Intel Architecture day 2021: Alder Lake

#5939344

Loobyluggs

2021-08-19 15:30

8 cores? That's a bit 'meh' from a company so far behind the competition

#5939380

ViperAnaf

2021-08-19 16:44

Loobyluggs:

8 cores? That's a bit 'meh' from a company so far behind the competition

the fact fanboys still evaluate how powerful or advance a CPU is by the number of its cores shows they know nothing about technology...

#5939386

Horus-Anhur

2021-08-19 16:54

Intel's DLSS alternative seems to be quite good.

#5939390

Loobyluggs

2021-08-19 17:17

ViperAnaf:

the fact fanboys still evaluate how powerful or advance a CPU is by the number of its cores shows they know nothing about technology...

Tell that to a game developer...

#5939398

waltc3

2021-08-19 17:36

Wake me when Intel has something other than vaporware paper specs to show...;) Working, shipping silicon would be very nice for a change, because somehow it always seems to be the case that Intel's vaporware paper releases of marketing info never seem to quite correlate with the actual product that eventually ships.

#5939399

Ricepudding

2021-08-19 17:37

Loobyluggs:

Tell that to a game developer...

Most games tend to top out with 4/6 still (normally going into the later 6 cores these days), don't think i count many who need 8+ crysis 3 maybe was good mutithread but limited games. Still you're also missing the smaller 8 cores that can also be used, unsure if this mean no hyper threading or each has its own threading cores hardware unboxed actually did a interesting video showing intels and amds cores vs games, and how it often was not a huge difference once the cache and feq of the cores were equalised with its higher self

#5939432

PrMinisterGR

2021-08-19 19:13

ViperAnaf:

the fact fanboys still evaluate how powerful or advance a CPU is by the number of its cores shows they know nothing about technology...

It's all relevant. This is not a powerful single core CPU going against tiny ARM CPUs or anything. It goes against CPUs that are faster on single core against their previous gen, and with 2x the core advantage, so yeah, core counts are relevant.

Horus-Anhur:

Intel's DLSS alternative seems to be quite good.

This looks fine actually. Did they say what kind of game integration it requires?

#5939437

Horus-Anhur

2021-08-19 19:29

PrMinisterGR:

It's all relevant. This is not a powerful single core CPU going against tiny ARM CPUs or anything. It goes against CPUs that are faster on single core against their previous gen, and with 2x the core advantage, so yeah, core counts are relevant. This looks fine actually. Did they say what kind of game integration it requires?

Only that it will be used on all GPUs vendors. But lower overhead on Intel GPUs, because they use XMX instructions. On other GPUs, it will use DPa4. SKD will be available to devs later this month. https://static.techspot.com/images2/news/bigimage/2021/08/2021-08-19-image-3-p.webp

#5939482

Agonist

2021-08-19 21:18

ViperAnaf:

the fact fanboys still evaluate how powerful or advance a CPU is by the number of its cores shows they know nothing about technology...

That sounds like a comment from an Intel fanboy with a quad core trying to feel good about his 7700k. Seriously. Games need to support more cores. We really need 16 threads as the standard mainstream alreasy, not pathetic 6 core/6thread i5

#5939487

cucaulay malkin

2021-08-19 21:29

Horus-Anhur:

Intel's DLSS alternative seems to be quite good.

so was dlss 1.0 in demos

#5939498

Horus-Anhur

2021-08-19 21:55

cucaulay malkin:

so was dlss 1.0 in demos

Correct. But let's hope that Intel has learnt from nVidias first stumbles with the tech. Remember that Intel just poached one of the creators of DLSS 2.0

#5939509

Loobyluggs

2021-08-19 22:34

Ricepudding:

Most games tend to top out with 4/6 still (normally going into the later 6 cores these days), don't think i count many who need 8+ crysis 3 maybe was good mutithread but limited games. Still you're also missing the smaller 8 cores that can also be used, unsure if this mean no hyper threading or each has its own threading cores hardware unboxed actually did a interesting video showing intels and amds cores vs games, and how it often was not a huge difference once the cache and feq of the cores were equalised with its higher self

Oh, sorry, I said 'developer' not 'games'. Dev tools are multi-threaded up the [insert pun here] for content creation, compiling, authoring, crunching shaders down.

"With processors getting more threads and cores almost exponentially each year, we have now added Blender, v2.9x. We fire off two heavy intensive renders, BMW27 and Classroom. The software likes many cores and threads. It's a relatively new benchmark suite asset, so over time results will build up."

#5939515

ViperAnaf

2021-08-19 23:27

Agonist:

That sounds like a comment from an Intel fanboy with a quad core trying to feel good about his 7700k. Seriously. Games need to support more cores. We really need 16 threads as the standard mainstream alreasy, not pathetic 6 core/6thread i5

Sounds like an AMD fanboy.... I currently own a 5950x btw...

#5939519

Airbud

2021-08-19 23:38

Agonist:

We really need 16 threads as the standard mainstream alreasy, not pathetic 6 core/6thread i5

they're not gonna sell many games if 8core/16 threads were the requirement.

#5939523

H83

2021-08-19 23:47

Agonist:

That sounds like a comment from an Intel fanboy with a quad core trying to feel good about his 7700k. Seriously. Games need to support more cores. We really need 16 threads as the standard mainstream alreasy, not pathetic 6 core/6thread i5

16 threads??? I think you need to spend less time in an enthusiastic forum like Guru3d, because normal folks are more than happy with any modern quad core or even a fast dual core. For them is more important to have a fast SSD than a powerful CPU. As for games, many game creators have already stated that most games don´t scale well past 6 or 8 cores, so until that changes there´s no point in trying to support more cores in games.

#5939540

Mineria

2021-08-20 01:12

H83:

16 threads??? I think you need to spend less time in an enthusiastic forum like Guru3d, because normal folks are more than happy with any modern quad core or even a fast dual core. For them is more important to have a fast SSD than a powerful CPU. As for games, many game creators have already stated that most games don´t scale well past 6 or 8 cores, so until that changes there´s no point in trying to support more cores in games.

\ Not to forget that threads don't equal cores. If I still was with my old CPU and was about to upgrade today I would go with a CPU from Intel instead of one from AMD.

#5939611

Loobyluggs

2021-08-20 10:42

H83:

16 threads??? I think you need to spend less time in an enthusiastic forum like Guru3d, because normal folks are more than happy with any modern quad core or even a fast dual core. For them is more important to have a fast SSD than a powerful CPU. As for games, many game creators have already stated that most games don´t scale well past 6 or 8 cores, so until that changes there´s no point in trying to support more cores in games.

It’s not about supporting games, it’s about making them.

#5939684

DeskStar

2021-08-20 14:42

Ricepudding:

Most games tend to top out with 4/6 still (normally going into the later 6 cores these days), don't think i count many who need 8+ crysis 3 maybe was good mutithread but limited games. Still you're also missing the smaller 8 cores that can also be used, unsure if this mean no hyper threading or each has its own threading cores hardware unboxed actually did a interesting video showing intels and amds cores vs games, and how it often was not a huge difference once the cache and feq of the cores were equalised with its higher self

One needs to play a game under the Vulkan API. Wolfenstein 2 The New Colossus I have no problem utilizing 40 to almost 60% of a 24 core 48 thread 3960x. It's all down to the graphics engine/API. Vanilla Minecraft I can use 60% to 55% of my 3960x

#5939689

schmidtbag

2021-08-20 15:01

ViperAnaf:

the fact fanboys still evaluate how powerful or advance a CPU is by the number of its cores shows they know nothing about technology...

That isn't wrong but the fact of the matter is, there's only so much that can be done to increase the per-core performance. You can add more instructions, but they don't contribute to anything unless programmers actually use them. You can boost clock speeds, but only if the power and thermal envelope allow it. You can shrink the transistors, but only if the technology exists to do so. Granted, most software isn't optimized to use more than 4 threads (or really, 1 thread), but having more cores does at least improve overall system performance (particularly in multitasking) even if it doesn't improve an individual application's performance. That being said, I have a hard time understanding why any gamer needs more than 16 threads, even 12 is more than enough.

#5939753

alanm

2021-08-20 19:31

A little more info on Intels Thread Director: Intel Thread Director Technology This new technology is a combined hardware/software solution that Intel has engineered with Microsoft focused on Windows 11. It all boils down to having the right functionality to help the operating system make decisions about where to put threads that require low latency vs threads that require high efficiency but are not time critical. First you need a software scheduler that knows what it is doing. Intel stated that it has worked extensively with Microsoft to get what they want into Windows 11, and that Microsoft have gone above and beyond what Intel needed. This fundamental change is one reason why Windows 11 exists.... https://www.anandtech.com/show/16881/a-deep-dive-into-intels-alder-lake-microarchitectures/2