Intel’s 12th generation Alder Lake has finally officially launched and is in the hands of the public. This new line up offers a few interesting changes over the previous generation, some of the changes we have never seen from Intel before. With all the information going around, it can be difficult at times to decide if it is enough.
Do the changes and performance increases justify the price of an upgrade? Sure, if you are on older generations of CPUs the upgrade is definitely worth the price, but is it enough to entice those on 9th and 10th generation?
In the below, we look at the changes Intel has made to the new generation and what these changes mean for the consumer.
DDR 5
Intel‘s Alder Lake has support for DDR 4 and DDR 5 ram, making it a better value proposition for those who may want to upgrade and bring their ram with them. That said, DDR 5 is a valid reason to upgrade in its own right. A lot of early adopters have jumped towards Intel’s Alder Lake specifically for the DDR 5 support. Intel having support for both 4th and 5th generation allows us to draw a direct comparison between the two to tell if DDR 5 is able to justify the additional cost. Before making a statement about the performance of the memory, it is worth noting that DDR 5 is still in its early stages. As higher clock speeds and bigger modules become available, DDR 5 will keep seeing improvements and become the new basic standard.
- Gaming – Initial tests have shown that DDR 5 can increase crypto thrills bonus codes performance anywhere from 0% to 7% over high end DDR 4. This is due to the much higher bandwidth yet longer latency times. Different games will favour bandwidth or latency, making a direct recommendation for DDR 5 not practical. As it is heavily dependent on what games you play, the upgrade right now is just not worth the cost over DDR 4.
- Workload – DDR 5’s higher memory bandwidth shows its muscles in some workloads. 7zips compression test saw a 15% improvement over DDR 4. This improvement is a best-case scenario and not consistent over different workloads, making it difficult to recommend for the outright upgrade.
It is important to remember that this is very early DDR 5, as DDR 5 gets higher frequencies and module sizes, these figures will change dramatically.
Cores
Intel has taken a new approach when it comes to architecture, Alder Lake. Previous generations ran several identical cores, of which the majority would be on idle for a lot of the time. Alder Lake on the other hand opts for having performance cores and efficiency cores together, this allows single and multicore applications to make full use of the performance cores, while the efficiency cores will excel at normal multitasking and power saving.
This also allows the performance cores to have more heat transmission abilities. This is all well and good but gives us very little idea of real-world performance.
Performance
Intel may finally be back on top with the biggest real-world performance gain we have seen from the company in many generations. Testing has so far showed a 12% to 17% improvement over 11th generation across the board. This may not be able to justify an upgrade from 11th gen but will be an incredible difference for 9th and 10th generation users.
If you need to upgrade now, Intel’s 12th generation Alder Lake is a solid line up with impressive performance throughout the range. If you do not need the board upgrade right now, it will be good to wait and see what AMD responds with in their next generational upgrade.
