The Intel 12th Gen Core i9-12900K Review: Hybrid Performance Brings Hybrid Complexity
by Dr. Ian Cutress & Andrei Frumusanu on November 4, 2021 9:00 AM ESTCPU Tests: SPEC MT Performance - DDR5 Advantage
Multi-threaded performance is where things become very interesting for Alder Lake, where the chip can now combine its 8 P-cores with its 8 E-cores. As we saw, the 8 E-cores are nothing to sneeze about, but another larger consideration for MT performance is DDR5. While in the ST results we didn’t see much change in the performance of the cores, in MT scenarios when all cores are hammering the memory, having double the memory channels as well as +50% more bandwidth is going to be extremely beneficial for Alder Lake.
As we noted, the DDR5 vs DDR4 results showcase a very large performance gap between the two memory technologies in MT scenarios. Running a total of 24 threads, 16 for the SMT-enabled P-cores, and 8 for the E-cores, Alder Lake is able to take the performance crown in quite a lot of the workloads. There are still cases where AMD’s 16-core setup with larger cores are able to perform better, undoubtedly also partly attributed to 64MB of on-chip cache.
Compared to the 11900K, the new 12900K showcases giant leaps, especially when paired with DDR5.
In the FP suite, the DDR5 advantage in some workloads is even larger, as the results scale beyond that of the pure theoretical +50% bandwidth improvement. What’s important for performance is not just the theoretical bandwidth, but the actual utilised bandwidth, and again, the doubled up memory channels of DDR5 here are seemingly contributing to extremely large increases, if the workload can take advantage of it.
In the aggregate results, there’s very clearly two conclusions, depending on whether you use the chip with DDR5 or DDR4.
With DDR4, Alder Lake and the 12900K in particular, is able to showcase very good and solid increases in performance, thanks to the IPC gains on the Golden Cove core, but most importantly, also thanks to the extra 8 Gracemont cores, which do carry their own weight. The 12900K falls behind AMD’s 5900X with DDR4, which is fair given the pricing of the chips here are generally in line with teach other.
With DDR5, the 12900K is able to fully stretch its multi-threaded performance legs. In less memory dependent workloads, the chip battles it out with AMD’s 16-core 5950X, winning some workloads, losing some others. In more memory dependent workloads, the DDR5 advantage is extremely clear, and the 12900K is able to blow past any competition, even slightly edging out the latest Apple M1 Max, released a few weeks ago, and notable for its memory bandwidth.
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Netmsm - Sunday, November 7, 2021 - link
I believe, we're not talking about ISO-efficiency or manufacturing or engineering details as facts! These are facts but in the appropriate discussion. Here, we have results. These results are produced by all those technological efforts. In fact, those theoretical improvements are getting concluded in these pragmatical information. Therefore, we should NOT wink at performance per watt in RESULTS - not ISO-related matters.So, the fact, my friend, is Intel new architecture does tend to suck 70-80 percent more power and give 50-60 percent more heat. Just by overclocking 100MHz 12900k jumps from ~80-85 to 100 degrees centigrade while consuming ~300 watts.
Once in past, AMD tried to get ahead of Nvidia by 6990 in performance because they coveted the most powerful graphic card title. AMD made the hottest and the noisiest graphic card in the history and now Intel is mimicking :))
One can argue that it is natural when you cannot stop or catch a rival so try to do some chicaneries. As it is very clear that Anandtech deliberately does not tend to put even the nominal TDP of Intel 12900k in their benches. I loathe this iniquitous practice!
Wrs - Sunday, November 7, 2021 - link
@Netmsm I believe the mistake is construing performance-per-watt (PPW) of a consumer chip as indicative of PPW for a future server chip based on the same core. Consumer chips are typically optimized for performance-per-area (PPA) because consumers want snappiness and they are afraid of high purchase costs while simultaneously caring much less than datacenters about cost of electricity.Netmsm - Monday, November 8, 2021 - link
@Wrs You cannot totally separate efficiency of consumer and enterprise chips!As an incontrovertible fact, architecture is what primarily (not completely) determines the efficacy of a processor.
Is Intel going to kit out upcoming server CPUs in an improved architecture?
Wrs - Monday, November 8, 2021 - link
@Netmsm Architecture, process, and configuration all can heavily impact efficiency/PPW. I’m not aware of any architectural reason that Golden Cove would be much less efficient. It’s a mildly larger core, but it doesn’t have outrageous pipelining or execution imbalances. It derives from a lineage of reasonably efficient cores, and they had to be as they remained on aging 14nm. Processwise Intel 7 isn’t much less efficient than TSMC N7, either. (It could even be more efficient, but analysis hasn’t been precise enough to tell.) But clearly ADL in a 12900/12700k is set up to be inefficient yet performant at high load by virtue of high frequency/voltage scaling and thermal density. I could do almost the same on a dual CCD Ryzen, before running into AM4 socket limits. That’s obviously not how either company approaches server chips.Netmsm - Tuesday, November 9, 2021 - link
When you cannot infer or appraise or guess we should drop it for now and wait for real tests of upcoming server chips to come.regards ^_^
GamingRiggz - Tuesday, March 15, 2022 - link
Thankfully you are no engineer.AbRASiON - Thursday, November 4, 2021 - link
AMD would have less of an issue If the 5000 processors weren’t originally priced gouged.Many people held off switching teams due to that. Instead of the processor being an amazing must buy, it was just a decent purchase. So they waited.
If you’re On the back foot in this game, you should be competing hard always to get that stranglehold and mind share.
I’m glad they’re competing though and hopefully they release some very competitive and REASONABLY PRICED products in the near future.
Fataliity - Thursday, November 4, 2021 - link
Their revenue and marketshare #'s beg to disagree.Spunjji - Friday, November 5, 2021 - link
They've been selling every CPU they can make. There are shortages of every Zen 3 based notebook out there (to the extent that some OEMs have cancelled certain models) and they're selling so many products based on the desktop chiplets that Threadripper 5000 simply isn't a thing. You ought to factor that into your assessment of how they're doing.BillBear - Thursday, November 4, 2021 - link
Is anyone gullible enough to forget more than a decade of price gouging, low core counts and nearly nonexistent performance increases we got from Intel, vs. the high core counts, increasing performance, and lower prices we got from AMD?