CPU has 18 MB L3 cache That’s 6 P Cores for 20 MB L3 in total
ASUS ProART B660 Creator D4 review Introduction
ASUS has released a motherboard in the Intel B660 series priced just right at 229 EUR/USD. We look at the Alder Lake-ready ProART B660 Creator series, which has two 8cm M2 slots (PCIe Gen4) and two 2.5 GigE ports, and even a pretty strong VRM design.
The B660 board is equipped with an LGA 1700 socket and can support the entire line of Intel’s Alder Lake Desktop CPUs. It can house the unlocked lineup all the way up to the Core i9-12900K; however, a preferable option will be to outfit this board with the non-K series processors that launched alongside the B660 series. The ASUS ProArt B660-Creator D4 features an 8-pin + 4-pin connector for powering the CPU socket and is powered by a 12+1 phase digital power supply solution (CPU-only) comprising of 50A SIC654phases paired with a PWM-Controller: ASP2100 / RT3628AE. The motherboard features dark heatsinks above the power supply, providing adequate cooling for the electrical components beneath. In terms of procedure memory, the board features four DDR4 DIMM slots that support XMP overclocking and support capacities of up to 128 GB. ASUS equips the B660 with 1x PCIe 5.0 x16, 1x PCIe 3.0 x16 (x4), 1x PCIe 3.0 x1. There are two 2280 M.2 slots, both of which have a thermal heat sink finished in the same brushed dark color as the rest of the motherboard. There’s another M.2/M-Key (CIe 3.0 x4, 2280/2260/2242 as well. The PCH heatsink is coated in the dark palette and embossed with the ‘ProART’ trademark. Additionally, the board features four SATA III ports. The rear panel connectors include USB 3.2 Gen 2 Sort-A ports, one USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port, four USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports, HDMI, Display-Port, a dual 2.5G Ethernet port, and a seven-channel audio jack array. The ASUS ProArt B660-Creator D4 will cost $239 US. We’ll load this B660 motherboard up with a Core i9 12900 processor and see how well she handles it. Let’s have a peek.
Alder Lake – Hybrid Computing Architecture
It was time for a new architecture, created from the ground up with a hybrid design; meet Alder Lake, which you’ve probably already heard a lot about. They will also be the first to adopt a hybrid architecture, similar to ARM’s BIG.little, that combines high-performance cores combined with efficient ones, making them the first of their kind for Intel. Furthermore, this new generation is now proven to be the first to support DDR5 memory (DDR4 compatible memory controllers as well) and PCI-Express 5.0, making it the first generation to do so.
Mind you the Core i5 12400 has 6 physical cores but 12 threads. 6 P-Core (12 threads) but 0 E-Core. The CPU has 18 MB L3 cache That’s 6 P Cores for 20 MB L3 in total
Solely performance cores
Alder Lake will make use of Golden Cove CPU cores when speed and performance is critical. And these should make a significant difference in IPC when it comes to processing data compared to say Comet- and Rocket lake. Golden Cove CPU microarchitecture will take the place of the Sunny Cove, Willow Cove, and Cypress Cove microarchitectures, according to Intel. Originally described to as 10 nm Enhanced SuperFin, it will be made using Intel’s Intel 7 manufacturing node, which was introduced in 2012. (10ESF). These high-performance cores will find their way into scalable processors such as Alder Lake and Xeon, as well as Sapphire Rapids. According to Intel, all of the enhancements combined should result in an improvement in IPC of 19 percent, which is on par with or slightly higher than the improvement achieved by Sunny Cove when compared to Skylake. That should even be sufficient to dethrone the Zen 3 architecture of the Ryzen 5000 CPUs.
64KB per core Level 1 instruction cache
DDR5 memory
PCIe 5.0 support
Support for AVX, AVX2, and AVX-VNNI instructions
Below an overview of the new additions non-K processors.
While the pricing for Alder Lake non-K CPUs appears to be quite favorable, their success will also be contingent on the cost of the H670, B660, and H610 motherboards. Additionally, it will be interesting to observe AMD’s reaction to the new Alder Lake processors. AMD’s Ryzen 5000 (Zen 3) had dominated the market before Alder Lake arrived and stole the show, but a slight price decrease might reintroduce Ryzen.
A full Alder Lake-S will processor can include 8 Golden Cove cores and 8 Gracemont cores. It will be manufactured utilizing Intel’s Intel 7 technology, which was previously known as the Intel 10 nm Enhanced SuperFin process. As previously stated, Alder Lake-S will have 8 Golden Cove cores, which are high-performance cores, and 8 Gracemont cores, which are high-efficiency cores. Due to the fact that Gracemont cores do not support Hyper-Threading (HT), Alder Lake-S will only be able to provide 16 cores and 24 threads, which is the same as the i9-12900K configuration.
