Alder Lake is Out - Whose upgrading? Whose waiting...for what? [Dieshrink Telegrams]

Im becoming more environmental and cost conscious, I don't think I would be upgrading to alderlake anytime soon. I think zen 3d will be a great upgrade, but I don't want to be stuck with a dead end platform.

Swiggles

ADL represents the start of a new generation of PCs, and while it would definitely not be bad for people who need the upgrade now, it's mainly for those who are willing to pay the early adopter tax (and possibly deal with some teething issues, especially on the software side with Windows 11) to have early access to a whole new platform with DDR5, PCIE 5.0, and small efficient cores for background tasks/multithreading. Zen 3D is going to be best for people who are hesitant or unwilling to pay the early adopter tax and just want a good product that has strong compatibility with legacy and existing software. Gamers should take note that up to 8 cores should be all that is needed for a long while if they don't need the multithreaded performance, and other products have also proven that a larger L3 or even L4 cache can greatly increase performance for games. It may take back the crown for best gaming CPU. Waiting for Zen 4 and beyond is going to be the best choice for anybody who's patient and doesn't need a new CPU within the next few months. As always, you can expect better performance for the same money, equal performance for less money, or even more for less if you are content with waiting. Those who do will be rewarded with cheaper and better DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 SSDs for both Intel and AMD platforms.

DeadOfKnight

Ooooh maybe I can feature in corrections and ommissions, haha... "Who is upgrading" = "Who's upgrading".... not whose. "Whose CPU is this?" is correct because you wouldn't say "Who is CPU is this?" Of course there's every chance you already know this and just had one of those moments where you're thinking about something else while banana. :)

Ryzza5

I'm here for this. Luckily I'm in need of a cpu, not the dreaded gpu.

Christopher Mullins

That's my plan as well. Intels chip isn't quite as impressive as is worth the price. My 7700 is holding me back greatly. 😢 5800x for $250? Plz lol

Christopher Mullins

I’m a little disappointed with most techtubers neglecting to mention that alderlake comparisons to AMD’s latest architecture is importantly at this moment in time 1year old!! Yes it’s gen 5 pcie, DDR5.. but my question is have intel mandated that release day reviews NOT include DDR4 comparisons?? I wonder if all the benchmarks are more influenced by the system memory speed and bandwidth. Than actually “massive” improvements! In my opinion if we could bump zen 3’s power up to 240w and put both systems on DDR4 memory it would be a fair comparison.. how much of alderlakes improvements are reliant on the DDR5 upgrade? Current system. 3950x rtx 3090 32gb ram. Doubtful upgrade until AM5 or raptor lake because I believe DDR5 and pcie 5 isn’t utilized enough yet and prices are not fair enough to justify. Waited 12 months to get a founders 3090 at MSRP.

I have been thinking about maybe upgrading to zen 3d but for just gaming and VR. I am not sure if it would be worth it to upgrade but I do plan on staying on the x570 platform for a while. Just trying to get some advice thanks in advance!! My current system is a ryzen 3600 paired with an rtx 2080ti on x570 asus tuf motherboard with 32 gigs of ddr4 3200mhz ram

Planning on upgrading from b550 and a 3600 to a 12600k if there's an itx motherboard thats not obscenely expensive. If i cant get one then i may have to just wsit for the b660 chipset or maybe zen 3d if theres a 6 maaaaybe 8 core sku A 3600 really bottlenecks a 3080 ti.....

Uwhm

I consider ram upgrade from DDR4 16GB total to 32GB + 5700G, as that looks interesting SKU. Im also waiting DG2 and what will happen next gen gpus, but that will be for a while, if even a year from now. Too early to say AM4 offerings in 5950X/5950XD, as that would go out of reasonable budget for needs in 800$. Also secondary pc uses DDR4 and AM4, so will be a while until take the jump to Win11 and ADL, back to intel.

Timo H

As someone waiting for prices to normalize to build in a tiny NFC case it seems ADL is not a viable option. I was expecting it to use less power considering their use of efficiency cores. Hopefully Zen 4 will have good 65W options.

Rentaro Matsukata

I've been looking to upgrade from an OC 4770k for a while now. My expectations for Alder Lake were that it would take back single thread and be competitive in multithread until it ran out of power/thermal headroom. Pleasantly surprised that it manages to be competitive with the 5950X (given at much higher power). Personally as a gamer and engineer, it seems like a good choice and priced well if I were to upgrade my desktop. Plus it has DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 support. Not entirely necessary now but nice to haves in the future. Even if I did upgrade from a 4770k I would still be stuck with a 1080ti (which for the most part still meets my needs just fine at 1440p). I have no interest in paying the bloated GPU prices out there, maybe with the exception of AMD shop @ MSRP. But part of me wants to hold out even longer until Zen 4 and Meteor Lake and for Win 11 to become more polished. I have a huge backlog of older games that run great on my machine, and that's what it's about at the end of the day right, actually playing games? However from a professional standpoint, at work I run workloads that are heavily multithreaded, and from that perspective Zen 2 and 3 cores are still looking great especially efficiency wise. I'm interested to see what ADL can do with lots of E cores in a Xeon chip. Happy to see that Intel is innovating again and embracing their compromises. They're really leaning into winning by brute force and stretching power draw but it's in a way that feels honest that I think enthusiasts will enjoy.

shredbird

Definitely not going move to Intel any time soon. I'm perfectly happy with my 5950X. I might consider a 16-core 3D on AM4, but otherwise waiting until Zen5 for my next upgrade. DDR5 will be in a good position by then and I am sold for now on AMD's longer-term socket/platform standards vs Intel's way of forcing people to constantly by new motherboards. That said, I run a lot of VM's and containerized virtualization (and of course gaming), so I'm curious about how ALD does with these workloads, particularly after hearing about Zen5 with possibility of the 4D cores. I feel like much of the scheduler and OS issues will be well ironed out by then. But aside from pinning cores, how are OS's going to handle dynamic allocation of CPU time and on which core architecture?

I'm considering upgrading my i7 6700 to a 12600k. It is decently cheap, maybe I might get away with reusing my old 2133 DDR4 and if I get a z690 mobo I can try overclocking it and actually get some use out of my 360mm radiator instead of running a 40watt chip on it. I considered buying a 5600x, but seeing the 12600k with about the same ST and significantly more MT made me kinda want to get it. I actually noticed the 6700 managed to bottleneck my ancient GTX 980 in BFV and CP2077. I can't really afford to do a GPU upgrade for the next year, so maybe Alder Lake might be the savior that will help me go from BF2042 running at 50 fps in 720p low settings, to maybe 55 fps. Love the show and keep up the great work!

The raw performance is impressive and about what I expected but if you're a "gamer" it feels like a poor choice - you're likely to be much more GPU limited than CPU limited anyway so unless you literally don't care about price or power consumption, mixing a 300W CPU with a 400W GPU feels like a poor idea - better to get a more power efficient CPU.

Chris Rijk

I’m really interested in ADL because it’s hybrid and while it’s still power hungry right now I feel like it’s the thought that counts for now… once Intel gets beyond intel7 it makes sense power levels should drop. However, to see ADL be as efficient as RKL at 65 watts gives me hope for mobile performance for sure. Question wise, I’m wondering when amd will get to the point that they add big little to mobile? This could really put them over the top in mobile powered chips!

Brad Medlin

I'm running 2 computers: one for work (software development), one as a HTPC/Gaming system. The work system runs a 3800X/X570/32GB DDR4. I don't do the kind of software development that pegs the CPU at 100% all the time, so I wouldn't notice any upgrades from ADL. But, I would notice the ~$250-$300 hit to replace my RAM, in addition to the other early adopter taxes. So, I'm eagerly watching to see what Intel's future brings, but not signing up just yet. My HTPC's 7700K is on the struggle bus more and more these days, but I'd probably end up finding a good used Ryzen 3000-series for it after AMD's response to ADL has been released. This isn't really about performance though, but because Gigabyte got ransomwared the day after I sent them my motherboard for repair and I had to buy a new one. Then, they send mine back 3 months later with no warning. So for me, having an extra motherboard lying around is more compelling than the ADL performance increases, or anything AMD could respond with.

This is an impressive upgrade and I am especially impressed at how well the hybrid threading seems to work, after looking at some benchmarks. Seems 12th Gen is market leading across the stack in terms of perf and perf/price. But this is the first iteration of big-bigger and I’m interested in where things go with it in a few gens. Right now on the top SKU, E cores make up 1/3 of the threads, even less of the total compute power, and just about 20% of the logic-area on package. To me that means these cores are firmly for specialized tasks. That means the bigger cores are still beholden to the design considerations faced by general purpose cores, instead of being unleashed to pursue one thing and one thing only: insane levels of per-thread perf. I think in a future Gen when the E cores are most of the threads in the system, most of the logic die-space, and are what things are normally running on, that’s when we’ll see the P cores really become something special. When a task gets sent to a P core it will be like a huge dude taking off his jacket when challenged to arm wrestling - “oh shit he’s getting serious.”

Deepest Learners

Hi Esteamd guest and Dan 👍 With DDR 5 capacity being huge, have any of the developers you have been talking to, hinted of some cool stuff that they will be able to do, if we all have 512 gb of RAM :-)

Joachim Haugen

My interest in alder lake is mobile and how it will compete with Rembrandt. After seeing reviews it looks like it has plenty of single and multi threaded horsepower but this appears to come at power draw that is over clocked zen 3 levels. I'm concerned with how well this will translate to laptop where cooling is an issue and their h35 chips were a disaster. They released info on a u28 and I believe u15 segments (I think the info was 6p + 8e & 4p + 8e). How competitive will those be with the Rembrandt u and HS processors?

B. Fish

As someone who's been running a 3400g on an x570 board since July 2019 I would have upgraded to a 5900x already if AMD hadn't gone and announced Zen3D just as Zen3 availability had finally stabilized and I was getting ready to drop some cash on one. I figured I could wait out another ~6 months if it meant getting an objectively better CPU upgrade for my current system, something that might last me that little bit longer before I start feeling the need to upgrade again.

John Fielding

It will be quite a while for me to upgrade. I'm currently on X299 and X399 Platforms , so I'm satisfied for now. I'll wait for GPU prices to go down(lol) and continue to observe.. SO SAYS THE WATCHER!!!(RIP Stan Lee)..

Honestly, given how screwed up the market is right now, I don't see myself upgrading from my R5 1600X until 2023, at the earliest. The only thing the early Zen 5 leak did was make me double down on that plan. That said, I might buy a Zen 3D chip for my brother's rig for his next Christmas gift, assuming the BIOS on his X470 mobo is updated for compatibility.

Cleansweep

I’m using a 4700g now, paired with an RTX3060 and am generally GPU limited and don’t use many cpu heavy applications so no need to upgrade now, though I am impressed

Recently upgraded to R9 5950x/X570 and I don't have any plans to upgrade for a couple years at least. My previous big upgrade came at the beginning of Sandy Bridge with a Core i5 2500k and it lasted me until this year so hopefully Ryzen 3 will have as much staying power

I just purchased the i5 12600k (upgrading from i5 4590). I also got a cheap DDR5 motherboard for $230 and 16gb of 4800mhz DDR5 for $137. I noticed that the ram is “Unbuffered, Non-ECC”. I was under the impression ECC was part of the DDR5 spec. Do you think it is a mistake going for budget DDR5 instead of going for mid-tier DDR4? Should I return the MOBO and RAM?

In my opinion, Alder Lake is for dedicated Intel fans and early adopters excited for DDR5. While the performance gains are impressive given Intel's recent track record, the power consumption figures are alarming and the prices on DDR5 and Z690 motherboards is pretty hard to swallow. I think the real deal for most shoppers will be if AMD lowers the price on their Zen 3 products as a response to this launch. A theoretical $200-250 Black Friday deal Ryzen 5 5600X paired with a $100 B550 board and $60 DDR4 RAM kit will destroy the value proposition of any potential i5-12600K build while using less energy and shipping with an included cooler. A lot of my friends are still using Skylake CPUs and are looking for the best deal possible for an upgrade.

kjm015

Hey Tom and Dan, I really wanted to upgrade to the 12900k, but I game at 4k with my 9900k and 6800XT. I decided to wait for Raptor Lake and Zen 4D(especially after your latest video). I am thinking of buying the 12600k and pair with a W6800 to make a good game development/editing pc.

Kinihun25

Having seen the Alder Lake reviews, I'm impressed, despite the high power consumption. Though I think I'll probably sit on what I have for a few years since I bought... [breathes in for dramatic effect] Rocket Lake... And an 11900k at that... I think Intel has been quite good with their Z590 and Z690 platforms, they have a boatload of connectivity, tons of PCIe lanes for m.2 slots, lots of USB... Honestly it puts most X570 boards to shame and I think it's a front AMD needs to address. B550 is a fine platform for more budget/basic builds, but X570 is just in an awkward middle ground.

qhfreddy

I bought the Ryzen 7 5800X in December 2020 because I could, and felt special that I could get an upgrade if I acted fast enough, which I did. Then I was positively surprised at the nice performance boost that I got in Northgard, a Viking RTS game, over my 3800X, because I didn't expect a boost of around 12% since I play at 3440x1440. However my other games are GPU-bound by my RX 6800, so I really don't have a need for more single core CPU performance for the near future, unless a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X exclusive game comes out for the PC as well to require more CPU performance. Until that happens, I could do with more multicore performance for when Plex hammers my CPU with transcoding a movie to the family's TV while I'm playing my games, so I'm looking forward to Raphael. I don't see ADL being for anyone if you can get Zen 3D in the next two or three months and it's compatible with existing motherboards, especially if Zen 3 gets a price cut as well. ADL gets too hot, it would only make sense if it had a price cut like AMD CPUs used to have to make the deal sweet enough.

Eleriam

My question is when do you think YOU will upgrade your CPU? Alder lake is for most intel users as their platform last generally for 2 gens and early Zen buys who motherboards can upgrade to Zen3/3D. Zen3D in my opinion is for anyone who can upgrade their CPU on their existing AM4 motherboard. With how well my 3900x performs, I most likely and going to get a 5950x 3D when those crash in price(if they do). After that, may as well wait until my CPU is falling significantly behind to change my whole system out. Maybe Zen 6 or so time frame. But let’s be honest, you may get a feeling that you MUST have the best of the best

Benjamin Cannon

Zen has always been a monster for code compile on Linux. Im currently running a 24C sandybridge server that is screaming every day because of new builds that get sent over there, and I'd have to see solid evidence that alder lake is better than zen in order to stay on Intel. If there was a CPU with only E cores, none of the extra bloated stuff that a compiler doesn't use anyways, I'd be very tempted to have it be our build server instead of having to use my zen 1 desktop for the heaviest of builds that take up to 12 hours. But for now I'm eyeing the zen 3d or zen 4, with massive cache that has always been the biggest benefit to compilers. I will say, anything will be better than that power guzzling sandybridge. But at least for the job, I bet that Zen will hold up to the test of time.

Pattycakes

No adl, I plan to upgrade from the Ryzen 2700 to the 5900x once they go on sale now that alder lake is out.

matthew saltzberg

I upgraded right at the end of the AM3 era, then again last year to Zen 3 at pretty much the end of the AM4 era. Let me know when y’all want AM6 to come out and I’ll upgrade to Zen 6d or whatever is out then and it’ll probably happen. (On a serious note, I’ll probably buy a used zen 3D 5950 once zen 5 comes out and people are upgrading. Should be a decent uplift from my 5800x)

Alexander

Hey Tom and Dan! So ADL is finally out but I can't help but feel like "nah let's wait for next year". For example right now I feel like unless one absolutely needs a new computer, they should not upgrade. Plus zen 4 will blow away alder and maybe even raptor lake. Not to mention raptor lake will add more E cores and prices should be better with motherboards and ram. Nevertheless I'm happy Intel is back and competition is alive again!

Falto

Personally I have an X570 motherboard, so I would definitely wait for ZEN 3D, and then for ZEN 3D to potentially drop in price. That is my current plan: I have however been considering making a secondary all Intel rig with an Xe GPU, but based on MLiD leaks I will be better off, waiting for Intel to let out those Dinosaur chips ;)

otiv lcurtš

For now I definitely plan to stick with my 5600x/6800xt. If lots of cheap 5800x's hit the used market I may consider that but I game on a 144hz 3440x1440 display and at this res I don't see a cpu helping me very much if at all.

Gary Swindle

Bought the 5600x since it was the first reasonable upgrade from my 6600k in many years. Intel kinda missed the boat by not having upgrade worthy for a long time. I would wait until single threaded is at least 50% better before it might make sense to consider an upgrade for desktop. My laptop is 5yrs old though, and it seems like Alder lake is going to really shine in that use case. I might upgrade the laptop in the next year.