume you misread the comment. Tigerlake 8 core is nowhere to be found. Rocket lake is NOT tiger lake, it is a hobbled version of sunny cove backported to 14nm.

A true tigerlake 8 core, like what was promised, on 10nm is nowhere to be found.
 

Mussels

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I swear i need a list of all these different intel chips, they're deliberately making a confusing mess of all this
 
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I swear i need a list of all these different intel chips, they're deliberately making a confusing mess of all this
It's the classic "peddle bullshit" move. When your product is snake oil, make sure you bombard the customer with it so they cant take notice of any one product.

You see this in terrible movies, where the pace never slows down to let you think about what just happened, and in shops selling ripoff goods, jam packed with everything on the planet.
 
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Intel didnt release new PCI-E generations because the CPU designs were delayed, remember its part of the new chip design.
Yes undoubtedly but it's also a fact that PCIe 4.0 was delayed a number of times, which had nothing to with with Intel's fab woes.
 
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Hahaha.

Just like Rocket Lake did by 18%? :D :D :D

"Rocket Lake Flaunts Up To 18% Higher Single-Core Performance Than Core i9-10900K"


I doubt it's over TGL, it's 20% above SKL or RKL ~ I'm guessing the latter but even then it's up to 20% so maybe AI/ML heavy benchmarks?

Definitely fake then, or maybe not :nutkick:
Eh lol. Very nice. Bulldozer vibes. The only difference is RL doesn't even have more cores. :D

 
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According to Morre's Law is Dead, it's 20% single core IPC uplift over skylake and up to 100% multithreaded uplift. Apparently the Gracemont cores are pretty strong too, I think he said they are about 70% the performance of skylake cores.
Anytime you see someone talk about single core/thread IPC and multithreaded IPC, you know they don't have a clue of what they're talking about (IPC is always single threaded). Don't listen to these nobodies on YouTube, not too long ago Alder Lake was supposedly bringing >30% IPC gains, who knows what it will be next week when Intel redesigns their architecture over night :p

So intels focused on AVX performance this time around?
In addition to bringing 19% IPC gains, yes.
AVX-512 isn't just AVX2 with twice the vector width, it also adds a lot of more operations, allowing for some algorithms to scale beyond just 2x, kind of comparable to FMA.
When heavy applications finally starts to embrace AVX-512, you don't want to go back.
 
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IPC is always single threaded
Lol no. IPC is just executed instructions divided by number of clock cycles it took to execute them. Of course you can do that for whatever software in however many threads. Usually people relate that (wrongly) to mean just single core performance, but that’s not really what it means.

For example if SMT didn’t improve IPC, why would AMD or intel implement such features? If adding more cores wouldn’t improve IPC, why would AMD or intel implement such things? Of course they don’t always improve IPC for all software, but the same is true for most processor improvements.
 
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Lol no. IPC is just executed instructions divided by number of clock cycles it took to execute them. Of course you can do that for whatever software in however many threads. Usually people relate that (wrongly) to mean just single core performance, but that’s not really what it means.
I'm sorry, but you don't have the faintest idea of what IPC really is.
IPC is instructions per clock of a single core, it's an underlying constant given by the architecture, and is totally independent of core count, SMT, etc. We use single threaded benchmarks to approximate the IPC, using a wide selection of CPU-bound workloads, to eliminate application bias. IPC is not application specific, and it has never equated single core performance, despite being one of the main factors to dictate single core performance.

For example if SMT didn’t improve IPC, why would AMD or intel implement such features? If adding more cores wouldn’t improve IPC, why would AMD or intel implement such things?
There are so many misconceptions here, where to begin?
SMT is a technique to utilize idle resources in a core, mostly caused by cache misses etc. Regardless if you have 1 thread or 8 threads per core, the total performance of that core will never exceed a single thread that is fully saturating the core. SMT have no impact on IPC.
There are many improvements that has nothing to do with IPC that still yields performance improvements. Clock speeds is the obvious one, core count, and of course more advanced instructions. Additionally you have external improvements like memory and IO, which doesn't affect IPC, but certainly can affect certain bottlenecked benchmarks.
 
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I'm sorry, but you don't have the faintest idea of what IPC really is.
IPC is instructions per clock of a single core, it's an underlying constant given by the architecture, and is totally independent of core count, SMT, etc. We use single threaded benchmarks to approximate the IPC, using a wide selection of CPU-bound workloads, to eliminate application bias. IPC is not application specific, and it has never equated single core performance, despite being one of the main factors to dictate single core performance.


There are so many misconceptions here, where to begin?
SMT is a technique to utilize idle resources in a core, mostly caused by cache misses etc. Regardless if you have 1 thread or 8 threads per core, the total performance of that core will never exceed a single thread that is fully saturating the core. SMT have no impact on IPC.
There are many improvements that has nothing to do with IPC that still yields performance improvements. Clock speeds is the obvious one, core count, and of course more advanced instructions. Additionally you have external improvements like memory and IO, which doesn't affect IPC, but certainly can affect certain bottlenecked benchmarks.
Its important to know what IPC is terms of the core architecture but most people are mostly interested in comparing how much faster Zen3 is vs Rocketlake, vs Skylake ect. I don't really see a problem using the term 'IPC' to compare single thread performance or multithread performance of two different CPUs.
 
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IPC is instructions per clock of a single core
As defined by you? Last time you stated that it was for a single thread, the IPC difference between the two is at best over 100%.

It is instructions per cycle of a single processor.

It is always software dependant, as it is different for all software you run. There is no ”global average IPC” or ”IPC without application bias”, as it is impossible to gather a biasless set of software to use to measure IPC.

Peak IPC is also quite worthless as a measuring stick, though very simple to calculate.
 
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IPC can be measured both in single core and multi core, it's just that modern designs slow down cores as the multi threading increases

IPC is best measured single core, but its not invalid to test it in a multi threaded environment as well... which everyone does
 
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This is why I'm waiting for Alder Lake. So many improvements and released so soon after Rocket Lake, that it's obsolete before it even got started.
Well if they are anything like cars, you always want to skip that 1st brand new design the first year until all the service bulletins are addressed ;)
 

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Well if they are anything like cars, you always want to skip that 1st brand new design the first year until all the service bulletins are addressed ;)
Oh yeah, that’s a good, cautious strategy. Nothing wrong with that.

Same principle as a company always running a few months behind on Windows and Office patches in case they break something.
 
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So Alder Lake on 10nm is like Zen3 on 7nm.

Well done Intel, in only 5 short years you have gone from being 18 months ahead of the competition to being 18 months behind the competition.

Intel's Zen3 answer should arrive about the same time as Zen4 :D

I swear i need a list of all these different intel chips, they're deliberately making a confusing mess of all this
Wikipedia. It's such a mess now that you need multi-page tables per branding "generation".


Scroll down and you get to this, which I've doctored:

1616850104928.png


The thing that really screwed the pooch was when Intel switched to Cove uArch with 10nm but couldn't transition its whole product stack. In a genius move of PR spin to confuse the shit out of everyone and sell previous gen products as new, they continued to name everything "Lake" so that they could continue to sell their old 2015 Skylake uArch derivatives as "new" product in 2020 and hope that reviewers and consumers alike were thinking they were getting something much better than 2015's Skylake.

No, Intel have made just four performance uArches (maybe 3.5 considering how much of the *Bridge uArch was recycled for Skylake, and hence why Skylake's numerous security vulnerabilities go back to Sandy Bridge) in the last 20 years. The *Cove uArch is the step forwards that Intel was hoping to make in 2019, delayed until 2022 because of 10nm failure.

Oof, was that really necessary, it wasn't bad enough people have to upgrade intel motherboards but now coolers as well :(
Should be a non-issue for any premium coolers as most brands offer free or optional mounting kits for new socket types as they come out.

The basic coldplate of your existing cooler will still be a cooled, flat surface that mates with an IHS, it's not going to be obsolete all of a sudden.
 
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they could continue to sell their old 2015 Skylake uArch derivatives as "new" product in 2020 and hope that reviewers and consumers alike were thinking they were getting something much better than 2015's Skylake.
They got 2 additional cores with each iteration :)
Other than power consumption concerns (that are only halfway related to lower IPC and need for higher clocks) it is actually pretty amazing that Skylake derivatives can be as competitive as they are.

No, Intel have made just four performance uArches (maybe 3.5 considering how much of the *Bridge uArch was recycled for Skylake, and hence why Skylake's numerous security vulnerabilities go back to Sandy Bridge) in the last 20 years. The *Cove uArch is the step forwards that Intel was hoping to make in 2019, delayed until 2022 because of 10nm failure.
You mean the 4 you wrote on the picture? First, that is 15 years - Merom was released in 2006. And it was largely an iteration of earlier Banias (2003)/Dothan/Yonah but that is a bit different story.
Four is not that few. In the same time frame AMD has had K8 (since 2003), K10 (released in 2007 and in many ways an iteration of K8), Bulldozer and Zen.
 
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I remeamber when DDR4 was new in mid 2014, 16gb kit costed something like like 300$, it took till the end if 2015 for prices to stabilize into reasonable rates, 129$ for 16gb
And now the prices are back up again.

Only Intel releases a processor that's slower than the one its suppose to replace. :D
 
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They got 2 additional cores with each iteration :)
Other than power consumption concerns (that are only halfway related to lower IPC and need for higher clocks) it is actually pretty amazing that Skylake derivatives can be as competitive as they are.

You mean the 4 you wrote on the picture? First, that is 15 years - Merom was released in 2006. And it was largely an iteration of earlier Banias (2003)/Dothan/Yonah but that is a bit different story.
Four is not that few. In the same time frame AMD has had K8 (since 2003), K10 (released in 2007 and in many ways an iteration of K8), Bulldozer and Zen.
My entire post was about microarchitectures. What does core count have to do with anything? For each microarchitecture there is a huge spectrum of core counts from puny dual cores up to, for example, the 56-core Xeon.

You're right about 15 years, I thought Pentium 4 died off whilst I was still an undergraduate but apparently it drooled along in a catatonic state for years whilst AMD held the limelight. I'm not trying to make this an Intel vs AMD flamewar, microarchitectures take a long time to develop and manufacture, but Rocket Lake with Cypress Cove uArch is the first significant uArch change since Sandy Bridge a decade ago. Skylake was a significant enough iteration of the previous Sandy Bridge derivatives to call it a new uArch but at the same time it re-used so much of the existing uArch that it is hard to call truly new, and at 7 years old when the Spec-Ex vulnerabilities went mainstream, it became very apparent that Skylake was not a new architecture but an evolved Sandy Bridge.
 
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… but Rocket Lake with Cypress Cove uArch is the first significant uArch change since Sandy Bridge a decade ago. Skylake was a significant enough iteration of the previous Sandy Bridge derivatives to call it a new uArch but at the same time it re-used so much of the existing uArch that it is hard to call truly new
Calling something a "new architecture" always ends up as a semantic discussion, and strictly speaking I don't think Intel has made a "new" desktop architecture since P6 or something (even that is disputable). There is nearly always something carried over from the previous one, even parts of the dead-end Netburst(Pentium 4) was carried over to Core.

I prefer to talk about major vs. minor architectural changes, and the sequence for Intel after Core would be:
Core -> Nehalem -> Sandy Bridge -> Haswell -> Skylake -> Sunny Cove -> Golden Cove (upcoming)
All of these have offered major improvements. Even the often overlooked Haswell was a good improvement over Sandy Bridge, especially in heavier applications. In dense math, even single ints and floats, it scales better than the IPC (which is an average) would lead you to expect. In single algorithms, it's not uncommon to see performance >60-80% faster in Skylake vs. Sandy Bridge, and that's without any AVX or any special instructions.

And don't forget that sometimes an architecture lies the groundwork, before it becomes more useful and refined later. E.g. AVX(1) introduced in Sandy Bridge wasn't that useful or performant at all, then Haswell extended this and offered massive improvements.

… and at 7 years old when the Spec-Ex vulnerabilities went mainstream, it became very apparent that Skylake was not a new architecture but an evolved Sandy Bridge.
That's a very flawed assumption.
Just because products have the same design flaws, doesn't make them the same. For most of the vulnerabilities found in Intel, very similar problems were found in all other modern microarchitectures, even though the share none of the same designs. (The same can be said when independent web browsers or SSL implementations have the "same" bugs without sharing code.)

What they do share however, is assumptions. When engineers are building comparable products using the same assumptions, they are destined to do similar mistakes. Most of the high level research for CPUs are done by academics, and is ultimately used by all the CPU designers. If there are flaws in this research, these flaws can end up in designs for years or decades before someone discovers it. That's why questioning assumptions and critical thinking is crucial, but are seemingly forgotten in the sciences today.
 
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The lawsuit wasnt really about the architecture being a "massive design failure" or the performance "not being there".
It was purely about the concept of a core in a cpu, what a core is, what can be called a core.

And tbh, Im not sure that was rightly settled/decided, regardless if it was AMD or any other company.

You're part right, but that's not the whole story. Yes, the ruling contained many elements of what a CPU core would have to be comprised of to be called one, but that wasn't the reason the case was filed.

The reason is that from a customer point of view, and 'reasonable expectations', the baseline was an Intel CPU with a level of performance per core - and even an AMD CPU (Athlon etc) with a certain level of performance per core. What happened here is that AMD suddenly could sell 'double the core count' which suggested AMD would also have a much more performant product, which was totally not the case. The arguments to turn that into a case you could win, is by focusing on the differences with the contents of a core that DID perform according to expectations. And AMDs marketing didn't help in that regard. They sold the product based on that higher core count as a unique selling point. Its really about the architecture being a departure from an established norm.

Its also easy to turn the principle around. What if AMD's architecture at the time DID offer twice the performance of an Intel quad core? Nobody in their right mind would have even started this legal fight. But in practice, AMD's eight cores could not move quite as much work as Intel quads, especially in then-commonplace single threaded applications. In hindsight, perhaps it was the right technology, but at the wrong moment in time and/or not optimally designed. Perhaps Zen is the ultimate proof of that, except much more refined.

No offense to anyone who follows that Youtube channel but the guy just talks out of his ass.

Yep. I still remember the Forum Cop episode well. Eternal student looking for internet. Found it. Makes videos that generate clicks. Yawn

Heck I even feature in it :D
 
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The only reason why PCIe 5.0 & especially now v6 exists is because of one-upmanship by Intel. That's the (only) major point they can tout against the Zen juggernaut & frankly even enterprises won't care!
Bullshit. If AMD came up with it first, you would approve it and say it is a great addition. If intel brings it first, neah, it ain't good.
 
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So when is this thread gonna go back to talking about the topic at hand and not descend into company vs company warfare
 

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Bullshit. If AMD came up with it first, you would approve it and say it is a great addition. If intel brings it first, neah, it ain't good.
whoever brings it first is good, cause it means we get more bandwidth to mobos

a 4x link to the chipset at 5.0 is AMAZING for the USB ports, sata and so on
 
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Any news about how many Cores will the top dog have? Frequencies? Wattage? Something to forget this mizerabile fiasco called 11th generation :)
 
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