12th gen spec nobody is talking about

Yeah I have to agree with everyone else.

I don’t turn on my PC to let it sit idle, granted it does some times, but it is there to be used and do it at load so that what I want to know about.

If it is stilling idle for long enough for that level of power draw to be worried over then it should probably be off till you can load it up and let it run through then turn it off again.

Ahcketuchewally… Gamers Nexus showed.12th gen running stock, not deliberately over clocked, running at 244w compared to a 5950x, which is deliberately over clocked to 4.7 permentantly, drawing 246/8w?

That is a lot for Intel. It is a lot for both but stock running the same as OC with 8 more threads and 4 cores? Yikes, when the Intel one will be doing most of that work on only 86 cores, that is a scary innefficency comparison.

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What was the purpose of that comparison? Sounds to me like they were trying to show off Intel power efficiency, but lost the plot?

Don’t get me wrong, Alder Lake seems to be competitive, but everything about these reviews is insane.

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I tend to agree. My use cases are part of the “not as intended” category. I want to run on UPSes for extended periods of time (2-3h instead of 15 minutes), which is why I’m looking for low-power consumption stuff to begin with. If I had a generator and solar, I’d be waaay less worried about my power draw. But even with solar, I’d be a little concerned in the winter if the solar panels gets covered up for too long.

Holy smoke.

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The opposite.

That 12th gen is woefully inefficient.

Intel’s 24 threads were consuming more power

Compared to

AMDs 32 threads

And at that Intel will be doing the heavy work on performance cores. Which means the level they push through in performance is amazing but it is doing that by consuming vastly more power on a core vs core, thread vs thread consumption.

Not really impressive.

Unless it is impressively bad.

Edit: basically getting at, that it is impressive but also anyone could do that if they threw caution to the wind and shoveled power into a chip, they will run fast, but run hot and this is what’s happening. Intel CANNOT be seen to regress by letting clock speeds drop below 5GHz so they force the chips up there and they do that with a large hammer compared to a small scalpal aproch.

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That is why I wouldn’t bother with Alder Lake for a server application.
You get few percents more performance for a lot more power usage compared to Zen.

But this is running full tilt. On a gaming scenario/light workload LTT and Hardware Unboxed showed comparable energy consumption between the platforms.

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Graphs of power usage from LTT


From: Damn, Intel! - YouTube


Now this is crazy, Steve found the 12700KF to be more efficient than the 5800X :eyes:

Video time stamped.

I thought everyone here had a 42u rack in their house?

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And is that the point at which they’re on performance parity, or is AMD beating them?

I’m trying to see where the idea of overclocking the AMD CPU came from. It makes no sense to me.

You’d compare overclocked to overclocked, stock to stock and that would make sense, but overclocked to stock seems disingenuous unless you were putting them at the same performance level to compare power efficiency.

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I’m also perplexed at Steve for OC’ing Ryzen to 4.7 GHz and running it in full throttle permanently. Zen has great frequency dynamic adjustment, so its power consumption by default is going to rock. By keeping Ryzen at 4.7 GHz permanently, it more shows how bad Intel is performing in its default state, rather than showing that Ryzen “can consume a lot of power too.” I mean, you can make any CPU draw 500W if you push them hard enough, but that doesn’t mean s**t.

I don’t watch GN, but those kinds of analysis make me want to not watch it even more than the length of the videos do.

The i9 12900K is kinda bad. If you’re a gamer, it might make some sense, but you are not going to make use of its full potential. On the other hand, the i5 12600K is amazing if you ask me, and the price is aggressive. If you are going to compile stuff, or do some semi-professional production workloads, the i9 might make some sense if power consumption is not an issue.

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The only thing that’s good about it is that it’s in stock.

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I’m curious what happens when AMD releases a DDR5 CPU.

I think that the vast majority of this performance uptick is due to the CPU being fed better, which, by the way, is a perfectly valid uptick, but it’s just not a crown Intel can hold on to forever because AMD will very likely come back with something with a similar uptick in the near future.

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Zen cores are pretty memory hungry, so DDR5 will definitely boost it by a lot. I can’t wait to see what APUs will do with DDR5, maybe we’ll finally see some RX 580 performance in APUs.

Yeah, Intel might have some advantage for now, but I think they’ll be overtaken again soon if they don’t keep up the pace and improve their power efficiency.

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I’d be happy with descrete gpus going away in laptops at that point.

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It does seem very odd alright, I was not sure why you were concerned before but that is a valid point. It is a silly way to go about it, and I do think there will be a LOT of user and software tuning or tweaks/hacks for how to make alder lake do what you want and when.

in the same way intel are not being subtle with the touch, this does seem like over kill to prove a point.

almost as if they forced it to bring AMD up to the same relative power consumption and show what that looks like for some reason?

ngl this was the logical conclusion of AMD’s announcement of XFR way back in 2017. As soon as CPU overclocking stopped being a thing and CPUs would boost themselves as high as that particular silicon could within power and heat limits, just like graphics cards, this was inevitable. And I’m not inherently opposed to it, but people don’t like it when number go up.

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Does anyone see that Intel is up to their old manipulative games again of incremental improvements… They could snow AMD but they want a full meal at every step up the performance ladder.

Well yeah with those Alderlake cpu’s especially the Core i9’s,
the motherboard vrm’s are going to be more important again.

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The other spec no-one is talking about…

In order to run avx512 code you need to go into bios and disable the E cores (as they do not have AVX512 capability).

Repeat… reboot, go into bios, disable half your cores… every time you want to run avx512.

Or just permanently have no E cores enabled.

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Little easteregg. But can be beneficial for AVX512 workloads, although I don’t really want to see the thermals. I heard the upcoming Xeons have no efficiency cores…

I like how Intel introduces efficiency cores and everyone is pointing out the high thermals/watt. Although idle power seems to be rather okish compared to full load.

sure, but I dont buy my CPU to idle and its not that much better than Ryzen 5xxx which is far better under load.

So… unless you have an AVX 512 specific workload Ryzen costs the same or less, idles about the same, uses less power under load (less heat and noise), performs about the same, has similar core counts but all are P cores, and uses lower cost motherboards and RAM.

If I were buying a computer today, I would probably still go Zen 3 unless I need AVX 512. In 3-6 months that might be totally different as RAM and Motherboards come down in price for intel. Then the i5-12xxxk series get interesting. With AMD dropping the price of the 5800x to $300 I dont see a reason to go intel at this second.

https://pcpartpicker.com/products/compare/ycGbt6,BB4Ycf/

This is the real fight I want to see, @wendell any chance you have the gear to do a head to head?

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