Can we have Alder lake’s power per watt metrics?
Can we see the size of the laptops it will be installed in?
Will it be able to reach the same performance while on battery, like the new MacBook Pros?
C’mon, I understand Intel is in a push to counter the Intel-is-screwed narrative, but their comms department should try to do better than this old school benchmark “leaks” post, with cherry picked comparisons and such.
I can understand the “they’re an underdog, so they deserve some money even if their products are not the absolute best”, but casting Intel as the poor underdog being steamrolled by their competition because they cannot get the latest and greatest is strange, to say the least.
Right now, it seems to me that Intel is behind both on the node and on the architecture vs M1 (and AMD). I expect them to eventually fix the node (or just buy from TSMC) but if they don't fix the latter that's a big deal.
From the POV of buying a CPU/laptop today, absolutely, power comparison and performance both are essential.
I’m an Intel bear on their existing markets - mainly because even if they achieve parity with TSMC the lead is gone and others will take market share.
I’m more positive on the Intel GPU business though given the potential huge demand for ML compute.
From a historical point of view, a systematic shift to hotter, more power-hungry chips was never a good sign (see for example the various Pentium 4s and the successive incarnations of Bulldozer and Piledriver). I hope it's a stopgap and that they have a new Core 2 masterpiece being readied, but let's not kid ourselves: it does not look good. the Physics of heat transfer put a limit to the gains in performance you can achieve if you don't also increase efficiency. It's cold comfort to know that your CPU would be wonderful if cooled with liquid nitrogen when your desktop throttles under load.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/AMD-Ryzen-7-PRO-5850U-v...
AMD 5850U 1253 scores vs Apple M1 1004 scores
Waiting for apple fanboys telling me something like "but TDP is not a good measure"...
I think this might be the comparison you were after? https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/AMD-Ryzen-7-PRO-5850U-v...
Beyond that, almost everything that does signal processing of some shape or another (audio, video, whatever) is multithreaded these days, so that one's out too. Compiling code is multi-process too.
I actually struggle to think of important work loads that are single-threaded these days. Obviously most simple apps are, but mainly because they don't use enough CPU to bother optimizing. We're more than a decade into multi-core systems being the norm and most CPU-heavy apps have taken advantage of that.
I'd go one step further and say that if modern apps are doing that that they should move the CPU heavy tasks out of the message thread. (And most have, again, since we're like 10-15 years into multi-core systems being the default.)
Those measures should use something like `powerstat` results standardizing other conditions - in fact, they should use benchmarking (just like the numerator of the numbers you report does, but not the denominator). This system here has a TDP of 6W, but uses 3.3W during light use, and peaks around 7.5W.
Sure, there could be a literal interpretation of "Performance/Power" which somehow could link speed and TDP (benchmarking at the same stated TDP), but (°) it would be imprecise as TDP is an estimate (so consumption should be benchmarked) and (°) it would not represent some more useful scenarios like "which system allows squeezing more working time out of a battery" (which is not represented by considering maximums - especially given technologies like big.LITTLE).
So unfortunately TDP has basically become a marketing term and we're back to literally measuring power usage instead. Which of course gets complicated when you consider that different machines have wildly different heat management systems.
[0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16959/intel-innovation-alder-...
> Waiting for apple fanboys telling me something like "but TDP is not a good measure"...
Not an Apple fan, but TDP is not even a measurement, it's a specification of the heat dissipation required for that CPU. So in theory it corresponds to the maximum power dissipated by the CPU under load, but in practice two machines with the same TDP may be equipped with differently dimensioned heatsinks which will influence your metric. You should consider using a real average power consumption measurement to establish your metric.
I think this isn't quite right - TDP is the amount of heat the system needs to be able to dissipate in order to prevent thermal throttling at a given base speed. If the system can dissipate more (and provide more power), chips can clock higher to a turbo or boost speed.