- My mind was so blown by the 12th gen Alder Lake
reference validation platform motherboard
that I had to do an entire video about not just it,
but the amazing test benches that Intel uses
in their validation labs.
Why is this so mind blowing to me?
Well, not because it has the most features,
or overclocks better than a retail board,
or even fits in a normal computer case,
but because the tools that Intel creates
for CPU development, including these boards,
are absolutely freaking incredible.
Incredible, like this segue to our sponsor.
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- Every new CPU that Intel builds needs
an accompanying development platform motherboard.
And I'm sure they'd be happy to have a Asus
or Gigabyte do it for them,
but the cold hard truth is that no one but Intel
could possibly hope to build a motherboard
for a CPU that hasn't even been manufactured yet.
Oh, and also, most of the features and tools
of these boards are both specific to the process
of designing and debugging upcoming platforms.
So, not as much value to general consumers and chalk full
of proprietary IP that could enable Intel's competitors
to clone their development methods.
Whenever these things leave the building,
it is under tightly controlled circumstances.
This is so cool.
Out of the gate, the reference validation platform,
or RVP, has a lot in common with the normal motherboard.
You got your LGA1700 socket,
eight pin CPU power connector, 24 pin motherboard power,
your PCI express lots, but it's when you get
into the details that you discover the difference
between a motherboard that's designed
for the general public and a motherboard that's designed
for day-to-day use by engineers.
For example, check this out.
The M.2 SSD slot up here,
this is the one that runs off
of the CPU directly, PCI-Express gen four by four,
instead of having a little screw
or a little plastic retention mechanism, this is so cool.
You could mount an SSD to this thing
in probably less than two seconds.
You just throw the SSD in, turn this little half
of a thumb screw around and boom, it's locked into place.
Those are the kinds of quality
of life improvements that a normal person doesn't need,
but an engineer who's installing
and uninstalling constantly, absolutely will.
Let's go ahead and build up this board.
Everything about this feels so naughty right now.
I know it's just a regular CPU socket,
but it's a forbidden one.
Like any motherboard, we've gotta install our memory.
In this case, we're installing
some 4,800 mega transfer per second DDR5.
'Cause of course, that's one of the key new features
of the Alder Lake platform.
Then moving over to the IO,
things get normal for a little bit, audio, USB, display,
and then not normal.
On most desktop motherboards you wouldn't find one of these.
This is a female ribbon connector for eDP.
And the reason that they have these
on their test motherboards is
because these super cool extruded aluminum test benches
actually have little mounts for bare laptop displays
that they can quickly and easily move around
'cause they're so light and so convenient to use
and just pop on here, plug in, and boom,
they're able to monitor everything the system's doing
through this ribbon connector right up here
at the top of the board.
And the board is chalk full
of similar quality of life improvements for the engineers.
So, in addition to headers that you would normally see,
like fan headers or internal USB 3.1,
or I dunno, what do they call it now?
Even here, nobody can remember
the new names for all the stupid USB standards.
Anyway, the point is, in addition to those,
you've got stuff like this.
This is a perfectly common connector,
but normally you would find it on the back plane
of something like a hot swappable server chassis, right?
Because what it allows you to do is take a two
and a half inch SSD and just plunk it on like that.
Here's a fun one.
You guys use PS2 because it just always works?
Pretty much?
Why has it got PS2?
- Why not? - Why not?
Why not, indeed.
Bring back PS2, that's what I say.
Here's another one.
This is super common on server motherboards
because it's pretty typical for a server to boot
either from a USB drive or from the network.
So, having a USB type A that you can just plug
a little USB key into and you're off to the races
is pretty nice, but for most desktop users
you'd have no purpose for that.
And even on any server board that I've ever seen,
I haven't seen two of them.
So, that's clearly to save them the trouble
of hooking upfront IO.
Here's a fun one.
Another thing you wouldn't normally hook up
on a test bench is your front activity LEDs.
So instead ,you've actually got activity LEDs
for the SATA ports built directly into the motherboard
so that you can monitor the functionality.
Another big difference between this and a retail board
is that modern motherboards try to make as many
of the parameters of the motherboard adjustable
through software as they possibly can.
Either because it's more work to develop that software
or because sometimes it actually is just quicker
to move a jumper or flip a dip switch.
An engineering board like this
is absolutely littered with little jumpers
and dip switches that are gonna allow all kinds
of different functionality to be enabled or disabled
or altered as the engineers are going through their testing.
Oh, this is another thing I really love.
The PCIe 16x slot has no lock.
That is, I just, honestly I hate them so much.
I just wish every board had no lock.
As for the rest of these headers,
honestly, the majority of them are either so proprietary
or so specialized that most of the people
in this room wouldn't even have any reason
to know what they're for.
However, there's one really cool thing
that I absolutely have to show you guys.
I was really curious about this.
Immediately I looked at that and I thought, oh, okay,
that's a really unusual cooling solution for the PCH
or for the motherboard chipset, but I was wrong.
What this is actually for is so
that as they are revising the hardware of the chipset,
they can remove it from the motherboard,
swap it out for the new revision,
put it onto the board, flash a new BIOS,
and there's no reason to completely recycle
or remanufacture this board.
That is an enormous time savings in development
because while I'm sure the engineers would love to wait
around for a partner to manufacture a whole new motherboard
for them, ain't nobody got time for that.
Here's one I didn't recognize,
but we found out what it does.
It actually, here we go.
You can see it running on this system right here.
It is connected to the CPU
through kind of like a, you could call it a back door,
but really what it's for is monitoring and diagnostics.
And it goes out to this proprietary box,
which goes into this USB hub right here
that actually communicates to this guy.
So, this you could think of as kind of like the brains
of the test bench because something you might have noticed
throughout our series of videos here
is that most of the testing stations don't actually
have an engineer sitting in front of them,
staring at the screen watching the test run.
That would be kind of silly in this day and age.
So, almost every parameter can be adjusted other
than physically unplugging and re-plugging something
into the device, remotely through this host system.
And they've got some other really cool quality
of life devices as well.
There isn't one on this bench, but we saw one
on the gaming test bench down in the demo room
that's basically a BIOS emulator.
So, under normal circumstances
if you wanna flash the BIOS, it's extremely slow.
That's very, very slow memory that you need to overwrite
in order to put a new BIOS on the motherboard.
So, instead what you can do is you can get
a BIOS emulation device that you can just quickly dump
a new BIOS onto and you can have it become a new version
of the BIOS in like three seconds.
Now, of course, the reference validation platform
is compatible with normal air coolers like this one,
but the engineers here have much, much cooler toys.
This is called a thermal head and we kind of glossed
over this one in one of our previous videos.
But in a nutshell, it connects
to a water supply that is run throughout the building.
So, it can either be chilled or heated,
as well as an air supply that runs throughout the building.
And this puppy is capable,
in fact, this just came off a running test bench.
So you can see if I flip it over
it's got condensation on it because this thing is capable
of reaching subzero temperatures
which is what allows Intel to validate their processors
at the entire thermal operating range that they advertise.
And according to the engineers here,
a lot of the time they'll push it quite a bit beyond that
just to see what happens.
Now, I can't give you too many details
about how this puppy works.
In fact, I can't even show you the rig on the bottom of it
because it's for a processor that's not really released yet,
but you can see that in addition
to water and air in, which is handling heating, cooling,
and then condensation management,
they've got this interface right here
that plugs into their control module
that can be configured either manually by the technician
or remotely as part of one of these complete setups
like we see running behind me.
Another superpower of this board is that Intel obviously
has many different motherboard chipsets
that support the features of their accompanying processors
to various degrees.
Maybe over clocking or not,
or fewer PCI express lanes, or other connectivity.
So, naturally I assume that since they have
a swappable chipset socket system,
that they would just swap on a B series chipset
or whatever they need.
Think again, ladies and gentlemen,
the chips that they use here are actually called
a super sku and they can be reconfigured
to be whatever the engineer wants it to be.
Of course, as you guys can probably imagine,
not everything Intel wants to test can be done
on exactly the same motherboard.
Welcome to the overclocking lab
where they've actually got a different version
of the RVP that instead of having 8-phase power
is equipped with 16-phase power and, at least at the moment,
an LN2 pot for a subzero overclocking demo
that they've got set up for me.
So, you guys are running,
I'm assuming this is gonna be a 12900K, is that right?
- Yes, right. - Okay.
This is obviously the DDR5 version of the platform
and I see XTU is up here.
So, here's one of those test bench control hosts.
And then what is this connected to?
- To the motherboard. - Where?
- Here, in this USB. - Okay.
So, it's the same thing we saw before
and then you guys are allowed to go in
and just play around with CPU parameters live?
- Yeah. - Sure, check this out.
- Okay, check this out, Dennis.
- We're gonna close it. - Okay.
- [Man] I'm gonna reload it with a new configuration
that we just changed through the host.
- Okay, that is hilarious.
Now for the rest of us,
I know one of the big things that you guys are proud
of with Alder Lake is the new one touch speed optimizer.
Is that right?
So, we did an overclocking demo yesterday
where basically they demonstrated that with one button
you can get about 5% extra performance out of the platform.
But, I think your intention was to push it
a little bit further today.
Is that right? - Yes.
And one more thing .
As you mentioned, we can do it all through the tap boxes.
We don't need exterior, no need BIOS, nothing.
- Wait, so you're gonna, wait.
You're gonna overclock it using your developer interface.
- Correct. - Okay, I love it.
I love it.
So wait, so, so that just interfaces using USB?
Doesn't it have anything else?
The one upstairs was connected
to like this guy or something.
- [Man] There are several connectors.
- Oh. - There is XTP.
- There is- - Typical engineer things.
Why have one interface when you can have three?
Okay, okay.
Do it.
Basically he's got like a terminal open over there.
So this is like legit packing
the mainframe level overclocking.
Hit me.
Now tell me something,
as part of your overclocking validation,
do you guys go and like hand cherry pick silicon
to see what the limits are?
- [Man] As you can see here, just a second.
- We're about to see a golden sample, ladies and gentlemen.
So, is this the percentile out of like 100
for quality or something like that?
- [Man] Yes.
- So, if I want a really nice E-Core overclocker,
I want this one right here?
It's a joke, it's a joke. - Yes.
- 'Cause it's, it's, yeah.
Yeah, terrible, I know.
Tell me something.
This one looks really nice.
Is that the maximum P-Core overclock?
- [Man] Yes.
- Woo, hoo, hoo!
(light music)
We're watching the frequency.
Okay, we're at 5.2, just like that.
Ladies and gentlemen, it is the power of the tap box,
which I've been informed stands for top access probe.
Fun fact, you might think that top
is because it's like top tier,
but actually it's because the probe used to be on the top
of the CPU.
Now it's on the bottom, but the name is still the same.
And you're just going in
and you're just changing values on the CPU right now.
- We're changing the ratio. - Have internal access
through the registers.
- Ridiculous.
Whoa, those E-Core clocks though.
4.8 on the E-Cores?
How high are you guys expecting to go here?
- [Man] Till I think 5.2, 5.3, maybe more.
- On the E-Cores? - Yes.
- Five plus on E-Cores.
Okay, it's official.
I need like- - Now you're dead.
- Oh, that's okay.
Honestly, for our purposes, that is an amazing demo
of the kinds of tools that you guys have to go in
and just make alterations to the CPU while it's working.
A lot of what we learned
about the reference validation platform though
was actually here
in the demo room where I got a chance to chat
with some of the folks who work
on the gaming performance validation team.
So, they explained to me in real world terms
why functionality like this is so important.
So, we're looking at Hitman 3 running over here right now,
all of the tests that they do are automated.
So, it'll run through 10 loops of the benchmark
and then it'll pull all the performance parameters
that you would normally expect.
Your average FPS, your 99 percentile lows,
all of that good stuff,
but that's not enough because they're going
through so many revisions of firmware, for example,
that they would end up running a benchmark suite like this,
literally over 1,000 times over the course
of product development.
And when you're testing that many variations of the BIOS,
the difference between waiting around two to five minutes
for it to flash and being able to do it
in three seconds is absolutely critical.
You might have noticed, by the way,
that this test platform isn't using
the Intel integrated graphics.
And that's because this team is laser focused
on treating the SOC as a gaming CPU.
So instead, they're using
a high-end, third-party graphics card,
in this case, an RTX 3090
and they're actually running all of their benchmarks
at 1080p because they are mostly concerned
with situations where the CPU would end up
being the bottleneck.
So, if say a security fix rolls in, they wanna make sure
that that's not gonna cost you any FPS today.
And even if you were to upgrade your graphics card,
you're still gonna be able to get the most out of it.
And since we're here, the demo room was full
of all kinds of other cool stuff
that's worth taking a look at.
This crazy monitor stand includes
a next level Thunderbolt dock
that not only does everything a Thunderbolt dock does,
but allows the notebook to run
in a completely hands-off manner.
So, it can even control powering it on and powering it off.
The new Killer networking app allows you to connect
via two wireless bands simultaneously
and steer your high priority apps
like games to the fast lane
while you redirect background tasks to 2.4 gigahertz.
This animation here,
demonstrating Alder Lake's Thread Director, is super cool.
Basically what you're seeing is the CPU's ability,
no matter what types of tasks are being thrown at it,
to provide hints to the operating system
about which processes should stick to which types of cores
in order to help achieve
the enormous generational performance gains
that we're seeing over Rocket Lake.
And you can see those on display at the productivity table.
Absolutely incredible stuff, guys.
But the most unbelievable part
of this whole trip was walking
into a place like IDC and seeing the engineers
and techs clamoring to get a selfie with me.
I mean, I'm flattered.
Thank you.
But, y'all know that you're the real MVPs, right?
Like it's kinda like watching a weird comedy sketch
where the professional sports ball game ends
and then the players all run over
to the sidelines to get an autograph
from the play-by-play commentator.
Like, thank you, but you guys are doing the real work.
None of that matters though.
What matters is that you guys were the most gracious
and accommodating hosts
that I could have possibly asked for.
And I appreciate all the love y'all gave me.
And I hope that I can visit again
the next time you make something groundbreaking.
Or well, scratch that.
If I commit to come back here
every time you guys create something groundbreaking,
I'm gonna spend more time in Israel
than telling you about my sponsor.
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- You guys enjoyed this video, frankly,
we've never experienced anything quite like it.
So, just go watch something else
from the series, it's been absolutely unreal.