Efficiency cores on a 200+ Watt CPU is… interesting.

@Wendell Speaking of virtualized workloads.. I have recently discovered a Linux project called ACRN (pronounced: acorn) which is an ultra-leightweight hypervisor tailored to virtualization on edge and IoT devices. This project exists for several years and literally nobody is talking about it. It takes some inspiration from Xen running an equivalent to its Dom0 for management. The spin of this project is you are practically reading information from your target motherboard, then build a highly customized kernel for it. Pretty sure this would make a really great topic for you to cover.

Thanks for making this video :) I am going to try being a linux gamer soon so this video is very helpful for me :) I look forward to the three week followup.

Nice to see Intel actually innovate! It should be fun to see not the next generation AMD CPUs, but the ones after that. Finally some real competition and evolution in x86 CPU land!!

Can't wait for part 2.

Always loved that LEGO stand. Timeless makeshift utility.

Thanks Wendell

Linux would probably need very little work to get the scheduling to work if they just pulled classic big.LITTLE, but instead they have their HW scheduler magic because they couldn't be arsed to make Windows's scheduler less of a joke...

Great breakdown!

It's remarkable how bad cpu's have become at idling over the last few years. Remember when intel actually cared about efficiency, Ivy bridge? My 3570k idled at 30w on the igpu, and it was overclocked at a fixed frequency! Edit: The entire system pulled 30w from the wall on an 80 plus white 450w psu.

This is the exact video I needed. While my Debian desktop runs perfectly with the R5 3600, my hedonism really wanted to try the new Alder Lake shinies. But if this much work still needs to be done (especially in terms of scheduling and kernel updates), I might just wait until next gen before any upgrades. Let's just hope 13 isn't an unlucky number.

Choose this as my first video to watch on the new Intel chips. Don't run Linux but just love your faces

Thank you so much for this video for my needs at the current time 11th Gen is better suited for my needs.

Thanks friend

I'm still pulling my hair out over every single scheduler I've tried (CFS, MuQSS, PDS, UPDS, cacule) switches my game threads between CCDs... and not just every now and then but literally every second. The number of cache misses is absolutely incredible because of this. I get ~10% better gaming performance if I just disable my second CCD on my 5950X

Thank you

O boy O boy O boy O boy!! Wendells back!

I’m thinking after a little maturity the alder lake 12900k could make a great UnRaid CPU where the e-cores are managing pihole, UNMS, Sonarr, lidarr, radarr, Plex, etc. and P-cores can go to 1 or 2 gaming VMs. Question does become would it still be better to run Threadripper?

People keep on saying it's the first time in history that a x86 hybrid architecture was used but I remember Intel had a mobile CPU that they had 1 normal big core and 4 Atom cores (Lakefied). Just for correctness' sake.

Let's get those CPUs to 1500W and it can replace a space heater.

UHD 770 iGPU performance would have been interesting. But I guess the FPS increase linearly with frequency, meaning 20% compared to UHD 750.

The best reviews on KZfaq!

Linux on ARM has probably done a lot of the heavy lifting for big+little cores on x86

I wonder how this type of chip would do with custom CPU schedulers, like those in the TKG kernel. I'm sure those schedulers need updating too but maybe they would do a bit better in some aspect?

As a man who pays for his own power bill... I want efficiency in a desktop XD

Agree with you on the desktop, dont care or want E Cores, those would be disabled, and then you have no more scheduler problems, but get that juicy high ipc

Where can I get one of those big die layouts? Would love to hang something like that on my wall.

Very cool

would definitely like to see what single thread performance is like in linux compared to other processors.

2 videos in the same day, dam

Im curious on how you updated the uefi. I havent been able to do that for a few years now since all mybsystems run Linux

Ohh thank you I’m using the same motherboard I was thinking I was crazy not researching more about what to use with proxmox and then truenas but I’m thinking maybe I just need to wait for the drivers to catch up I went to as close to next gen as I could and I feel I got it all at a decent price till I saw nvme ssds seemed to drop $30 a few weeks after I bought everything and currently testing with unraid and unraid is really easy but might fall back to proxmox and just wait for everything to catch up

@7m0s The L1 cache bandwidth numbers measured by Aida64 are invalid.

I had the opposite reaction. Why always big cores? Smaller cores=more cores for less money. I would love to see a chip with 40 E cores for a home server. The E cores' performance is nothing to sneeze at. Imagine 40 cores during the skylake generation! Something like that could disrupt the market! (threadripper) Even on a hybrid BIG.little design like Alder Lake without intel's hardware thread scheduler working, having all those extra cores to breakout into non-time-sensitive/security segregated tasks while maintaining a high speed desktop could be a boon. I mean how am I supposed to feed three thin clients, run a home NAS/router, seed bittorrent and LBRY and have a superb gaming experience without ALL THE CORES!

Just curious if you could someday do an in-depth video on using Fedora Rawhide. Explaining all the pros and mostly cons of using Rawhide. I use Rawhide and love it. But from my perspective, if it crashes, it does not affect me, as I just reinstall it. I do not use it enough though to say how often it crashes, and primarily just use Gnome, so do not know if it crashes more frequently on the Fedora alternative DE's. Rawhide does have all the debugging stuff running in the background. I am not familiar with all that kind of stuff.

How does this High Performance / High Efficiency design compare to the mobile Big / Little designs? I would have assumed the Linux schedulers used for these ARM devices would be applicable to Alder Lake, but apparently they don't?

Exactly what I wanted to know ever since Intel announced this mixed model!

if you have a server, could you pass trough the p-cores to a VM and e-cores for something like docker?

When you are doing the revisit, please try out pinning for only P cores.

150W idle? Kinda disappointed in Intel they didn't prepare patches in time. Hopefully it will change fairly soon.

Hey Wendell Since it has been more than a year, could you give us a small update in the comments on how does i9 12900k perform on latest fedora say v38

Have Intel announced a tuned version of their Clear Linux for these new CPUs?

Have you been able to check out if the ECC of the DDR5 works?

Speak for yourself, I do care about efficiency on desktop. If I want to heat a room, I turn up the radiator instead of buying Intel CPUs.

Should I use the z690 hardware raid or use the Linux software zfs? Or combo?

What is a good CPU from intel to use as a server, vm, containers, storage use?

Right now there's no scheduler patch in the horizon for 5.16 kernel so as a Linux user I would wait until Intel releases kernel patches that will make the scheduler work with the new Alder Lake CPU correctly.

engagement challenge for Linux goodness

Why 3 weeks rather than when 5.16 lands for followup, given that has a bunch of Intel patches due for Alderlake (though I don't recall off the top of head how applicable for this stuff)? EDIT: Apparently there's nothing in the pipe for 5.16 regarding core/thread handling. 😕

fun fact: intel vmd is for some reason available for my tigerlake laptop, despite only having 1 nvme slot

@3:02 - I have the exact same errors since I put in my new Samsung NVME M.2 980...let's see what you say about this...

What's wrong with using taskset to tell a process which cores it is allowed to run on ?

ARM phones have big.LITTLE do they run on special linux kernels? Or how is this solved on those?

actually we do care about efficiency in desktops: California (& other West Coast states IIRC) are enabling legislation that limits the amount of power electrical equipment can consume, particularly in idle mode.

Hell my Debian desktop is running an FX8320 slightly undervolted to manage heat while minimizing fan noise, with DDR3 at 1333 and it seems snappy to me. For the .01% of tasks would really benefit from more CPU meh, or for huge tasks I'll go rent some CPU time.

Is it possible to buy a die layout like yours?

maybe a dumb question but if linux already runs on arm with its big little cores, why doesn't it work for these intel chips?

On the question of "why e-cores?": For a first stab at this setup, this seems good.... BUT, that wattage does seem kind of high for a i5 and we have all seen what big.LITTLE has done in energy constrained environments. I don't think that Intel is done with tweaking the power profile of their hardware from this point out with the next generation, in-fact I think that it will become more important to do more with less wattage when it come to HPC. Their are already ARM efforts to stab at the data centre market, which is the money bin for Intel, AMD, etc. I don't think that they are just going to concede that, not without a brawl in the streets.

If you run your system as a dedicated VFIO backend, you could, theoretically, reserve all of the efficiency cores for CLI only Linux base OS operations, and then grant all of your performance cores/threads to a QEMU Windows 10 VM with GPU passthrough for gaming. You could also use the base Linux system as a NAS, accessible to the Windows VM and other devices on the network. Correct me if I'm wrong.

This is a special cpu for Windows 11 to show off potential for future performance. Clearly aim at M1 pro and Max. But at a big energy use hit.

Why do you run Fedora and not Opensuse Tumbleweed?

0:30 That's not completely true. I mean there was Lakefield. But does that count?

I can see it. 8 little cores is more than enough to run your ide smoothly. Add in 8 big cores to run your code on? Glorious. I'm basically doing that now by sending code to my home server from my laptop.

So, Linux' schedulers don't deal with these different types of core well, (yet).

Hmmm, what you said about single core performance is not true at all. If you are not worried about efficiency just because it plugs into the wall... you draw half the power I use with a single machine. That is pretty taxing for the environment.

I hear that Intel has their own version of linux for their chips: ClearLinux, or something like that. I wonder if that distro would be better at handling the new chip. I mean, I would hope so.

I can’t read those bar graphs on my phone.

Microsoft and Intel are in cahoots. That's for sure.

Kinda surprising that there wouldn't be a good Linux scheduler for heterogeneous core sizes. Android is just a locked down version of Linux for ARM mobile cores, and ARM has had big/little architecture for a while, hasn't it? Or do those Android schedulers not work on x64 because Intel implemented big/little in a bizarre non-compatible way?

Homogeneous architecture? IBM XT/AT/PS2/compatibles were definitively a heterogenous compute platform on disaggregate processing system in package before Intel gulped it all up. mb

This is what I've been curious about! Thanks! LOL Not gonna lie, not really surprised here. It's "good" to have confirmation. It is disappointing though. I had really been hoping that Intel would be working more with Linux kernel devs to get ahead of the usual Linux support curve. I mean we all knew Microsoft was going to flub this, and will probably continue with a half-baked implementation for a long time. It's M$ after all. We know Linux is smarter and capable of great things ... if you don't mind the wait. I just had hoped, for once, the wait wasn't going to be quite so long.

Apart from the i5 Alder Lake chip overall I feel very underwhelmed by this release. Marginal performance increases achieved by massively increasing power consumption which doesn't bode well for laptop performance.

finally some body looking at 12th gen and Linux will Intel big/small make Linux faster? Anyway I still waiting on Zen4 APU's until then I can stay on 2200G which for a Linux desktop run well. My windows rig is unsupported by Windows 11 and I won't to focus more on Fedora Linux my daily driver. Windows is only used for DJ gear and Gaming. All my coding and work is on Linux now and I am not going to switch back as Windows sucks. Which is why I feel these CPU are trash for me.

kinda sad but expected for a new architecture

Meanwhile, no Thread Director support even on 6.2.

Im wondering why Linux has not an optimized scheduler for little.big architectures yet, because all those android devices have such configurations now for years

this may be awesome for laptops, but it seems like such a marketing stunt to call the i9 a 16 core when it is really an 8+8. To my mind I'd rather have a true 16 core like a Ryzen 5950x. The same can apply all the way down the line. I guess at the i5 12600k level you are getting the 6/12 big + 4 small cores. So you get the small cores for "free" compared to the Ryzen 5600x 6/12. They can keep your discord running, etc. Unless the efficient cores can do something amazing well that the performance cores can't do, why not just have all performance? Power is not an issue in the desktop. Why not make the i9 12900k a 12 core/24 thread? Would you not rather have 10-12 performance cores, rather than 8? Forget the efficiency cores when you can plug in. This all seems designed to put a bigger number on a box just like the Mhz wars. Intel have decided to put more less powerful cores in the package, but pretend they are the same in the marketing. They are way smaller, but way slower. Just to get a bigger number in the advertisements. It's got to be such a pain for the schedulers as well.

16 PCIe lanes from the CPU is kinda meh, Intel really should go with at least 20 so the GPU and NVMe are directly connected.

Not to worry just buy now and btel will have everything workig with the next gen dropin CPUs

this cpu was named after the lake i almost drowned in

Stick to AMD, that's the future!

Lol Apple must really regret ditching Intel.

Intel, Please 2P cores and 8E cores in an i3

*Responsibility

This Intel 12900k with efficiency cores is a dirty hack, and from now everybody has to suffer. [First impression]

Amd will snap their fingers, ryzen drops by $100 and easy. Amd stock already up 27% in a month, too bad i cashed out at $105

Not the first time, Lakefield was heterogenous.

I thought Linux would have a huge advantage, cause of big.LITTLE, why is it not used?

Power usage doesn't matter? You try 100+F degrees in summer with a system burning 250W for the CPU and then whatever the 3090s crank along at. No thanks. And as the world in general is trending that way....hope you have good AC and enough cash to use it.

excellent point re: virtualization. Intel are losing me on Alder Lake. I think I will stick to Rocket Lake (or earlier) or AMD processors that don't require a "Thread Director". Maybe it will all come good eventually, but I don't want to be beta testing Intel's latest brainwave for two or three generations before all the kinks are ironed out. Thanks for the great review!

They can fit 40 E-cores into a 12900k die

i have a 12900k and i have NEVER been able to get a reliable install of any linux on it. i want gentoo but it is constantly crashing during builds. i put mint on there and its fine for... 15 to 20 minutes then it just STOPS. no cursor movement no led's blinking, no nothing, just DERAD. never over clocked, never been reliable.

this CPU consumes as much power as 20 M1 chips

It's unlikely a linux user would prefer Intel RST over ZFS.

Who really wants the added headaches that this will cause? I think I'd prefer the simplicity of uniform cores.

neat trick, but i just want plenty of uniform cores, thank you very much.

My big question is does the 12900k have the raw processing power to run a wide empire on a Modded Stellaris game in a huge galaxy?

Ah. Level1Linux, the red-hair headed child is back.

200w is this a joke?

we do care about power usage on the desktop. electricity is not free. a few of these in a room and you need to turn the ac up. like cooking in the kitchen the stove heat ups the room. winter might be nice fore the extra heat. intel in too heavy. needs to get smaller like 0.05 nm and use no more than 45 watts on its xeon processor with 64 cores, and a terabyte of memory on the chip. and that would be xeon with graphic cores, called xeon EX for home/game/content creators pro consumers. what is the hold up intel, lazy? hiring only kids that went to the rubbing elbows schools, get off the stick, or pot... hire some new creative don't know it can't be done folks that will make it work. good grief. you should have never loss apple. whole divisions should be fired for that. hell i'm almost willing to vote to close the doors and turn off the lights on that loss. you've got 6 not seven months to demo a processor that uses a quarter of the power of apple's silicon and 10 times the performance in actual workloads, or start getting your collective resumes together. maybe apple will give you a job.