Intel’s Core i9-12950HX has 16 cores and 55 watts of power

https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/10/23065131/intel-core-i9-12950hx-mobile-laptop-processor-16-cores-55-watts

by carlycue • 4 years ago

48 71 4 years ago

mperham• 4 years ago

The 14” MBP has a 70 watt-hour battery so a 55W draw will drain the battery in just over an hour. And that’s just the CPU.

gabagool• 4 years ago

In fact, the de facto upper limit for laptop batteries is 100 watt hours since this is the largest battery size permitted on a flight by the FAA (the US air travel regulatory body) without special approval [1]. The CPU would drain such a battery in 1 hour and 50 minutes.

[1] https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/whatcanibring/...

windowsrookie• 4 years ago

It's even worse. The Max turbo power on these CPUs is 157W. So if the cooling can keep up these will draw much more than 55W.

jeffbee4• 4 years ago

These will sit there drawing < 1W 99.5% of the time like all other laptop CPUs.

daniel-cussen• 4 years ago

I like that. I work on algorithmic performance, making the big-oh notation better often accompanied by a better hidden constant (both at the same time), and I would say...

Waiting for a machine is considered harmful. You are never to wait for your machine, it ought to wait for you. You yes want it running at 1% or so. Then it's at your beck and call, ready to fire up at a moment's notice. Instead of the other way around, you planning your schedule around the machine's work. I've done that, there's problems with this, for instance experiments failing half-way while I was out on a walk. I think one time I left it running overnight, that's a classic.

But if the computer can go all-out for 110 minutes, that's good, means it's a good sprinter, that's actually better than a good marathoner for the type of mathematical experiments typically carried out on a laptop. And for the laptop? Nobody cares about the energy efficiency when it's working hard. Then you plug it in. Or you think the problem over harder.

Like I've never had to do a long mathematical experiment without connecting to the wall. In 13 years as an algorithmist, doing all kinds of shit, not one time. Because then you can't use it for listening to music, or writing essays on Hacker News, or applying to anything, or using emacs. I guess the reason for that is lack of will, so that 110 minutes according to a child node of this poster is much less on an older battery, like 60% of that, so 66 minutes. Then, don't assume I start out on a full charge, I have to code up the algo first, that takes a lot of time at low intensity, a lot of battery, plus you have to finish up the experiment properly, save some files before shutting down. So I guess if you were allotted a limited amount of charge overnight and that's all you could use, then sure. Plus the TDP is lower than if you do really fucked up things with the cores, one time the jumping I think would use up more than TDP. I think I've broken the conceivable limit on one chip, one chip for sure. They assumed my algorithms were sane, reasonable, that's where they fucked up. And all these considerations, I could brainstorm more, but all the considerations reduce the effective battery. Nothing makes it bigger again, it's all a drain. Even writing about the drain like I am now causes drain, accounting for accounting should be accounted for in the total. In other words the Silva Paradox https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... . In practice I behave totally differently on eg an airplane trip with limited battery than plugged into the wall. Might as well get another user account on everything, full on Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde with power versus battery.

And I had fucking old old batteries most of the time, my laptop was only a supercomputer due to algorithms, not software or hardware. Only a few of the algorithms were that good yet, when I had it, so in practice I couldn't say it was truly a supercomputer like this machine. Single thread, dual core, like a crappy plastic Macbook. It got looks at Stanford because your laptop is always visible in class (pre-covid) and a status symbol. Well mine was becoming the best, under the hood. And I did all sorts of stunts on it. It's not meaningfully different than now, that was 2.0 GHz, this is less than 3.0 GHz, clock speed for me is still king. Well I guess it depends. Yeah so in fact because of the clock speed factor, your experiments will run on one core usually, I wonder how that compares with the assumptions that lead to a 55W TDP.

alkonaut6• 4 years ago

I’d pay good money for a 5kg laptop without any battery at all.

I just need a computer I can move between the office and home.

I don’t need a screen, keyboard or touchpad either. They are a bonus (for meetings, for example) but I’d trade them away for a more powerful cpu any day.

Gravityloss2• 4 years ago

You could build a Mini ITX PC. Some cases have even handles.

Beltiras2• 4 years ago

Sounds like you really just need sshfs and mount the machine from 2 locations.

xanaxagoras• 4 years ago

Why not just get a mini PC and 2 wall warts? I wouldn't mind hauling this thing around [1], or a mac mini for matter. I'd love to see something similar with a battery so I can hibernate in between locations.

[1] https://system76.com/desktops/meerkat

sdflhasjd2• 4 years ago

I've carrying a Mac Studio to the office for a few weeks now and it's a pretty reasonably arrangement actually.

It's liberating not having an atrocious keyboard and a tiny screen in front of you all the time.

Intel do some pretty powerful NUC models now, and you (could) get something similar with an AMD model.

thefz2• 4 years ago

Who cares? MBPs will never see this CPU anyway. Assuming that a CPU is at 100% TDP all the time is a bit naif, too.

nottorp• 4 years ago

Yeah, with Intel's recent definition of TDP the CPU can stay at 300% TDP.

nindalf• 4 years ago

Interesting choice to double down on a power hungry chip when targeting mobile. Personally I would prioritise battery life and a quiet laptop above other considerations. But perhaps the gaming laptop segment they’re targeting is big enough that it makes sense?

Mikeb85• 4 years ago

Don't forget workstation laptops that are basically always plugged in.

flatiron• 4 years ago

my work laptop's CPU sucks 45W: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/201837/...

lasts about 90 minutes when not plugged in (it also has a nvidia card to drive a bunch of monitors). is basically only not-plugged in while checking a quick e-mail or something. i have USB-C bricks and cables scattered throughout the house. doesn't particularly bother me.

macilacilove• 4 years ago

With severe throttling it might become an energy efficient but slow chip when needed.

wmf3• 4 years ago

This is kind of a rebrand of the 12900K so it didn't cost much to develop. They have P class and H class processors for laptops that you could actually use on your lap.

ChuckNorris895• 4 years ago

This is kind of a rebrand of the 12900K so it didn't cost much to develop

More correct would be binning instead of rebranding, and no, better binned chips do cost more to weed out from the rest of the silicon, regardless of being identical in design to the rest of the (cheaper) chips, since they can clock higher within the same power envelope due to winning the silicon fab lottery.

jeffbee4• 4 years ago

The fact that it can draw a ton of power doesn't make it "power hungry".

adrian_b• 4 years ago

The mobile workstations which use such CPUs have usually also a much higher idle power consumption, not only a much higher peak power consumption, in comparison with low-power laptops.

For example, my laptop is an older Dell Precision mobile workstation, with a Skylake mobile Xeon, 32 GB ECC RAM and an NVIDIA Quadro GPU.

It has an idle power consumption of 25 W (with the screen light being on), which means that even when staying idle the battery would last only 4 hours (with the screen light off the battery would obviously last longer, but the 4 hour limit would be valid e.g. when I would just use the laptop to read documents).

In this Dell mobile workstation, the CPU power limit for infinite time is set to 60 W, even if that laptop CPU has a nominal TDP of 45 W. Unlike in thinner laptops, in such a mobile workstation the CPU can indeed dissipate continuously for an indefinite time 60 W without throttling. Taking into account the power consumption of the remainder of the laptop, when running at 100% CPU utilization, the battery will be drained in less than an hour.

The new Alder Lake i9-12950HX will be used in the new mobile workstations Dell Precision 7670 and Dell Precision 7770.

These might have a lower idle power consumption than my older model, but I doubt that it will be less than 20 W, when also having a discrete NVIDIA GPU and 64 GB RAM.

I expect that the steady-state CPU maximum power consumption will also be higher than the nominal 55 W TDP, maybe at 65 W, while the turbo power consumption of i9-12950HX is 157 W, according to the rumors.

The other mobile workstation vendors, e.g. Lenovo, HP, MSI, will have similar models.

kllrnohj5• 4 years ago

The low-power CPUs already launched first. That's what the prioritized, and are already showing up in thin & lights like the XPS 13 Plus ( https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/laptops/new-xps-13-plus/spd/... ).

These power-hungry variants are the last of the lineup to be released.

michaelmrose• 4 years ago

Gaming and desktop replacement. Plenty of people basically move their laptop between a desk at home and a desk at work.

thefz2• 4 years ago

In SFF PCs like the NUC this makes a lot of sense.

vondur• 4 years ago

These CPU's appear to be for a niche market, the semi-portable mobile workstation.

ChuckNorris895• 4 years ago

Why? This exact class of powerful Intel chips were placed in MacBook Pros before the M1 and those were not exactly niche nor workstation class.

wmf3• 4 years ago

No, HX class didn't even exist in the Intel Mac days. This is a 300W chip being heavily throttled down to <100W for 2-inch-thick "laptops".

pram• 4 years ago

Those were “HK” in the 16 inch MBP. Intel never met a SKU it didn’t like.

alkonaut6• 4 years ago

Which shouldn’t be niche these days. What developer (for example) doesn’t sit 8h per day 98 days of 100 plugged into a wall socket and using external keyboard/screen?

Seems it would be a more common laptop use case than actual mobile use.

inglor_cz• 4 years ago

I take a train to a far away city sometimes (and I am due to take it more often from October on) and there isn't always a socket available, or I have to share it with someone else in turns (one socket for two or three people).

denimnerd42• 4 years ago

I need a chip like this for remote work. I work from my at-home office and company policy doesn't allow desktops at home so we work with H/HX series Intel processors instead. Battery life or weight don't matter at all.

ChuckNorris895• 4 years ago

Laptop OEMs like Eluktronics or XMG have been putting desktop chips in laptops since forever. Have you checked them out? Sounds exactly what you need.

l-albertovich• 4 years ago

OMG, I just went to Eluktronics' site out of curiosity and saw LPP which sounds AMAZING. I've been thinking of something like that for a long time and seeing it readily available just blew my socks off.

throwaway81523• 4 years ago

I have not felt the need for a very fast laptop given reasonable internet. I just do any heavy computation (builds etc.) on a remote server.

antisthenes2• 4 years ago

You don't. You need better software.

Unless you're encoding video or compiling kernels 24/7 on your local machine.

This is the equivalent of asking for a faster horse instead of a car.

theamk4• 4 years ago

Let me guess, you are a web dev?

We have large C++ code base, and our build times are super slow. With beefy machines, it is tolerable. With laptops, it takes hours.

And yes, writing this in C would decrease our compilation times.. But would make the development and debugging times much longer due to the lack of safe abstractions.

nix232• 4 years ago

You don't. You need better software.

Oh, the dream no one ever can achieve ;)

caycep• 4 years ago

someone should make cloud desktops for this sort of thing?

bitL3• 4 years ago

Misleading marketing. It has 8 cores and 8 "cores". Hybrid workloads can really kill performance on big.LITTLE architectures.

kllrnohj5• 4 years ago

Intel's efficient cores are not like the little cores of a big.LITTLE. They are still very potent CPU cores in their own right. We're still talking out-of-order cores & all that jazz ( https://www.anandtech.com/show/16881/a-deep-dive-into-intels... ).

If you have a multithreaded workload that can actually hammer that many cores, you will get decent scaling out of them ( https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Intel-12th-Gen---... )

bitL3• 4 years ago

Still, it's a "Core" core and "Atom" core together, leading to all kinds of unexpected consanguinities. As with M1 benchmarks, what really suffers is the 20%-80% load area, together with the lack of AVX-512 which 11th gen had that might be a deal breaker to some. Also, having 8 efficiency cores is just silly, if you just want to run background tasks with minimal power consumption, how do 8 cores lead to that?

dmitrygr• 4 years ago

They rate these things like planes are rated: "1900 mile range, 400mph speed" really means "1900 mile range" OR "400 mph speed" because the range is only at best economy speed, and the top speed will never produce range.

Same thing here: stated perf OR stated low power. Power use at max perf: 157W

hu3• 4 years ago

Nice. I might get one to replace my current mobile workstation. Then replace thermal paste with liquid metal and it's good to go. Should stay silent unless running some benchmarks.

hulitu• 4 years ago

Are all the cores working at full speed at those 55 watts ?

wmf3• 4 years ago

No, at full speed it consumes 175W.

johnklos• 4 years ago

It's a little sad to see Intel trying so hard to be relevant. AMD has really upped the game, and Apple has surprisingly made Intel #3, all in just the last few years.

Intel is only relevant when they throw power at their CPUs, which isn't something you want with mobile chips.

I genuinely hope they become more competitive soon, since it'll mean better performance and prices for everyone. However, the high power chips really need to go.

nix232• 4 years ago

Don't be sad, since intel changed from a engineering to a pure money-making firm, it went downhill...they deserve it. So many shady things, blatantly lying to customers and faking benchmarks.

I hope they are a getting beaten down until they realize that the are an engineer firm, and if the US is smart, they eventually take over Intel -> "country important products"

Intel - From Inventors of the CPU to Laughing Stock:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JH2nXMv6yZI

mbrodersen2• 4 years ago

Not sad at all. I am glad to see that the market place is working. Punishing companies like Intel that decided to focus more on top management enrichment than quality products. Intel had the chance to do the iPhone CPU and turned it down. Intel was the #1 chip manufacturer in the world but ended up falling behind. Intel had the chance to be the #1 ARM manufacturer in the world but decided not to. And yet the Intel CEO’s who made these decision were all rewarded with massive bonuses. So much for accountability.

teleforce• 4 years ago

If you're willing to spend USD500 on a new Intel CPU for your new system, you might as well buy the new Xeon W-3300 series CPU (3rd Gen Xeon Scalable).

The cheapest W-3300 (W-3323) series is based on Ice Lake architecture, that means it can now suport accelerator for polynomials multiplication and SHA-2 for crypto operations. The lowest specs CPU has 12 cores/24 threads and only cost double compared to Core i9 (around USD1000), however it can support up to 4TB RAM (~30 times more memory than the core i9 max 128GB RAM).

But again we're comparing mobile CPU with workstation CPU, i.e. 1/4 of the power, 55 W vs 220 W. If any laptop manufacturer is adopting the Xeon CPU in a laptop workstation (e.g. Thinkpad Extreme), I'll probably buy the laptop in a heartbeat. If we can have a powerful gaming tablet, why not a powerful laptop workstation? [1]

[1]Introducing The World's Most Powerful Gaming Tablet: The Rog Flow Z13:

https://rog.asus.com/articles/rog-gaming-laptops/2022-rog-fl...

Intel’s Core i9-12950HX has 16 cores and 55 watts of power

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