News Intel's Alder Lake-S CPU Hits 4 GHz, Flaunting DDR5 Memory

Giroro

Splendid
Most of this went over my head, because I've like given up on trying to memorize Intel's deliberately-confusing premarketing codewords... plus their official processor naming is pretty bad right now too.

What I really want to know though, is why a high-power desktop user would want a split of "little" cores when full cores are readily available from their competition.
Plus I'm already pre-angry at the inevitable scam-marketing Intel will allow their OEMs to use when they start selling these against the R9 5950X as if they have 16 real cores. Remeber how Intel let them add Optane to their "total system memory", even though those cache drives in no way act like RAM?
 

InvalidError

Titan
Moderator
What I really want to know though, is why a high-power desktop user would want a split of "little" cores when full cores are readily available from their competition.
big.LITTLE architectures aren't meant for all-cores heavy-lifting, they are meant to offload low-priority tasks to low-power cores so the fast cores can be used primarily for things that require low latency / high few-threads throughput which is what most desktop software heavily favors.
 
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So not only the usual new socket and new chipset to use Intel's new chip (despite the competition not requiring this), we now also have to get new RAM (this is assuming you need DDR5 to get the full potential out of these new CPUs?). What sort of price premium will DDR5 have over DDR4? Will it even be widely available at launch? That people continue to stay loyal to the Intel brand beggars belief.
 

InvalidError

Titan
Moderator
So not only the usual new socket and new chipset to use Intel's new chip (despite the competition not requiring this), we now also have to get new RAM (this is assuming you need DDR5 to get the full potential out of these new CPUs?). What sort of price premium will DDR5 have over DDR4? Will it even be widely available at launch? That people continue to stay loyal to the Intel brand beggars belief.
AMD is going with AM5 and DDR5 for its next CPUs, so it'll be new everything regardless of which side you are on.

As for the premium for DDR5, it'll likely be quite substantial due to all of the extra active circuitry (data and address buffer chips on top of the VRM) on the PCB.
 
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Plus I'm already pre-angry at the inevitable scam-marketing Intel will allow their OEMs to use when they start selling these against the R9 5950X as if they have 16 real cores.
The R9 5950X runs all core at 3775Mhz while single is at 5Ghz so at all core you lose about 30% of "cores" (performance) just because they are real cores doesn't mean much.

Also let's see first what this CPU is even about, it could be replacing the whole lineup or it could be a niche product just like BGA where people freaked out that it would replace every CPU.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-preparing-to-put-an-end-to-user-replaceable-cpus/