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Intel's New Chimera: Alder Lake

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Re: Intel's New Chimera: Alder Lake

#121

Post by NikolaNovak »

dataflow wrote: post #113
NikolaNovak wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do some work on my ThinkPad t420s. It's about a decade old now. I understand it's anecdotal but fwiw. Note that it's plugged into Ethernet. I do ALL my work on a t25 which is just about 5 years old now. This includes daily calls with dozens of video participants (ms teams and WebEx mostly) while I have chrome and Firefox open with multiple tabs including outlook and Gmail and slack, couple of MS words, couple of Po…

> This includes daily calls with dozens of video participants The real question is, are you one of the video participants too? Or are you just watching others but not sending any video of your own?

With my t25? Participant, absolutely! As I said, it's my main daily workstation. Over last two years that included using built-in webcam, a dsrl, and currently Logitech external webcam.

Heck I've run full PeopleSoft multi vm setups on my ancient t420 back in the day. A little CPU really goes a longer way than people realize.

Re: Intel's New Chimera: Alder Lake

#122

Post by esyir »

kouteiheika wrote: post #57
zasdffaa wrote: post #21

Earlier 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-…

Nobody said you needed an enterprise grade server. A simple desktop with proxmox or something installed would work just fine.

Re: Intel's New Chimera: Alder Lake

#123

Post by cassepipe »

willis936 wrote: post #105
paulmd wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s also not very intensive, especially since video decode usually runs on the GPU. (Or it should - browsers are not always very good about this but the tools are there, they just don’t want to pay licensing fees to use them.) I always cringe a bit when people insist they need 6 cores “so they can have discord and Spotify open while they game”. People don’t generally have a very good intuitive sense of just how litt…

Sure chat apps and video playback are light, but what isn't is browsing the web. Web browsing has become a heavy task. If you tried to install a browser and then use it today on a core 2 duo, you'd have a very bad time. And everyone browses the web, usually quite a bit.

Core 2 Duo on a late 2007 Macbook running Firefox on Linux Mint. It's doing surprisingly ok. It would not work as a daily driver because waiting one second for a moderately heavy page is not something anyone is willing to accept nowadays but totally functional whereas browsing on a single core 2004 iMac is excruciating.

Re: Intel's New Chimera: Alder Lake

#124

Post by nicoburns »

paulmd wrote: post #116
nicoburns wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Playing a video and writing a document is something that can be trivially done on a core2duo era processor, or the modern equivalent of a low-end dual-core nuc with e-cores (atom cores) like a J4005. You don’t even need performance cores for that. Playing a video and editing a document, sure. But change that to being on a video call and having a few moderately intensive web apps open (say Gmail, Google Docs and som…

Video encode is also hardware-accelerated these days. J5005 may be Nehalem performance but unlike Nehalem it has a hardware video encoder onboard. Intel has had it for a long time, I think maybe back to Sandy or Ivy days so it’s basically in everything at this point. It’s not archival quality but it’s more than fine for videoconferencing starting from around Haswell. Goldmont actually has a fairly modern media block…

> It’s not archival quality but it’s more than fine for videoconferencing starting from around Haswell.

My 2015 MacBook Pro with Broadwell i5 would indeed work "fine" for videoconferencing (in my case Google Meet), but it would also use most of a CPU core to do it. Which is fine if that's all you're doing. But if I wanted to share my screen and work on something else while doing so then it could quite quickly get to the point where I needed to start shutting down other programs, and even then it could cause lag when typing in less well-implemented apps.

My new MacBook with M1 Pro cpu it still uses most of a cpu core for videoconferencing, but it's a single E core and I have 9 others cores. Videoconferencing now makes zero difference to system responsiveness.

Most people won't need 8 cores, but I reckon the average office worker in 2022 would benefit from 4.

Re: Intel's New Chimera: Alder Lake

#125

Post by cheschire »

Traster wrote: post #80

You get a bunch of smart hardware guys into a room, they design this funky exotic architecture. Then the software goes "Allocate these threads to whatever is idle" and suddenly you've completely lost any possible advantage and are thrashing around with no idea what you're doing. The big-little architecture from Apple was accompanied by software that basically handles that for you. From what I heard there were similar…

Right, this design model works only if there’s a certification process for software. If they can convince the virus scanning and HIPS companies to implement a certification standard, and then convince businesses that this certification process matters when purchasing enterprise numbers of clients, then it will start to make a dent.

Re: Intel's New Chimera: Alder Lake

#126

Post by jiggawatts »

zasdffaa wrote: post #84
jiggawatts wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would be... surprised. The query engine in Microsoft SQL Server is absurdly advanced, and simply beats the pants off just about everything else for complex, general-case queries. There are other engines that are better tuned for special cases, but if you've got "stuff" that's within the capacity of a single box, it's really hard to beat MSSQL. Let's expand on my example above: Clustered ColumnStore.[1] It's basic…

I've not used columnstore in MSSQL but in fact I likely know more about the innards of MSSQL than you. WRT memory, all I mant was that if your working set doesn't fit in RAM, you're screwed regardless. Nothing will save you, so check that first. I don't know what your 70GB means in this context - please check. > It then parallelises this across all cores/hyperthreads, so I get 100% utilisation on 16 cores. that sugge…

I do know a thing or two about MS SQL optimisation also. 8)

So keep in mind that the SSD I'm referring to can read at 7 GB/s. Not seven gigabits... 7 gigabytes per second. I've benchmarked some not-so-old servers (the entire box, not a VM!) as capable of only 35 GB/s streaming reads from main memory! So these days "disk" is more like "5x slower memory". It used to be 100-1000x slower.

I told one customer to get a 16x PCIe gen 4 adapter card with 4 NVMe M.2 ports on it. This would -- in theory -- be able to pump out 28 GB/s of reads, equivalent to a 200 Gbps NIC. Total storage would be 32 TB with CoTS 8TB drives.

That's a mind-blowing amount of IO in a single box!

The hardware has the capability, it's the software and inability to utilise that is the bottleneck now..

Re: Intel's New Chimera: Alder Lake

#127

Post by moffkalast »

em500 wrote: post #37
kouteiheika wrote: post #16

Personally 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…

Well it would make some sense to have perhaps 2 or 4 single core speed focused cores for the main process that you're currently working on, and then add as many of the smaller E cores as you can, to handle the hundreds of background processes so that the P cores can run uninterrupted by them.

If this works that way in practice is anyone's guess though.

Re: Intel's New Chimera: Alder Lake

#128

Post by orra »

masklinn wrote: post #97
orra wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember Mono, a .NET runtime, having to change its allocations to fit inside a smaller core. This was because a thread could start on a bigger core but then be shunted onto a smaller core. That fixed the crashing but obviously came with a loss of performance.

It was a bit more complicated than that: the issue was that one of the early big.LITTLE designs (Samsung's Exynos 8890) had different cacheline sizes on the big and little cores. glibc's `__clear_cache` would cache the cacheline size on first call, so if the program was started on a big core then migrated onto a little core it would only flush every other cacheline. Which was an issue for any program needing to expli…

It wasn’t my intention to blame Mono. The solution seemed necessary albeit unfortunate.

Nonetheless, I appreciate the corrections and extra context you have provided.

Re: Intel's New Chimera: Alder Lake

#129

Post by sorenjan »

moffkalast wrote: post #127
em500 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well it would make some sense to have perhaps 2 or 4 single core speed focused cores for the main process that you're currently working on, and then add as many of the smaller E cores as you can, to handle the hundreds of background processes so that the P cores can run uninterrupted by them. If this works that way in practice is anyone's guess though.

I think a single E core can handle all the background processes when they're not doing any real work. I currently have around 250 processes and 3500 threads running on my computer, and the CPU utilization is 1%. It would probably make sense to use an extremely power efficient core that's only used for background services, one core that could be clocked much higher than all the rest for the foreground thread(s), and maybe some combination of E and P cores for the rest of the threads doing actual calculations. But adding lots of simple E cores for parallel work feels a bit like Larrabee.

It's clear that we need something in between regular quad core CPUs, and GPUs connected through PCIe. Some kind of parallel compute unit should be standard in pretty much all CPUs (or SoCs) eventually.

Re: Intel's New Chimera: Alder Lake

#130

Post by Nursie »

paulmd wrote: post #117
Nursie wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had an eeepc 901, used it for years with linux. First it ran gnome 2 I think, then xfce. Perfectly useful little machine. In later years I switched to lxde to eke a little more out of a little less. In that form factor, and costing what it did, I was massively impressed.

I had a college professor who loaned me one for a project and it was absolutely unusable in windows. Took like 10 minutes to boot to the desktop (although maybe he had viruses, wouldn’t have surprised me, and he certainly didn’t have an SSD in it). Lxde is great though and sure id believe that. I ran lxde on a single-core Phenom low power thing and with a SSD it was marginally usable even with that complete shit hard…

Yeah I think the solid state storage card really made it workable, I got an add-on 64Gb card at no small expense, doubled the RAM (to 2GB!), and linux was generally very happy on there.
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