Intel Alder Lake-H Core i9-12900HK Review: MSI's Raider GE76 Goes Hybrid
by Brett Howse on January 25, 2022 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- MSI
- Laptops
- Alder Lake
- GE76 Raider
- 12th Gen Core
- Alder Lake-H
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
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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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blanarahul - Tuesday, January 25, 2022 - link
That has always been the case with Intel CPUs for the past 4-5 years. Desktop Alder Lake touches 240 watts to beat AMD and laptop Alder Lake crosses 110 watts in a portable chassis to beat AMD.I am looking forward to how the 6800H performs.
Yojimbo - Tuesday, January 25, 2022 - link
You're looking at the wrong laptop as a basis for this discussion.FMinus - Tuesday, January 25, 2022 - link
Looking at how this loses to 4800U from 2020 at 30W in CB20, this does not bode well for Intel in anything but 100W+ scenarios. 6000 U series will walk over anything Intel puts out. A shame really. The efficiency cores seem to be a waste of die space, what I suspected.IntelUser2000 - Wednesday, January 26, 2022 - link
Actually you are mistaken. The E cores are what allows them to achieve this performance level. Without it it'll be worse.So the problem is the P cores are too inefficient.
Spunjji - Thursday, January 27, 2022 - link
The E cores aren't actually very efficient in terms of power - just die area. Their main purpose is marketing: they let Intel advertise a "14 core" CPU and scrape out wins in multi-threaded productivity benchmarks (when power isn't constrained).demian_thorne - Tuesday, January 25, 2022 - link
I hope the “right” laptop does not cause 3rd degree burns :)Spunjji - Thursday, January 27, 2022 - link
You say they're looking at the wrong laptop, but it's the laptop Intel provided, so it's worth asking yourself why Intel would provide this specific laptop. Much like the Ice Lake and Tiger Lake launches, Intel is front-loading reviews with high benchmark scores from an over-cooled platform that the vast majority of end users will not see reflected in actual products.drothgery - Tuesday, January 25, 2022 - link
It's not great, but anything using an H-series CPU is going to spend a lot more time plugged in than on battery, and it's better than Tiger Lake H or Comet Lake H, so it's not like they're getting worse there.yeeeeman - Tuesday, January 25, 2022 - link
this is a performance oriented laptop. I think having the OPTION to get the highest performance with close to unlimited power is good. If you keep it on balanced power profile it will consume 70W and lose about 10% of performance, so still a LOT faster than any other laptop.Kamen Rider Blade - Tuesday, January 25, 2022 - link
Then go get a desktop AlderLake PC. You'll get even more Performance!