Lion Cove: Intel's P-Core Roars

About 94.9 GB/s DRAM bandwidth for the Core Ultra 7 258V they measured. Aren't Intel going to respond to the 200GB/s bandwidth of the M1 Pro introduced 3 years ago? Not to mention 400GB/s of Max and 800GB/s of the Ultra?

Most of the bandwidth comes from cache hits, but for those rare workloads larger than the caches, Apples products may be 2-8x faster?

It looks awesome. I am definitely going to purchase a 14" Lunar Lake laptop from either Asus (Zenbook S14) or Lenovo (Yoga Slim). I really like my 14" MBP form factor and these look like they would be great for running Linux.

> A plain memory latency test sees about 131.4 ns of DRAM latency. Creating some artificial bandwidth load drops latency to 112.4 ns.

Can someone put this in context? The values seem order of magnitude higher than here: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16143/insights-into-ddr5-subt...

I completely agree with the author that renaming the L1 cache memory as L0 and introducing a new L1 cache, as done by Intel is a completely misleading terminology.

The correct solution is that from the parent article, to continue to call the L1 cache memory as the L1 cache memory, because there is no important difference between it and the L1 cache memories of the previous CPUs, and to call the new cache memory that has been inserted between the L1 and L2 cache memories as the L1.5 cache memory.

Perhaps Intel did this to give the very wrong impression that the new CPUs have a bigger L1 cache memory than the old CPUs. To believe this would be incorrect, because the so called new L1 cache has a much lower throughput and a worse latency than a true L1 cache memory of any other CPU.

The new L1.5 is not a replacement for an L1 cache, but it functions as a part of the L2 cache memory, with identical throughput as the L2 cache, but with a lower latency. As explained in the article, this has been necessary to allow Intel to expand the L2 cache to 2.5 MB in Lunar Lake and to 3 MB in Arrow Lake S (desktop CPU), in comparison with AMD, which has an only 1 MB L2 cache (but a bigger L3 cache).

According to rumors, while the top AMD desktop CPUs without stacked cache memory have an 80 MB L2+L3 cache (16 MB L2 + 64 MB L3), the top Intel model 285K might have 78 MB of cache, i.e. about the same amount, but with a different distribution on levels: 2 MB L1.5 + 40 MB L2 + 36 MB L3. Nevertheless, until now there is no official information from Intel about Arrow Lake S, whose launch is expected in a month from now, so the amount of L3 cache is not certain, only the amounts of L2 and L1.5 are known from earlier Intel presentations.

Lunar Lake is an excellent design for all applications where adequate cooling is impossible, i.e. thin and light notebooks and tablets or fanless small computers.

Nevertheless, Intel could not abstain from not using unfair marketing tactics. Almost all the benchmarks presented by Intel at the launch of Lunar Lake have been based on the top model 288V. Both top models 288V and 268V are likely to be unobtainium for most computer models, while at the few manufacturers that will offer this option they will be extremely overpriced.

Most available and affordable computers with Lunar Lake will not offer any better CPU than 258V, which is the one tested in the parent article. 258V has only 4.8 GHz/2.2 GHz turbo/base clock frequencies, vs. 5.1 GHz/3.3 GHz of the 288V used in the Intel benchmarks and in many other online benchmarks. So the actual experience of most Lunar Lake users will not match most published benchmarks, even if it will be good enough in comparison with any competitors in the same low-power market segment.

We'll have to see how this compared to Zen 5 once 24H2 drops.

And once more than like three Zen 5 laptops come out.

I apologize in advance for my possibly off-topic linguistics-nerd pun:

Q: What do you call Windows with its UI translated to Hebrew? A: The L10N of Judah