Intel Alder Lake-H Core i9-12900HK Review: MSI's Raider GE76 Goes Hybrid
by Brett Howse on January 25, 2022 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- MSI
- Laptops
- Alder Lake
- GE76 Raider
- 12th Gen Core
- Alder Lake-H
Initial Thoughts
Intel has been consistent over the last several years to bring their low-power processors to market first, and then move towards the higher-performance platforms and desktops. With the laptop market being the majority of sales, this has made a lot of sense, but it most certainly has left the desktop crowd at a disadvantage. With Alder Lake, Intel has flipped that around completely by launching the desktop products first, and are now just moving down to high-performance laptops, and then finally low-power notebooks. The Core i9-12900HK at the heart of the MSI Raider GE76 is our first taste of Alder Lake in a portable system, and it tastes delicious.
The new hybrid CPU design delivers in multiple ways. Outright performance easily exceeds everything else on the market. The new Golden Cove P-Cores offer a significant uplift in terms of instructions-per-clock (IPC) and allow Intel to regain the single-thread performance crown. Having twenty threads available in a laptop processor also gives Intel the multi-threaded performance lead.
Perhaps the most impressive result though is Intel’s Thread Director, which provides very impressive system responsiveness even when the system is at 100% CPU load. Tasks that are being done in the background are still done quickly, but no longer at the expense of the user, and without having to manually adjust thread priority. This is a major win.
The supplied MSI Raider GE76 with the i9-12900HK and GeForce RTX 3080 Ti for Laptops also showcased increased gaming performance, although the increases were more subtle than the system performance results. At 1920x1080, the Alder Lake system almost universally provided a reasonable uptick in gaming performance, although the 3080L Ti GPU did not significantly move the yardstick at UHD resolutions.
Intel has also been able to integrate the CPU and chipset into one package for the 12th generation H-Series processors, and that System-on-Chip provides a lot of connectivity and expansion options, as well as compatibility with four different memory choices in DDR4, DDR5, LPDDR4, and LPDDR5. There is support for four Thunderbolt 4 controllers, as well as two by four lanes of PCIe 4.0 for storage, and another eight lanes for graphics and an additional twelve lanes of PCIe 3.0. Intel now also includes Iris Xe-LP graphics in their H-Series, with the full 96 Execution Units on tap with the Core i9-12900HK.
The one downside from sampling the MSI Raider GE76 was that it's a laptop designed to show off Alder Lake at its best with regards to performance, but at the expense of more mobile-friendly matters such as portability, energy efficiency, and battery life. Case in point: despite having the largest possible battery allowed in a notebook at 99.9 Wh, the base system power draw of the Raider was significant, making battery life poor and masking any changes that would have been a result of the CPU. Intel is aiming Alder Lake-H at everything from luggable desktop replacements such as the Raider to 14-inch ultraportable laptops, so there is a second side to Alder Lake that we've still yet to see. Once more laptops start shipping – especially the U-Series with LPDDR5 – we should get a much better feel for how the hybrid CPU design does when the device is running off the battery.
Thankfully, the lack of battery life was really the only negative for the MSI Raider GE76. It offers plenty of cooling, a great display, and offers the most potent laptop GPU on the market. The Tiger Lake version was the quickest laptop we had tested, but the new Alder Lake one takes things to another level. It is simply one of the best gaming notebooks on the market right now, and it's easy to see why Intel picked this laptop to show off the performance capabilities of Alder Lake-H.
Alder Lake appears to be a significant step forward for Intel, with commanding single-threaded performance, exceptional multi-threaded performance, and the benefits of Thread Director to increase system responsiveness. Alder Lake was a step forward for desktops, but likely an even larger step forward for notebook computers. Intel has delivered tremendous performance across the board and the gap is not even close. 2022 is shaping up to be an exciting year again.
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tkSteveFOX - Wednesday, January 26, 2022 - link
Just a note for Brett here, when you do a laptop review thermals, throttling and noise levels are important things to have in the review.Brett Howse - Wednesday, January 26, 2022 - link
This isn't a laptop review. Please check the link to the GE 76 Raider review we did in September.TheinsanegamerN - Friday, January 28, 2022 - link
*reviews laptop CPU**uses laptop*
*this is not a laptop review*
Whew, anandtech quality ladies and gentlemen! I guess that throttling and thermals are not important in CPU tests either? Or would that get in the way of using RAM to exuse the hideous power draw?
corinthos - Wednesday, January 26, 2022 - link
Whole point of a laptop is portability and using unplugged for a considerable amount of the time. That's why you pay a premium. If the best Intel can do is 3.x hours on battery, this is essentially a desktop alternative/replacement, in which case you get even more for your money just buying a desktop.Brett Howse - Wednesday, January 26, 2022 - link
This is literally a desktop replacement. That's actually a product category for notebooks.Spunjji - Thursday, January 27, 2022 - link
I'm sorry you have to keep replying to comments like this...Spunjji - Thursday, January 27, 2022 - link
For me, those "percentage of no load performance" graphs may have been the most interesting. It certainly shows what Alder Lake can offer when it's being used to the fullest. It doesn't represent a use-case that I'd ever put a laptop to, but it will be very interesting for the sort of user for whom 20 threads in a mobile CPU is less a flashy selling point and more a necessity.Otherwise it's looking as I expected - peak performance is significantly better than the ageing Cezanne platform, sustained performance in a slightly more representative platform remains to be seen. Tiger Lake H was ~25% down on Cezanne in terms of performance/watt in multithreaded loads, so there's certainly potential here for Intel to have caught up and maybe even surpassed that.
abufrejoval - Thursday, January 27, 2022 - link
The least impressive statement in this review is this “Perhaps the most impressive result though is Intel’s Thread Director, which provides very impressive system responsiveness even when the system is at 100% CPU load…”, because to me it sounds either like paid content or lack of reflection.Intel is pushing E-cores as a “must have”, because it’s exclusive to their platform, very much like MMX or AVX-512 back then.
But it’s mostly yet another marketing smoke bomb.
I am convinced you could achieve a very similar gain in responsiveness by emulating the 8 E-cores via the 2 P-cores they replace in terms of silicon real-estate on Alder Lake. What you perceive as a hardware benefit is mostly an OS defect in workload management.
What happens here is that long running batch and latency sensitive interactive workloads are being separated and assigned to hardware partitioned processing pools dependent on whether they are running in the “foreground” or “background”. Doing that in the Windows task manager today, is obviously cumbersome, but writing a tool that prohibits the usage of all CPU cores once workloads are switched to background, should be trivial enough. And to my knowledge even cache partitioning has been part of x86 since Broadwell to ensure that busy background batch tasks won’t flush latency sensitive interactive workloads entirely from them.
Yes, E-cores have been proven to squeeze longer run times out of smartphones or more concurrent session support per Watt in certain cloud servers, because they are designed to be more efficient in in terms of instructions per Watt/h at the price of instructions per unit of time.
But those constraints do not apply to a gaming laptop or most desktop computers. Actually, even on ultra-thin laptops CPU core power consumption is becoming a rather insignificant contributor to overall energy spend, outside of some synthetic fringe cases.
Intel fits 8 E-cores into a similar space for 2 P-cores, so the high-end mobile Alder-Lake parts could just be 8 P cores or 32 E cores or any of the other permutations. And quite obviously you would be able to find workloads with an ideal fit for each, just as you’d also find workloads that violate either performance or efficiency targets on them.
Intel promotes a hardware partitioned compromise between E- and P-cores and then interestingly charges an E-core premium on desktop parts, where collective energy savings on remotely managed always-on volume parts might actually provide an ecological benefit. But I can’t help thinking, that a software solution via “E-core emulation” would deliver more flexibility and adjustable performance on most laptops and workstations and prefer 8P+0E over 6P+4E practically everywhere except server parts.
Bik - Thursday, January 27, 2022 - link
Simple thought will prove this correct: a big task that feels like it bogs down the whole system, will no longer be so if you willing to sacrify some cores for background tasks. The scheduler just isnt smart enough to do that today.There's another thing I notice. When it is true that 8-E cores put up more performance than 2-P cores, Intel claims of silicon real-estate between the two being equal may not be correct. Because if they do, we'll surely have all E-cores cpu for heavy multi-thread work loads. But that didnt, and I doubt, will ever happen.
diediealldie - Thursday, January 27, 2022 - link
oh, they will. There's Sierra Forest AP which consists of 128 e-cores. Intel is not making all e-cores yet since launched platforms are kind of mass-market general-purpose ones which need high ST performance along with good MT performance.