In a laptop, I care far more about battery life and the fan noise. However, Intel 12th gen is only able to pull these impressive performance feats due to very high turbo boost clocks.
It's not that Intel is bad, it's still pretty great but in the age of M1 I wish Intel released a processor with similar power consumption.
The AMD offerings are much closer to M1 although they're not yet on TSMC 5nm so they don't quite match it. It's a historic event. Intel was #1 in laptops for an eternity. Even when the Pentium 4 was being outclassed by AMD Intel still kept the crown in mobile. This time around they first got overtaken by AMD and then by Apple and are now #3. Puts into perspective how huge of a miss their process node fail was.
I agree, but than you have corporate compliance installing an insane amount of Spyware on your device so that a 2021 XPS 13 Dell with a gen 10 Intel is out of battery when only using word within the hour.
Fans spinning all the time and no way of disabling this madness.
Nearly the same for my Mac colleagues. They maybe get 2 hours out of their M1 MBPs unplugged.
Note that Cinebench R23 (the main CPU benchmark we use) runs for 10 minutes, so it’s a measure of sustained performance. Boost (PL2) is typically 30 seconds or less with a long period after that of staying at the PL1 limit.
The wild thing is, your benchmarks with turbo boost disabled (GB5 single: 617 / multi: 5163) almost identically match the benchmarks on levono's new ARM laptop[1], the Thinkpad x13s (GB5 single: 1118 / multi: 5776). True, Windows on ARM will likely keep on being a pain for some time, but linux support seems to be coming[2], and for those of us that target Linux ARM development anyways, this is one of the first performant alternatives to post-arm Macbooks. Plus it has the killer feature: no fan, long lived battery life.
Another interesting ARM system is Nvidia's Jetson AGX Orin DevKit, which clocks in at (GB5: single: 763 / multi: 7193) [3]. That system is linux native right now, but of course isn't a laptop form factor.
> However, Intel 12th gen is only able to pull these impressive performance feats due to very high turbo boost clocks.
Don't forget 12th gen Intel CPUs have a lot more cores than 11th gen Intel CPUs. That's where the significant benchmark improvements are coming from. Unfortunately though, these often don't reflect the real world use case. Having more cores isn't going to improve the day-to-day performance very much. The new efficiency cores probably improve battery life though
You can usually use the "Xtreme Tuning Utility" (by Intel) to scale down without disabling turbo boost. I use it to scale my ~4.8 Ghz cores to 3.2 Ghz, so they can run without fans on my small form factor PC. 3.2 Ghz x 8 is enough to run most my favorite games.
Without TB, I'm down to 8x 2.4, which is a bit sluggish.
How is 12th gen compared to 10th gen, in your experience? My XPS 13 on a 10th gen i7 just becomes absolute syrup on battery, even if I put it in high performance mode.
We all wish intel could release a processor with similar power consumption to the m1, but it's not like they just overlooked battery life. x86 is just fundamentally not competitive with arm on that front, unfortunately. The only advantage it seems to have from an architecture standpoint is raw performance
Meanwhile in a server, I'm starting to worry that as I work to flush performance issues out of the system, especially latency problems, that I won't see the sort of perf numbers I'm expecting because the fact that the machines are running well below 50% CPU utilization are likely to dogleg the moment it hits the thermal limits, and I have no way to predict that, short of maybe collecting CPU temperature telemetry. Not only might my changes not translate into 1:1 or even 1.2:1 gains, they might be zero gains and or just raise the CPU utilization.
Magical CPU utilization also takes away one of the useful metrics for autoscaling servers. Thermal throttling opens the door to outsized fishtailing scenarios.
Tested an i7 1260p recently and it ran like a beast. What's interesting is they have a discrete GPU now which is the Intel Arc that should take a lot of the load off the CPU.
The coolest thing isn't just the cpu upgrade, but that the whole mainboard is something like a standard. Other laptops have weird shaped boards just for that one model.
If this 'standard' takes off it could start an entire ecosystem of modular hardware. That's exciting. I'm hoping for a 'Framework surface', a 'Framework tv', a 'Framework 400', etc.
I'd pay very very good money for a Framework router or a Framework TV...
Imagine hardware that you control, that you can upgrade piecemeal when something gets out of date. Besides the eco friendliness, it just sounds... nice?
I went from saying, "if only they had an AMD" to getting a different machine in ARM and now im saying "if only they had ARM".
I never realized how much heat, vibration, air blowers negatively affected me before. A framework laptop with some type of ARM or ARM-like cpu could do a lot with the space savings on cooling.
After Apples announcement of M1, I feel like it is mandatory for such a laptop test to discuss power per watt and for how long you can game on the 11 vs 12th gen processor.
I also feel like it is worth mentioning that 12th gen laptop is priced ~ $150 over the 11th gen.
If you're coding against an online build system and 11 last an extra hour (or whatever), it's a no-brainer to stick with the old one.
I think for those who primarily work on AC and do not mind increased power draw, 12th Gen is a good choice. As a software developer, I appreciate a few seconds shaved off here and there. With good thermal design, 12th Gen laptops can be silent and cool (I've never heard my MSI GT77 spin up the fans, unless I tell it to with a dedicated hardware button). I understand that people have different use cases and for lot of customers laptops need to be lightweight. I'm okay with the bulk and weight.
Just ran Phoronix Linux kernel compilation test (defconf), I get 74.68 sec on my laptop, on par with desktop Intel Core i7-12700K, but I can carry my "desktop" around. :) In comparison, Apple M2 result is 416 sec, AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX is 103 sec. It's not much, but it's compound gains if you compile and test a lot.
Do you think the very broad loose culture of macOS users (developers/creatives - coffee shops, nomadic etc) vs Windows (most corporate stuff - workstations, meetings etc) could be some factor in how they are optimised?
I’m rather disappointed in 12th Gen for mobile. I have a AMD 5800h Lenovo laptop and a 12700 Dell. The dell stutters, fans spin, etc. the Lenovo is just rock solid and fast. Never stutters or slows down. Fans spin up only when playing games.
I wish framework would do an AMD laptop. But Linus put them in touch with AMD and they done nothing.
What I don't like about framework notebooks is that they seem to be mostly interested in speed, which is why they seemed to choose these P-series CPUs. With a notebook, I'm much more interested in energy consumption (how long can I work off grid), emissions like fan noise and the like. Why no U-series CPUs?
Would increasing the RAM really make that big a difference in terms of kernel compilation time? It feels to me that 16GB should be plenty for any sort of caching that will speed things up.
Yep! We released an announcement around starting shipments of this two weeks ago. Our blog post this week was just a round-up of benchmarks both from reviewers and from us, to respond to common questions we got around performance improvements.
6800U is awesome from what I’ve seen — better efficiency by far, and legit integrated graphics better than Xe — but it is vanishingly rare, even months after announcement.
The scale Intel has in manufacturing mobile CPUs is still unmatched.
Maybe I'm spoiled, but it feels like an article like this would have turned out way better if they contracted Michael Larabel from Phoronix to do an in depth benchmark run with both versions of the laptop comparing multiple type of workloads, temperature, performance per watt (or if they would have used the full Phoronix test suite themselves). Although there is nothing wrong with the current one, it feels a bit... shallow on details.
Just yesterday, I ran a few CPU benchmarks to compare my new System76 Lemur Pro (12th Gen i7-1255U) against my older ThinkPad X1G7 (10th Gen i7-10710U). Both are ultra low-power processors, so it's a fair comparison.
I don’t like that we call it 12th Gen Intel. It would be more correct to just call it the 12000 series Intel.
Intel didn’t change CPU generations from 6000-10000 series, they’re all the same generation. Just because the years advance and they refresh their products with increased product numbers doesn’t mean that they’re a new generation of products.
The mainboard is really great. I’m reminded of the i9 NUC “compute element” and I’m disappointed Intel hasn’t really done anything more innovative in these kinds of form factors. Seems like they could easily standardize a swappable module like this for laptops and small computers.
The IBM Keyboard Trackpoint has evolutionary paths towards being a tiny trackball while retracted down, the trackball locks and pops up a functional joystick. The problem with the Trackpoint is it feels superslow, superheavy on the fingertip compared with glidetouch trackpads.
If I’m working a job where I really need performance, I try my hardest to get a desktop. The last 20 years of hardware development has not replaced the workstation for even light computational workloads.
My biggest frustration with remote work so far is the corporate fixation with laptops. For some types of work, performance isn’t just a convenience, but weeks of lost productivity. If the difference between the 11th and 12th generation of Intel in your laptop really moves the needle for you, you’re using the wrong form factor to do your work.
In the first table, in the first row (11th Gen), the professional column is missing the core count. It currently says "(Up to 4.8 GHz, Cores)" and by https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/208664/... it should be "(Up to 4.8 GHz, 4 Cores)".
[+] [-] SpacePortKnight|3 years ago|reply
It's not that Intel is bad, it's still pretty great but in the age of M1 I wish Intel released a processor with similar power consumption.
I use my Intel i5-1240p with turbo boost disabled when on battery. Here's the geekbench with TB disabled. https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/16497299
[+] [-] pedrocr|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sdoering|3 years ago|reply
Fans spinning all the time and no way of disabling this madness.
Nearly the same for my Mac colleagues. They maybe get 2 hours out of their M1 MBPs unplugged.
[+] [-] nrp|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] schaefer|3 years ago|reply
Another interesting ARM system is Nvidia's Jetson AGX Orin DevKit, which clocks in at (GB5: single: 763 / multi: 7193) [3]. That system is linux native right now, but of course isn't a laptop form factor.
[1]: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/15575694 [2]: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-5.20-SoCs-8cx-Gen3-Arm [3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrZt90c_-C8 (sorry for the video link)
[+] [-] nabakin|3 years ago|reply
Don't forget 12th gen Intel CPUs have a lot more cores than 11th gen Intel CPUs. That's where the significant benchmark improvements are coming from. Unfortunately though, these often don't reflect the real world use case. Having more cores isn't going to improve the day-to-day performance very much. The new efficiency cores probably improve battery life though
[+] [-] jvanderbot|3 years ago|reply
Without TB, I'm down to 8x 2.4, which is a bit sluggish.
[+] [-] augustl|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pcai|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hinkley|3 years ago|reply
Meanwhile in a server, I'm starting to worry that as I work to flush performance issues out of the system, especially latency problems, that I won't see the sort of perf numbers I'm expecting because the fact that the machines are running well below 50% CPU utilization are likely to dogleg the moment it hits the thermal limits, and I have no way to predict that, short of maybe collecting CPU temperature telemetry. Not only might my changes not translate into 1:1 or even 1.2:1 gains, they might be zero gains and or just raise the CPU utilization.
Magical CPU utilization also takes away one of the useful metrics for autoscaling servers. Thermal throttling opens the door to outsized fishtailing scenarios.
[+] [-] princevegeta89|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asdff|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 2OEH8eoCRo0|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stainablesteel|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sroussey|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] jacknews|3 years ago|reply
If this 'standard' takes off it could start an entire ecosystem of modular hardware. That's exciting. I'm hoping for a 'Framework surface', a 'Framework tv', a 'Framework 400', etc.
[+] [-] lhl|3 years ago|reply
* https://github.com/whatthefilament/Framework-Tablet
* https://www.instructables.com/Framework-Tablet-Assembly-Manu...
[+] [-] dont__panic|3 years ago|reply
Imagine hardware that you control, that you can upgrade piecemeal when something gets out of date. Besides the eco friendliness, it just sounds... nice?
[+] [-] nominusllc|3 years ago|reply
I never realized how much heat, vibration, air blowers negatively affected me before. A framework laptop with some type of ARM or ARM-like cpu could do a lot with the space savings on cooling.
[+] [-] wodenokoto|3 years ago|reply
I also feel like it is worth mentioning that 12th gen laptop is priced ~ $150 over the 11th gen.
If you're coding against an online build system and 11 last an extra hour (or whatever), it's a no-brainer to stick with the old one.
[+] [-] mstaoru|3 years ago|reply
Just ran Phoronix Linux kernel compilation test (defconf), I get 74.68 sec on my laptop, on par with desktop Intel Core i7-12700K, but I can carry my "desktop" around. :) In comparison, Apple M2 result is 416 sec, AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX is 103 sec. It's not much, but it's compound gains if you compile and test a lot.
[+] [-] antihero|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philliphaydon|3 years ago|reply
I wish framework would do an AMD laptop. But Linus put them in touch with AMD and they done nothing.
[+] [-] stewbrew|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] procodr|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zingplex|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nrp|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walrus01|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 2muchcoffeeman|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nrp|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] itvision|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bwhitty|3 years ago|reply
The scale Intel has in manufacturing mobile CPUs is still unmatched.
[+] [-] _odey|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codewiz|3 years ago|reply
Here are the results: https://mstdn.io/@codewiz/108785771608278574
[+] [-] lynguist|3 years ago|reply
Intel didn’t change CPU generations from 6000-10000 series, they’re all the same generation. Just because the years advance and they refresh their products with increased product numbers doesn’t mean that they’re a new generation of products.
[+] [-] cbg0|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qyahz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thijsvandien|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theonemind|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nightfly|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pram|3 years ago|reply
https://hardwarecanucks.com/wp-content/uploads/Intel-NUC-9-E...
[+] [-] chx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abudabi123|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] killingtime74|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AndrianV|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deepsquirrelnet|3 years ago|reply
My biggest frustration with remote work so far is the corporate fixation with laptops. For some types of work, performance isn’t just a convenience, but weeks of lost productivity. If the difference between the 11th and 12th generation of Intel in your laptop really moves the needle for you, you’re using the wrong form factor to do your work.
[+] [-] jvanderbot|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Temporal_Trout|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nrp|3 years ago|reply