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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  • Lbibass - Tuesday, January 25, 2022 - link

    It seems that there may be something wrong with your benchmarking process. Linus Tech Tips was getting significantly improved battery life over the previous gen GE76 Raider in watching YouTube videos, nearly a 40% improvement.

    For the Alder Lake Raider in your review to get significantly less battery life than the previous gen shows signs that there is something going on with your specific laptop that I wouldn’t be so quick to blame on background power consumption.
  • doungmli - Tuesday, January 25, 2022 - link

    you have to see the configuration tested, here the autonomy problem is surely linked to the 17" 360hz screen. I don't even understand their comparison with the asus g513 which has a 15" screen ans only 144hz
  • Brett Howse - Tuesday, January 25, 2022 - link

    Our results were very close to what Intel had sent us as to what they were getting so I think they are fine.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Friday, January 28, 2022 - link

    But they are not in the same ball park with what other reviewers are getting. It suggests either there was a difference in the manner the laptop was tested or there was something off about this specific model you got.
  • deil - Thursday, February 10, 2022 - link

    or that drivers still suck, it did not go to E-cores as planned, hence the difference.
  • Silma - Tuesday, January 25, 2022 - link

    The laws of physics are the laws of physics.
    On battery life and performance per watt, Intel won't catch up with AMD until it goes 7 nm, and then again, it won't catch up with Apple until it goes 5 nm, assuming the change is immediate.
    In reality Intel will probably needs to go 4 or 3 nm to catch up.
  • drothgery - Tuesday, January 25, 2022 - link

    Intel 7 and TSMC N7 are similar-density processes (though the latter is more power efficient). That until was calling Intel 7 "10nm Enhanced Superfin" until recently and people who should know better always called TSMC N7 "7nm" doesn't actually make them that different. Neither process actually has any 7nm features, or even any 10nm features; the last time marketing names for semiconductor processes actually reflected any feature size on real chips they were still using microns, not nanometers.
  • Otritus - Friday, January 28, 2022 - link

    Planar transistors had size match the smallest dimension of the transistor. So 28nm was in fact 28nm. The move to FinFET dramatically decreased the smallest dimension (14/16 nm would be called 8nm if they didn’t change how transistors were named). Since there is not standardized naming for FinFET and GAAFET transistors you have the arbitrary naming that all companies now use creating confusion around how performant and dense a process is.
  • Duwelon - Tuesday, January 25, 2022 - link

    Wonder why they don't offer a 144hz VA panel.
  • Calin - Wednesday, January 26, 2022 - link

    That is a $3000 laptop, they can't use "second-best" technologies in it.
    (and by the way, I have a "second-best" MVA 32 inch display, and the contrast is absolutely incredible. Colors are good, viewing angles are good, but that contrast <3

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