In recent times, the consumption of CPUs has been significantly increased when compared to previous generations, and in fact this is a rather worrying parameter since higher consumption not only results in a higher temperature, but also a higher electrical cost. raised. Now, it looks like the next two generations of Intel game processors will have fairly similar, but more extensive consumption data than the generations currently on the market; we will see it.
Consumption of Intel processors: Raptor Lake-S with up to 125W
The Intel Raptor Lake-S line of desktop processors will replace the Alder Lake-S family of processors over the next year or so, and Alder Lake has yet to hit the market (this shows us Intel’s work to continue to innovate, everything is said). These two new generations of processors (the 12th and 13th generation Intel Cores) will be quite stiff competition in the consumer PC segment, and of course Intel intends to complicate the task of AMD to prevent it from pursuing the hegemony of its CPUs. Ryzen.
Thus, Intel’s next generation gaming processor line will have a similar segmentation in terms of consumption, as we will find “K” variants with 125W TDP, “standard” variants with the already so common 65W TDP, and a Plus “Low-TDP” variant with only 35W of TDP.
According to the source of this leak, one of the minor changes we’ll see in Intel Raptor Lake-S will be that the limit of PL4 it will switch to a new reactive operation. Intel Alder Lake-S processors will offer proactive operation, but the new responsive mode will allow chips to reach higher frequencies when performance is required while maintaining peak efficiency.
PL4 will remain an opportunistic limit with a Tau of <= 10ms, so it will almost always appear as a simple spike during some workloads. The PL4 limit also activates overcurrent protection for the supply when it reaches the highest wattage and amperage allowed by the platform.
Regarding the Required power, the 125W Raptor Lake-S variant will feature a PL1 rating of 125W (125W also in performance mode), a PL2 rating of 188W (253W in performance mode) and a PL4 rating of 238W (314W in performance mode). We can see that the PL4 rating is lower due to the recently introduced responsive operation, but the PL2 rating has increased on Alder Lake (which has 241W).
The same goes for Alder Lake 65W chips which are rated 65W PL1 (same in performance mode), 133W PL2 (219W in performance mode) and 179W PL4 (277W in performance mode) . In the end, we have the 35W variants with a 35W PL1 (same in performance mode), 80W PL2 (106W in performance mode) and 118W PL4 (152W in performance mode).
Has the consumption of modern processors exploded?
As can be seen, in the end, no matter how much the relatively low TDP requirements are stated, the actual consumption can be triggered, making the overall system consumption really very high. To the consumption of the processor must be added that of the motherboard, peripherals, storage and, of course, that of the graphics card, which suggests that in the end the Intel ATX12VO standard is intended to ensure that the users need increasingly powerful power sources.
And where is the efficiency? For many years, efficiency has been sought as a primary objective: more performance with the same consumption, or the same performance with less consumption. However, it seems that the tendency is to offer more performance but also more consumption, so it seems that the efficiency is lagging a bit behind.
