Alder Lake vs Zen 4 for the "son of the forbidden router"

[hsnyder]

In the Son of the Forbidden Router video, @wendell focused on Alder Lake and W680. I’m quite curious if Zen 4 (perhaps the 6 core) would be an inferior choice and if so, why? I don’t have alder lake or zen4 so I can’t really compare them for myself, but my reasoning is that if the core-to-core performance is similar, and if the user cares about ECC, then the price difference between i5-12400 + W680 vs R5 7600x + an ECC compatible AM5 board is probably a wash…

Are alder lake P cores better than zen 4 cores for this application? Or am I forgetting a key feature of W680?

I definitely see that in the non-ECC case, the intel route can be done for cheaper…

Thanks!

[GigaBusterEXE]

The 7600x has poor performance per watt vs the 7700x though I don’t know if that’s still true on the lower frequencies

Zen 4 is actually SUPER power efficient… Once you cap the power limit so something reasonable

Remember, CPU ppt is only the core power consumption there’s also the io die and about 10-20w going to misc. Things like fabrice

To really juice your power efficiency set the max freq to -500mhz then start playing with negative curve optimizer

[hsnyder]

Thanks. So from a power consumption standpoint it sounds like this could be done very nicely with zen4.

I’d still be curious to hear if zen4 is meaningfully worse (or better) for packet routing than alder lake, though.