Intel’s Alder Lake big.little CPU design, tested: it’s a barn burner
Intel&#x27;s processor is drawing 307W to slightly edge past the 5950X in Cinebench, which only draws around 214W.<p>It&#x27;s hard to cool 307W over extended periods without your computer becoming <i>really</i> loud, even with a water cooling setup.<p>Now, if they had that kind of cooling available, they could have easily gotten a lot more performance out of the Ryzen, while the i9 is already operating at the limits of what consumer grade cooling can sustain.<p>There&#x27;s no way that Intel processor is beating a 5950X that is <i>also</i> drawing 300W. At that point some Ryzen&#x27;s will be operating at close to 6GHz per core.<p>The most interesting takeaway is that Intel apparently has no qualms selling a processor with a stock configuration that draws 300W.<p>Also their Ryzen numbers are beyond suspicious. On a <i>silent</i> configuration (peak power draw ~209W, 175W sustained, some undervolting) my Ryzen 5900X hits a Cinebench R20 score of 8835 vs their 8390. I suspect my rig is worse since I cheaped out on the RAM, but I wouldn&#x27;t know because they omit information about the Ryzen test rig.<p>Their Ryzen numbers don&#x27;t add up with other benchmarks around the internet either: The 5950X should hit around 10400, and the 5900X should hit 8600 in their stock configurations with mid-to-high-grade RAM[1]. Their scores are 400 points and 200 points lower respectively.<p>To get numbers as bad as theirs, I have to mismatch my FCLK and RAM intentionally. But again, we don&#x27;t know what their setup is because they didn&#x27;t tell us.<p>We however do know that they used DDR5 RAM for the Intel processor, which the current gen Ryzen don&#x27;t support. Likely some performance was gained there as well, but obviously they didn&#x27;t test the Intel processor with DDR4 RAM to get an idea of how much comes down to faster RAM. It&#x27;s still fair to use DDR5, since the Intel processor supports it, but it&#x27;s hard to say much about the Intel processor performance (development) itself without some additional information. Without this information we don&#x27;t know whether we can expect the next generation of Ryzen processors with DDR5 support to immediately leave Intel in the dust again, or whether DDR4&#x2F;DDR5 doesn&#x27;t really matter.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.guru3d.com&#x2F;articles_pages&#x2F;amd_ryzen_9_5900x_and_5950x_review,10.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.guru3d.com&#x2F;articles_pages&#x2F;amd_ryzen_9_5900x_and_...</a>