Intel Kills Off Exotic Packaging For Core i9-12900K, Core i9-10980XE
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Core i9-12900K
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Intel has officially killed off its «exotic» CPU boxes for its 12th Gen Core i9-12900K, one of the best CPUs, and the Core i9-10980XE, the HEDT flagship, from three years ago. Instead, Intel will replace the packaging for each CPU model with the same smaller boxes as their non-flagship Core i9, i7, and i5 counterparts. Intel will begin enforcing these changes by September 4.
The Core i9-12900K box is getting the simplest update of the two, with its «exotic» 164 x 130 x 139mm gold wafer box getting replaced with the same box as other Alder Lake Core i9 models lacking an Intel cooling solution. This new box measures 116 x 44 x 101mm. Remember that this change is for the standard Core i9-12900K variant alone. The special edition Core i9-12900KS will retain its exotic packaging, featuring a chip-exclusive dark blue theme.
The most surprising twist is the box change of Intel’s nearly obsolete Core i9-10980XE 18-core flagship from almost four years ago. Intel’s last HEDT platform is still in production and needs a box art change right now for cost-cutting reasons. Like the Core i9-12900K, the core i9-10980XE box will shrink from its existing 138 x 138 x 61mm package into the smaller 116 x 44 x 101mm packaging from its non-flagship counterparts. But, the black and gold box art will remain the same to stay in line with the «Extreme Edition» lettering on the chips model name.
The box art change for the Core i9-12900K isn’t surprising. Intel has done this habitually over the past few CPU generations, killing off the flagship box art just before releasing a new generation of CPUs, Raptor Lake, that may come out in October. Intel probably does this to ensure the next-generational CPU box art stands out much as possible.
But, the Core i9-10980XE’s box art change is quite puzzling given the architecture’s age.
Intel has forgotten about the HEDT platform since Cascade Lake debuted in 2019, leaving AMD to dominate the space with its Ryzen Threadripper CPUs. So instead, the company has relegated itself to its mainstream platform and building up core counts on that front instead.
But, there is a chance this Core i9-10980XE box art change is more than a cost-saving measure from Intel. There have been rumors that Intel will return to the HEDT market relatively soon with a new architecture codenamed Fishhawk Falls (known as Alder Lake-X).
This new architecture would be a copycat of Intel’s previous HEDT platforms, where the company takes its latest server architecture and transforms it into a high-end consumer desktop platform. For Fishhawk Falls, that architecture would be a HEDT variant of Sapphire Rapids — Intel’s upcoming server architecture built on the same Intel 7 node as Alder Lake.
Anything beyond this information is pure speculation at this point. But, there is a chance this info could be genuine, with the Core i9-10980XE’s box art change being the first sign of Intel returning to the HEDT platform.
But that could be a while, with Intel constantly delaying Sapphire Rapids due to unforeseen bugs.
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Aaron Klotz is a freelance writer for Tom’s Hardware US, covering news topics related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.
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Intel kills off ridiculous Core i9 10900K packaging
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Intel has announced that it is switching out the massive boxes it uses for the Core i9 10900K for more modest packaging (via PC Watch ). The large plastic and cardboard boxes it currently uses will be replaced on February 28, although it may take a while for the new packaging to filter through, and you can expect to see both types for a while.
The reason for this is simple—it means it can fit more than three times as many chips on to a pallet as it does currently. It’s all about shipping, you see, and moving around a lot of mostly empty boxes is not quite as efficient as Intel would have hoped. Currently, it can only get 480 of the oversized boxes on a pallet, while the switch to the normal packaging will allow it to 1,620 units on the same pallet. That’s 3.375 times as many.
This can only be seen as good news, and hopefully could mean we see an end to some of the ridiculous packaging used for high-end chips. While I understand the need to make the halo product in its chip line up feel special, it feels like Intel has left reason behind.
(Image credit: Intel)
It had to pull a similar move with the dodecahedron packaging used with the 9th generation top-end chip, the Core i9 9900K . Sure it’s a wonderful bit of packaging, but it’s not a good use of resources, and once you’ve actually wrestled the CPU out of the box (which wasn’t easy), it’s essentially reduced to useless trash.
(Image credit: AMD)
AMD isn’t blameless on this front either. The packaging it uses for its Threadripper chips is frankly ridiculous. And even though those are massive chips, no one needs that much plastic and foam sitting around afterwards.
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While we’re on this subject, the fact that AMD has dropped the coolers from its Ryzen 5000-series means that its boxes are mostly empty too. Intel’s chips ship in ever so slightly smaller boxes, but there really isn’t much in it. At least these are only cardboard affairs, which is widely recycled and doesn’t feel quite so wasteful.
There’s a lot of dead air being shipped around the world at the moment, and that costs money, money that is ultimately passed down to use consumers.
I could definitely take a hit on a box if it means we save a few pennies.
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Alan has been writing about PC tech since before 3D graphics cards existed, and still vividly recalls having to fight with MS-DOS just to get games to load. He fondly remembers the killer combo of a Matrox Millenium and 3dfx Voodoo, and seeing Lara Croft in 3D for the first time. He’s very glad hardware has advanced as much as it has though, and is particularly happy when putting the latest M.2 NVMe SSDs, AMD processors, and laptops through their paces. He has a long-lasting Magic: The Gathering obsession but limits this to MTG Arena these days.
tests and impressions / Habr
After the official release of the first Alder Lake processors, interest in the 12th generation of Intel Core continues to grow; numerous Internet resources publish various kinds of comparative tests and benchmark results.
We traditionally follow Anandtech, paying tribute to the professionalism and meticulousness of the site’s experts. In the case of Alder Lake, we were more interested not in the number of test parrots, but in the real performance characteristics of the processor, its behavior — such revolutionary changes in the microarchitecture do not happen every day. Under the cut — selected excerpts from extensive testing of the 12th generation flagship — Intel Core i9 models-12900K.
First, once again about the main thing. The Alder Lake family is based on Intel’s hybrid architecture. This architecture combines performance cores (P-cores) with high-performance Efficient cores (E-cores) designed to scale the performance of multi-threaded workloads. Intel Thread Director technology enables two new microarchitectures to work together seamlessly, allowing the operating system (OS) to place the right thread on the right core at the right time.
One of the main questions that worries the average PC user is how much power the processor consumes and how efficient it is.
In the case of Alder Lake, this question becomes really a cornerstone, and this is what the experiment shows.
The chart is clickable. Green shows the increase in consumption due to the inclusion of E-cores one after the other, blue — P-cores. The consumption of the entire package is measured, that is, the performance of the cores is slightly distorted due to the influence of the cache, memory controller, etc., but in general the picture is quite even, with the exception of the first P-core, which gave a jump of over 70 watts. But E-cores live up to their name, they are really effective, but how powerful?
Based on the ideology of Alder Lake, someone may assume that the E-core is something very small and weak, in fact, this is by no means the case. The E-core is equivalent in performance to the single-threaded Sky Lake core, here is its comparison with the P-core in integer and floating point operations.
As for single-threaded performance in general, the picture is as follows.
The P-core is in the lead, regardless of whether DDR4 or DDR5 memory is used, and the E-core looks decent against the background of homogeneous competitors — given its specifics.
Another interesting nuance, discovered by Anandtech experts, is related to Alder Lake’s “multi-nucleus” nature. The official specification of the family states that it does not support the AVX-512 vector extension set. In fact, the Alder Lake P-cores have such support, and if you disable the E-cores and configure the BIOS accordingly (this option is available in a number of motherboards), then a large number of vector functions from the AVX-512 will become available. And when using optimized applications, this will give a performance boost, in some cases very solid, as in the diagram below.
Another pressing practical issue is the choice of hardware and software. DDR4 or DDR5? Windows 10 or Windows 11? As for memory, DDR5 is, of course, preferable — and the point here is not only in speed, but also in twice the number of channels, which makes it possible to better utilize multithreading.
However, as long as prices for DDR5 remain at a speculative level, the topic is rather philosophical. As for Windows, as we remember, Intel promised full support for Alder Lake in Win11 and seamless operation of processors under Win10. After some initial difficulties, the targets were met, at least in terms of performance. Here are the steepest discrepancies in tests, a good two dozen others show a difference of a few percent, and in different directions.
And now there will be slides
We won’t present test results here in comparison with other processors, here is a whole page of them. Gaming benchmarks are placed on a separate page. In short, the performance of the Intel Core i9-12900K is good. As for the conclusions from testing, the main one can be translated as follows: an unusual structure gives rise to unusual problems. Everything new must take root and settle down. The makings of Alder Lake are good, both types of cores, according to experts, turned out to be successful, and the idea itself is interesting and has the right to life.
Intel Core i9-13900KF 24-core LGA 1700 @ 3GHz, LGA 1700 13th gen, 24 cores, 32 threads, 36MB cache, 3GHz P-core, Max Turbo
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