Intel Core i5 12600K / Core i9 12900K "Alder Lake" Linux Performance

[andreano]

Maybe this is where vector instructions (instead of SIMD, i.e. not hardcoding the instruction width) would have paid off. They are supposedly easier to support on big and small cores alike. Not to mention that we wouldn't have needed AVX512 for the purpose of moving to 512 bit.

[numacross]

But ... can't the OS simply never let AVX-512 tasks run on e-cores? It's trivial to detect AVX-512 instructions and then pin the application to the appropriate cores. If I've said something stupid, please let me know.

It's not stupid, your idea is correct, but what about all the previous OSes? As I wrote, the problem here is backwards compatibility. You can still run MS-DOS (provided your motherboard has CSM, which was made not mandatory in 2020 on Intel boards) on modern computers.

Maybe this is where vector instructions (instead of SIMD, i.e. not hardcoding the instruction width) would have paid off. They are supposedly easier to support on big and small cores alike. Not to mention that we wouldn't have needed AVX512 for the purpose of moving to 512 bit.

AVX-512 is not only about enabling the use of 512-bit registers. It's also about operand masking and memory capabilities.
Yeah, something like SVE2 would be great, but Intel is hamstrung by its legacy (Larrabee, Xeon Phi, AVX/2).

[sdack]

A bold statement considering the many times Intel lost in court over anti-competitive practices (and had to pay billions to AMD). They seem to only allow competition from AMD up to a certain point, basically allowing them to be a deterrent for antitrust investigations from governments. The situation has changed a bit lately with the advent of ARM in more markets and the general lack of antitrust action from governments (when compared for example to the 90's).

Not bold at all. Intel had competition not only by AMD, but also by IBM, Cyrix and Via. All while x86 is Intel's creation. Others copied from Intel to get a piece of their success and for no other reason. Companies like Sun, DEC, HP, SGI, Motorola, MIPS, ARM and others at least had the decency not to copy, but to create their own CPU designs and to use these to compete. This says enough about the copying companies and also explains why any other reasonable company would have tried to fight off copying competitors like Intel did. It still is Intel's success and their creation. Others are just hitching a ride on it to this day. And let us not pretend as if x86 was the world's best CPU design. It is being kept alive thanks to the copying competition like AMD and why we still use x86 CPUs today. We could have let it all die a long time ago, and gone with ARM or other RISC designs. Instead, did we buy what was cheap and affordable, no matter who stole what from whom. Your objection then fails to address why Intel was somehow like Monsanto.

[numacross]

Not bold at all. Intel had competition not only by AMD, but also by IBM, Cyrix and Via. All while x86 is Intel's creation. Others copied from Intel to get a piece of their success and for no other reason. Companies like Sun, DEC, HP, SGI, Motorola, MIPS, ARM and others at least had the decency not to copy, but to create their own CPU designs and to use these to compete. This says enough about the copying companies and also explains why any other reasonable company would have tried to fight off copying competitors like Intel did. It still is Intel's success and their creation. Others are just hitching a ride on it to this day. And let us not pretend as if x86 was the world's best CPU design. It is being kept alive thanks to the copying competition like AMD and why we still use x86 CPUs today. We could have let it all die a long time ago, and gone with ARM or other RISC designs. Instead, did we buy what was cheap and affordable, no matter who stole what from whom. Your objection then fails to address why Intel was somehow like Monsanto.

You are aware that Intel was forced by IBM to "allow" the competition in the first place? They didn't want to let Intel have the upper hand as the sole vendor of x86.

What is more Intel actually tried to break from x86 a few times (i960, ARM, Itanium), but in the end they decided to scrap all that and, here will come a shock, copy AMD's amd64

[Archestratus]

Greetings!

I am a relatively non-technical forum member with a request for guidance. If I am in the wrong place, please direct me toward the right direction. Thank you.

My situation: I am looking at the purchase of a new computer upon which I plan to run a Linux home Desktop. My habit has been to run the latest Ubuntu LTS for close to five years at a time, then upgrade as the older version loses support. My computer usage is relatively non-demanding: web browsing (Firefox with ~20-30 tabs open, max), email and the occasional printed page. Quiet is the major priority. I like to go with an upgradeable desktop computer with a GPU integrated into the processor - I tend to keep a computer for a while, with upgrades of used parts as the sands of time pass by. Unfortunately, I do not feel very comfortable in the command line.

A generous relative has offered to provide me with a moderate new Dell computer of my choosing.

People are basically good.

I have been looking at 10th and 11th (hotter/noisier?) generation Intel offerings, when, today - November 4 - with the announcement of the 12th generation chips - imagine my surprise - the world has changed.

Hence this post.

I regret that Mr. Larabel's meticulous Alder Lake review is a bit beyond my ken, but from what I can gather, Linux does not seem to be quite ready for Intel Generation 12 at this time. And I am not sure that the integrated CPU/GPU chips have hit the market at this point. My questions:

(1) Should I go now with a generation 10 or 11 chip, or will I be well-served to wait just a little bit? No hurry, here - no time pressure. If I do choose to wait - any guesses as to a likely timeline?

(2) I think that a 12th generation i5 with integrated graphics may suit my purposes well. Yea or nay?

(3) My kind benefactor seems to think that my current computer is a tad slow. I have tried to explain to him that it proceeds at a perfectly normal computer pace, but you know how these young 70 year-old whippersnappers are. Always in such a hurry!

The current computer is largely of 2008 vintage - cobbled together post capacitor plague (another story). E8600 Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GB of DDR 800 RAM, a blazingly silent (fanless) nVidia GeForce GT 520 video card, a conventional spinning hard drive, Ubuntu 16.04 or so.

My question: do you really think that upgrading by 10 or 12 Intel CPU generations will make much of a difference?

Thank you for your kind patience -

Archestratus

[Kraut]

But ... can't the OS simply never let AVX-512 tasks run on e-cores? It's trivial to detect AVX-512 instructions and then pin the application to the appropriate cores. If I've said something stupid, please let me know.

Then you get other issues, like for example with task based libraries. (HPX)
Where you will "dirty" up all threads in no time if you happen to use any AVX512 instructions.

Way to many programs will have this issue of "dirty" threads, that can never be migrated to the E-cores again. Maybe the thread director could detect if threads don't use AVX512 for some time and mark them as "clean" again. But every time they use it again, it triggers an expensive IRQ and a thread eviction from the E-core.

[blackshard]

It's not stupid, your idea is correct, but what about all the previous OSes?

It is not stupid, but it just not feasible.
How does the operating system could know in advance if an AVX-512 instruction would be executed or not?
You could say that the operating system would scan the whole .text segment (the code), do something like disassemble it, and then flag the process to run on P-core if an AVX-512 instruction is found. Yet you don't know if that instruction will ever be executed, so the OS allocates the process to P-cores wasting the E-cores presence, not counting the fact that the OS should do something which is not expected it to do (disassemble the executable to change affinity mask ...)

The only way to do that is catching the IRQ fault during runtime in case of illegal instruction and then moving the process to a more capable core. This is similar to what Windows 95 did as a compatibility layer with MS-DOS when in/out x86 instructions were issued during runtime.

[sdack]

You are aware that Intel was forced by IBM to "allow" the competition in the first place? They didn't want to let Intel have the upper hand as the sole vendor of x86.

What is more Intel actually tried to break from x86 a few times (i960, ARM, Itanium), but in the end they decided to scrap all that and, here will come a shock, copy AMD's amd64

So what? What you call "AMD's amd64" was the logical choice forward for the instruction set, and AMD was in no position to sue Intel after they had copied everything else from Intel. The fact is rather that both companies had moved past court fights, or else would you now have to call it "Intel's AVX" or whatever. You only have arrived at hypocrisy in your argument, and because you do not want others to think of Intel as being holier than the Pope. Nobody does that. At best do you think of AMD highly and dislike Intel that you want to compare Intel to Monsanto, but lack the sincerity to admit it nor do you want to give credit to those who deserve it. Now, to bring this back to my original point, which to which you still object so much, how many people have Intel poisoned or driven into suicide to justify a comparison with Monsanto?

[sophisticles]

For all the AMD fanboys:

Adobe Premiere Pro: 12th Gen Intel Core vs AMD Ryzen 5000 Series (pugetsystems.com)

Overall, the new 12th Gen Intel Core processors do extremely well in Premiere Pro, providing anywhere from a 20% to nearly 50% performance improvement over the previous 11th Gen processors. And compared to a similarly priced AMD Ryzen 5000 series processor, Intel holds anywhere from a 25-40% performance lead on average! That number drops a bit if you are restricted to DDR4 (which most users will be until DDR5 supply improves), but even without DDR5, the 12th Gen CPUs represent a major jump forward in performance for Premiere Pro.

And in fact, our Windows 11 vs Windows 10 testing found that the 12900K is actually roughly 8% slower in Windows 11. This performance drop did not happen on the AMD Ryzen CPUs, which means that Intel should be able to expand their lead even further when the Windows 11 performance issues are presumably fixed.

To put this into context, the 12th Gen CPUs are fast enough that even the Intel Core i5 12600K 6+4 Core processor was able to effectively score on par with the significantly more expensive AMD Ryzen 5950X 16 Core. And from there, the Core i7 12700K and Core i9 12900K only give you better and better performance.

Intel Core i9-12900K Review - Fighting for the Performance Crown | TechPowerUp

The encoding, mysql, AI, and Office benchmarks are really eye-opening.

[blackshard]

I'm not very impressed to be honest.
Taking a look to a more serious and in-depth review (Anandtech: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17047...rid-complexity) there some things that I see:

DDR5 memories give a serious leap over DDR4 in memory-bound tasks. This is clear, but benchmarks are obviously affected by this when a core comparison is going to be made.

Power usage is out of control. Peak usage is two times the peak usage of 5950x as exposed in this graph:
122765.png

Power and performance are still heavily favored during the initial period of the workload, then power usage and performance decreases over time.
This artificially inflate short benchmarks numbers, as it is usual for Intel hardware of the last 2/3 generations.
Power%2012900K%20POVRay%20Win11%20DDR5_575px.png

Adding the BIG.little mimick into the x86 zone seems to add even more trashy technologies into the game that the operating system has to handle.
Now we have Hyperthreading, Turbo Core, Performance cores, Energy efficient cores and I ask myself how it is possible that the Apple M1 cores perform so well without all such messy bloated x86 hardware:
117493.png