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Intel launches Rocket Lake; how much heat and power are okay?
Intel is launching its Rocket Lake processors today. I've previously explained how it's a backport of 10 nm architectures to a 14 nm process node.
You can find reviews on a variety of sites. The upshot is that it manages to roughly match AMD's Ryzen 5000 series in per-core CPU performance. However, it tops out at 8 cores, while the Ryzen 5000 series goes up to 16, and even Intel's previous generation Comet Lake went up to 10.
But the big caveat is power consumption. You might argue that you typically don't care about CPU power consumption, at least in a desktop. And if one CPU tops out at 105 W, while another goes up to 125 W, it's reasonable to not care about that. But when power and heat get far enough out of hand, maybe you should care. What is out of hand? Well, try this chart:
Ultimately, the only real reasons to buy Rocket Lake are if you aren't bothered by runaway power consumption and at least one of:
1) you need AVX-512 support,
2) you have a strong brand preference for Intel, or
3) you can find Intel Rocket Lake CPUs in stock near MSRP, but not the competing AMD CPUs in the same price range.
Point (3) has been salient lately, and it's not clear what Rocket Lake inventory will look like. Unfortunately for those who need AVX-512, that's precisely what causes power consumption to go nuts, sometimes pushing temperatures over 100 C or even crashing the machine.
The other problem on price is that while a Core i7-11700K is cheaper than a Ryzen 7 5800X and a Core i5-11500K is cheaper than a Ryzen 5 5600X (at least if you assume that all are at MSRP), once you get a better cooler to handle the higher power consumption, will the Intel CPU still be cheaper? It might not. The Ryzen CPUs will never go over 142 W for any thermally significant amount of time, and it's easy to handle that on air. The Rocket Lake CPUs can stay over 200 W for extended amounts of time, and that takes either water or a high end air cooler.
You can find reviews on a variety of sites. The upshot is that it manages to roughly match AMD's Ryzen 5000 series in per-core CPU performance. However, it tops out at 8 cores, while the Ryzen 5000 series goes up to 16, and even Intel's previous generation Comet Lake went up to 10.
But the big caveat is power consumption. You might argue that you typically don't care about CPU power consumption, at least in a desktop. And if one CPU tops out at 105 W, while another goes up to 125 W, it's reasonable to not care about that. But when power and heat get far enough out of hand, maybe you should care. What is out of hand? Well, try this chart:
Ultimately, the only real reasons to buy Rocket Lake are if you aren't bothered by runaway power consumption and at least one of:
1) you need AVX-512 support,
2) you have a strong brand preference for Intel, or
3) you can find Intel Rocket Lake CPUs in stock near MSRP, but not the competing AMD CPUs in the same price range.
Point (3) has been salient lately, and it's not clear what Rocket Lake inventory will look like. Unfortunately for those who need AVX-512, that's precisely what causes power consumption to go nuts, sometimes pushing temperatures over 100 C or even crashing the machine.
The other problem on price is that while a Core i7-11700K is cheaper than a Ryzen 7 5800X and a Core i5-11500K is cheaper than a Ryzen 5 5600X (at least if you assume that all are at MSRP), once you get a better cooler to handle the higher power consumption, will the Intel CPU still be cheaper? It might not. The Ryzen CPUs will never go over 142 W for any thermally significant amount of time, and it's easy to handle that on air. The Rocket Lake CPUs can stay over 200 W for extended amounts of time, and that takes either water or a high end air cooler.
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The Bad
The Ugly
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2024: 47 years on the Net.
And by the way Jean_Luc. I hug my trees every day
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
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2024: 47 years on the Net.
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2024: 47 years on the Net.
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
Under an all-core AVX2 workload, the same chip only hit about 241 W. That, of course, is still quite a lot, but it's still atypical for consumer use. Intel's nominal 250 W PL2 power, however, indicates that a 241 W workload might not be nearly so atypical as the 296 W one.
They were hardly the only site to find runaway power consumption, though. Here's one from TechPowerUp:
That 419 W is for total system power, not just the CPU alone. The Ryzen 7 5800X and higher AMD CPUs on that list are probably using just shy of 142 W each, but the rest of the system uses some power, too. Even so, 419 W for the whole system is still way out of hand, and it comes when using Cinebench, which hasn't traditionally been regarded as a power virus.
Even if a power virus causes atypical power consumption, if that fries your hardware, is it really so comforting that the runaway power consumption didn't last for very long? Processors are supposed to have something in place to prevent things from getting way out of hand like that, precisely to prevent a power virus from wrecking hardware. Remember how the StarCraft 2 title screen fried some Nvidia GPUs? A "power virus" can show up accidentally in weird ways. It sure looks like the new Rocket Lake CPUs don't have robust protection against that.
This is the sort of thing that it seems likely that Intel will "fix" with a BIOS update or some other sort of update. Of course, the way to reduce power consumption is to reduce clock speeds (and voltages, but that also requires reducing clock speeds), and hence performance. This would hardly be the first time a hardware vendor tried to show power consumption and performance at wildly different settings while trying to falsely imply that you could have both at once.
I love my Cedars and other evergreens but you can't light up them Alders quick enough, they grow like weeds
I have 10 acres with about 3-4 acres of forest. I have 2 acres cleared around my home, then a nice trail through the forest and onto about a 4 acre pasture.
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
What I was pointing out was the electro-migration (EM) of metal gets much worse if the metal is hot. It all goes together. Higher current gets you more performance, but also more heat. And heat is deadly for EM.
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2024: 47 years on the Net.
But even worse in a way....at least the old amd had people that liked to OC buying them.
The reversal of fortunes here is just mind boggling to me.
If you go back far enough, all consumer CPUs were single core, and the clock speed was the only way that they had to distinguish different bins of the same architecture. Today, no matter how far you overclock a six-core CPU, you can't turn it into an eight-core one.
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
https://videocardz.com/newz/intel-awkwardly-forgot-to-release-graphics-drivers-for-rocket-lake
Apparently it doesn't. Intel hasn't yet released a public driver for it, and that's apparently still a few weeks away. And you thought MMORPGs had rough launch days.