What Kind of Performance Should We Expect from Intel’s Alder Lake?

Interest in Alder Lake is running high as we move into the back half of the year and closer to the CPU family’s launch date. Alder Lake is intended to be a major step forward for both Intel and x86 CPU design in general. Historically, x86 CPUs have all been based on a cluster of identical CPU cores, in contrast to ARM, which has mixed big and little cores on the same SoC for a decade now. Alder Lake will be the first x86 CPU to adopt this trend, with its combination of Golden Cove “big” cores and Gracemont “little” cores.

There have been a variety of rumors of late concerning what Alder Lake performance might look like. Some Cinebench leaks imply that Alder Lake hits an extraordinary level of performance, outpacing AMD’s Ryzen 9 5950X despite fielding far fewer “big” cores. Recent mobile rumors imply Alder Lake competes with AMD’s laptop parts but doesn’t blow them out of the water. All rumors regarding Alder Lake and any unreleased CPU should always be taken with a grain of salt. All discussion of rumors is similarly theoretical.

The current leaked data on Alder Lake points in two different directions. Desktop leaks have implied that the Core i9-12900K (reports of a 12900KS were a typo by the leaker) scores a single-threaded score of 810 and a multi-threaded score of 11,600. This is said to be achieved via water cooling, and it’s substantially better than the Ryzen 9 5950X, which scored a 623 and a 9,944 in our testing. It is claimed that Gracemont offers performance almost equal to that of a Sunny Cove CPU at equivalent clock speed.

If Alder Lake were a traditional 16-core chip, the conclusion would be straightforward. The fact that it isn’t raises additional questions about overall CPU performance. Alder Lake is expected to run at roughly the same clocks as Intel’s existing Rocket Lake family and Intel has promised a ~1.2x IPC boost. Clock speeds between desktop parts should be identical, whereas Tiger Lake’s performance increase relative to Ice Lake was significantly tied to higher overall clock speeds. With Rocket Lake, Intel demonstrated that an eight-core chip based on Ice Lake could generally compete with a 10-core CPU based on the older 14nm Comet Lake architecture.

An equivalently-clocked eight-core CPU with a 1.2x IPC gain should offer about 10 cores “worth” of RKL performance. From there, we need to evaluate Gracemont’s contribution. Unfortunately, without knowing how much of the TDP budget is soaked up by the “big” cores, it’s difficult to estimate how much improvement the small cores could offer. Even if we assume that every small core offers Skylake-equivalent performance, the small cores do not have Hyper-Threading and are not clocked as high. Unless leaked clock speeds are also inaccurate, the small Gracemont cores are unlikely to contribute more than 40-70 percent as much performance as an equivalent “big” core with HT enabled would, despite rumors to the contrary.

Available data backs up this argument. Benchmarks of the Celeron N5095 (4C/4T Tremont, 2GHz base, 2.9GHz boost) suggest it is slightly slower than chips like the Pentium Gold 5405U (Whiskey Lake, 2C/4T, 2.3GHz) or the Amber Lake i5-8210Y (2C/2T, 1.6GHz – 3.6GHz). The quad-core Tremont is also quite close to the Core i3-8145U (2C/4T, 2.1 – 3.9GHz). Four Tremont cores appear approximately equal to two Whiskey Lake-era cores. CPUs like the Core i3-1115G4 (2C/4T, 3GHz base, 4.1GHz boost) are 16 percent faster than the N5095 in Geekbench multi-core, according to Notebookcheck.

Comparisons against older 14nm “big” cores will allow for more favorable metrics than comparisons with later Ice Lake and Tiger Lake processors, but we’re estimating that one Gracemont core should deliver between 40 percent and 70 percent of the performance of a Golden Cove core with Hyper-Threading enabled. A high contribution factor for Gracemont makes the Cinebench R20 figure more plausible.

If you assume that Alder Lake delivers a static 1.2x IPC increase at the same clock compared with Rocket Lake, and that the eight-core Gracemont CPU cluster offers 50 percent of the performance of a Rocket Lake single-core CPU with HT enabled, the projected score we’d expect for the ADL chip is ~10,500. If you assume Gracemont can offer 70 percent of the performance of an ADL core, you can hit those 11,500+ scores that are being leaked.

Let’s put this data set down for a moment and look at the other leak, which came out this morning.

According to Tum_Apisak, leaked results for the Alder Lake P mobile platform point in a very different direction. Here, the top-end Alder Lake P, with six Golden Cove cores and eight Gracemont cores, hits 1,258 and 6,831 points in Geekbench 5 (14 cores, 20 threads). Typical Ryzen 7 5800H scores are 1,338 and 7,063 according to THG. These results suggest that an eight-core Ryzen CPU with SMT (8C/16T) can match Alder Lake P.

We would not typically expect an eight-core/16-thread mobile chip to compete effectively against a 14-core/20-thread hybrid processor if its 16-core desktop counterpart falls to a 24-thread variant with half as many “big” cores. Previous results, leaked earlier this year, also suggested Ryzen was quite competitive in Geekbench. More recent data, again from Tum_Apisak, suggest the Razer 14 Alder Lake is faster in Puget System’s DaVinci Resolve Studio benchmark than the 5900HX:

Razer Blade 14 – RZ09-0391R9 5900HX + RX 6600Mhttps://t.co/eKlgqvpzsC pic.twitter.com/A3bZ0fr2QR

— APISAK (@TUM_APISAK) June 20, 2021

One of these applications — Geekbench or Cinebench — may respond unusually well or unusually poorly to Alder Lake’s hybrid CPU cores. At least some of these tests were run under Windows 10, and Windows 11 is expected to offer better performance for hybrid CPUs like Alder Lake. The fact that we’re looking at CB20 instead of CB23 means that the rendering test completes very quickly — possibly too quickly for the CPU to heat up and throttle. Cinebench R23 runs for 10-minute loops by default specifically to address this issue.

We bring up thermal dissipation because it’s a major unanswered question in all this. Reports indicate that Intel’s Alder Lake PL2 is lower than Rocket Lake’s, having been reduced from 250W to 228W despite the increased core count. Intel’s already-launched Ice Lake didn’t support high frequencies very well. Tiger Lake improved on that, but the company’s 10nm technology wasn’t originally expected to reach parity with 14nm in terms of clock (or power consumption at very high clocks) until this generation. The excellent results reported for the 12900K in Cinebench R20, combined with the lowered PL2, imply that Alder Lake is far more power-efficient than anything that has come before. The weaker (but still solid) results in Geekbench suggest that the chip is an iterative improvement but not a crushing blow.

I think Alder Lake is going to be tougher to predict than a lot of previous Intel and AMD launches. The CPU platform mixes big and little cores in a way we haven’t seen on x86 before. There was a definite period of adjustment when ARM debuted big.Little, and software vendors may need to update applications to take advantage of what Alder Lake offers. How well the CPU performs will depend at least in part on how much of its thermal budget is soaked up by the big cores and how much room there is for Gracemont to kick in. It’ll depend on how effectively Intel budgets TDP and how quickly it can ramp clock and hand over data during the big-core/little-core transitions. It’ll likely depend, at least a bit, on whether you’re running Windows 10 or Windows 11.

Having said all of that: I think there’s reason to conclude that Alder Lake will be a positive launch for Intel on both desktop and mobile. The CPU manufacturer may not see the same power savings Apple has realized from this method depending on how Gracemont and IceStorm compare with one another, but hybrid x86 is expected to deliver an advantage. It’s easier to predict power savings at idle than it is to predict performance improvements at load because we don’t know anything about how effectively Gracemont can boost Alder Lake’s overall performance when the Golden Cove cores are already fully loaded.

If the CB20 scores prove indicative of overall Alder Lake performance, AMD will find itself pressed back on its heels — though we already know the company intends to introduce large 3D L3 caches with an estimated 1.15x performance bump. A 5950X + 128MB of additional L3 with a 1.15x performance bump would therefore be competitive with the Core i9-12900K, even if these figures are accurate. If the Geekbench scores prove more accurate, we’d expect Alder Lake to be a power efficiency story and an example of how using a cluster of small cores helped the company keep pace with an all-big-core AMD chip. No rumors thus far indicate a poor showing against AMD. All of them suggest a competitive Intel platform. The only question is whether Alder Lake is more of an iterative improvement or a major leap forward.

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