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Intel's New Chimera: Alder Lake

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Re: Intel's New Chimera: Alder Lake

#141
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.

Does it seem strange to anyone that this might be the case, that web browsing is more resource intensive than streaming and playing video? If true, is it because everyone builds SPAs for everything using heavy frameworks like angular and react?

Re: Intel's New Chimera: Alder Lake

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t completely agree. A MacBook Air M1 is 25% faster than a 10th generation Intel 10700K, running the same code full of floating point instructions and matrices. It’s not a simple matter of process node. The same MacBook Air can do hour long Skype video calls with ~9% charge consumption, with no discernible heat difference on the body too. M1 is a different beast.

Isn't M1 two process nodes ahead of the 10700K?

[deleted]

Re: Intel's New Chimera: Alder Lake

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMD beats them because they are a process node ahead. Dunno why every comment implies there's some design gap that leads to M1 or AMD being more powerful or efficient. It's 90% the process node. There is no magic design sauce that makes those chips better. The big/little design change did seem to improve performance quite a bit for Intel, even using the same manufacturing node as before

There is a massive design gap between all Apple designed chips and non Apple designed chips. Apple’s chips are ridiculously humongous. They’re built for extremely wide, high performance applications for the past 10 years. A single A14 core can do 64 32-bit floating point operations in a single clock cycle. AMD/Intel were long at 16 operations and only the latest Intel went up to 32 operations.

Well, Intel's latest chip has better performance than M1 despite being two process nodes behind. So not sure what you're going on about

Re: Intel's New Chimera: Alder Lake

#144
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth making it explicit that many home computing tasks are highly parrallelizable because the work is actually completely separate programs. If you watch a video while writing a document in word, that's trivially parrallelizable.

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…

> they just don’t want to pay licensing fees to use them

Can you blame browser makers for this? When was the last time you saw someone pay for a browser? Pre-2005 Opera?

Re: Intel's New Chimera: Alder Lake

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a massive design gap between all Apple designed chips and non Apple designed chips. Apple’s chips are ridiculously humongous. They’re built for extremely wide, high performance applications for the past 10 years. A single A14 core can do 64 32-bit floating point operations in a single clock cycle. AMD/Intel were long at 16 operations and only the latest Intel went up to 32 operations.

Well, Intel's latest chip has better performance than M1 despite being two process nodes behind. So not sure what you're going on about

Apple optimises for performance per watt. That the biggest Mac Studio is almost silent when fully loaded is remarkable when compared to my Intel desktops that start screaming the moment I start video conferencing.

Re: Intel's New Chimera: Alder Lake

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMD beats them because they are a process node ahead. Dunno why every comment implies there's some design gap that leads to M1 or AMD being more powerful or efficient. It's 90% the process node. There is no magic design sauce that makes those chips better. The big/little design change did seem to improve performance quite a bit for Intel, even using the same manufacturing node as before

AMD does not beat Intel [1] unless we limit the CPUs to the same wattage (see efficiency benchmarks below). [1] https://www.tomshardware.com/uk/news/ryzen-7-5800x3d-vs-core...

If that’s the game we want to play, there’s always POWER to show what you can pull off with an unlimited power (no pun intended) budget.

Re: Intel's New Chimera: Alder Lake

#147
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth making it explicit that many home computing tasks are highly parrallelizable because the work is actually completely separate programs. If you watch a video while writing a document in word, that's trivially parrallelizable.

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…

Hardware decoding avoids license fees by anything that uses it. The fees are paid by the manufacturer of the hardware doing the encode/decode.

Even then it’s not like they’re paying per unit. All of the patent pools and licenses I know of have a cap and AMD, Intel, Nvidia, etc are easily already there.

Re: Intel's New Chimera: Alder Lake

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a massive design gap between all Apple designed chips and non Apple designed chips. Apple’s chips are ridiculously humongous. They’re built for extremely wide, high performance applications for the past 10 years. A single A14 core can do 64 32-bit floating point operations in a single clock cycle. AMD/Intel were long at 16 operations and only the latest Intel went up to 32 operations.

Well, Intel's latest chip has better performance than M1 despite being two process nodes behind. So not sure what you're going on about

1 process node behind. Intel 10nm has similar or better transistor density as TSMC 7nm.

Re: Intel's New Chimera: Alder Lake

#149
post #23

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…

It's quite possible AMD has plans for this type of thing as well: despite their cores being more energy efficient and powerful per watt than Intel, I don't think they can match Apple yet (some of that is due to 5 nm process though). They have a patent for something similar at least: https://wccftech.com/amd-big-little-processor-cores-show-up-...

A lot of Apple’s advantage here comes from the regular instruction size, the relaxed memory semantics, and how those allow efficient instruction reordering.

Not saying x86 can’t ever replicate that, but the ISA makes it harder.

Re: Intel's New Chimera: Alder Lake

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Intel's latest chip has better performance than M1 despite being two process nodes behind. So not sure what you're going on about

Apple optimises for performance per watt. That the biggest Mac Studio is almost silent when fully loaded is remarkable when compared to my Intel desktops that start screaming the moment I start video conferencing.

Endless series of comments that don't understand the manufacturing side of processor development...
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