Z690 Chipset Motherboards and Alder Lake CPU

[eric76]

@c-o-pr

Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Someone once said, it’s better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. We can try and fail, but often it’s the journey that matters.

You have decided to quit without even trying. That’s your choice.

well said !

 

[beelzebozo]

Not to sound negative -- but with the supposed power hungry Alder Lake SoC, where Apple has been touting how good the M1 chips are, I find it hard the Intel will convince Apple to utilize Alder Lake on the at least the next Mac Pro; but of course I could be totally wrong.

 

[CaseySJ]

Not to sound negative -- but with the supposed power hungry Alder Lake SoC, where Apple has been touting how good the M1 chips are, I find it hard the Intel will convince Apple to utilize Alder Lake on the at least the next Mac Pro; but of course I could be totally wrong.

Alder Lake is extremely power hungry at load with just 8 high-performance cores. On the performance per watt scale, Zen 3 continues to lead by a healthy margin.

Mac Pros have historically used Intel Xeon processors instead of desktop processors, so Alder Lake-S is most likely excluded from a rumored Intel-based successor to the current Mac Pro.

Ice Lake-W is the rumored contender.

There are significant differences between the standard M1 and the M1 Pro/Max, including new new interconnect fabrics. A recent YouTube video from Rene Ritchie interviews two Apple VPs who discuss the remarkable enhancements that went into the Pro and Max variants.

Rumors recently stated that a high-end desktop (HEDT) version of the chip has taped out to TSMC and may be ramping up soon. It’s supposed to be a dual M1 Max so I’m not sure whether that chip is powerful enough for the Mac Pro or whether it might go into a rumored small form factor Mac Pro.

If this new chip is not powerful enough to replace a 28-core Xeon, then there might be an Ice Lake-W version of the Mac Pro as an interim solution.

Lots of “ifs” and “maybes”…

 

[etorix]

@beelzebozo There's no issue with power but no speculation here: MacPro7,1 uses Xeon W-3200 CPUs. These are Cascade Lake-SP, with TDP up to 205 W, 64 PCIe 3.0 lanes, up to 28 cores and support for up to 2 TB of ECC RAM in six channels (DDR4-2933 RDIMM). Alder Lake is a desktop CPU and comes nowhere near these specifications. No Alder Lake in a Mac Pro.

The server version of Alder Lake goes by the code name "Sapphire Rapids": 2 MB L2 per P-core core instead of 1.25 MB in Alder Lake; no E-cores. But Sapphire Rapids has not yet been launched—and by the time the Xeon W variant appears Apple will likely not sell any Intel-based Mac and will not look back. So no hope for Sapphire Rapids in a Mac Pro.

If Apple were to update the Mac Pro, it would be with the current Xeon W-3300 CPUs. TDP 270 W, PCIe 4.0 up to 38 cores (but OS X can only use up to 64 threads) and up to 4 TB of DDR4-3200 RDIMM in eight channels. But Apple could also just keep the current Mac Pro until it is replaced by an Apple Silicon Mac Pro some time next year. As time goes without an update, it gets less and less likely that there will be an update to the Intel Mac Pro. The last hope might be that Apple introduces both an updated Intel Mac Pro and the "Jade" Apple Silicon Mac Pro. (If, and only if, Apple thinks that a dual M1 Max is not enough to replace a Xeon W-3xxx. And assumes this position publicly. That's a big "if". A very, very big "if".)

And, before you ask, no one has yet succeeded to boot OS X on a W-3300, although these are "Ice Lake Xeons", the server/workstation counterpart to the 10th generation of Core CPUs, and the last generation with full support on OS X. (It's getting closer and closer, but no success yet.)

I will follow the attempts with Alder Lake here like I follow the attempts with an Ice Lake Xeon, but I do not expect it to be a short and simple story.

 

[beelzebozo]

I have a 12700K and am supposed to get a GA z690-AERO-G-DDR4 board in a few weeks so if you need a hand, I can help.

 

[dehjomz]

@c-o-pr

Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Someone once said, it’s better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. We can try and fail, but often it’s the journey that matters.

You have decided to quit without even trying. That’s your choice.

It's still an x86 CPU after all. If macOS can run on Ryzen with its CCX's and so on, why not Alder Lake? They may be different, but they still run x86 code.... Alder Lake still boots on Windows 10. The challenge for macOS may be the ACPI implementation, although Gigabyte is claiming the same ACPI 5.x on z690 as they have on z490 and z590. Will be interesting to see what's different.

I agree where there's a will there's a way!

 

[CaseySJ]

It's still an x86 CPU after all. If macOS can run on Ryzen with its CCX's and so on, why not Alder Lake? They may be different, but they still run x86 code.... Alder Lake still boots on Windows 10. The challenge for macOS may be the ACPI implementation, although Gigabyte is claiming the same ACPI 5.x on z690 as they have on z490 and z590. Will be interesting to see what's different.

I agree where there's a will there's a way!

They even got macOS to run on Threadripper TRX40. That took a while, but there was a will and they found a way. And user TrulySpinach on GitHub developed AMDRyzenCPUPowerManagement.kext.

 

[CaseySJ]

I agree with your sentiments, but ARM is not proprietary to Apple. The Apple Silicon M1 is a proprietary implementation of a licensed third-party instruction set, but the fact that it can run Windows 11 (ARM Version) and Linux (ARM builds) means it's not "completely" proprietary.

Many companies have licensed the ARM instruction set ("architecture" license) and ARM cores ("core" license). With an architecture license, a company can produce its own implementation of the architecture without licensing the implementation from ARM. Apple has been doing this at least since their 64-bit ARM chip for iPhone.

ARM was founded in 1990 as a joint venture between (a) Acorn, (b) Apple, and (c) VLSI Technology.

 

[dehjomz]

As to the new Alder Lake chip, personally I am actually quite happy to say that I've never been as excited about a new Intel chip in such awhile, not since the announcement of Skylake.

I'm glad you're excited... Intel needed to come back. It was sad to see them languish for so long, unable to volume ramp 10nm.

I came across this interesting article from Igor's Labs on setting a custom V/F Curve for Alder Lake that allows the user to tune the voltage and thus power consumption under load.

Intel Alder Lake Test: When motherboard settings affect the power consumption and temperature of the CPU | Practice | Page 4 | igor´sLAB

Are you still amazed about the so different power consumption values at the different launch reviews of Intel’s Alder Lake? In the meantime I have the data of a second motherboard model and I could…

www.igorslab.de

The default values in the MSI BIOS resulted in 254W of power consumption under an all-core load in Cinebench R23 with temps approaching 86C.

And by applying a voltage offset, he shaved 31W (and 11 degrees C) off of the 12900K. 86C to 75C, and Cinebench scores remained roughly the same as stock. That's a marked improvement. So while Alder Lake is a power consumption beast, perhaps it can somewhat be tamed by the astute user, rather than relying on the motherboard's defaults.

Something to experiment with when you're up and running.

 

[CaseySJ]

Just when we thought Alder Lake was exciting, here’s AMD’s data center presentation from earlier today.

In the above keynote AMD announced the first multi chip module GPU: