Intel's Alder Lake-S Desktop CPUs are going to offer a huge performance increase over the current 14nm parts but will do so while running really hot and consuming lots of power.
Intel's Alder Lake-S Desktop CPUs Allegedly Run Really Hot & Consume Lots of Power
The Intel Alder Lake-S Desktop CPU testing was done by WolStame over at Weibo who is Lenovo's China Gaming Desktop & Product Planning manager. In his post, WolStame states that it's not only the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card that would need 350W to run at its fullest potential & follows up with what seems to be early numbers of an Intel Alder Lake-S chip running at Lenovo's test labs.
The testing was done with AIDA64 and the respective power/temperature figures were reported in HWiNFO. The AIDA64 stress test is very brutal and shouldn't be compared with standard workloads such as gaming and rendering which puts way less stress on the CPU cores. It looks like both tools aren't reporting the correct specifications for the Intel Alder Lake chip but we do get to see power & temperatures of the chip.
It looks like the chip could be the flagship Intel Core i9-12900K solely based on Windows 11 task manager. The task manager shows 12 thread boxes however this is just half of the view & there could be an additional 12 boxes that aren't displayed. The alignment is definitely not correct for a 16 core part however I may be wrong here so let's talk about the metrics we can actually see. The Intel Alder Lake CPU is shown running with an average temperature of 86C and peaked at 93C. It's not known what sort of cooling equipment was used but the system was stress-tested for at least an hour.
As for power consumption, the Alder Lake chip averaged around 250W power consumption with a peak of 255W. This is in line with its 255W PL2 rating which we heard of before. Previously leaked information showed us that the power demand would increase by 50-100W for Intel's 12th Gen Alder Lake Desktop CPUs compared to 11th Gen Rocket Lake chips.
This is the peak current so we are talking boost clock loads (Power Limit 4) which has a duration of less than 10ms. The existing Core i9-11900K has a PL2(Tier 2) rating of 250W and we have seen early ES variants of Alder Lake CPUs (non-K) already featuring PL2 ratings of 228W so we can expect over 250W PL2 ratings for the higher-end SKUs.
125W TDP CPU
- 10/11th Gen: 34A/408W
- 12th Gen: 39A/468W (+14.7%)
Intel Raptor Lake Desktop CPUs Power Ratings
| CPU TDP Segment | 125W | 65W | 35W |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alder Lake PL2 | 188W (241W Perf) | 126W (202W Perf) | 78W (106W Perf) |
| Raptor Lake PL2 | 188W (253W Perf) | 133W (219W Perf) | 80W (106W Perf) |
| Alder Lake PL4 | 283W (359W Perf) | 195W (311W Perf) | 131W (171W Perf) |
| Raptor Lake PL4 | 238W (314W Perf) | 179W (277W Perf) | 118W (152W Perf) |
| Peak Wattage Increase (Alder Lake vs Raptor Lake PL2 Perf) | +5% | +5.5% | +2.5% |
| Peak Wattage Increase (Alder Lake vs Raptor Lake PL4 Perf) | -19% | -9% | -11% |
The Intel Alder Lake Desktop lineup and the Z690 platform are expected to launch on the 27th of October & will be the first mainstream consumer platform to utilize PCIe5.0 and DDR5 technologies along with a new hybrid architecture approach, something that Microsoft has optimized for its Windows 11 operating system.
News Source: HXL (@9550pro)
