Maximum PC - USA (2022-01)

Over the past year, I have

fallen back in love with older

games from my childhood

and this nostalgia hit has left

me with less time to focus on

the newer releases. That was

until November arrived.

Until then, I played the

Lego Star Wars and Batman

games on PS2 again. I’m

also big into racing titles, so

I always find myself hopping

back into Gran Turismo 4 ,

Dirt Rally, and Forza Horizon

4. Other games I’ve gotten

into include the original two

Star Wars Battlefront games

and a load of Call of Duty and

Battlefield titles.

So when November crept

up, I knew it would be a busy

month. I was mainly interested

in Call of Duty: Vanguard,

Forza Horizon 5 , Grand Theft

Auto: The Trilogy Definitive

Edition, and Battlefield 2042.

All of these games, on paper,

I knew I’d be excited about.

The one I was most

interested in, though, was GTA

Trilogy. This might show my

age, but when San Andreas

came out I was only five, so the

chances of my parents letting

me play these titles were slim.

I did manage to play them on

Android in my teens, but this

should be an opportunity to

play them properly before

making a judgment. I will

check in next month with my,

hopefully positive, opinions.

Often with games, less can

be more—a case of if it ain’t

broke, don’t fix it, just tweak

it a little. You don’t need to

reinvent the wheel, otherwise,

it’s back on with the PS2.

SAM LEWIS

Staff writer

JEREMY LAIRD, EDITOR

INTEL’S NEW Alder Lake chips are

undoubtedly a big step forward. But do

they have a fatal flaw? I speak, inevitably, of

power consumption. Not in a global quasi-

environmental sense, that’s not my remit.

What I’m talking about is the extent to which

power consumption is a problem from a

performance and usability perspective.

Last issue, we had the 129 00K in the labs

and, boy, does it like a drink. It’s a 2 40W-plus

chip. This month, the compact 12 600K is in

the house and, at first glance, it’s a more

efficient chip, topping out at around 150 W in

heavy multi-threaded workloads.

Depending on how you look at that, the

126 00K seems to solve Alder Lake’s power

problem. After all, 150 W is manageable on

the desktop. On the other hand, the CPU

part of Apple’s new M 1 Pro and Max chips

delivers roughly the same class of multi-

threaded performance for just 30 W.

Yes, the 126 00K is a fair bit faster than

an M1, and it’s a desktop chip, not a mobile

chip. But the mobile version of Alder Lake

is based on the same silicon. Clock it down

for mobile use and it will use less power,

but also deliver less performance. To put

it another way, the 12 600K uses four to five

times more power for about 30 percent

more performance.

Revised for mobile implementation, that

gap will narrow. But it’s hard to imagine that

M1 won’t remain at least twice as power-

efficient, which will make Alder Lake look

silly in a laptop performance comparison.

In the short term and for the desktop,

you could say who cares? 15 0W is practical

on the desktop and M1 chips only come with

Apple computers. But it begs the question of

whether the ARM instruction set, on which

the M 1 is based, is fundamentally superior

to x86. People used to dismiss ARM as

not being suitable for high-performance

computing. That now clearly isn’t true.

Instead, the current doubt is whether x 86

can close the efficiency gap to ARM.

In the short run, it’s academic but the

comparison will become harder to ignore.

Just imagine how much CPU performance

150 W’s worth of M 1 could deliver on the

desktop, let alone 2 40W. Anyway, M 1 is

showing what is possible when it comes to

power and performance. We’ll never have

Apple chips in our PCs. We may never have

ARM CPUs, either. But what we will have is

definitely going to be faster thanks to the

impressive example being set by Apple.

Does power consumption matter?

©^

IN

TE

L

Does Alder

Lake have

a drinking

problem?

66 MAXIMUMPC JAN 2022

tested. reviewed. verdictized.
in the lab

66