I’ve replaced my four year old PC with a new PC with Intel’s recently announced 12th gen (Alder Lake) CPU and have been curious about how the dramatically changed chip architecture affects simulations. A standard, one hand CVData simulation ran ten billion rounds in 90 seconds, or about 110 million rounds per second. This is about four times the older PC. Of course, a more complex sim will take longer. This is vastly faster than the equipment I used to run the Blackjack Attack Chapter X sims.

Some notes. The old PC (I7-8700K) was substantially overclocked with increased voltage and higher frequencies on all cores. The new PC (I9-12900KF) ran with standard settings as I have not yet overclocked. The RAM is currently running below specs and will be increased in frequency by 8%. The old PC was running at 95-100% CPU. I only ran 16 of the 24 threads on the new PC, so it was running about 85-90% and temperature peaked at 70C, which leaves some room. (Note, I was using task manager for CPU measurements which is notoriously inaccurate.) I am using Win10. The Thread Director in the new chip, which theoretically increases performance, is only supported by Win11. So, it looks like I can find substantially more speed.

Last upgrade I made was a disappointment. This one was more than I expected. Of course, this is vastly faster than the first multi-million dollar mainframe I used.