Info FYI: Comparison of Alder Lake's performance vs efficiency cores (Geekbench 5)

Aug 27, 2022
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I was curious about exactly how the Intel 12th gen efficiency cores compare to the performance cores, so I wrote a script that runs Geekbench 5 against each individual core. I chose Geekbench for this test because it offers a nice mix of real-world algorithms rather than an arbitrary synthetic mix of computations. Here are the results for an i7-12700h running in an Asus Vivobook S 14X.

Code:
Summary of results
-----------------------------------------------
Core # 0: Average=1771.00  *** Baseline ***
Core # 1: Average=1770.50  vs Baseline:  99.97%
Core # 2: Average=1767.33  vs Baseline:  99.79%
Core # 3: Average=1749.00  vs Baseline:  98.75%
Core # 4: Average=1844.16  vs Baseline: 104.13%
Core # 5: Average=1843.66  vs Baseline: 104.10%
Core #12: Average=1091.66  vs Baseline:  61.64%
Core #13: Average=1097.66  vs Baseline:  61.97%
Core #14: Average=1096.50  vs Baseline:  61.91%
Core #15: Average=1098.50  vs Baseline:  62.02%
Core #16: Average=1097.83  vs Baseline:  61.98%
Core #17: Average=1095.50  vs Baseline:  61.85%
Core #18: Average=1097.16  vs Baseline:  61.95%
Core #19: Average=1096.33  vs Baseline:  61.90%

Cores #0-5 are the six native performance cores (hyperthreaded cores excluded); cores #12-19 are the eight efficiency cores. Core #0 is the 100% baseline.

Based on these results the efficiency cores are 62% as fast as the performance cores on a i7-12700h.

Note how cores #4 and #5 are faster than the other four performance cores - these are the "favored cores" on this particular CPU die. See Intel Turbo Boost Max Technology 3 for details.

Here is a link to my GitHub repository if anyone would like to run this test on their setup as well. It runs under Linux.

https://github.com/horshack-dpreview/GeekbenchAutomationTools
 
I chose Geekbench for this test because it offers a nice mix of real-world algorithms rather than an arbitrary synthetic mix of computations.
But they do weigh the results in the matter they think is important.
So getting some results from these categories separately would be nice.
The e-cores could be great, ok good, at crypto or float but because they are weighted lowly it might reduce the average, not that 60% is bad.
These scores are computed using a weighted arithmetic mean of the subsection scores. The subsection scores are computed using the geometric mean of the scores of the workloads contained in that subsection.

Subsection Weight Cryptography 5% Integer 65% Floating Point 30%
 
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Aug 27, 2022
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But they do weigh the results in the matter they think is important.
So getting some results from these categories separately would be nice.
The e-cores could be great, ok good, at crypto or float but because they are weighted lowly it might reduce the average, not that 60% is bad.

Excellent point and I completely agree. I'm planning to add the individual test results in a later release.