System Performance: Hybrid CPU Design

With the new hybrid CPU design available in Alder Lake there are now 20 threads available. The system features six P-Core, and each P-Core offers simultaneous multithreading with two threads per core, meaning there are twelve threads available on the P-Cores. The E-Cores are single-threaded only, and there are eight E-Cores. The new Thread Director from Intel coupled with Windows 11’s thread scheduler is aware of the cores being high-performance and low-performance and will tend to assign work accordingly; but if the system is not busy and the workload is in the foreground and multi-threaded, it will schedule threads across all 20 cores if needed. If an active task is moved to the background by the user, by either minimizing the task or opening another workload, the background task is allocated to the E-Cores and the P-Cores are prioritized for user-focused work.

This means that even on a heavily loaded system, system responsiveness should be maintained, and although the user will not have their full system performance available, the P-Cores will be prioritized for active workloads instead of background tasks. For our standard performance testing, benchmarks are always run as the only active task so that the results are representative, but for this review we will also cover some multi-tasking scenarios in a bit.

To test system performance, the system was set to dedicated graphics mode since this is the way most Desktop Replacement systems will be run, and the MSI laptop was set to its maximum performance setting.

PCMark 10

PCMark 10 - Essentials

PCMark 10 - Productivity

PCMark 10 - Digital Content Creation

PCMark 10 - Overall

UL’s PCMark is a full-system benchmark which not only measures CPU performance, but also memory, storage, and graphics. It is being included as a reference since we always include it in laptop reviews, but be aware that the MSI Raider GE76 now offers the RTX 3080L Ti GPU, which is a step above the RTX 3080L found in the 2021 MSI GE76 Raider. As with all laptop testing, it is almost impossible to have a completely apples to apples comparison. The Raider GE76 also ships with much faster DDR5-4800 memory, an advantage of the Alder Lake platform.

That being said, the new Alder Lake system is by far the quickest notebook we have ever tested on PCMark 10. Some of that is CPU, and some is GPU, and some is memory, and some is storage. As was said at the start, Intel is putting their best foot forward, and it is hard to blame them.

Cinebench R20

Cinebench R20 - Single-Threaded Benchmark

Cinebench R20 - Multi-Threaded Benchmark

Always a popular benchmark due to its ease of use and ability to set the test to be single-threaded or multi-threaded, Cinebench is more of a pure CPU test since it does not leverage the GPU at all and is not very memory intensive.

Tiger Lake had a small single-threaded performance lead over the latest Ryzen processors, and Alder Lake simply smashes both of them. The single-threaded performance uplift is seriously impressive.

On the multi-threaded side, AMD’s better power efficiency with Ryzen allowed them to pull ahead in the past, but now that Alder Lake features 20 threads compared to 16 in the Ryzen 9 5900HX, the Core i9-12900HK pulls well in front with all threads loaded. This is despite it having only twelve threads of performance cores, so the eight E-Cores are definitely pulling their weight here.

Handbrake

Handbrake Transcoding (Software)

Probably the most popular transcoding tool around, Handbrake has support for software-based transcoding as well has hardware-based with support for AMD’s VCE, NVIDIA’s NVENC and Intel QuickSync. We test by doing a transcode of a 1080p Blu-Ray rip to 720p with the same quality settings for all encoders. For most transcoding, software transcoding tends to yield the best quality, however the specialty hardware can often complete the task in less time.

As a heavily multithreaded task, AMD’s Cezanne platform was our previous champ here, but Alder Lake demolishes the previous results. The new Golden Cove / Gracemont combination offers an almost 30% uptick compared to Tiger Lake in the same chassis. If you peek down to the Hardware transcode graph, you will see that the new Alder Lake platform is actually quicker at this particular test than the QuickSync was on Tiger Lake. Very impressive.

Handbrake Transcoding (Hardware)

Speaking of hardware transcoding, Intel’s QuickSync does get a bump over Tiger Lake’s implementation, but perhaps unsurprisingly they are smashed by the NVIDIA encoders in the big graphics cards installed in the MSI Raider systems.

7-Zip

7-Zip Compression

7-Zip Decompression

Despite a massive uplift in compression speed in the Core i9-12900HK, Intel isn’t quite able to wrestle the decompression crown away from AMD’s Ryzen 9 5900HX, although it is much, much closer than it was before.

Web Tests

Although web performance is an integral part of most people’s lives now, testing web performance is both testing the CPU performance as well as the browser’s scripting engine. As such, to be as consistent as possible, all web benchmarks are run on the current version of Microsoft Edge, which is based on the Chromium web browser. However, updates to the browser which happen very frequently could impact performance, so any results we have in our database are snapshots from the time that laptop was reviewed. For now, with the decommissioning of several popular browser benchmarks, we are focusing on Speedometer 2.0 from Webkit, and WebXPRT 3 from Principled Technologies. WebXPRT 4 is in preview now, and once it launches, we will take a look at it for future reviews.

Speedometer 2.0

WebXPRT 3

Web performance is often dependent on single-threaded performance, as well as how quickly a processor can ramp up to maximum performance. Both AMD and Intel have made big improvements in how quickly their processors can boost to their maximum frequency, as well as how many steps there are on the way.

With Intel’s hefty increase in single-threaded performance with the Golden Cove CPU architecture it should be no surprise to see them at the top. How far they are in front though is very impressive.

System Performance Summary

Wow is a good word to summarize. Intel’s newest Alder Lake with its new hybrid design, featuring both Golden Cove and Gracemont CPU cores, delivers a substantial increase in performance over their outgoing Tiger Lake platform. With six P-Cores and eight E-Cores, the new Core i9-12900HK offers an impressive twenty threads. With dissimilar performance of the threads, extra legwork was needed to be done to correctly distribute workloads to the right cores, but Intel has done that with their Thread Director system which is integrated into Windows 11.

Intel has squarely thrown the ball back into AMD’s court. Intel now lead in CPU performance by a substantial margin, and Intel’s Iris Xe graphics also delivers more performance than the current Vega GPU in Ryzen 5000. This is a potent combination.

The Test Platform: MSI's Raider GE76 Platform Power and Multitasking
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  • corejamz - Friday, February 4, 2022 - link

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  • sandeep_r_89 - Monday, January 31, 2022 - link

    Depends on the performance plan, and other things like DPTF, plus the laptop manufacturer UEFI doing screwy things with respect to power management and heat.

    Too much nonsense gets in the way.

    And of course Windows is always doing something in the background, and not actually allowing the CPU to sleep as well as it should. Can't get good battery life with E-cores if the P-cores can't actually turn off.
  • deil - Thursday, February 10, 2022 - link

    That's kinda expected when your laptops is 330W on wall but 45 on battery ? Who would think a battery can provide consistently 115W for cpu alone, when it's not brick sized ? That's why AMD wins this IMHO, their laptops loose on a plug, but on battery they win soundly. There is another thing to be said about 250W of heat under your palm that 330W brick suggest.
    I think that if you would disconnect power while under load, this would just explode.
  • at_clucks - Wednesday, January 26, 2022 - link

    Apple's M1 seems to be in ballpark performance (from the few benchmarks I've seen on ArsTechnica) so if you want battery powered performance you don't go for the 7lbs DTR gaming Christmas tree but more likely to the 4.5lbs Mac.

    On the other hand you gotta love a CPU focused review of a laptop subsequently comparing the storage performance to another machine's who's storage details get no mention as far as I can tell. I mean what's the point of showing me how much faster the 2 PCIe 4.0 SSDs in the MSI are compared to the 5400RPM SATA HDD in the Asus laptop? I'm glad it's class leading though...
  • jrocket - Wednesday, January 26, 2022 - link

    Or better yet, a much more power efficient Ryzen laptop, so you don't have to run macOS.
  • corinthos - Wednesday, January 26, 2022 - link

    M1/Pro/Max provided optimized for your desired workloads. AMD Ryzen & 3070+ also do pretty well in terms of battery life. One really needs to test out their typical workloads to determine exactly how much battery life is gained by going Apple vs AMD, rather than just go by reviews based on reviewers' test scenarios. Also, being able to properly gauge how often you need to be unplugged is another thing to factor into a purchasing decision. If it's not as much as you think it would be, then you'll get more power for your dollar getting a desktop.
  • Netmsm - Wednesday, January 26, 2022 - link

    The title is about testing Alder Lake but actually it is about testing MSI laptop! Who in their right mind would consider this gaming tests as a justifiable review for Alder Lake?
    What are you doing Doc?
  • Spunjji - Thursday, January 27, 2022 - link

    "the one where its performance is too poor for it to actually be used as a desktop replacement"
    Weird how often the benchmark level for "enough performance" magically moves to be as much performance as Intel provide...
  • evolucion8 - Wednesday, February 2, 2022 - link

    So, a laptop with Ryzen 5800X/Radeon RX 6700XT class performance is not a desktop replacement? In which parallel world it isn't? With the fact that according to tests, it barely loses any CPU performance when unplugged and retains over 75% of its GPU performance as well?

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