Early reports from retailers is that 12th Gen Intel sales are poor

[SpyderTracks]

This is interesting, I think anyway.

Despite my personal feelings around Intel - who I think are in league with the Devil and their business practices in general are enough to put the previous 2 CEO's behind bars for the rest of their lives - it's undoubtedly the case that they have been the big dog for a long time and as such have pretty strong followers / fanboys.

Now, the release of Alder Lake without question puts them at the top of the performance charts, leaving aside the cost to get there, it's an undisputed fact that they're top of performance again.

The official release date was November 4th which is 5 days ago now, and we're just after payday, so that was a sensible release date.

Worth adding, that retailers had stocks of the 12900k and were selling them long before release date, since around 22nd October, this was no mistake, Intel planned that to sensationalise release, it's a childs trick.

Intel’s unreleased Core i9-12900K processor goes on sale early

Intel’s next flagship CPU is already on sale.

www.theverge.com

Now, I'm doing my best to leave my personal feelings aside and just go with the data, I'll explain why I find this significant.

With AMD 5000 series launch, AMD broke most retailers records, that was without question a significant launch.

AMD Ryzen 5000 smashes processor sales records

Lots of people buying them, apparently

www.techradar.com

AMD Sold Over 35,000 Ryzen 5000 & Ryzen 3000 CPUs While Intel Only Sold 5000 10th/9th Gen CPUs In November at MindFactory

AMD sold an insane 35,000 Ryzen 5000 & Ryzen 3000 CPUs in November at MindFactory compared to Intel's measely 5000 10th & 9th Gen Core CPUs.

wccftech.com

AMD Ryzen 5000 was the 'fastest-selling CPU launch' for one UK retailer

Definitely not a paper launch, then.

www.pcgamer.com

In some ways though, this Alder Lake is even more important as it's addressing an entirely new architecture for Intel (first time since 2015) and performance is unquestionably impressive.

But according to early reports from Retailers, Pre Orders and sales so far have been poor. The quote is that they sold more 5000 series in the first few hours than they have of the whole Alder Lake series to date. Remember, the argument that production volumes are low is no different to the 5000 series release, it was just as bad then.

Certainly if we base interest on this forum, we've had very few people looking to buy a 12th Gen system, they're still appearing to go for AMD 5000 platforms.

My thoughts are that AMD have done enough to win over such a percentage of market share, that it is a niche few of the fanboys remaining in Intels camp.

Remember, we've got the AMD 5000 refresh due for release in January which are set to beat Alder Lake again and take the top spot.

Is it that people realise that although Alder Lake is a significant improvement, with the cost of entry, both in motherboards and coolers, plus the cost in power and therefor high end PSU's, that the percentage performance gain doesn't justify the cost? Or is it that people are more interested in AMD's upcoming answer?

 

[Martinr36]

I think its a case of its too early to tell yet, and with intels record over the last year or so its best to hold off till we know more, I mean this is intels second stab of regaining ground since AMD launched the 5000 series.................

 

[barlew]

Absolutely fantastic post as always @SpyderTracks.

So my thoughts are mixed on this one. I am coming from the R9 5900HX.

It was unquestionably an absolute monster of a CPU but it had major flaws.

1. It ran extremely hot. Far hotter than any Intel I've ever owned and that is with liquid metal.

2. I had limited options to control temperatures because there is, as it stands no way to undervolt them.

3. The Ryzen software is absolutely abysmal. I was forever reinstalling drivers or rolling back drivers because, for no reason at all the control software had decided it would have a fit.

Whilst it was a fantastic CPU it gave me more dramas than any Intel CPU ever has. Please bear in mind I need this for gaming and nothing else.

As most of you know I am in the market for a new laptop and after doing the research I will be switching to the I7-11800H. Its frankly a complete no brainer.

Part of me thinks this is a shame because I literally detest Intel and their business practices. However choosing anything else for my use case at this point would literally be foolish.

 

[Ram]

Does anyone think that the delays in getting high end gfx cards is also contributing to people waiting to purchase ?

 

[barlew]

Does anyone think that the delays in getting high end gfx cards is also contributing to people waiting to purchase ?

I am sure in some cases that is the reason but I doubt its a significant number. Intel have really damaged their reputation recently and AMD really came out swinging with their latest line up.

It will be interesting to see how AMD respond.

 

[AgentCooper]

 

[SpyderTracks]

Absolutely fantastic post as always @SpyderTracks.

So my thoughts are mixed on this one. I am coming from the R9 5900HX.

It was unquestionably an absolute monster of a CPU but it had major flaws.

1. It ran extremely hot. Far hotter than any Intel I've ever owned and that is with liquid metal.

2. I had limited options to control temperatures because there is, as it stands no way to undervolt them.

3. The Ryzen software is absolutely abysmal. I was forever reinstalling drivers or rolling back drivers because, for no reason at all the control software had decided it would have a fit.

Whilst it was a fantastic CPU it gave me more dramas than any Intel CPU ever has. Please bear in mind I need this for gaming and nothing else.

As most of you know I am in the market for a new laptop and after doing the research I will be switching to the I7-11800H. Its frankly a complete no brainer.

Part of me thinks this is a shame because I literally detest Intel and their business practices. However choosing anything else for my use case at this point would literally be foolish.

Yeah, I get what you're saying, but I think that's more down to the chassis design than anything. There are plenty of really impressive 5900HX chassis out there that perform admirably.

It's more and more the case that manufacturers just are putting out poor chassis designs, it's not a fault of the CPU's, it really is the design of the case that's the issue. The same is true of many Intel chassis currently also.

The Asus G15 is widely hailed as the best gaming laptop ever, and has the 5900HX and is superb on temps and performance.

Also, if the control center bugged out because of a driver update, that's the fault of the chassis maker, they need to release an update to play nice with the driver update.

The software, I absolutely grant you, it's something Lisa Su is extremely hot on and they've invested an awful lot of cash into hiring some really good programmers to address that. That's definitely always been a weak point of AMD no matter how far ahead they've been.

 

[DarTon]

The Alder-Lake (AL) 12600K and 12700K look excellent. The 12900K is a thermal mess but it's a halo product. Nonetheless, the've beaten AMD's 5000 series on 7nm with a 10nm node. That's impressive. Seems Intel was right to go down the big.little route.

AMD now has a problem. It's a small company and, unlike Intel, they don't own the foundries. They are hostage to TSMC and they ain't TSMC's priority client. Threadripper 5000 is behind schedule. AM4 is not shaping up well, dropping PCIe5 support and being delayed. They just don't have the capacity. And now Intel is right back in the game.

Now, I don't care whether I buy Intel or AMD. I'm looking to buy a new desktop to replace an old i7-6700 some time in 2022, and right now, if pushed, I'd say something like a 12700F would be ideal. Nonetheless, I'm not buying now, and will put it off into 2022 for the following reasons

1. Aldur-Lake is a new architecture. At work, initial testing on 12700K and 12900K rigs is finding loads of issues. Add that to the numerous issues with Win11 and it's a non-starter for us right now. I want to wait for those issues to be ironed out.

2. The overall system cost for AL isn't especially competitive vs. AMD. If I hop over the Pennies to a certain competitor, a 5900X/3080 system is £2,350. The equivalent 12700K, with a 690 board that uses DDR4 and PCIe4 (rest identical) is £2425. Go for a 690 board with DDR5 and PCIe5 support with DDR5 RAM and it's £2,675. It's not a no brainer to go for the Intel system. I want some cheaper boards to be available. Again that's 2022.

3. AL is a "transition" generation. It's straddling both DDR4 / DDR5 and PCIe4 / PCIe5. Where is my upgrade path if I go for a 690 board that uses only DDR4 and PCIe4? Yet the boards with DDR5 and PCIe5 support cost more and that's before I pay 3x the price for DDR5 memory. Plus there are no PCIe5 GPUs or SSDs to buy right now anyway.

If I can, it's just more sensible to wait. Next year we get a refresh of Ryzen in 1H22. 4Q22 we get the 13th gen Raptor Lake which will be fully DDR5/PCIe5. Perhaps we get AMDs Raphael Zen4/AM4 though this seems more likely in 2023.

 

[SpyderTracks]

The Alder-Lake (AL) 12600K and 12700K look excellent. The 12900K is a thermal mess but it's a halo product. Nonetheless, the've beaten AMD's 5000 series on 7nm with a 10nm node. That's impressive. Seems Intel was right to go down the big.little route.

AMD now has a problem. It's a small company and, unlike Intel, they don't own the foundries. They are hostage to TSMC and they ain't TSMC's priority client. Threadripper 5000 is behind schedule. AM4 is not shaping up well, dropping PCIe5 support and being delayed. They just don't have the capacity. And now Intel is right back in the game.

Now, I don't care whether I buy Intel or AMD. I'm looking to buy a new desktop to replace an old i7-6700 some time in 2022, and right now, if pushed, I'd say something like a 12700F would be ideal. Nonetheless, I'm not buying now, and will put it off into 2022 for the following reasons

1. Aldur-Lake is a new architecture. At work, initial testing on 12700K and 12900K rigs is finding loads of issues. Add that to the numerous issues with Win11 and it's a non-starter for us right now. I want to wait for those issues to be ironed out.

2. The overall system cost for AL isn't especially competitive vs. AMD. If I hop over the Pennies to a certain competitor, a 5900X/3080 system is £2,350. The equivalent 12700K, with a 690 board that uses DDR4 and PCIe4 (rest identical) is £2425. Go for a 690 board with DDR5 and PCIe5 support with DDR5 RAM and it's £2,675. It's not a no brainer to go for the Intel system. I want some cheaper boards to be available. Again that's 2022.

3. AL is a "transition" generation. It's straddling both DDR4 / DDR5 and PCIe4 / PCIe5. Where is my upgrade path if I go for a 690 board that uses only DDR4 and PCIe4? Yet the boards with DDR5 and PCIe5 support cost more and that's before I pay 3x the price for DDR5 memory. Plus there are no PCIe5 GPUs or SSDs to buy right now anyway.

If I can, it's just more sensible to wait. Next year we get a refresh of Ryzen in 1H22. 4Q22 we get the 13th gen Raptor Lake which will be fully DDR5/PCIe5. Perhaps we get AMDs Raphael Zen4/AM4 though this seems more likely in 2023.

In my view, the comparison of Intel Alder Lake to AMD 5000 isn't fair, one is over a year old now. I realise it's the only comparison to make at the moment, but it's not what I'd be concentrating on if I were looking to buy a system.

The fair comparison will be AMD's 5000 refresh in January. By all current reports, they're set to beat Aldur Lake at vastly reduced power consumption and core count.

 

[barlew]

Yeah, I get what you're saying, but I think that's more down to the chassis design than anything. There are plenty of really impressive 5900HX chassis out there that perform admirably.

It's more and more the case that manufacturers just are putting out poor chassis designs, it's not a fault of the CPU's, it really is the design of the case that's the issue. The same is true of many Intel chassis currently also.

The Asus G15 is widely hailed as the best gaming laptop ever, and has the 5900HX and is superb on temps and performance.

Also, if the control center bugged out because of a driver update, that's the fault of the chassis maker, they need to release an update to play nice with the driver update.

The software, I absolutely grant you, it's something Lisa Su is extremely hot on and they've invested an awful lot of cash into hiring some really good programmers to address that. That's definitely always been a weak point of AMD no matter how far ahead they've been.

The thing is, putting my experience aside, whether the issues I saw were endemic of the CPU or the manufacture of the chassis, at this point is purely academic.

Even when the chip is in a chassis which it peforms well in it is being outclassed by the 11800H.

The driver missmatch issue is a problem with AMD it is documented thoroughly online. The software just loses sync with the currently installed driver. It happens with their GPU's as well apparently (at least that's what my reading leads me to believe).

Again I'm loath to tout Intel as I think they are a horrible company, but at the moment there is no way I could consider another 5900Hx over the 11800.

I see what you are saying about the G15 but if you read the reviews the same can be said for the Asus chassis I am coming from. When you run benchmarks on the thing it really stands up to the reviews but when you use it in real use cases it has alot of problems.

Like I said earlier the ball really is in AMD's court. They need to pull another rabbit out of the hat here.

 

[SpyderTracks]

The thing is, putting my experience aside, whether the issues I saw were endemic of the CPU or the manufacture of the chassis, at this point is purely academic.

Even when the chip is in a chassis which it peforms well in it is being outclassed by the 11800H.

The driver missmatch issue is a problem with AMD it is documented thoroughly online. The software just loses sync with the currently installed driver. It happens with their GPU's as well apparently (at least that's what my reading leads me to believe).

Again I'm loath to tout Intel as I think they are a horrible company, but at the moment there is no way I could consider another 5900Hx over the 11800.

I see what you are saying about the G15 but if you read the reviews the same can be said for the Asus chassis I am coming from. When you run benchmarks on the thing it really stands up to the reviews but when you use it in real use cases it has alot of problems.

Like I said earlier the ball really is in AMD's court. They need to pull another rabbit out of the hat here.

Software wise, on all platforms, AMD really need to totally readdress what they deem as acceptable as public releases.

Their current GPU's are really good in raw performance terms, and even the first attempts at DLSS and Ray Tracing are impressive given how late to the party they are, yet sales are very weak, and I don't doubt that's very much down to the loss of trust with their history of driver support, but especially with the RX5000 series, which lets face it were always problematic.

 

[Martinr36]

This type of thing isn't going to help sales, and it looks as though you're going to pretty stuffed till next year if gaming on 12th gen & W10

 

[DarTon]

Software wise, on all platforms, AMD really need to totally readdress what they deem as acceptable as public releases.

Their current GPU's are really good in raw performance terms, and even the first attempts at DLSS and Ray Tracing are impressive given how late to the party they are, yet sales are very weak, and I don't doubt that's very much down to the loss of trust with their history of driver support, but especially with the RX5000 series, which lets face it were always problematic.

The AMD 6000 GPU series on 7nm TSMC are in many ways superior to Nvidia's 3000 series on 8nm Samsung. Power efficiency and pure rasterization are marginally better. They lag in areas like FSR vs. DLSS, RT, NVENC though. And, yes, most of us have a default of buying Nvidia due to driver issues.

I think though they would have sold more GPUs simply if they could have made more. The problem is again capacity. TSMC is a bottleneck.

AMD don't have a tech issue. It's just that they are spread so thin over a wide range of products. Retail CPUs, Threadripper, EYPC, consoles GPUs etc. The market caps are similar at $200bn for Intel vs. $180bn for AMD but Intel has 115,000 employees and AMD only has 13,500. Let's not mention Nvidia with a market cap of $800bn and also about 13,000 employees but their product range is far narrower than AMD. AMD just need to be bigger and more vertically integrated so they can provide better support for their product releases.

 

[SpyderTracks]

This type of thing isn't going to help sales, and it looks as though you're going to pretty stuffed till next year if gaming on 12th gen & W10

God, that's a long list on what is supposed to be the ultimate gaming platform.

 

[Martinr36]

God, that's a long list on what is supposed to be the ultimate gaming platform.

Exactly mate, and from the sound of it is going to have to be sorted at BIOS level, and not till next year for W10, so with the Ryzen refresh early next year I think their time at the top could be really short lived......

 

[SpyderTracks]

I've been quite intrigued about Intel sales of 12th Gen. On a new gen release, the forum normally explodes and we get some idea of the popularity and demand to a product generation.

Since the Intel launch, the forum has been remarkably quiet compared to normal, even before the covid madness.

It does appear that while intel have made some headway with 12th Gen, people still seem to be mainly going AMD

Alder Lake boosts Intel's CPU market share, but AMD remains dominant

The data comes from Germany's largest retailer, Mindfactory, and was posted by Redditor ingebor. We see that Intel has finally reached a 30% share of a sales...

www.techspot.com

AMD Continues to Gain CPU Market Share as Intel's 12th Gen Alder Lake Sales Remain Flat | Hardware Times

AMD continues to rule the desktop CPU and gaming market despite the launch of Intel’s 12th Gen Alder Lake-S processors. Going by various reports from popular retails and statistics from Steam, AMD gained close to 1% of the CPU market in November, increasing its overall share to nearly 32%. This...

www.hardwaretimes.com

 

[B4zookaw]

Is the price of 12 Gen motherboards delaying adoption? And DDR5 prices for that matter?

 

[Salmon Fisher]

I've been quite intrigued about Intel sales of 12th Gen. On a new gen release, the forum normally explodes and we get some idea of the popularity and demand to a product generation.

Since the Intel launch, the forum has been remarkably quiet compared to normal, even before the covid madness.

It does appear that while intel have made some headway with 12th Gen, people still seem to be mainly going AMD

Alder Lake boosts Intel's CPU market share, but AMD remains dominant

The data comes from Germany's largest retailer, Mindfactory, and was posted by Redditor ingebor. We see that Intel has finally reached a 30% share of a sales...

www.techspot.com

AMD Continues to Gain CPU Market Share as Intel's 12th Gen Alder Lake Sales Remain Flat | Hardware Times

AMD continues to rule the desktop CPU and gaming market despite the launch of Intel’s 12th Gen Alder Lake-S processors. Going by various reports from popular retails and statistics from Steam, AMD gained close to 1% of the CPU market in November, increasing its overall share to nearly 32%. This...

www.hardwaretimes.com

AMD has been rightfully popular, partly due to the fact they kept the same chipset. But they have made a consistently good CPU for three gens now. Intel can't claim that.

 

[SpyderTracks]

Is the price of 12 Gen motherboards delaying adoption? And DDR5 prices for that matter?

I do think that certainly plays a part. Although they released the B660, H670 and H610 boards, the general consensus is that they are so poor, they're not a viable option for anything over a very basic office PC, so it really is only the Z690 boards that are worthwhile buying, and they're at an extreme premium. Plus B660 is still really expensive for what's supposed to be a mid range board.

Plus they've hugely cut down the features on B660, so only one NVME slot, only 4 sata ports, no CPU overclock, it's just hugely restrictive for mid range. Doesn't make sense given the price and limited features, you just go for Z690

Best B660 Motherboards [Budget, High-End, Overclocking] - Tech4Gamers

Here, I have listed the Best B660 Motherboard, sorted by Budget, Value, Size, Looks, and performance alongside comparison.

tech4gamers.com

The pricing on B660 may well be just down to short supply as they're still very new, so that may well come down.

Hardware Unboxed were testing a B660 board, and the actual PCB itself got so hot that it melted some tape they'd stuck sensors on to measure it. That's just not normal, and apparently it wasn't an isolated event, seemed to happen across a few boards they tested. That's really not good

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1490543283730214916

Buildzoid who is the king of anything motherboard related has basically given up looking into anything other than Z690 on Intel, in this own words "I've come to the conclusion that the channel has gotten way too normie recently. As part of making the channel less normie I've decided I will not be doing any B660 or H670 or H610 content what so ever. As far as I'm concerned those motherboards no longer exist."

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1489747152263913474

AMD has been rightfully popular, partly due to the fact they kept the same chipset. But they have made a consistently good CPU for three gens now. Intel can't claim that.

What I also wonder is given the power requirements on the 12th Gen which is the first iteration of a new architecture, normally subsequent architectural improvements would be power adjustments and minor overclocks. I just don't see the headroom available with 12th Gen, certainly on the 12900k, there's just no room for more power or thermals, it's already drawing 400w just to keep up with AMD.

 

[SpyderTracks]

I do also think it's unfortunate timing for Intel, they really needed 12th Gen chips at the time 11th Gen released as that's when the market was booming due to remote working and the news about the upcoming GPU's.

I think after March 2020 and the pandemic, so many people have already upgraded to AMD as that was really the only option unless you settled for 10 Gen Intel. But I think so many people upgraded since March 2020 that a significant portion of the market are set for the next 5 years.

AMD just had an exceptional new platform right at the right time, with nvidia and AMD following on with exceptional GPU's not far afterwards. I think it's satisfied a lot of the market for some time to come.