Hasn't it been at least six months since release? What an odd self promoting entry
Research and experimentation generally takes time.
As of now, the linked forum thread contains zero research
Intel's New Chimera: Alder Lake
51–60 of 253 posts
Re: Intel's New Chimera: Alder Lake
#52For a desktop or mobile processor this might make sense, but many hosting providers sell dedicated hardware with desktop processors to be used in a server environment. (E.g. Hetzner https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ex100)
So the provider can save energy and make sense of this, but customers won't notice the energy savings in their pocket and they only notice that they can only use 8 cores.
When I tested this a few months ago under Linux every request of our server application would land on a different CPU leading to funny performance characteristics. Even Ubuntu 22.4 does not seem to have the kernel included 5.16+ that fully supports this CPU (https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=adl-linu...)
As we use the JVM the only interesting use case I can imagine would be to assign the slower efficiency cores for the garbage collector.
Re: Intel's New Chimera: Alder Lake
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm interested, what are you doing that can eat all those cores>
Anyone working on even a medium sized C++ project needs a very high end machine in order to compile. For large projects, 32 core work stations aren't crazy at all. Try building something like Firefox or Chromium on a quad core and you will see what I mean. The cost of the workstation is tiny compared to the cost of the engineer and you really don't want them to be waiting around for half their day (quite literally) b…
I talked about linux recompiles because sometimes you do need the cores; not arguing. But that's the long tail and many devs don't. I'm not against blowing cash if needed, but really it's about asking if there are more efficient ways. I guess we agree.
Re: Intel's New Chimera: Alder Lake
#54For a desktop or mobile processor this might make sense, but many hosting providers sell dedicated hardware with desktop processors to be used in a server environment. (E.g. Hetzner https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ex100 ) So the provider can save energy and make sense of this, but customers won't notice the energy savings in their pocket and they only notice that they can only use 8 cores. When I tested…
While there might be some edge cases where it's useful, heterogenous cores don't make a tonne of sense in the datacentre, hence why Intel hasn't made Xeon's with that design.
It seems to me this falls firmly in the category of caveat emptor.
Re: Intel's New Chimera: Alder Lake
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a dev too, my machine is a dual core haswell. It depends very much what you're doing of course (compiling linux kernel repeatedly perhaps) but if you have a little you can get a heck of a lot out of it with experience, although you surely will hit a wall sometime. But 32 cores not enough is just unimaginable for me.
So in $dayjob I have used an 8-core (16-thread) CPU to 100% regularly, as well as fully utilising 64-GB of RAM. I would be able to use 16 cores, 32, or more. Random examples: Trawling through 70 GB of web server log files going back years with ad-hoc analytics. I tried ingesting this into a cloud service but it was taking forever , and cost a non-trivial amount of money. It was also dog slow compared to just doing it…
Cloud stuff is never going to make sense, local machine it is. I do see what you're saying and here it seems like a good fit for a massive machine. No argument here.
NB. "Trawling through 70 GB of web server log files" unless you partition your search you're going to be doing a lot of IO due to having only 64-GB of RAM. Chucking in extra mem to keep it all ram-resident will beat cores any day.
Re: Intel's New Chimera: Alder Lake
#56Personally I don't really see a point in having a hybrid architecture like this unless it'll lead to massively increased core counts, and so far it doesn't look like it does. AMD still beats Intel in both core counts and power efficiency, and they're only using P cores so... what's the point of having E cores? But maybe that's just because it's a first generation technology for Intel? I hope things improve in the fut…
The top Alder Lake desktop CPU has 16-cores, 8P+8E, compared to 8P in the 11-th gen. The E cores get around half the performance of the P cores, so the 8P+8E is get roughly the performance of a hypothetical 12P+0E CPU. The very high core parts are reserved for Xeon (a 56 core Alder Lake Xeon has been leaked, but I think the P/E split is still unknown). What people need to realize is that a P cores takes around 4 time…
Indeed, I do sometimes wonder what it'd be like if they made the entire processor out of E cores.
Re: Intel's New Chimera: Alder Lake
#57Personally I don't really see a point in having a hybrid architecture like this unless it'll lead to massively increased core counts, and so far it doesn't look like it does. AMD still beats Intel in both core counts and power efficiency, and they're only using P cores so... what's the point of having E cores? But maybe that's just because it's a first generation technology for Intel? I hope things improve in the fut…
> because I sure would love to have more cores available (currently rocking a 32 core Threadripper) wtf do you need more cores for??? Wat are you doing? > not interested in actually pushing HEDT forward since consider buying a server.
> wtf do you need more cores for??? Wat are you doing?
I have a bunch of embarrassingly parallel workloads which I have to run regularly (text analysis, machine learning which is not easily accelerated on a GPU, etc.).
> consider buying a server.
I looked into it; not really an option. Those are vastly more expensive, really loud (I need a quiet workstation), have significantly lower boost clocks (I also need single-thread performance), and are either really hard or even impossible to actually buy in my country through normal retail channels.
Re: Intel's New Chimera: Alder Lake
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a dev too, my machine is a dual core haswell. It depends very much what you're doing of course (compiling linux kernel repeatedly perhaps) but if you have a little you can get a heck of a lot out of it with experience, although you surely will hit a wall sometime. But 32 cores not enough is just unimaginable for me.
Can't speak for the guy you're replying to, but I regularly saturate my 16-core CPU as a web developer. I often work on environments that need 20+ services locally virtualized to properly simulate the environment they'll be used in.
Worked in a place where the local architecture astronaut had taken over and we were subject to his insane designs that were virtualisation and microservices everywhere. A monolithic lump on a server would have been better, cheaper, faster in every way and needed many fewer cores.
But your case, ok, understood.
BTW The biggest slowdown IME is not from lack of cores but lack of RAM. Odd that no-one's mentioned that. Or using a server with larger numbers of memory channels to keep their cores fed. I/O > cycles more often than not.
Re: Intel's New Chimera: Alder Lake
#59Personally I don't really see a point in having a hybrid architecture like this unless it'll lead to massively increased core counts, and so far it doesn't look like it does. AMD still beats Intel in both core counts and power efficiency, and they're only using P cores so... what's the point of having E cores? But maybe that's just because it's a first generation technology for Intel? I hope things improve in the fut…
> Personally I don't really see a point in having a hybrid architecture like this unless it'll lead to massively increased core counts
What about massively reduced energy consumption and associated loss of head dissipation/noise and increased battery life? Isn't that why Apple and mobile phone SoCs introduced that design in the first place?
Re: Intel's New Chimera: Alder Lake
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
> because I sure would love to have more cores available (currently rocking a 32 core Threadripper) wtf do you need more cores for??? Wat are you doing? > not interested in actually pushing HEDT forward since consider buying a server.
> wtf do you need more cores for??? Wat are you doing? I have a bunch of embarrassingly parallel workloads which I have to run regularly (text analysis, machine learning which is not easily accelerated on a GPU, etc.). > consider buying a server. I looked into it; not really an option. Those are vastly more expensive, really loud (I need a quiet workstation), have significantly lower boost clocks (I also need single-…
OK, you win! Just a thought, if embarrassingly parallel, buy a 2nd desktop and farm it out?