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Intel Core i9-7980XE and Core i9-7960X CPU Review Part 1: Workstation
- sverige 9y agoI'm glad AMD is competitive again. Yes, Intel just surpassed them, but at twice the price. Plus, I suspect that competition pushes Intel into releasing better chips quicker. I'm not really part of the "prosumer" market (what a word!), since I don't have a burning need for that much power, but it helps move prices lower in the middle and bottom of the performance range when the top end improves.
- kbart 9y agoSame here. I haven't upgraded my home PC for almost 5 years now, even though I do some digging from time to time to see if there's something worth buying in a middle tier. So far, it was simply not worth upgrading, I hope things will change soon. Heck, even GPU bought back in 2013 is still doing well (I remember times when 1 year old GPU was considered obsolete, even in a middle tier).
- dingo_bat 9y agoI think you'd see a significant improvement now with Ryzen 7 or threadripper. Unless you spent >$3k on your rig ;)
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- dagw 9y agoThat depends very much on what you use your machine for.
- geezerjay 9y ago> That depends very much on what you use your machine for. In generally it actually doesn't. The AMD Ryzen 7 1800x is selling for less than half the price of an Intel i7-6900k ($420 Vs $1010), and in benchmarks the Ryzen system beats the i7 or practically matches the performance. Getting the same performance for 40% of the cost is something that does not depend on your use case.
- dagw 9y agoGetting the same performance for 40% of the cost is something that does not depend on your use case. Sure, but in many cases the practical difference between an Intel i7-6900k and for example an Intel i3-7XXX (or a 4 year old i5/7) is basically negligible, and the i3 is less than half the price of the Ryzen
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- chiph 9y agoI just upgraded the gaming PC from an i7 2600 (ancient) to a Ryzen 7 1700. So far, video encoding is significantly faster with all 16 logical CPUs busy (but a GPU based program would be stupid fast). I'm having an issue where I get occasional lockups when gaming - updating the BIOS hasn't helped. I expect the game makers will need to ship updated code. One thing I found - the Ryzen is very sensitive to memory speed. Buy 2666 and don't overclock it much - if at all.
- kpil 9y agoThe last time AMD was competitive, they delivered really good value for money. Yet they were only available in the "enthusiast" market segment as Intel were able to give all OEM strong incentives to not buy AMD. Is there any chance that they are not having all OEMs by the balls this time too?
- xchaotic 9y agoit's not even that, but in the OEM and server market, there's more than delivering 90% of perforamnce for 50% of the price - there's reliability, driver support and all other costs which means that a higher Intel CPU price might only translate to <5% higher TCO or something like that, in which case I'd have gone with Intel myself (no one got fired for buying IBM/Intel)
- agumonkey 9y agoThe consumer market was also forever growing at the time. Now companies are shipping less and less. Different situation I suppose.
- jhasse 9y ago> Intel were able to give all OEM strong incentives to not buy AMD. They were bribing and blackmailing OEMs.
- coredog64 9y agoI beg to differ. The last time AMD was competitive, my employer was buying AMD server hardware from HPaq for their VMware environment. Granted, all our desktops/laptops were c2d or early core i-whatever.
- subwayclub 9y agoIf you look around, you can find AM4 platform in prebuilts from some of the biggest PC OEMs. Intel is still the majority of the lineup, of course, but APU systems have given AMD leverage here that they didn't have the last time they had competitive performance. It makes the OEMs offer the platform for an energy efficient/SFF build option, while also giving leeway to do an upgrade down the road.
- jokoon 9y agoI wonder, what makes intel chips more expensive? Is it a matter of money sunk into research? Because it seems that in terms of FLOPS per $, AMD always wins, and I have a hard time understanding that. What makes AMD more interesting?
- detaro 9y agoOther way around: AMD has to be cheaper to compete with Intel, which until now basically could charge what they wanted. And this specific example here is clearl in the high-end enthusiast space, where whoever has the best can charge the highest price and the target market will pay it.
- dingo_bat 9y ago> I wonder, what makes intel chips more expensive? The fact that if you want a chip that powerful, there is only Intel. An example in GPUs are the NVIDIA Quaddro cards. If your frame needs more than 16GB memory to render, there is no other card available. So they sell the same chips packaged as a Quaddro at 5x the price of a Titan.
- smitherfield 9y agoI believe the biggest reason the workstation/enterprise GPU lines (AMD’s too) are priced so much higher than the gaming/consumer lines is because the “certifications” for CAD[1] and 3D graphics[2] software cost a king’s ransom plus require expensive testing and validation of every individual card before it’s sold. [1] http://www.nvidia.com/object/quadro-design-and-manufacturing.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/quadro-design-and-manufacturing... [2] http://www.nvidia.com/object/media-and-entertainment.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/media-and-entertainment.html
- gsnedders 9y ago> The fact that if you want a chip that powerful, there is only Intel. How does, e.g., POWER8 compare? (And POWER9, soon?) That said, POWER tends to be even more expensive than this.
- indescions_2017 9y agoMe too ;) And with ROCm support for deep learning frameworks such as Tensorflow, GPU price competition aids in "democratizing" AI.
- dogma1138 9y agoTensorflow isn’t supported yet. The ROCm libraries are optimized for AMD hardware explicitly this isn’t democratizing anything it just locks you into a different vendor other than NVIDIA. If anything AMD should follow NVIDIA in supporting OpenACC which is the way to go as far as true probability goes.
- AlphaSite 9y agoDoesn’t ROCm compile to amd’s libs for AMD GPUs and cuda lins for Nvidia gpus? It doesn’t matter that the rocm libs are optimised for AMD.
- dogma1138 9y agoNo, ROCm is an amalgamation of a lot of things and it's been very inconsistently represented, you are thinking of HIP which in theory should that but in practice it's a tool to more easily convert CUDA applications to ROCm, since while you can in theory use NVCC as a backend for HIP the design directive for HIP make it nonviable. In all effectiveness ROCm is AMD's version of CUDA it includes it's own run time and driver stack which effectively replaced the OpenCL frontend for AMD GPUs, basically it gives AMD the ability to do with their GPUs what CUDA allowed NVIDIA to do and it's not to be dependent on a camel (OpenCL). This is what ROCm is: https://rocm.github.io/images/ROCm_Stack.png https://rocm.github.io/images/ROCm_Stack.png or at least this is what AMD is pushing it to be, currently a lot of things are still unfinished or non-existent. The representation of it being open is misleading, while more of the source code is available than for CUDA, ROCm isn't vendor agnostic on any tangible level. In 2-3 years once it's somewhat in a production ready state it will lock you into a single vendor just like CUDA does.
- mtgx 9y ago> Yes, Intel just surpassed them, but at twice the price. Which to me says that Intel is not competitive. If you can only release a slightly better product at twice the price, then you failed. Of course Intel's products have some branding inertia behind them, too, but that will be short-lived if the products don't become more competitive in the near future.
- smitherfield 9y agoOn the other hand, you could also say that the i7-7740X[1], at a third TR's price, will (significantly) outperform TR in most real-world usage, and even for video-editing/compiling-Chromium type tasks, the $700 difference would probably be better spent on a better graphics card, more RAM or, since we're getting into overkill territory, a nicer monitor. And, in theory, I suspect that a dual-7740X build might match or beat TR in multithreaded, too. [1] Kaby Lake-X, 4/8 cores/threads, 4.3/4.5 freq/turbo, $329 https://www.anandtech.com/show/11549/the-intel-kaby-lake-x-i7-7740x-and-i5-7640x-review-the-new-single-thread-champion-oc-to-5ghz https://www.anandtech.com/show/11549/the-intel-kaby-lake-x-i... https://www.anandtech.com/show/11697/the-amd-ryzen-threadripper-1950x-and-1920x-review https://www.anandtech.com/show/11697/the-amd-ryzen-threadrip...
- Dylan16807 9y agoThat's a different category, though. The competition for low core count is Ryzen. Perhaps a 1600X. 6/12 cores/threads, 3.6 boosts to 4.0/4.1, $249. > And, in theory, I suspect that a dual-7740X build might match or beat TR in multithreaded, too. Is that possible? And I really doubt you'll get 8 cores to beat 16.
- smitherfield 9y ago>>>That's a different category, though. My point is it's the category most enthusiasts would be happiest with, even if they think otherwise. >>>Is that possible? Looks like I was mistaken, I thought the Sky/Kaby Lake-X chips used the same socket as the Xeons. So no. >>>And I really doubt you'll get 8 cores to beat 16. If it were possible, it would be 8 cores operating at a 50% higher frequency (with substantially more room for overclocking, too) and that support AVX-512 instructions. And you get quickly-diminishing returns from throwing more threads at a program (just mathematically, even if it's embarrassingly parallel and CPU-bound, each time you double the threadcount you get half the improvement of the previous doubling).
- vbezhenar 9y agoFor price of 7980XE you can buy Epic and have even more performance, if you care about multithreading. The only thing that Intel surpassed them is single-thread performance. It's important even on workstation, IMO, that's the main reason I'm thinking to stick with Intel for now, everything else AMD made better.
- nerdy 9y agoUnfortunately the 7980XE does not appear to be available for purchase yet :( Intel's site says Q3 (which ends this month): https://ark.intel.com/products/126699/Intel-Core-i9-7980XE-X-series-Processor-24_75M-Cache-up-to-4_20-GHz https://ark.intel.com/products/126699/Intel-Core-i9-7980XE-X... And in a blog post they appeared to indicate the 7980XE would be available Sept 25 (at least the 14-core version, which also hasn't yet appeared, depending on parsing): https://newsroom.intel.com/news/intel-unveils-full-intel-core-x-series-processor-family-specs-14-18-core-processors-available-starting-september/ https://newsroom.intel.com/news/intel-unveils-full-intel-cor...
- CyberDildonics 9y agoThere seems to be giant lag between the press releases of these chips and when someone can actually buy them.
- bryanlarsen 9y agoThis press release wasn't supposed to go live for a while, but somebody broke the embargo, forcing Intel's hand. So the availability lag might be worse than normal.
- dis-sys 9y agoIntel must be pretty desperate, according to the review article - * Intel doubled the price of a threadripper 1950x for giving you a 8% increase on multithread performance (measure by Cinebench R15 scores). * when Intel could't afford to match AMD high end CPU's 60 PCIE lanes, they invented the term "platform PCIE lanes" to include those from chipsets. * when Intel couldn't match AMD's TDP, they came up with some different TDP definition, as a result the 165w TDP Intel 7980xe draws 15w more than a 180w threadripper 1950x. Intel must have a pretty good propaganda department known as "marketing"? for those who believe Intel is responding to AMD's challenge - no, it is not, according to leaks, Intel is about to release i3-7360x, which is going to be 1.25% faster (yeah, 1.25% faster, no typo, source linked) than the previous generation. when you can fully utilize your well established marketing department to fool consumers to buy your overpriced slow processor with far less cores and PCIE lanes, why bother giving those customers anything better? https://videocardz.com/72775/intel-preps-dual-core-i3-7360x-for-x299-but-why https://videocardz.com/72775/intel-preps-dual-core-i3-7360x-... * why Intel released Q6600 10 years ago and made quad core mainstream? because AMD was competitive. * why Intel repeatedly refused to make 8 cores mainstream in the last 10 years? because AMD was not competitive. * why Intel finally made 6 cores mainstream 10 years after the release of Q6600? because AMD is competitive again.
- Iv 9y agoI haven't followed the market for a while but a few years ago it was more or less established that the top Intel CPU had about 10% better performance and 2x the price of the nest one. Has it changed much?
- dis-sys 9y agobusiness as usual, nothing changed.
- michaelbuckbee 9y agoThe new chip is smaller (and I'd presume more energy efficient) while being slightly faster. Those characteristics are what a good chunk of the server market craves (more blade server density per rack at the same power draw).
- smacktoward 9y agoIntel's staunch refusal to support ECC RAM on non-Xeon chips seems incredibly chintzy at this price level. Who is the customer that's simultaneously willing to spend $2,000 on a CPU and so desperate to save a few bucks that they'd settle for non-ECC RAM? I want to meet that person.
- xchaotic 9y agoI'm running VMs in a LAB and I need multples of 6 virtual machines so these high core count CPUs are exactly what I'm after and I don't mind the occasional bit flip as it's for testing only, not production. But I agree supporting ECC RAM wouldn't add much to the cost of the CPU itself.
- detaro 9y agoI think these things are primarily aimed at gamers and overclocking enthusiasts. They don't care about ECC at all, or might even worry that gets in the way of overclocking (since at least for now, nobody optimizes ECC DIMMs for that) Those who care are supposed to spend even more on Xeons.
- snuxoll 9y agoNobody is doing enthusiast overclocking on these, they run hot enough at stock to need AT LEAST a 120mm closed loop cooler.
- Filligree 9y agoDon't underestimate the enthusiasts. Someone will overclock 'em.
- snuxoll 9y agoI mean, I guess they WILL - not many people invest in HEDT boards and CPUs to not milk every last bit of performance they can for their dollar, but even with a 360mm rad and a high flow pump you can’t push these very far, the thermal and electrical window just isn’t there.
- GiorgioG 9y agoI recently put together a Threadripper PC. Overclocked to 4.0ghz (stable) using a Noctua air cooler, my machine beats both these processors in the multi-threaded CineBench 15 benchmark (3288cb vs 3281cb & 3083cb.) Single core is a bit slower (161cb vs 189cb.) This is my first AMD system in ages and I can't say I'm disappointed, performance is great, value is better than Intel's offerings. CineBench / UserBenchmark screenshots: https://ibb.co/mapRUQ https://ibb.co/mapRUQ
- misticdeveloper 9y agoWould have been nice if they'd used 3200 memory. Would have boosted threadrippers. No OC vs OC?