Really?I always knew RPL will be pretty much a boosted up ALD, i kinda knew what to expect. Zen 4 is what surprised me, i expected the pcores to dominate zen 4 because the gap between a pcore and a zen 3 was huge in both performance and efficiency, but zen 4 did very well, surpassing my expectations. Still loses to pcores but its much closer than i expected
The hype surrounding Zen 4 was unreal, and ultimately unrealistic. There were reports of a 25% IPC increase which when combined with a healthy clock speed increase, would bury anything from Intel. I think the fact that Zen 4 would have access to TSMC's 5nm process fueled the hype and made it more believable.
As for Raptor Lake, I know that Moore's Law is Dead had said that the core would be enhanced in some way from Alder Lake, but that IPC increase would be minimal and thus most of the performance increase would come from clock speeds. While this had merit, I don't think anyone was expecting Intel to tinker with the cache performance the way they did. That more than anything is what elevates Raptor Lake above Alder Lake.
Raptor Lake's L3 read cache bandwidth was nearly doubled over Alder Lake for instance, and that's huge!
Just look at the cache bandwidth increases here between ADL and RPL. It's apparent that ADL was bandwidth starved and never reached it's performance potential due to the slower cache:
We had a thread over at tpu testing pcore vs zen 3 core and yeah, was pretty nutty. It took hours of tuning on an ultra binned 5950x to get anywhere close to a stock auto settings 12900k when comparing 8P vs 8 zen 3. And even at full configuration, the 12900k just destroyed everything at 35 watts. The score ALD was getting was so insane det0x thought I was cheating 😱😂
@Det0x is an exceptional tweaker, so if that made him pause and consider, it must have been exceptional