A Look At Alder Lake Against Older CPUs Going Back To Sandy Bridge, Kaveri

After recently carrying out the Core i5 12400 Linux benchmarks against other modern processors, for curiosity I ran some benchmarks on some older hardware going back to AMD Kaveri and Intel Sandy Bridge for a look at how the modern Ubuntu performance compares across all those systems.

For your enjoyment today are those Linux benchmark numbers across systems with:

- Core i5 2500K
- Core i7 4770K
- Core i5 8400
- Core i5 9400F
- Core i3 10100
- Core i5 10600K
- Core i5 11600K
- Core i5 12400
- Core i5 12600K
- Core i9 12900K
- A10-7850K
- Ryzen 3 3300X
- Ryzen 7 5700G
- Ryzen 5 5600G
- Ryzen 9 5950X

All of the CPUs/systems were tested using Ubuntu 21.10 with the Linux 5.16 kernel freshly for this comparison using the same storage. The RAM/motherboard (and GPU, not tested for these CPU/system benchmarks) varied by system but obviously all at their optimal memory channel configuration, etc.

An even larger formal comparison is in the works with also testing a Intel Celeron G6900 Alder Lake dual-core processor and some other systems in the labs, stay tuned for that review next week.

Across dozens of different Linux benchmarks used, the main takeaway with the geometric mean of all results successfully tested on all CPUs amounted to:

Or a look at the CPU power consumption over the entire span of tests for the CPUs with power metrics exposed via RAPL/PowerCap:

Those wanting to dig through the dozens of individual benchmarks along with the per-test power metrics, see this OpenBenchmarking.org result page. Next week will be the Celeron G6900 benchmarks and other older/lower-end CPUs tested as part of a formal review article while for now is just a look at that quick testing from new to old for those interested.