Intel Alder Lake (12000 Series)

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Whats gear 1?

"Gear 1" means the IMC is at a 1:1 frequency ratio with memory speed. Gear 2 at 1:2 (half the speed), Gear 3 1:3, Gear 4 1:4.

The IMC speed has an impact on performance, so therefore there is a performance deficit running higher Gears in practice as for example to match DRR4 3600 at Gear 1 you'd need to be running DDR5 at 7200 in Gear 2 to have the same IMC speed. In the other posters example you'd be looking at DDR4 3700 Gear 1 IMC = 1.85ghz vs DDR4 4000 Gear 2 IMC = 1ghz, which is quite a big difference.

Off hand I believe some Alder Lake IMCs are capable of running at 2ghz (therefore DDR4 4000). However anything much more in excess of that will require Gear 2. DDR5 is also hard limited to Gear 2 I believe, even if you force a downclock it won't let you use Gear 1.
 
I would suggest buying low timing DDR4 3200-3600 instead of anything with faster clock speed.
 
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That advice also applies to amd anything faster than 3600mhz and it wont run 1:1 with the infinity fabric (whatever that is I'm guessing its like fsb)
 
That advice also applies to amd anything faster than 3600mhz and it wont run 1:1 with the infinity fabric (whatever that is I'm guessing its like fsb)
On newer Ryzens that limit is closer to 4000MHz and 2000MHz Infinity Fabric, but in general, 3600MHz mem. is a safe maximum bet for every Ryzen 3000 and 5000 user.
 
[Updated] Games Updated for DRM Issue with 12th Gen Intel® Core™ Processors for Windows 11* and Windows® 10
https://www.intel.com/content/www/u...0088261/processors/intel-core-processors.html
Intel has resolved the DRM issue on 12th Gen intel® Core™ Processors that caused games to crash or not load in Windows 11* and/or Windows® 10 by working with game publishers and Microsoft. At this time, all games originally identified as having this DRM issue have been fixed through game patches or OS updates.

If you experience issues on an older Windows OS, run the latest version of Windows Update to resolve the issue. Along with game patches, the most recent updates for Windows 11 and Windows 10 have resolved a majority of the DRM issues.
 

This intel laptop CPU/alder lake is a true beast. Very impressed, faster than anything else for laptops, by and large. Also the fastest laptop device for content/creation.
 
Isn't that really more in the "desktop replacement" category than outright "laptop" though?

Dave2D also tests with laptops plugged into power.

We will need to wait for proper benchmarks in order to make any conclusions. So far, Anandtech's and Hardware Canuck's preview benchmarks show some pretty disappointing battery life.

I'm not holding my breath though. I think ADL is quite the performer when you throw power efficiency out the window.
 
Seems to me the E cores were just to be able to cheaply claim higher core counts for marketing, did nothing for light load runtimes.
 
Seems to me the E cores were just to be able to cheaply claim higher core counts for marketing, did nothing for light load runtimes.
Wouldn't they be more for light load power efficiency?
 
Doesn't do much for idle screen on time and browsing endurance AFAICS from benchmarks. How much lighter does the load have to be?
 
Doesn't do much for idle screen on time and browsing endurance AFAICS from benchmarks. How much lighter does the load have to be?
Keep in mind, there's a minimum power threshold in those two benchmarks where lower CPU power consumption wouldn't have a material effect on battery life.

Think about the minimum power needed to keep the memory DIMMs active, run the screen backlight, the WWAN card, the PCIe bus itself, the NVMe disk(s), CMOS and RTC, and whatever else needs some minimal power trickle to stay alive. Let's use my Gigabyte Aero v8 as an example, because I have some numbers on it... If the laptop is truly doing absolutely nothing except sitting at the desktop of Windows 11, I have logging showing the total package power of the i7-8750H with 32GB of memory can drop as low as ~350mw -- which includes the CPU, iGPU, IMC and PCIe controller components. In this state, the laptop has about an 8Whr burn rate on a 93Whr battery -- so about 11 hours of total run time. That's ~7.6Whr more power than the CPU is consuming and is mostly linked to the backlight of the screen, the NVMe drive in a power saving state, the WWAN card doing background things, the bluetooth adapter talking to itself, the fans actually don't turn off so that's another bit of power burn...

If my CPU consumed literally no power at all, the total idle-only battery life of my laptop wouldn't move by even so much as 30 minutes. Now if I'm surfing the web? Yeah, the CPU will kick up briefly from time to time as things load up, but we're talking little spikes of a few watts until the page fully loads. The big power consumers still end up being the backlight, the WWAN card, and the NVMe drive to some extent. The total package power of the CPU socket still wouldn't rank in the top 3 power consumers of the device for any more than a few seconds tops.

You asked the right question but seem to have expected a wrong result: how much lighter does the load have to be? It doesn't, that point was achieved several years ago. The rest of the laptop is what needs to be addressed.
 
Intel owns the Evo certification too, they knew where they could get at this point.

The E-cores just caused lots of software headaches without providing any real advantage on any workload, I'd have preferred to just have 10 P-cores. For the ultra-mobile use case it makes sense, but I don't know if Intel has noticed ... they aren't too big in mobile.
 
Won't do any good if it doesn't sell. Who's going to make anything with the 2 P-core, 8 E-core ultra-mobile version and sell it to a large audience?
 
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