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Intel's New Chimera: Alder Lake

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Re: Intel's New Chimera: Alder Lake

#161

Post by School-Cotton »

zasdffaa wrote: post #21
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…

> 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.

Rust or C++ compilation can easily make use of more than 32 cores.

Re: Intel's New Chimera: Alder Lake

#163

Post by pohl »

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…

True, and not just the system software, but the larger software ecosystem as well. Apple paved the way for the M1 by years and years of goading developers to be honest with themselves about what QoS priorities they really need on their DispatchQueues, and now there are plenty of threads explicitly marking themselves as being good candidates for running on the E cores.

Re: Intel's New Chimera: Alder Lake

#164

Post by bayindirh »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #160
bayindirh wrote: post #39

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.

> I don’t completely agree. A MacBook Air M1 is 25% faster than a 10th generation Intel 10700K Why is everyone insistent on comparing Apple’s latest CPUs to Intel’s parts from multiple generations back? Intel is on 12xxx series now. AMD also has new generation laptop CPUs that perform very well. Let’s compare to those. The M1 is power efficient but much of that is due to the TSMC process they used. I really don’t und…

Because that’s what I had access when I did the tests. I’ll do a series of tests on our cluster and post these.

Will these be meaningful for you?

The thing is, M1 on air is a relatively low clock speed CPU with passive cooling. 10200K is actively cooled, unlimited beast of its generation. The libraries I use are X86 optimized. Yet the code I’ve written is 25% faster on ARM.

This is significant.

Re: Intel's New Chimera: Alder Lake

#165

Post by formerly_proven »

bayindirh wrote: post #39
adam_arthur wrote: post #22

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

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.

> 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.

The M1 has other advantages which are decidedly not rooted in the hardware: software. Apple seems to do profoundly better than Windows and Linux at applications actually using hardware accelerators. This makes a gigantic difference in performance and power efficiency.

On a Windows or Linux system it is not at all a given that even very easily hardware-accelerated tasks, like video decoding, actually use the hardware that's there.

Re: Intel's New Chimera: Alder Lake

#166

Post by formerly_proven »

bayindirh wrote: post #164
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t completely agree. A MacBook Air M1 is 25% faster than a 10th generation Intel 10700K Why is everyone insistent on comparing Apple’s latest CPUs to Intel’s parts from multiple generations back? Intel is on 12xxx series now. AMD also has new generation laptop CPUs that perform very well. Let’s compare to those. The M1 is power efficient but much of that is due to the TSMC process they used. I really don’t und…

Because that’s what I had access when I did the tests. I’ll do a series of tests on our cluster and post these. Will these be meaningful for you? The thing is, M1 on air is a relatively low clock speed CPU with passive cooling. 10200K is actively cooled, unlimited beast of its generation. The libraries I use are X86 optimized. Yet the code I’ve written is 25% faster on ARM. This is significant .

I'm not saying it isn't, but the "low clock speed" part is often brought up in a discussion like this, implying that Apple could make a M1KFS running at much higher clocks.

Re: Intel's New Chimera: Alder Lake

#167

Post by jeffbee »

layer8 wrote: post #140
mrath wrote: post #2

I don't have an idea on CPU design. Can this lead to M1 like performance?

Compared to the M1, Intel is still restricted by the existing memory and I/O interfaces and by x86 compatibility, which means they can’t do certain things the M1 did, like the integrated unified memory (for massive memory bandwidth) and the relaxed memory model. And as the siblings explain, the P/E design is more about power efficiency than about performance, although the increased power efficiency does allow for mor…

The M1 has the exact same memory architecture as an 11th generation Intel Core series mobile CPU.

Re: Intel's New Chimera: Alder Lake

#168

Post by n7pdx »

adam_arthur wrote: post #22
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…

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

"Dunno why every comment implies there's some design gap that leads to M1 or AMD being more powerful or efficient."

That is because there is a huge design gap. Intel architecture and design teams have always assumed on the inevitability of their own manufacturing superiority and process advantage and thus never had to really consider where to place transistors for the most benefit, or think really hard on better ways to improve single-thread performance instead of just turning a knob that was invented two decades ago.

In any case, your statement is just plain wrong. Dennard scaling has been dead for a decade now. Planar area decreases with new processes come with increased power density, i.e. new process nodes reduce die sizes but the transistor performance does not improve the way they used to.

source: worked at Intel for CPU design for a decade, then worked on the same things elsewhere using TSMC process

Re: Intel's New Chimera: Alder Lake

#170

Post by vxNsr »

paulmd wrote: post #69
delusional wrote: post #46

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…

I’ve seen degradation in game play when I have 20+ tabs open in chrome. I have a modern 8core 16thread cpu (ryzen 3700x) 32gb of ram, nvme, and a 3070. It’s noticeable, either bec the tabs are saturating the eth or bec they’re pegging the cpu, but you can clearly feel slower.
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