Intel says one of its 13th Gen CPUs will hit 6GHz out of the box | Hacker News Reader

Intel says one of its 13th Gen CPUs will hit 6GHz out of the box

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AMD announces 5.7ghz Ryzen 9 7950X chip retailing for $699 this month, meanwhile Intel hints at vapor chip that theoretically might hit 6ghz with no release date and no price. This stinks of desperation on Intel’s part.

I'm waiting for them to somehow redefine speed, like they redefined production geometries. How fast is it? It's Intel 7.

You laugh, but AMD did that in the mid-2000's with the Athlon XP series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Athlon_XP_processo... The numbers used to match their clock speed (ex. Athlon 1000 was 1000 MHz), but that changed with the XP models (ex. Athlon XP 2400+ was 2000 MHz).

IPC is a thing - clockspeed optimized architectures like Alpha and the Pentium 4 just didn't get as much done per cycle or had much harsher penalties when the pipeline stalled, even though they ticked faster.

Comparing the whole system against an actual task is the only way to really measure - everything else, including the clockspeed, is marketing.

Certainly, the last two decades prove that raw metrics win advertising because the complicated world of benchmarks just don't sway many people.

There was an expression floating around for this naming scheme, but I can't remember what it was and don't find any good search results either for my candidates. "Processor/Pentium equivalent rating"?

Edit: found it - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_Rating

This actually caused some problems with some Maxis/EA games at the time (like Sim City 4 or The Sims 2), because those games automatically tuned certain settings (mostly graphics settings, but somewhat annoyingly in The Sims also things like the maximum number of sims on one lot) depending on the power of your computer – mostly as measured by GPU model, amount of system and video RAM and CPU clock speed.

The problem was that the CPU clock speed levels categorising your system as high/mid/low performance were quite obviously based on Pentium 4 clock speeds, even though at the time AMD actually had a market share of around 40 – 50 % for desktop computers. This meant that everybody with an AMD processor would find his/her performance and graphics settings mysteriously restricted. People using the first generations of Intel's own Core i-processors had similar problems if they were still playing those games a few years later.

The saving grace was that at least things weren't totally hard-coded – things were controlled by a rules file in a plain text-based format, and so it was comparatively easy to just change the expected clock speed levels to something more reasonable for a non-Pentium 4 processor.

This was also useful because the GPU detection had its own share of problems down the line – I still occasionally play Sim City 4, and for some reason or other on my current system the game doesn't correctly detect the amount of video RAM I have and therefore resorts to extremely restrictive fallback settings unless I manually override it, and AMD recycling graphics card model numbers also caused some confusion that had to be manually fixed.

Cyrix 5x86 PR100. Or Cyrix 6x86 PR266

And Apple started it with their Megahertz Myth campaign.

I was a kid back then and we had mac labs at school, and those things were always slow or hanging. Maybe because they were imacs? During the second coming of Jobs era, Macs never really blew me away performance wise until the intel transition.

Intel just did that to conform to what the rest of the industry (namely TSMC) had already been doing. NM hasn't meant nanometers for a decade.

The numbers were always complete bullshit this is like complaining about a shop calling a cake tasty.

Nanometers has been a meaningless measurement for a long time now, ever since it stopped referring to the actual size of the transistors.

I hope Intel can keep up, actual competition has been so great. It does feel like they are really struggling with their process issues though.

I think we're going to see major shakeups over the next ~10 years from both companies. Old models of design are quickly reaching their limits. Heterogeneous cores and multi-die designs are just the start. It's an exciting time!

reaching the performance limit would be a blessing in disguise

Factoring in say 10x-100x repetition code for for error correction, existing silicon tech is already damn near to the launder limit. General purpose CPU and GPU architecture has some data flow logistics it could optimize, but ASICs are pretty much at the performance limit already.

It just seems like they are struggling as a company.

Please have some sympathy for the pathetic workers who have to work overtime to keep up because management failed to keep progress for the new and exciting.

Sometimes this competition thing is a distraction. Like now there is an emergency meeting for the three year roadmap to shrink to 1 year and with less innovation than they planned it to have, and the actual three year roadmap becomes 5 years because of wasted energy for short term gains.

Thats how business works. If people dont want to work at intel because of this thats ok too. Its the society we created and its worked out really well in the CPU industry for 50+ years now.

I know that is how some businesses work. But workers have more sight. Some would pander for the philosophy of Apple, don't compete just innovate. And sometimes they get that opportunity.

But other times when competing, long visions lose. And so do the workers who have them. This is detrimental.

I am not ever working for something like this I hope, but I do see others work in this way. And sometimes they are gifted yet unable to make that gift work.

Sounds ripe for a union

that 6ghz intel chip will probably use at least 300W too (12900ks uses 274W)

that's actually a feature since you don't need to have a space heater anymore. checkmate

You won't need to worry about the heat, since you can just reuse some of the liquid nitrogen that's cooling the chip to allow it to hit 6ghz in the first place.

Sure does... also the Intel announcement is on the same date that AMD releases their new chips.

Intel was always good at marketing. Performance (buck for buck) on the other hand ...

That was exactly my thought. It's just a bit sad to watch Intel fail so badly here. I was a big Intel fan for a long time.

Raptor lake engineering samples are already in the hands of people benchmarking them if you know where to look

The pendulum swings yet again. I remember in the 2000s when AMD and ATI were the best buys.

I'd recommend waiting for unbiased reviews of actual products, taking into consideration price, performance, and power usage before determining the "best buy" of the upcoming generation of products.

Though I hope the pendulum is swinging enough to keep driving the improvements. My current desktop CPU is absolute overkill while sipping relatively little power during my light usage.

drum roll please

To be honest, I'm disappointed by the new Ryzen 7000 series power consumption, enough so that I'll be sticking with my 5000 series CPUs for as long as I can. Not everyone wants their PC to double as a space heater.

Ryzen 7000 has better performance per watt though. If you don't want a space heater you might be better served to get a Ryzen 7000 and limit the TDP to whatever you're comfortable with.

It'll be faster than a Ryzen 5000 drawing the same amount of power: according to AMD the Ryzen 7000 will be "up to 49 percent"[1] faster at the same power draw.

[1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/918007/amd-launches-ryzen-70...

Precisely which reviews have you seen for Ryzen 7000 that paint it as a space heater?

The official announcement indicated significantly better power efficiency. AMD claims that if you limit both to a 65W TDP, you'll see 74% better performance on the new generation, but that even at full TDP, the efficiency will be higher.

However, I am waiting on the actual reviews... not making multi-year decisions based off of limited, pre-release information. If it is more efficient, then vowing to stick with an older, less efficient product just because it has a lower TDP number on the box doesn't make any sense. Efficiency is the only thing that matters when seeking to avoid a space heater, since the less efficient product will generate more heat for a given amount of work. All of these processors will clock down when idle

Not the person you asked but I poked around to see what I could find. Seems like a bunch of random sites all taking about some leaker. I could find nothing concrete to support them running hot.

https://www.google.com/search?q=ryzen+7000+running+hot&rlz=1...

Psychologically it's going to be hard for most people to underclock something they spent hundreds of dollars on.

Wow, Raptor Lake's max TDP looks to be 253W. That's crazy high https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-13th-gen-raptor-lake...

All these power hungry beasts coming out of Intel and NVIDIA feel quite out of sync with the zeitgeist in a world that's worried about the power bill - especially when the M1/M2 is there to provide contrast. I'm getting Pentium 4 vs Core architecture vibes.

> All these power hungry beasts coming out of Intel and NVIDIA feel quite out of sync with the zeitgeist in a world that's worried about the power bill -

These CPUs aren't consuming 250W all the time. Those are peak numbers.

Both Intel and AMD are providing huge efficiency gains, too. Rumors show the new i7 13700T Raptor Lake part can have a 35W mobile TDP and still outperform a Ryzen 7 5800X: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-13700t-raptor-lake-a...

Speed scales nonlinearly with power. These high TDP parts are halo parts meant for enthusiast builds where it doesn't matter that the machine draws a lot of power for an hour or two of gaming.

It's also trivially easy to turn down the maximum power limit in the BIOS if that's what someone wants. The power consumption isn't a fixed feature of the CPU. It's a performance/power tradeoff that can be adjusted at use time.

Just adding to what you said, a 24-core CPU won't get anywhere near peak power usage during gaming. Most games only use a handful of cores. The only way you'll approach it is with parallelizable productivity work like video encoding or compiling code.

I don't really second this perspective.

CPUs and GPUs keep getting hungrier and that is just not where we should be heading. I wish the perf increase didnt keep coming along consumption increase each gen.

> Both Intel and AMD are providing huge efficiency gains, too. Rumors show the new i7 13700T Raptor Lake part can have a 35W mobile TDP and still outperform a Ryzen 7 5800X: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-13700t-raptor-lake-a...

Don´t let the TDP of T-models fool you. Power consumption to reach boost clocks can peak up to 100W for T-models of the previous generation, and the 13700T probably needs to run close to that to outperform a 5800X.

> for an hour or two of gaming

U gotta pump those numbers up, those are rookie numbers.

> These CPUs aren't consuming 250W all the time. Those are peak numbers.

But they require a heat-sink management designed for that peak. And it is insane. Try to keep microwave oven under 100C :-)

Its still pretty terrible from an optimal performance viewpoint. I can undervolt my 3070Ti by ~100mV, dropping performance by ~6% but dropping temperature by about 10C, or 13%, and dropping fan speed from PS3 to inaudible for anything <90% load.

If you consider the mainstream products of Intel and Nvidia, they have way more moderate power consumption. These products with massive power draw are ultra enthusiast products. They are an outlier. You could build a great PC now with a RTX 3060 and a mainstream CPU that would be fine with a 500~ watt PSU.

As technologists, we should support manufacturers pushing the limit in power and performance. It helps drive overall efficiency and move technology forward.

Power consumption doubled at least even on mainstream and keep increasing gen over gen.

1070 vs 3070 is +52٪ average (145 vs 220w) and +66% (154 vs 250w) sustained.

2070 vs 3070 is +10% (195) or +24% (203) sustained.

Even the 3060 you defend draws power as older flagships and 500w arent enough even for mainstream gaming.

And it keeps getting worse both on gpu and cpu size.

We aren't technologists but consumers, and reality is that x86 and gpus are in near duopolys so the 3 companies involved have little reasons to do a better job and it's clear Apple socs or more and more cloud moving into arm have not been enough of wake up calls.

Yep, I’m using a 500w psu to power my gaming pc with a rtx 3060 ti and a 12700k cpu

where is the amd/nvidia/intel product that offers comparable performance at a power draw that is anywhere near m1?

Power consumption is an issue, but worrying about CPUs of a gaming machine is like worrying about straws in the context of the pollution.

Electricity needs of an average household in western world are going to increase a lot in coming decades, with transition to more electric heating, cooking, cars, etc. Gaming machine power usage is minuscule compared to those.

Just because energy needs keep increasing it's not a good reason to be okay they do.

While most house electronics keep pushing to consume less, computers go in the opposite direction.

This also adds tons of heat in my laptops or the air.

Working or gaming in a small room during hot days is painful.

Even consoles making noises of a turbo jet are nowadays considered normal. It's a disaster.

The major difference between a CPU and, say, an oven, is that the former runs 24/7, whereas an the latter would run for a short period of time.

Back of the envelope calculation here:

Assuming an average oven consumes 2kWh, and a CPU 0.1kWh:

Oven for four hours (average weekly usage) would be 2 * 4 = 8kWh weekly.

CPU for 24 hours, 7 days a week = 0.1 * 24 * 7 = 16.8kWh weekly.

I would say that people who regularly invest in top end hardware don't care as much about power bills. Otherwise power efficient chips is the norm (laptops, phones, etc).

This is slowly changing IMO - I'm seeing concern over energy use even on forums discussing high end hardware builds as cost of energy mounts in Europe. Previously no one really ever mentioned this other than to laugh at poor thermals.

If some of Nvidia's next generation 4xxx series GPUs are close to 1000w draw as many rumors suggest, the total draw of a high spec Intel/Nvidia system is going to probably have similar running costs to an electric space heater when playing demanding games. The existing 3090ti is already a 500w part, which not so long ago was enough to power a whole system in addition to the GPU.

> that people who regularly invest in top end hardware don't care as much about power bills

It adds up, especially in data centers where you end up needing even more megawatts of power and cooling capacity.

I wonder what % of the overall power bill a PC actually consumes. My gut would say it doesn't compare, really, to the water heater or air conditioner, but it would be good to see numbers.

They are in development for years, not last 6 months

arguably it was the same thirst for electricity that was the killing stroke for most of the POWER architecture. that, and IBM contract fees.

netburst was the first thing that came to mind

I don't know, we found Helium-3 on the moon this week, so I think it might be fine.

In Intel's case, they need to push these insane TDPs in order to even dream of performance parity with AMD and Apple. All those years spinning their wheels on 14nm+++++++++++ are biting them in the ass.

Between this and the ridiculous TDP expectations for this generations latest graphic cards people are going to have to start thinking about using dedicated circuits per gaming computer.

It certainly makes building Mini ITX a lot more interesting when you're trying to get the sweet spot for performance to thermals/noise ratio.

I did a nCase M1 build recently and my objective for the build was small as possible, quiet as possible, and as powerful as possible in that order. I still ended up with a pretty powerful machine by going with an i3-12100 instead of an i5/i7 which uses much less power and puts out less heat. The RTX 3080 reference card was the biggest card that could fit into the case which I undervolted.

A lot of people are undervolting their RTX GPU's because for an only about a ~3% performance loss you get about 10C less temp which translates to far less fan noise. I don't know why Nvidia doesn't just have a one click button for people.

nCase unfortunately have discontinued this case based on 'market factors' which I suspect means that they don't anticipate things to be getting smaller and cooler any time soon.

>A lot of people are undervolting their RTX GPU's because for an only about a ~3% performance loss you get about 10C less temp which translates to far less fan noise

Bah, this is brilliant. I just upgraded a 1070 to a 3070 and am flabbergasted at how much heat it dumps into my room. One of the reasons I did not go with the 3080 was the ~100 watt lower draw.

Do you know of any good tooling to assess the impact of undervolting or is it a manual guess-and-check process?

>> my objective for the build was small as possible, quiet as possible, and as powerful as possible in that order.

With the same priorities and a deemphasis on graphics, I present to you the Mellori-ITX: https://github.com/phkahler/mellori_ITX

Uses the CPU fan as a case fan. By protruding through the top we get a lower profile than is possible with any other ITX case (well the standoffs can be cut down but that has not be optimized).

My next build will be an upgrade of the same design but with a Zen 4 or 5 chip with 8 or 16 cores depending what fits in the power constraints of the Pico-PSU. It will be a while though because that system is still more than enough for everything I do with it.

Mini ITX is also insanely more expensive than building a regula tower. Sure, if you're only putting the most expensive CPU and GPU in it then probably it doesn't matter to you but for value oriented builds, miniITX case, Mobo, PSU and cooler add up a lot.

I have an M1 gaming build where I prioritized efficiency; 5800X3D and RX 6600 with a 450W PSU.

I also have a mini-ITX Lone L5 build with an i3-12100 and no GPU with a 192W PSU. (Effectively - PSU is technically a bit more, but the AC/DC adapter is only 192W.)

> A lot of people are undervolting their RTX GPU's because for an only about a ~3% performance loss you get about 10C less temp which translates to far less fan noise. I don't know why Nvidia doesn't just have a one click button for people.

Yeah, I did exactly that with my 3080. Dropped ~50W depending on the game and I was able to keep the same clock speeds.

Undervolting actually let me over clock my 3070 higher, presumably due to extra thermal headroom? I noticed two peaks in the timespy results and undrrvolting moved me between them, so this must be pretty well known.

They probably work on a successor. In the meantime, the DAN Cases A4-H2O or the FormD T1 are worthy replacements.

Yeah undervolting is always worth it.

You can also limit your i7 power usage, so no need to go for an i3 if you have the money.

And also use the heat from their PC to boil water and then spin a turbine to generate electricity to sell back to the grid.

For people who use resistive electric heating I've recommended them to run crypto miners on their computer. Same efficiency with regards to heating, but you can earn some extra money as a bonus.

Not really even close. Even with a 235W CPU and a theoretical 600W GPU you wouldn’t actually exceed even half the capacity of a single 15A circuit in synthetic benchmarks that stress the system beyond real-world loads.

I think the issue is with older houses that might have 15 amp circuit breakers compared to the modern standard of 20A. One high end desktop computer by itself isn't likely to be a problem, but the way these houses are wired, there are a lot of outlets on the same breaker since they were mostly designed for lighting loads. Our 1950 house in MI will flip the breaker if we use the microwave, toser and bathroom vent at the same time, and my desktop is also on that circuit (with a UPS)

For sustained loads you are only supposed to draw 12A, and the PSU has a conversion loss, dropping you to perhaps 10A of power for it all. Plus, then you can’t run anything else on the circuit.

Sure, you would be able to put smaller power draw items on the same circuit, but between the CPU/GPU/Motherboard/PSU/Monitors/Peripherals you will not be able to put two of these machines onto the same circuit.

A 15A circuit is good for 1440w sustained(120*15*.8), not 1800w.

People often use power strips for their computer. So you also have your dual 4K LCD monitor system, as well as maybe plugging in a phone to charge as well which can have high peak power draws over USB 3.0.

I actually did this...I got two dedicated circuits put into my room - one for the window unit AC (no point in cooling the whole house when I really just need to cool this room most of the time), and one for my gaming computer. My work laptop, lights, etc. are all on the original main circuit of the house.

A friend of mine is an electrician so the price was very reasonable, and it has been worth it, especially during this hot summer.

I did something similar for my home lab setup in my previous house. It was pretty reasonable having two dedicated 20A circuits run w/ surge protected hospital-grade outlets and dual function breakers. Each circuit fed a different UPS which fed a different PDU so everything had redundant power back to the breaker panel, which was all I could reasonably do residentially, and it meant none of the servers/network gear impacted the rest of my office circuits.

It was reasonably cheap, and in my next house I'll do the same again. Running additional circuits is pretty easy if you have an attic or crawl space.

Are you exhausting the gaming computer to the outside or into the room you are cooling?

Ironically, I have a printer that really needs a dedicated circuit. When it warms up the toner, it draws 12 amps for 1-2 seconds.

Printing often pops the breaker. I had to move the printer out of my home office into a bedroom, but even then we've popped the breaker when printing while vacuuming.

(It's not a case of bad wiring, either.)

There are types of fuses that have a time delay on them for this purpose. A lot of electrical appliances have that kind of startup burst of energy. An electrician can tell you more

Warming up the laser printer (and its a small one) reliably causes the lights throughout my apartment to flicker.

It's not an AFCI breaker, is it? My last house had sensitive AFCI breakers that my laser printer would trip about a quarter of time when warming up.

I used to own a brother laser printer and it did this, I switched to HP LaserJet and this no longer occurs.

who cares about these russian gas problems. I will have to throttle my cpu so it doesn't get too hot in winter

My office gets about 5c warmer when I play games on my PC, despite being poorly insulated with the window open.

And I've only got a 3900X+2070 Super...

feeling a bit cold, gonna turn on my gaming pc for an hour

253W is only 2 amps in the US, thats like 10-20% of a breaker’s capacity

Peak draw for even a current-gen graphics card is well over 500W. There are rumors that a 4090 will need as much as a 1500W power supply to run it. That's almost a complete 15A circuit just for the PC once you factor in cooling, speakers, monitor etc.

I already have issues where the breaker would pop with my current gaming PC if it fully spins up and I had to get a 20A circuit put in to handle it (mostly because there is more than one computer on the circuit).

With the GPU it's going to reach 51% at this rate. That's all it takes to require one per computer.

I believe the new 4x nvidia series uses 450-500W.

Throw in 2 monitors and a speaker system and you're coming close to overloading your 15amp breaker.

For those of you unaware, most households in the USA have 15amp circuits for their wall plugs. With that you can safely pull about 1200Watts constantly.

I am unsure what the normal household circuit amperage is in the EU or elsewhere...

Max sustained load on a 15A breaker is not 10A/1200w, it’s 80% of 15A at 120v, or 12A/1440w.

The normal amperage in Germany is 16A at 230V, with a peak load of 3500W and a sustained load of 3000W.

I had a LAN party at my house in 2012 and one lunatic brought his 1KW+ PC and tripped a breaker which has seemed really twitchy ever since.

Circuit breakers do degrade after being tripped. Once usually isn't enough, but repeated tripping will wear them out.

You should have an electrician check the wiring too. You might be leaking a little current due to decaying insulation.

If you have to wire a room, ask for a larger gauge of wire so have the option of a larger breaker if you want it.

Already there in Europe... I actually prefer getting the Steamdeck out than turning the main computer on for "light" games.

This is the definition of “working smart vs. working hard”. Not everything about the CPU needs to be solved by pushing it to the limits of physics. TDP is not linear relative to CPU freq.

...no. Average EU circuit is 230V/16A, that's 3.6kW

Even if you ran 1kW (...somehow) you could still connect 3 of them and still have 600W left for audio/monitors.

We usually only use that high amperage fuses on high power appliances, like ovens or workshop equipment from my part of Europe.

I would say it's more normal to be fused to 10A for most indoor things, anything else is not normal, as most home appliance power cables are not even thick enough to carry the 16A 230V power safely.

You're right, I was being North American-centric, which is 120V/15A and could only run a single 1000W machine.

I popped the breaker when I accidentally connected my gaming computer and my car charger (plug-in hybrid) to the same circuit.

Probably would've been fine if it were a 20A circuit and not a 15A, but it did remind me how much power these things draw...

Or with power in SF averaging 40-ish cents per kWh a standard evening gaming session can easily cost a non-negligible amount of money.

That's not a TDP, which is a sustained metric (originally designed for board/cooling design integration) and shows 125W for that part. The 250W number is a new thing they're calling "Processor Boost Power" and I guess it's intended to represent some kind of "maximum short term draw" number. That's not something that's been historically reported for other parts, so it's kinda wrong to try to compare them 1:1.

intel's following AMD and introducing a "PPT" terminology for the boost value, since they routinely get compared against AMD's (non-boost) TDP values.

even in this thread you see people saying "wow intel pulls 250W against AMD's 105W processors"... when the comparable PPT number for AMD this generation is actually 230W, and their previous-gen number was 145W.

It's a huge marketing disadvantage, just like with node naming for fabs. Intel's 14nm is hugely better than GF 14/12nm or TSMC 16/12nm, and 10ESF is comparable to TSMC 7nm (although much later ofc). When the competitors are playing marketing games, to some extent you just have to start playing them too.

Desktop/HEDT TDPs used to pretty much cover boost clocks, the "tau" concept always officially existed but (eg) 5960X has a 143W idle-to-prime95 power delta as measured by Anandtech, so, the 140W tdp is pretty much sufficient to cover any "normal" non-prime95 AVX load at full boost clock. Similarly 4770K is a 85W TDP on paper and the measured idle-to-prime95 is 88W. Overclocked desktop loads could go higher of course, but most people overrode tau limits anyway in those cases. So in practice, tau limit was pretty much only a thing that existed on laptops in the intel world, because there was always enough TDP available to cover boost clocks, in a stock configuration.

https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph8426/67026.png

Then AMD came along with Ryzen and started marketing around base TDPs, and made their boost TDP this other higher number (but it's not a boost TDP guys, it's, uh, PPT, yeah!!!!)... and allowed it to boost to the higher number for an unlimited period of time. 9-series really started pushing it and Tau limits started becoming a problem, but it looks really bad to have a 145W TDP when the competition has 105W... even if it's the same actual power consumption in practive. So over time Intel more or less had to move to the same "TDP/PPT" concept as AMD.

It's really really noxious in laptops where AMD allows processors to boost to 50% (more than the desktop chips even!) above their configured TDP for an unlimited period of time. Yeah partners get to pick the cTDP for the particular laptop, but either way an AMD chip with a 15W cTDP gets to use 50% more power than an Intel with a 15W cTDP, for an unlimited duration, which is a huge functional advantage... basically a 15W AMD laptop is more comparable to a 25W Intel laptop in terms of power draw, and a 25W AMD will pull more power than a 35W Intel. So they move themselves up a whole power bracket through The Magic Of Technical Marketing (tm).

https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16084/Power%20-%2015W%20Co...

Looks like that's just for the 5.4GHz chip. To hit 6GHz, it's probably going to be this 350W (!!!) turbo mode.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-raptor-lake-to-featu...

It sounds high, but we’ve had plenty of AMD and Intel workstation CPUs with even higher TDPs for a long time. Overclockers have also routinely pushed well past that number.

235W is well within the range of what a decent air cooler like the Noctua NH-D15 can handle without excessive fan noise.

Justifying the off-the-shelves TDP of new GPUs/CPUs by saying it's still lower than what overclockers reach is the same as saying a car doing 50L/100KM is completely fine because an M1 Abraham uses 2000L/100KM offroad.

That's not what I said. I specifically said that AMD and Intel have been shipping CPUs with higher TDPs (stock!) for a long time. Overclockers have been going even further.

AMD's Threadripper PRO CPUs come with up to 280W TDPs.

It's really not a problem with modern air coolers and not a problem at all for people running liquid coolers.

A 253W boost TDP isn't really a big deal any more. There are plenty of smaller CPUs for people who don't want such high overheads.

Some of Intel's new parts can be limited to 35W and still outperform a Ryzen 7 5800X: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-13700t-raptor-lake-a...

There's a lot of "sky is falling" over these numbers, but it's a non-issue for the enthusiast builds these are targeted at. Nobody is forced to put a 253W CPU into their machine, but it's great that the vendors are making them available for those who want them.

Your comparison is moot as nobody is forcing you to buy the most gas guzzling chips Intel and AMD make as those are exclusively for enthusiasts who want to have the best of the best with no regard for value for money or efficiency.

But Intel and AMD also make enough chips with very good efficiency for the average folk who don't need to set benchmark records.

Wasn’t the top of the line DEC Alpha drawing 200 watts at one point?

So, almost 25c an hour at EU electric prices.

Coin operated Game systems lol. We have come in the whole circle.

Or <$0.04 in the US and in most of the EU under normal circumstances.

Here is US data:

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

Is eu electricity really 1 dollar per kwh?

Here are the hourly prices in Denmark, without taxes and other charges which are about 1.6DKK/kWh. If you go forwards and backwards, you can see the price has varied/will vary from about 1kr to 4.5kr, plus tax, or 35¢ to 81¢. Car chargers can be set to charge at the cheap times, and things like dishwashers and washing machines have delay timers for people who want to run them at the cheaper times.

Straightforward day/night electricity rates have existed for decades, hourly rates are more recent, and optional.

100¢/kWh has happened in the last month, but only at a peak period. I'm not sure how long or how often it happened.

1.00DKK = 0.14USD

https://andelenergi.dk/kundeservice/aftaler-og-priser/timepr...

Depending on the day and hour of the day, yes. At least here in Denmark.

Here in downtown San Jose it’s around $0.75/kWh

Wow... my whole desktop setup, with 3 screens, a 7-year-old intel CPU, a gaming GPU, and a grip of hard drives is showing a draw of 143W right now, up to 289W under stress (prime95). 235W just for the CPU is nuts.

TBF the performance per watt is also nuts. 7 year old is Haswell-Skylake (same performance mostly)?

Alder Lake impresses me, but Ryzen is the better choice because f Intel heh

Yeah, this PC has a Haswell CPU.

As much as I want to agree on Ryzen, Intel is still the best platform for low-latency audio stuff. So I hope that performance-per-watt is or will be good as I'm beginning to get that PC-building itch. I'm curious what its idle usage is like.

But my living-room PC has a third-gen Ryzen (I built it just before the pandemic hit) and have been super pleased with its performance.

My i9-12900k hovers right around 250W TDP with no overclocking or anything. If you keep it under 100C it's happy to do so.

Just to clarify for the audience, there is nothing you can do within reason that will cause your CPU to ever self-heat above 100°. They manage their own power to stay below their maximum design junction temperature, less a safety margin. Even if you ran it without a heat sink, it will not run above 100°. It just won't run very well or very often.

I damaged some traces on an AMD board which allowed the CPU to talk to the VRM (anything related to SVI2 couldn’t be read when booted) and even that didn’t kill anything, it just put the system in like a 0.8 V, 400 MHz mode. Windows 10 takes an incredible amount of time to do literally anything on a system like that btw., even with twelve cores. Patched the traces and everything was back to normal.

Modern hardware is really difficult to permanently damage as long as you don’t go full “manual OC” - in that case many protections may be disabled, and you can certainly get Ryzens to overheat and die like that.

Intel CPUs most certainly will hit 100°C and above in laptops.

These designs pretty much demand a setup with a water cooling loop implemented via radiator sized for two 140mm fans (280 mm length).

Thankfully all-in-one kits for that which are pre filled and sealed are much more commonplace than they used to be, and even fairly cheap midtower ATX cases I see on newegg in the $60-70 range will have a top panel mounting place for a 280mm radiator.

And definitely any "gaming" marketed ATX case above that price range will have the capability for it.

You possibly could get away with a 240mm length radiator (dual 120mm fans) on something like this but I really wouldn't recommend it, and the savings for an AIO kit would be only $50-60.

From the perspective of noise annoyance, fan pitch and sound is somewhat proportional to size. 140mm fans can be a lot quieter and move more air than 120mm with less perceptible noise to the human sitting next to it.

Higher end stuff will be implemented by 360mm length radiator (3 x 140mm) which I am pleasantly surprised to see not ridiculously priced ATX cases having options mounting now.

I would figure you have to budget an additional $150-200 on top of the CPU cost for a capable water cooling loop setup. Which is not absolutely ridiculous considering that a really good skived copper heatsink/heatpipe/fan setup for pure air cooling on a 130W TDP CPU could easily be $65.

Just in time for the winter.

Relatedly...

One of the things I'm not happy about on my current machine (Ryzen 1800X, RTX 2070S) is the heat and noise. I'm going to invest in a better case and fans next time, but new hardware is trying to make the problem even worse. The new hardware is supposed to be very efficient if you limit the max power, but they don't make it easy to do.

From what I can tell the only way to change power limits and fan curves for CPU/GPU are either to reboot into BIOS or use multiple separate manufacturer's shitty bloated windows GUI utilities. AMD's Ryzen Master software is supposed to be good but it doesn't work at all if you have Hyper-V enabled which is basically mandatory for developers nowadays. My GPU's default fan curves have them turn on/off around typical idle desktop temperatures so they continuously cycle on/off and have worn out the bearings and now make a scraping noise every time they do this. The only way to fix this is to launch a bloated windows GUI utility every boot. I was surprised to not find an open source Linux library or kernel driver that lets you read and write fan speeds for GPU and motherboard controlled fans.

I want two things:

1. A simple, unobtrusive button in my system tray that lets me toggle power limits of my CPU and GPU from "silent" to "performance".

2. A simple, unobtrusive way to configure fan curves with averaging and hysteresis that, crucially, lets the case fan speeds be controlled by a combination of GPU and CPU temperatures.

As far as I know neither of those are possible today. I've considered buying or making a USB fan speed controller and even plugging my GPU fans into it because there's no other good way to control them.

I have found it much more difficult to tune fan curves for quiet operation on Ryzen than on Intel chips. There are frequent short surges in fan speed, presumably caused by frequent short surges in core temperature. This happens at normal load just above idle, e.g just web browsing and YouTube.

This has happened with a few different brands of motherboards, in multiple chassis with different brands of fans, so I think it's a characteristic of the Ryzen platform rather than a specific motherboard brand or BIOS.

It's really odd and annoying, and I've resorted to fan curves that keep the fan on low RPM until just before the CPU hits 90C -- basically flat with a big hockey stick inflection at the end.

> It's really odd and annoying, and I've resorted to fan curves that keep the fan on low RPM until just before the CPU hits 90C -- basically flat with a big hockey stick inflection at the end.

Same. I haven’t found much better. I always wonder how it doesn’t drive other people nuts.

The counterintuitive trick I've used for my 5900X is to increase the minimum fan speed up to around 60% or so. It makes the base volume very slightly higher, but avoids it constantly ramping up and down through the 50% zone which is what I found the most annoying/noticeable.

Currently using AMD Software Adrenalin Edition (on Windows): https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/software

Pretty average as far as bloat goes, ~150-200 MB of RAM used, about as much as JetBrains Toolbox takes up in the tray, or Mattermost, Discord or other apps like that.

Lets me switch between GPU power/fan profiles (Performance > Tuning) so I can run my GPU at 50% of its maximum power most of the time (as well as different fan curves), for longevity/noise related reasons, especially when dealing with badly optimized software/games.

The CPU just seems to do its own thing and throttles up/down based on system load, haven't really needed to tune it for any particular reason yet.

It's passable but you're right that things could be way better, more usable and user friendly! I guess in a way, when everything is bloated, nothing is. Wirth's law at its finest.

It can't control the speed of case fans though, no?

I suppose I don't care about memory usage for "bloat". I want it to be easy and pleasant to use, and to start quickly and unobtrusively. No 10 second long splash screen every time I boot.

100% depends on your mainboard manufacturer and their software support. Once upon a time most Mainboards had Fans controllable through SpeedFan

> they continuously cycle on/off and have worn out the bearings

Does cycling a fan on/off wear bearings faster than being on all the time? Naively I would have assumed that bearing wear is a function of time enabled and speed, with # of spinups a negligible factor.

So what you're after re fan control exists, in this bloody fantastic app: https://github.com/Rem0o/FanControl.Releases

I'll look into that, thanks! Too bad it's not open source, though.

I use this for my radeon RX 5700XT: https://gitlab.com/corectrl/corectrl You can use it for cpu as well, but i havent felt the need to fiddle with any settings there.

How about putting the button on the case, like the good old turbo buttons on 386/486s

Welcome back to the failed Pentium 4 strategy.

>Raptor Lake to Offer ‘Unlimited Power’ Mode for Those Who Don’t Care About Heat, Electric Bills

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/338748-raptor-lake-to-...

It's true that like... naturally throughout production some chips have better "silicon" (for lack of better terms/words) and some have worse, leading some to get marked as lower frequency chips (because otherwise if you turn the clock speed/power/heat up too much on them, they don't perform as well/have errors due to... mild defects in manufacturing?)

Am I understanding that correctly or butchering it?

Like how would you describe the fact that not all chips Intel producers will be able to hit 6GHz+?

I think more just the fall into "We're having trouble scaling performance with sane power usage, so just amp up the power usage" as to what was referenced as the Pentium 4 strategy. What you described is called binning and as far as I'm aware everyone does it (for example nvidia's founders editions tend to be the higher quality chips, causing 3rd party cards to not always overclock as well as older generations).

Is it offered first? We can just set PL1/PL2 unlimited for older Intel CPUs.

P4 was just plainly inferior architecture, this is not that. "Just" outdated one

These are crazy frequencies and I am sure they have the thermals to match, but this is also the sign that competition is tight. Both companies are trying to get every bit of performance out of their designs. Advanced cooling systems that are now common on enthusiast machines are helping.

Regardless if you think they can pull it off or not, Intel's roadmap is fascinating. They expect pretty tremendous growth not just in the processor space, but in the US foundry space. They are aiming to be able to compete with TSMC and Samsung in this space.

Looks like desperation to me.

I believe AMD's technology and furthermore strategy is superior to intel's. Now with Xilinx on board I am curious if we will see GPU's or APU's with FPGA's which allow custom hardware instructions.

I'm really not sure what's the point of this either. Some AMD FXs were clocked to 5GHz back in the day and it sure didn't help them with performance much, they just had to ship with water coolers as stock because they overheated like crazy.

Meanwhile an Intel i5 of the time could run faster at half the clock speed. I suspect this'll be a similar blunder but companies reversed in some stroke of irony.

The difference is that Bulldozer (and NetBurst before it) was a bad design. Golden Cove and Zen 4 are both excellent and quite similar core designs with nearly identical IPC so the difference between 5.7 and 6.0 GHz is the difference between being #1 (by a hair) and being #2.

5% clock difference can be dealt with using AMD's 3d V-Cache. Hundred megs of cache goes a long way.

It seems that if you don't opt for AMD on AMD this new generation of PCs will be absolute toaster ovens.

AMD is also in the process of being a toaster oven. The new Ryzen 9 7950x will use considerably higher power (105W -> 170W) for a smaller die area, which is making people worry about air-powered cooling being not enough (previously a Noctua D15 was enough to cool a 5950x). And I really don't want high-end CPUs to require water cooling since it's more unreliable and requires more maintenance.

There's a small silver lining in that you can set hard power limits in the bios and amd claims it's still ~15% faster when limited to 105w. It would be nice if they just left it at that but it makes them look worse in benchmarks against Intel since most people won't check the power consumption.

keep in mind that is not idle power consumption. If you are setting a limit like that it's because of heating or power constraints (battery? PSU?)

> 7950x will use considerably higher power (105W -> 170W)

The 5950X uses 180W at full load. Some measure as high as 230W. The 105W figure reported as "TDP" was a mistake.

Not sure why the specs were a big lie but this is well documented online.

> air-powered cooling being not enough

If you want to turbo to 4.1GHz or better on all cores on the 5950X, you have to spend about $60 on a cooler - water or air. The AIOs perform well. A big AIO will give you 4.5GHz. No turbo air cooling - 3.4GHz - is a waste of money.

I can definitely confirm this, I tried to air cool my 5950X without much luck. Enabling PBO I've seen it go over 200W, which a 240mm rad handles very well.

those are base-clock TDPs not the boost TDPs (which AMD calls a PPT) too... it's 170W base/230W boost power, and those chips are allowed to boost for an unlimited duration (which of course has pluses and minuses).

Since noctua nh d15 air cooling has been on par or surpassing any aio and even all but the high end custom loops. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeQX1uhb0iQ

Not really. The NH D15 is an impressive cooler, but it falls behind 280 AIOs. Even ones cheaper than itself.

https://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/3571-arctic-liquid-fre...

Intel power scaling works very well. My 12th-gen 12700K says its is drawing 660mW at the moment, and its complete silence is consistent with that estimate. If there's some power level that you prefer, you can just enter it in the BIOS and leave it that way.

Personally, I do not pretend that CPUs are light bulbs. If my CPU could draw 1000W for 10ms and that made short tasks like web page rendering twice as fast, that's a trade I would happily take. The short-term power consumption of CPUs is pure benefit to the user, and the rarer sustained tasks that run all the cores flat out for more than 1 second are always going to level off at about 125W because of the long-term cooling situation.

Intel CPUs have better idle power consumption that even the latest Ryzen CPUs. It caught me off guard when I switched from Intel to AMD and the idle draw of my PC went up by a significant amount.

Given that our computers spend more time idle than at 100% peak load, my AMD CPU draws more power (and therefore heats up my room) more then my Intel setup. That wasn’t an outcome I was expecting, but then again I was only looking at peak, not idle, numbers at the time.

I really hope AMD can start bringing their idle power consumption down in this next gen.

IIUC, this is mainly because the IO die was made on 14nm. With Zen 4 moving to 7nm for IO die, I think lower idle power draw is expected. We'll see by how much soon.

It’s not just the IO die, but also IF on AM4 seemingly not supporting power management - it always runs at full speed, unsurprisingly a bus that fast burns a lot of power.

In Ryzen Master, my Ryzen 9 5900X is showing 11-13W CPU Power, 17W SOC Power.

It's largely idle, just lots of background stuff/open programs (VS Code, Discord, Excel, Firefox, Teams, Edge, MySQL Workbench, Thunderbird, Messenger, Outlook.)

PPT is 30% of 142W = 42.6 W. (Not sure what PPT stands for.)

EDIT: https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/3491-explaining-precision...

> Package Power Tracking (“PPT”): The PPT threshold is the allowed socket power consumption permitted across the voltage rails supplying the socket.

This is true, it seems like the infinity fabric limits how low AMD cpus can idle. Intel invested pretty heavily in power saving tech during their 4 core

One other thing that hurts AMD here was the x570 chipset. It seems to be a hack job, basically installing the I/O from the CPU upside down and running it as a chipset. IIRC it uses like double the wattage of the x470 chipset it replaced.

It seems quite unlikely that the idle power draw difference between Intel and AMD is doing anything at all to your room. The chiplet design is hurting AMD's idle power, but it's still going to be far from a "large" difference. Your monitor is probably using more power than an idling Ryzen CPU is.

Over in Japan, Intel CPUs are sometimes fondly(?) called Idlemaster, which is a pun and reference to Idolmaster[1], for their superior idling performance. :V

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Idolmaster

I see the same thing in Intel vs AMD servers, AMDs are like 3x the power on idle

Can you give some details (components and consumption)? I'm interested in the topic, and I've done some wall measurements as well, in the past and present.

My 5600G idles at 22W whole system (wall power). However it has the cheaper chipset, not the x prefixed one, no video card at the moment and just one NVMe ssd for storage. It does have 4 x 16 Gb ram sticks so you can go even lower if you get 2 x 32 i guess.

I have a 3950X and a 5950X. I thought it was the other components at first but then someone pointed me to the official Ryzem master software. It shows CPU package power, which has a persistently high floor consumption. Idle temps are also higher on the same cooler. It’s a well-known phenomenon on the forums when I searched.

My 3900x is also very inefficient when idling. It never goes below 50w according to hwinfo64. My entire pc is surely above 100w idle.

Does this apply also to laptop parts?

No it doesn't. Unlike desktop parts the mobile chips are single die, it's the separate IO die which seems to be the primary reason for the high idle draw. Current gen AMD mobile chips are pretty much even with Intel at idle and significantly more efficient under any load metric.

Yes, and even moreso for the laptop/mobile CPUs because those generally tend to have more E-cores than P-cores compared to the desktop CPUs, which further reduces power use in exchange for less absolute performance.

Why do we focus so much on TDP or max boost? How often and for how long are you running your CPU at max? I'd like to have the performance there when I need it but for most of the day I am sitting near idle.

How often and for how long are you running your CPU at max?

On my workstation? 8-16 hours at a stretch is common, several times a week.

What are you doing that’s pegging your CPU at 100% for 8-16 hours? Or do you just turn off throttling?

Microsoft Teams.

What happens in the bedroom stays in the bedroom, and we don't kink shame here. :P

I would imagine some machine learning/development or video editing. Or playing dwarf fortress.

If someone is doing ML or video editing and the software is not using the GPU for most parts of the workflow, I'd like to invite that person to 2022.

Now Dwarf Fortress, that's another beast with no cure...

A possible answer would be running Android Studio, another one, piles of Electron apps.

Electron apps.

ok, I know you're being snarky, but that legitimately made me laugh.

One word, bro: Docker!

torrenting linux isos

It must be IO bound.

Maya or Blender batch rendering

Yes, this will only be useful for servers, workstations, and performance nodes. I heavy doubt this will be useful for generic home computing any time soon.

I collect and rip Blu-Rays. Whenever I buy something big (like a complete TV series box set), it usually means my 5900x will be churning away in Handbrake non stop for a few days straight. It makes my basement a bit toasty.

But given that space is cheap and transcoding means you're necessarily compromising image quality, why bother re-encoding?

Because I have a lot of shows and space isn't that cheap, especially on mobile devices.

Video compression has improved a ton since the introduction of Blu-Ray in 2006. I can cut the average size of a 45 minute TV show from ~8-10GB on the disc to ~2GB with minimal or no perceptible quality loss. This makes a huge difference when I go to load up my iPad with movies and TV shows before I travel.

I do not bother re-encoding anything on a 4K disc, I just rip them straight to my NAS and strip out foreign audio and subtitle tracks.

HEVC can produce extraordinary quality for the size (especially on cartoons/anime) but man it is a fucking CRUNCH to get it there. It makes even x264 look easy by comparison.

And AV1 is a whole 'nother level past that... minutes per frame basically. But great size/quality.

Just as a casual observation, you should look at hardware AV1 encoders once they come out, because they'll beat software HEVC with a hardware (read: fast) encoder. Of course you also have to have support in the devices to play it back... which can be a problem with HEVC as well.

Which drive are you currently using? I bought the external Archgon drive but never got to the flashing part.

Want to be friends?

TDP is correlated with consumption, so a higher TDP is indicative of how much the CPU will burn in general.

Completely false, idle and low load power consumption has little to do with TDP. Case in point: Ryzen

Post your exact numbers. I've done wall-power measurements with different Ryzen models.

HN is full of Intel bears / AMD bulls so they're going to latch onto whatever they can complain about.

CPU temps will spike, computer turns into revving jet engine. Opening a program is all it takes. Shouldn't have to have the biggest noctua cooler on the market to keep a CPU below 90C. They're meant to be quiet.

Kind of hard to say they're "meant to be quiet" if opening a program is all it takes to make them... not quiet.

big numbers good. we need big numbers. big numbers better than small numbers. big numbers please monkey brain. monkey brain happy = more sales = more money = bigger number in bank. bigger number in bank good

Seriously, reading semiconductor news these days feels like watching dragon ball z. I won't even be surprised if someone announced a cpu that runs at over 9000MHz.

Daily for a couple of hours at least. TDP max is basically the only interesting metric. Because this is what you have to design your power delivery and cooling for. Average TDP is only interesting for your energy bill.

Almost no one is capable of the nuance to actually compare these on real workloads without buying one.

For a whole minute before throttling.

Warning: required power station not included.

Properly cooled workstations don't throttle, ever.

I run simulations which use 100% of all cores for endless hours.

You just gotta use a decent thermal paste and cooling fan. In my case it's water cooling so I don't even hear the fans.

Warning: small lake required for proper cooling not included

Haha. It's a closed loop, just plug and play. The radiator is 14cm x 14cm and fits nicely inside the case.

Which model do you use? Just realized that I've only seen or heard about 120mm (single fan) AIOs :)

Briefly looked 140mm AIOs up, and have only found Corsair XR5 so far. These 140mm rads seem like a rare-ish thing. Did you randomly stumble upon one of those or is it, like, a new trendy thing?

I think an underappreciated thing in these conversations is that +200W of TDP of top end products nets a very small increase in actual performance, especially if you're not maxing out all 24 cores. The "halo" models are there purely for the enthusiast that want the absolute fastest CPU regardless of other tradeoffs not those concerned about things like air cooling or electricity cost. E.g. the 13700k is a 125W/253W CPU. The 13700T is a 35W/~105W? CPU. They have ~identical single thread performance and are within <25% on 24 core performance.

What the article doesn't cover is the actual performance uplift but that seems a given being an article about this newly rumoured model not an overview of 13th gen performance as a whole.

I love my power efficient M1 macbook and I love my number crunching Zen 3 CPU. The 2 SKUs I have aren't serving the same market and where the architectures overlap the differences aren't as profound as comparing extremes from each family would lead you to believe.

Yeah, basically unless a piece of laptop hardware comes on x86 that can match the M1's battery life/efficiency/performance, Gigahertz and 13900 k-class unicorn horns and all that is just marketing. Generations, X% better than last generation is all powerpoint / tech press bulletpoints.

The M1 produced a bigger enduser boost than the introduction of SSDs. We're now at 1 year for the M1 essentially, and there is no conquerable x86 product yet, and I don't really see it on roadmaps.

Microsoft remains too incompetent to make a usable desktop OS, and their hardware forays are always spectacular failures, so they won't provide the hardware leadership. That leaves Intel and AMD, and both appear to be in head-in-sand mode.

And I am no mac zealot. The only thing I like about my M1 work laptop is the battery life, but it's such an incredible leap over any other laptop experience that it is the gold standard. I'd love a linux laptop that was comparable, x86 or ARM, but if the M1 is an A+, all other laptops are basically at C or C- grade.

If your only guiding metric is laptop perf/watt then absolutely the M1 is ahead of the pack. I'd call things like the 6800 at least B grade for that class though - close calls in both single/multi with each having a win and power efficiency not all that far behind for doing so. It'll be interesting to see Zen 4 based mobile CPUs vs the M2 in '23, the M2 didn't really make much of a move but Zen 4 did.

Does the "box" include a 2kW industrial chiller like last time?

My NUC ECE board can reach 5ghz. But I throttle all cores down to 3.2 GHz so it can run without the helicopter sounds from all the fans running full tilt. This sounds the same.

I would be pretty amazed if this 6ghz "stock" clock can be achieved with just air cooling.

Modern air coolers are extremely performant. The popular Noctua NH-D15 can handle these TDPs and more without problem, and has been available for years.

Wait, what? I've been researching this lately, and have been coming to the conclusion that the NH-D15 can NOT handle peak head from intel's 12700k.

The NH-D15's max cooling ability is slightly beneath the 12700k's max thermal output. So if you're running a 12700k, you can get away with it, because the liklihood that you're running the 12700k at max thermal output for long periods of time are pretty slim, and if you're running under max, then you're covered.

I don't remember TDP numbers off the top of my head, but if the 13700 is a significantly higher thermal output, and its going to be in the same case as the next gen video cards with their higher output? That doesn't seem feasible for the NH-D15 anymore

Heck, I have a cheap Coolermaster air cooler (I think it was $30) on my i9-9900K. I've run Prime95's max heat torture test on all 8 cores and my CPU will hover around 65 C, well below the thermal throttle threshold.

Either you mean 65C above ambient or something's wrong with your machine, unless you're running liquid nitrogen there's no way that chip's only at 65C under max heat torture. Here's Tom's Hardware getting 90C on the blend test (MUCH less heat than max heat) with a 240mm AIO. https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-core-i9-9900k-9th...

Hmm...you might be right...

I just tried the test again, and with the max heat test, I was in the 95-100 C range and it was throttling to 4.3 Ghz.

Now I'm wondering exactly what I did. It was years ago when I did this, right after I got my CPU.

I'm sure a big air cooler like the Noctua NH-D15 would be enough to stop throttling.

Maybe Intel will include a beefier stock cooler in the box?

Intel's stock coolers were always a joke and people usually switched it out for something else. It might be good for them to bring some decent stock coolers to the entry-mid level models like what AMD does.

But really doesn't make sense including a stock cooler for the i9 lineup though, since that monster of a CPU will defeat probably every mid-level air cooler and would require a beefy Noctua or something similar...

Just one though, so some lucky individual will have the fastest 13th Generation Intel CPU.

how on earth does this not melt all matter in the known universe?

forgive my laymen knowledge, I am just a humble software person but isn't the equation of power -> speed exponential which is why CPU speeds clocked out around 4ghz and we moved to multi core processing? what sorcery exists that lets us suddenly break that barrier?

Lots and lots and lots of energy. The tdp of my first i7-920 was 95 watts, and rumors are this new Intel chip will clock in almost 3x higher.

This processor's TDP will likely be 125W just like its predecessor and the generation before that and the generation before that, too. It's a practical design point that desktop cases, coolers, and motherboard power circuitry can hit.

Power = Capacitance * Voltage ^2 * frequency ; not exponential

thank you! I just had a simple graph in my head. Now that there is something I can conceptualize, is it :

Power = Capacitance * Voltage ^(2 * frequency)

Power = Capacitance * (Voltage ^2) * frequency

In general you can often work out the answers to questions like this by considering units. In this case, we don't need to figure out what Watts / Farads is(1), we can see that Volts^Hz is not going to give us anything well-behaved.

(1)[m^4 kg^2 s^-7 A^-2]

The latter. See also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Processor_power_dissipation#So...

and

https://electronics.stackexchange.com/a/33340

The difference in energy stored in a capacitor at two different voltages is 0.5*C*(V^2). A chip will burn that energy 2*(frequency) times per second, so P=C*(V^2)*F.

Edit: forgot a half

It's

Power = Capacitance * (Voltage ^2) * frequency

I look forward to TSMC fabbing it for them.

In all seriousness, hasn't Intel been hanging on to their current architecture for way too long at this point? IIRC Ryzen consumes less power and does more per Watt on the high end and ARM is eating them up on the low end. It feels like Intel is just trying to squeeze out a little more from a much-delayed 10nm process and their existing architecture.

It sort of reminds me of Pentium 4 just outstaying its welcome.

Genuinely curious: what's on the horizon for Intel as their next big change and not something that's just a marketing clock speed boost?

Current architecture, no - this big+little architecture just started with the last generation, like a year ago I think? However, if you mean process node, then yes, I think this is on the same one they’ve been using for awhile. But they have 2-3 more nodes coming in the next 3-4 years. If they don’t screw those up, they should be ok. That’s a big if, though.

They’re also changing to a chiplet-based architecture with their next Xeon line which will be interesting.

They finally started moving forward in the 11th gen, where they backported the core originally meant to 10nm to 14nm. 12th gen had a nice IPC boost, pity they didn't keep AVX512 enabled IMO.

Arm is absolutely nowhere. Apple are very good but that's not an arm design.

Also you're wrong, it's really not an existing architecture unless you talk in extremely broad strokes.

Incidentally, the chip is code-named Preshott 2

Snark aside, I have a couple of 3700x machines and an itch. Kind of split between upgrading my gaming machine (not entirely worth it) or changing the mini-ITX and severely undervolting a 7700x.

Or, I can just wait for the zen 5 which was my original plan but as I said, I've the captains itch

Apparently this is a stopgap until Meteor Lake, which will use the "Intel 7" process, hopefully improving on power efficiency. However Meteor Lake isn't scheduled until 2nd half of 2023.

These 13 gen are Raptor lake, which uses the same process as Alder Lake.

Meteor Lake is on Intel 4.

Doubling processor speed over 20 years is still exponential.

Literally halt and catch fire.

... and will it be a 400 W cpu or a 600 W cpu?

Where have I seen this "more megahertz" strategy at Intel? Right, with the Pentium 4.

I can't wait to see the RPCS3 benchmarks. We are so close to perfection with the 12900K already.

This is literally crazy. To think just a few years ago we could barely get 3Ghz. With this and AI breakthroughs I think the next decade will be crazy.

I'm betting 99 percent of devices using this chip will be used 99 percent of the time for internet access, meaning the bottleneck is now bandwidth.

Intel still playing the GHz game, not having learned anything from the Pentium 4?

They are losing the process manufacturing game so need to make up the lost ground somewhere.

Golden Cove (Alder Lake) has been a massive uplift in performance-per-clock from the previous generations. This is also related to the fact that Intel was reiterating Skylake for most of the time until ADL, which itself is barely more than Sandy Bridge with a few generations of iterative tweaks. I believe Raptor Cove (what will be in 13th gen) is not that big of a change from Alder Lake; it's the same but with some refinements and mainly larger caches.

Furthermore, the P-core/E-core divide means that they can make the P-cores quite large and inefficient, as E-cores will pick up the heavily-threaded tasks. So while a Zen core is significantly smaller than a Golden Cove core, Gracemont is much smaller still.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpMvS1Q1sos

No, amd and intel are still lumping eachother over the head with IPC gains.

Alder lake was Intel's first proper response to Zen -> huge IPC boost

Every few years either AMD or Nvidia comes out with some chips that blow away the competition and everyone claims that the chip war is dead. Then the gap slowly closes again until they are sort of neck and neck until one of them does the same thing.

> everyone claims that the chip war is dead

Who claimed this?

Yeah but how much actually gets down in each of those cycles?

And use fifty gigs watts of power or?

Nice, that will be my next build!

Tejas and Jayhawk lives !!!!.

Are we back to the GHz wars?

1 plank meter! 12 GHz!

this chip will cause a blackout in the neighborhood

Does it come with an included nuclear power plant?

At what TDP?

No more than 1kW

Even if that were true, there'd be a niche for these. There are still tasks for which single threaded performance dominates.

Not sure it'd be a big enough niche to save Intel's market share though.

I can finally have the greatest Minecraft server ever

Dwarf fortress as well, though not a server unless you play over SSH.

Nice and cheap for us Europeans!

Might as well be productive while we heat our homes this winter!

Resistive heater with a cheeky twist!

You can also boil water for tea while you game!

finally! doom at full speed

Clock rate limits are directly due to physical heating limits on-chip with silicon. That's what it stopped being an automate gimmme of scaling and it likely never will come back again as a systematic thing because the laws of physics can't be changed.

Cores were the direct answer to this limit. But then Amdahl's Law limits what cores can do.

What this story means is someone decided to trade off thermal effects for clock rate. The primary effect of heat is reliability - that is, how many years of operation can you expect with the final product. Heat kills the life span of transistors, metal and oxide.

Honestly there's nothing special about hitting 6 GHz - it's not some magical thing. Magical thinking people!!

I read headline as 60 GHz and raised my eyebrows, then I reread it as another non news. CPU tech is extremely boring last decades.

I wouldn’t say that. At least in the last years it way more exiting than before since AMD is competitive again and Apple does use ARM chips with a whole new tradeoff strategy. The only boring part is Intel IMO

Given the fact that x86 instructions are not generally completed in a single cycle, how much of this increased clock do we actually expect to translate into faster performance? Presumably we're not expecting a 50% performance increase here.

X% higher clock gives X% better computation performance, regardless of the number of clock cycles each instruction takes.

Most x86 instructions do translate into a single uop that executes in a single cycle. Going from 5.5 to 6.0 GHz should be around 9% faster; maybe 10% with the larger L2.

When are we getting good alternative to M1?

If battery life is what you're after, looking at a 1.5 generation (soon to be 2.5) old 35W Ryzen that gets 11 hours of battery life should give you clues. Ryzen 7000 mobile should be announced in January, and those will utilize TSMC 5nm.

https://www.laptopmag.com/features/how-amd-ryzen-whooped-int...

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-ryzen-4900hs-battery-l...

Or 0.5 generation ago 15W Ryzen getting 17-20 hours...

https://youtu.be/An3OpQ7v0rs?t=546

https://asahilinux.org/

A fork called Fandaniel Linux is sorely needed. It doesn't even need to have anything.

When you buy AMD instead of Intel.

AMD is worse in every regard

That's a pretty bold claim that you're going to need to back up. AMD has been beating Intel in performance-per-watt for years now, and both are regularly trading blows when it comes to fastest consumer chip.

And that's not even talking about EPYC which is pretty thoroughly trouncing Xeon in just about every metric.

probably never.

Intel and AMD are waving the white flag. They're bowing to Apple and admitting that they can't compete in the laptop arena.

This comment is a bit like saying Telsa is admitting they cannot compete in entry level electric cars because they announced the Cybertruck's maximum performance figures.

Meanwhile, 9 out of 10 laptops sold... contain Intel or AMD chips (or presumably Qualcomm), rather than Apple Silicon.

https://macdailynews.com/2022/01/31/apple-takes-10-share-of-...

Now if the question was... is Apple Silicon much more efficient... than an enthusiast level desktop CPU?

How is this "waving the white flag." That usually signals defeat, this is an attempt to build hype.

Can you run this chip on a laptop? How will they hope to compete with Apple's M2Pro/Max?

Answer: they won't. It'll be like phone chips where Apple is 2+ years ahead of the game for perf/watt.

It sounds like Samsung's marketing on the phone side. Wasn't there a time when they competed on having more cpu cores? And they were caught overclocking them when benchmarks were run, leading to power consumption and heat that was unsustainable in normal usage?

At least Intel is doing this with a desktop CPU. If you can afford the electricity bill generated by said GPU and the A/C to cool the room.

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