31 ms·

Intel 9th Gen Review

221 points by endorphone 8y ago

arcanus 8y ago
> When Intel’s own i5-9600K is under half the cost with only two fewer cores, > or AMD’s R7 2700X is very competitive in almost every test, while they might not be the best, they’re more cost-effective.
- noir_lord 8y ago
  In the UK the 2700X is half the price of the i9-9900K and trades blows with it on the stuff I mostly care about. I'm truly loving the 2700X I built last week, it's a nice bump over the 1700 at work.
  - eikenberry 8y ago
    Is the 2700X that noticeable of a bump over the 1700? On paper it doesn't look _that_ much better.
    - dragontamer 8y ago
      The L2 cache dropped from 17-clocks to 12-clocks of latency. Its not a big improvement, but there's just better power-management, better caches, better memory compatibility (!!!), etc. etc. But enough that you get a real boost in practical benchmarks (FPS in games or Handbrake rendering). The compatibility problem was probably most annoying. The 1700 didn't work with a lot of RAM when it launched, requiring BIOS settings to change. You'll still see AMD builders praising the "Samsung B-Die" (the most compatible RAM with AMD Ryzen). The 2700x just works overall better. I'd personally consider it due to all of the little changes and little improvements.
    - blihp 8y ago
      You're probably better off waiting for 3rd gen Ryzen which sounds like it will be a nice all-around performance bump. Should be arriving in ~6 mo.
      - tracker1 8y ago
        That's what I'm waiting for, around that time my 4790k will be 6yo, and the bump should be worth it... more ram and threads will be nice. May wait for the TR refresh as a consideration too... longest I've ever held on to a desktop PC.
        bpye 8y ago
        Yep, I'm coming from a 4690 and my plan is similar. Hopefully Zen 2 provides a substantive enough improvement but even if not I would still be quite happy.
        blihp 8y ago
        I'm in the same boat. Been running my SB for ~2x longer than I've ever stuck with a primary system before. No complaints, it's been a great system. But I'm really looking forward to getting more threads. Probably won't go with TR though, I think the mainstream Ryzen will do what I need and won't have to deal with the latency idiosyncrasies.
- paulmd 8y ago
  It all depends on what you're doing with it. For gaming alone, current games are barely using 6 threads, so a 2700X is complete overkill with 16 threads. It's always a bit revealing that people leap to recommending AMD's flagship processor as some sort of a value king for gaming. You really should save $100 and go with the 2600X instead, there's virtually no difference in gaming benchmarks. The 9600K, 9700K or 2600X are really what gamers should be looking at. The only thing that's going to make use of a 2700X or a 9900K right now is productivity tasks (video encoding, 3D modelling, etc). Intel still has a lead in high-refresh gaming (which is a coded way of saying they have better gaming performance that is currently bottlenecked by GPU performance), so if you're primarily a gamer it's still worth leaning to the 9600K/9700K. And the 9900K, while expensive, combines that gaming performance with a ~20-25% lead in productivity tasks. Expensive, but hands-down the fastest thing on the market for at least a year. Threadripper is great for productivity stuff, but since it's NUMA it really doesn't perform any different than a 2700X for gaming. Also, the 2990WX has an even weirder configuration where half the dies don't have access to RAM, so it's hard to recommend except as a specialty product. 2950X is the generalist recommendation there. Next year the Zen2 upgrade will hopefully bring AMD up to parity with Intel in gaming, and probably beat them in productivity. But it's hard to recommend planning on buying two different processors to "save money", so if that's your cup of tea, just wait until next year. So, the recommendations look like: 60 Hz gaming => buy a 2600X high-refresh gaming => buy a 9700K 60 Hz gaming+productivity or productivity only => buy a 2700X high refresh gaming and productivity => 9900K really heavy productivity stuff => 1950X/2950X/wait for 3800X/3950X next year
  - babypuncher 8y ago
    There are some games, like the new Assassin's Creed, that benefit from having 8 physical cores. The 2700 is probably not the best value proposition to play games that are out right now, but it probably is a good value if you want a chip that will handle new games for the next 4 years without needing an upgrade. Games today may be using 4 or 6 threads but it wasn't that long ago when games ran on only 1 or 2.
  - individualcell 8y ago
    Are you saying that when you start a game, you are closing all the programs you have opened and disable all the services/background processes? If a game uses 6 cores, you can have 2 more for your office, browser and god knows what else running without slowing you down.
morley 8y ago
Are there any games nowadays that are CPU bound to the extent that you'd see a big performance improvement by using a high-end processor?
- LeoPanthera 8y ago
  Not many, but a few. Civilization still thinks quite hard in the late game.
  - mikepurvis 8y ago
    But it's turn based— most of the time that you're playing, nothing is happening! Surely it could be running its simulations and AI speculatively and then just tossing out the bits which aren't relevant any more as the player makes changes to the world state.
    - gameswithgo 8y ago
      that would be extremely complex to be able to toss out the bits which are no longer relevant. everything might be no longer relevant.
      - mikepurvis 8y ago
        Most turn-based bots are in some way derived from minimax— you peer down the road looking at the space of possible moves and evaluate them based on an assumption that your opponent will respond with the strongest possible move available to them, so each move you can make now is only as good as the game state after the opponent's response, recursively. I think basically as you're building up this tree you'd add annotations at each branch/ply which call out things the human user (opponent) could do that strengthen or weaken the position. Then as the human performs their actions, the tree is pruned/rebuilt accordingly.
        gameswithgo 8y ago
        Yes with Chess you can do exactly that no problem, but I bet Civ has a thousand heuristics woven through that which would make it horribly difficult. Maybe not impossible though! The other complication is it isn't just 1 on 1, its 1 player vs ~10 players. So your move changes player 2's move changes player 3's move and so on.
Coding_Cat 8y ago
Disappointing that it's still only 2 memory channels. Would have loved for quad channel to become the norm.
- dragontamer 8y ago
  4-sticks of RAM is cost-prohibitive for a lot of builds. Heck, a lot of laptops still ship with only 1-stick of RAM for cost-saving purposes. 2-memory channels is what is expected on a normal, consumer platform. Especially since DDR4 effectively doubled the bandwidth from DDR3 anyway. In effect: DDR4 2-channels is roughly the same speed as DDR3 4-channels. So that's how RAM scales: it gets faster without necessarily needing more sticks. In two or so years, DDR5 is going to double-bandwidth again. So 2-channel DDR5 will be the same bandwidth as 4-channel DDR4. Latencies are all going to be the same though, but that's the nature of the technology. ---------- If you need 4-channels of RAM, x299 exists (and x399 for AMD Threadripper). If you need 6-channels, you got Xeon Scalable, 8-channels got EPYC, 12-channels (or more) for higher-end Xeons. So these high-end systems exist for people who need them. But most consumers are fine with the ~40GB/s speeds that 2-sticks of modern DDR4 get you today.
  - Coding_Cat 8y ago
    True enough, but I personally hit bandwidth limits on occasion for my most heavy processing jobs (data analysis, wouldn't be surprised if the same applied to people doing media editing or working with databases). Threadripper or cheap EPYC are looking quite attractive to me because of the high bandwidth per core and price-point. I just wish Intel would also compute on this point.
    - dragontamer 8y ago
      I agree that Threadripper / EPYC look good on that. Intel's main price/performance competition are Dual Xeon Silvers. Its not talked about very much, but 2x Silver 4114 (https://www.amazon.com/Intel-Xeon-4114-Deca-core-Processor/dp/B074G22N14 https://www.amazon.com/Intel-Xeon-4114-Deca-core-Processor/d...) isn't really that bad. 10-cores x2 == 20 cores at $1500 total. That's 12-memory channels too (6-channels per socket). You'd have to buy an expensive dual-socket motherboard, but its relatively high-end / server-class for a reason. Xeon Gold and Xeon Platinum are just WTF with the pricing though. I guess those are for people who stopped caring about price/performance. AMD EPYC still seems better on a price/performance front than Dual Xeon Silvers, if only because you can get a single-socket EPYC with 8-channel RAM. But Xeon Silvers aren't really that far away.
walterbell 8y ago
> Intel is also forgoing hyper-threading on most of its processors. The only Core processors to get hyper-threading will be the Core i9 parts, and perhaps the Pentiums as well ... The other angle is one of the recently discovered side-channel attacks that can occur when hyper-threading is in action. By disabling hyper-threading on the volume production chips, this security issue is no longer present. Does this give AMD an advantage with Ryzen and Threadripper, since AMD supports hyperthreads?
- dragontamer 8y ago
  AMD has a cost/performance advantage. The Ryzen 2700x sells under $280 with a free cooler for 8c/16 threads. The Intel i9-9900k sells for $550+ to $580+, requires an added cooler, and 8c/16 threads. The difference is that the i9-9900k can single-thread turbo to 5GHz, which makes a big difference in single-threaded situations. The i9-9900k also has 256-bit AVX pipelines, while AMD Ryzen is 128-bit based AVX pipelines. So any AVX-heavy code (H264 rendering, Blender benchmarks, etc. etc.) will be hugely beneficial on the Intel platform. ----------- AMD still wins price/performance. I'd personally still take a Threadripper 2950x for example. But the i9-9900k is impressive because of that 5GHz clock, even if its a bit restrictive to use. Anyone who cares about maximum single-threaded speeds is looking at the 5GHz clock. That's huge.
  - leetcrew 8y ago
    > The difference is that the i9-9900k can single-thread turbo to 5GHz minor nitpick: the 9900k can actually turbo to 5GHz on two cores simultaneously.
- blihp 8y ago
  I think so. I'd bet that the reason Intel is removing HT is for market segmentation rather than architectural reasons.
IvyMike 8y ago
I'm comparing the i7 here to the i7 in my current computer, built in April 2011(!) https://ark.intel.com/compare/186604,52214 https://ark.intel.com/compare/186604,52214 Kinda though I would see a lot bigger differences. There was a time in my life when I expected I would have to build a new computer every two years. Weird.
- dragontamer 8y ago
  The i7-2600k doesn't even have 256-bit busses on the inside. The i7-2600k barely begun to implement AVX (and doesn't even implement AVX2). The i9-9900k is way better. 3x 256-bit execution ports, 64-byte (512-bit) messages going around the Ringbus, DDR4 RAM (double memory bandwidth). The raw clocks ignore the huge advancements in IPC that exist between Sandy Bridge and Coffee Lake. And even then, the 5GHz clock on the i9-9900k makes it completely incomparable to compare the ancient Sandy Bridge with the modern Coffee Lake.
  - blihp 8y ago
    If you roll up all of the 'huge advancements' (IPC, clock speed, all of it) over the course of 7 years, that's probably in the neighborhood of what we used to call the 'annual upgrade.' Ancient? Yes. Incomparable? No.
    - dragontamer 8y ago
      The Pentium 4 Netburst architecture was relatively stagnant between the years 2000 and 2004. "Prescott" (2004) was still "Netburst" but Prescott includes AMD64 so I'd say that's a major change. Still, its reflective in the naming. Netburst, Willamette, Northwood, Prescott, and Tejas were all called "Pentium 4", and lasted from a time period from year 2000 to 2006. Sure, there were a few additions: Hyperthreading I guess. But otherwise, the main difference in this timeframe were the 250nm to 90nm scaling (which got "free" GHz upgrades back then without any effort) In short: > what we used to call the 'annual upgrade.' You're exaggerating. Progress has slowed but Willamette (year 2000 1.5GHz) vs Northwood (year 2002 2GHz) Pentium 4s weren't that dissimilar. Prescott (2004) is even more amusing, as it hit 3.8GHz (Intel Pentium 4 570J). But boy, oh boy... you really can't compare Prescott 3.8GHz against Sandy Bridge (2011, 3.6GHz) or Coffee Lake (2018, 3.6GHz ), even if the base clocks are all close.
gameswithgo 8y ago
At first I thought this was super unimpressive, not much faster than previous gen, often slower. Then I realized my own cpu is already 3 generations old! And it is quite a huge jump from mine to the new i9! It has only been a few years!
dxhdr 8y ago
Why aren't they benchmarking it against the latest Threadrippers? They've got a i9-7900X up there which costs the same as the 2950x.
- Brockenstein 8y ago
  I think to give you perspective against previous HEDT Intel chips that had more than 4 cores.
tedunangst 8y ago
Print link loads about 700 graphs and images and lacks internal navigation... Alt: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13400/intel-9th-gen-core-i9-9900k-i7-9700k-i5-9600k-review https://www.anandtech.com/show/13400/intel-9th-gen-core-i9-9...
rl3 8y ago
It's worth noting this is largely a paper launch thus far: https://www.reddit.com/r/intel/comments/9pidjh/any_9900k_amazon_orders_shipped_yet/ https://www.reddit.com/r/intel/comments/9pidjh/any_9900k_ama... The October 19th date that everyone was given thus far seems to be a fantasy. The new processors aren't in stock anywhere, and as of yesterday every single retailer said they were shipping today. After waiting weeks for the 19th to arrive, it's rather infuriating.
- adameast9000 8y ago
  I saw some 9700k in stock at Microcenter in Brooklyn this morning
  - selectodude 8y ago
    9700k is in stock everywhere. 9900k (the i9 with hyperthreading) is still nowhere to be found.
    - rl3 8y ago
      Amazon doesn't even have the 9700k right now. Newegg does, however if memory serves they didn't earlier today.
patrickg_zill 8y ago
For server usage, where you have multiple processes involved, I seem to find that memory bandwidth is very important. If the CPU can not get the data it cannot work with it...
- romed 8y ago
  Probably that's why the Skylake Xeon CPUs have 6 channels.
martinpw 8y ago
> The other angle is one of the recently discovered side-channel attacks that can occur when hyper-threading is in action. By disabling hyper-threading on the volume production chips, this security issue is no longer present. This line of reasoning feels unconvincing. If there were really worried about this they should disable it everywhere.
- derefr 8y ago
  There's no conceptual vulnerability if the system the chip is being integrated into isn't multi-tenant (where a "tenant" can be a literal time-share user, or something like a website's Javascript code executing in a web browser.) So: cloud computing, and consumers that might be running dumb code from the internet (= i{3,5,7} and Xeon = volume production) should get chips with no hyperthreading; while HPC, locked-down workstations, and gaming PCs that probably don't have any important data on them (= i9 = low-batch-size production) should get chips with hyperthreading.
  - Coding_Cat 8y ago
    Unfortunately, it's the multi-tenant applications that tend to gain the most from hyperthreading. For HPC it's usually turned off, and I think for gaming and workstations it also has little if any use.
    - derefr 8y ago
      I think I've seen either Intel or AMD explain hyperthreads as being useful in the case of a gamer who is also using a software encoder to stream their gameplay. Also, HPC doesn't necessarily imply a uniform workload; it just implies that all workloads are trusted. Really, modern HPC clusters are still "multi-tenant"; they're just tenants who are all e.g. employees of the same company, or researchers at the same university. So you can describe them, from a security perspective, as one "tenant." None of them would have anything to gain by doing a side-channel attack against one-another.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
gigatexal 8y ago
Would rather save the bucks and go with a Ryzen 2700 unless I was doing avx512 work but who’s doing that these days?
- mrbonner 8y ago
  Could you elaborate why AVX-512 is not important? I guess that you are referring to GPGPU programming is what everybody is doing right now instead of SIMD in the CPU.
  - gigatexal 8y ago
    I could be talking out of my butt but it’s my understanding that AVX512 isn’t used in but few niche programs.
    - oconnor663 8y ago
      Isn't that niche the same as the niche of programs that can realistically max out a modern desktop CPU? Video encoding, compression, and things like that?
      - gigatexal 8y ago
        according to this only x265 uses AVX512: https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/accelerating-x265-with-intel-advanced-vector-extensions-512-intel-avx-512 https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/accelerating-x265-... But I wouldn't doubt that things like Video encoding / compression uses this. Again, I was not saying it's not valuable just saying that for my use case where I don't encode videos for a living or run a large Handbrake/Plex video farm / library the i9 cpu is not worth as much to me as the cheaper, cooler running Ryzen 2700.
  - gigatexal 8y ago
    It’s important yes but hard to implement I think and not widely used is what I was getting at. For me compiling and running VMs I’d take the Ryzen over this.
noipv4 8y ago
Threadripper or Core i9 for my next Linux desktop build?
- gameswithgo 8y ago
  i7 8700K may be the most sensible choice overall really.
  - tracker1 8y ago
    Not sure that I agree.. if you have truly multithreaded workloads, the R7-2700X is probably a better option... in the end, it depends on your use and how much you want to spend. System cost is also a consideration.
    - zepearl 8y ago
      On one hand I agree for "truly multithreaded workloads" - on the other hand having strong single-threaded performance is still a nice feature to have (e.g. when writing prototypes or simply when using simple SW). I did evaluate about 2 months ago if to go for a 2700X or the usual Intel, and based on the benchmarks I saw, the 2700X is still a bit too weak when running single-threaded SW => I then bought an i7-8700 (no "k") just to be "safe" when running semi-single threaded SW (e.g. my current prototype uses 10 threads but has a single coordination bottleneck). Let's see what happens in ~January (I think that's when AMD is supposed to present the new CPUs that are supposed to be the "real" next-gen with higher IPC?)
      - tracker1 8y ago
        A lot of the time I'm working multi-tier software so will have VM and/or docker containers running in support of what I'm specifically working on. And even then it's mostly node/js based, so the NVME is the single biggest boost to my productivity. In any case, it's often browser + app server + backend services running... so I notice the single-thread performance less. TBH my current CPU (i7-4790k) keeps up reasonably well, though I wouldn't mind more threads and more RAM. When the GTX 1080 came out, I bumped up to that with a 1TB NVME drive (Samsung) which has been fantastic in limited use. Mostly notice the difference in my npm scripts (ci and build). I'm mostly just itching to upgrade more than feeling pain at this point. I'm pretty sure the Ryzen 2 CPUs (not 2xxx) will be sufficient, as will the mid-upper Intel. However, unless Intel brings their pricing into better competitive range, I may go AMD on my next build.
vbezhenar 8y ago
How those 8 cores communicate? I remember that AMD uses NUMA architecture that can bite in rare cases. Does Intel uses something similar too?
- hesdeadjim 8y ago
  Only the Threadripper has to worry about NUMA and that's because it has two physical dies with 8 cores each. The regular Ryzen 8-core only has a single physical die and thus NUMA isn't an issue.
- en4bz 8y ago
  Intel consumer class CPUs still use a ringbuffer architecture. Server chips use a newer mesh architecture.
PHGamer 8y ago
so it looks like intel is having the same issues as amd where more cores means not necesarily better gaming. i5 is still the best it looks like lol. this puts amd in a better position because they are at least cheaper for their cores.
individualcell 8y ago
I can't wait for the Skylake-X refresh. I use my computer for real-time audio and although the processing scales to multiple cores the "real-timeness" is limited by the speed of the single-core. Sadly AMD still is nowhere near Intel in this regard. I was hoping 2990WX could be an upgrade to 1800X, but sadly it won't be as the single core can also be limited by not having access to local memory. It is Intel this year.
ksec 8y ago
140 Comments, and not s single word mentioned about TDP. It seems people are OK with Intel stating a 95W TDP when its max could be 225W. We knew TDP wasn't a reliable figure for a long time and had sort of expect 20 - 30% variant, but now we are looking at ~2.4x difference.... After all the lies Intel have told, after all the disappointment and anger that Intel has been sitting there not innovating, cost cutting in the simplest thermal measures, their near irresponsible sales pitch to enterprise, the cries for AMD to bring competition. And they still buy an Intel Chip. The lesson here is brand building and stickies. I could only wish AMD best of luck. I am waiting for Zen 2.
- mcraiha 8y ago
  Anandtech noticed error in power measurements and tested with another motherboard that provided better results https://twitter.com/IanCutress/status/1053427417052798977 https://twitter.com/IanCutress/status/1053427417052798977
  - dis-sys 8y ago
    166w when fully loaded on a 95 TDP processor, for me, that is the textbook definition of dishonesty.
    - mtanski 8y ago
      It's pretty annoying... but in lot of Intel marketing and spec sheets you'll find small print language that TDP is measured at base clock speed. The base clock has fallen from the 6700k where it was 4.0Ghz. In the end, it seams to me like the intent is to deceive.
      - m45t3r 8y ago
        I don't think so, Turbo Clocks are Turbo since they're meant for burst usage. Getting above TDP for a few moments is fine, however keeping those clocks are the problem.
  - std_throwawayay 8y ago
dis-sys 8y ago
I really like that Die Sizes from Wikichip chart. For a quad core processor, Die Size went down from almost 275mm2 (Nehalem) to 125mm2 (Kaby Lake) over the last decade, but that didn't translate to cheaper price or much better performance, Intel worked so hard to prevent any of these to happen in their mainstream desktop processor product line.

221 points by endorphone 8y ago

> When Intel’s own i5-9600K is under half the cost with only two fewer cores, > or AMD’s R7 2700X is very competitive in almost every test, while they might not be the best, they’re more cost-effective.

noir_lord 8y ago
In the UK the 2700X is half the price of the i9-9900K and trades blows with it on the stuff I mostly care about. I'm truly loving the 2700X I built last week, it's a nice bump over the 1700 at work.
- eikenberry 8y ago
  Is the 2700X that noticeable of a bump over the 1700? On paper it doesn't look _that_ much better.
  - dragontamer 8y ago
    The L2 cache dropped from 17-clocks to 12-clocks of latency. Its not a big improvement, but there's just better power-management, better caches, better memory compatibility (!!!), etc. etc. But enough that you get a real boost in practical benchmarks (FPS in games or Handbrake rendering). The compatibility problem was probably most annoying. The 1700 didn't work with a lot of RAM when it launched, requiring BIOS settings to change. You'll still see AMD builders praising the "Samsung B-Die" (the most compatible RAM with AMD Ryzen). The 2700x just works overall better. I'd personally consider it due to all of the little changes and little improvements.
  - blihp 8y ago
    You're probably better off waiting for 3rd gen Ryzen which sounds like it will be a nice all-around performance bump. Should be arriving in ~6 mo.
    - tracker1 8y ago
      That's what I'm waiting for, around that time my 4790k will be 6yo, and the bump should be worth it... more ram and threads will be nice. May wait for the TR refresh as a consideration too... longest I've ever held on to a desktop PC.
      - bpye 8y ago
        Yep, I'm coming from a 4690 and my plan is similar. Hopefully Zen 2 provides a substantive enough improvement but even if not I would still be quite happy.
      - blihp 8y ago
        I'm in the same boat. Been running my SB for ~2x longer than I've ever stuck with a primary system before. No complaints, it's been a great system. But I'm really looking forward to getting more threads. Probably won't go with TR though, I think the mainstream Ryzen will do what I need and won't have to deal with the latency idiosyncrasies.
paulmd 8y ago
It all depends on what you're doing with it. For gaming alone, current games are barely using 6 threads, so a 2700X is complete overkill with 16 threads. It's always a bit revealing that people leap to recommending AMD's flagship processor as some sort of a value king for gaming. You really should save $100 and go with the 2600X instead, there's virtually no difference in gaming benchmarks. The 9600K, 9700K or 2600X are really what gamers should be looking at. The only thing that's going to make use of a 2700X or a 9900K right now is productivity tasks (video encoding, 3D modelling, etc). Intel still has a lead in high-refresh gaming (which is a coded way of saying they have better gaming performance that is currently bottlenecked by GPU performance), so if you're primarily a gamer it's still worth leaning to the 9600K/9700K. And the 9900K, while expensive, combines that gaming performance with a ~20-25% lead in productivity tasks. Expensive, but hands-down the fastest thing on the market for at least a year. Threadripper is great for productivity stuff, but since it's NUMA it really doesn't perform any different than a 2700X for gaming. Also, the 2990WX has an even weirder configuration where half the dies don't have access to RAM, so it's hard to recommend except as a specialty product. 2950X is the generalist recommendation there. Next year the Zen2 upgrade will hopefully bring AMD up to parity with Intel in gaming, and probably beat them in productivity. But it's hard to recommend planning on buying two different processors to "save money", so if that's your cup of tea, just wait until next year. So, the recommendations look like: 60 Hz gaming => buy a 2600X high-refresh gaming => buy a 9700K 60 Hz gaming+productivity or productivity only => buy a 2700X high refresh gaming and productivity => 9900K really heavy productivity stuff => 1950X/2950X/wait for 3800X/3950X next year
- babypuncher 8y ago
  There are some games, like the new Assassin's Creed, that benefit from having 8 physical cores. The 2700 is probably not the best value proposition to play games that are out right now, but it probably is a good value if you want a chip that will handle new games for the next 4 years without needing an upgrade. Games today may be using 4 or 6 threads but it wasn't that long ago when games ran on only 1 or 2.
- individualcell 8y ago
  Are you saying that when you start a game, you are closing all the programs you have opened and disable all the services/background processes? If a game uses 6 cores, you can have 2 more for your office, browser and god knows what else running without slowing you down.

morley 8y ago

Are there any games nowadays that are CPU bound to the extent that you'd see a big performance improvement by using a high-end processor?

LeoPanthera 8y ago
Not many, but a few. Civilization still thinks quite hard in the late game.
- mikepurvis 8y ago
  But it's turn based— most of the time that you're playing, nothing is happening! Surely it could be running its simulations and AI speculatively and then just tossing out the bits which aren't relevant any more as the player makes changes to the world state.
  - gameswithgo 8y ago
    that would be extremely complex to be able to toss out the bits which are no longer relevant. everything might be no longer relevant.
    - mikepurvis 8y ago
      Most turn-based bots are in some way derived from minimax— you peer down the road looking at the space of possible moves and evaluate them based on an assumption that your opponent will respond with the strongest possible move available to them, so each move you can make now is only as good as the game state after the opponent's response, recursively. I think basically as you're building up this tree you'd add annotations at each branch/ply which call out things the human user (opponent) could do that strengthen or weaken the position. Then as the human performs their actions, the tree is pruned/rebuilt accordingly.
      - gameswithgo 8y ago
        Yes with Chess you can do exactly that no problem, but I bet Civ has a thousand heuristics woven through that which would make it horribly difficult. Maybe not impossible though! The other complication is it isn't just 1 on 1, its 1 player vs ~10 players. So your move changes player 2's move changes player 3's move and so on.

Coding_Cat 8y ago

Disappointing that it's still only 2 memory channels. Would have loved for quad channel to become the norm.

dragontamer 8y ago
4-sticks of RAM is cost-prohibitive for a lot of builds. Heck, a lot of laptops still ship with only 1-stick of RAM for cost-saving purposes. 2-memory channels is what is expected on a normal, consumer platform. Especially since DDR4 effectively doubled the bandwidth from DDR3 anyway. In effect: DDR4 2-channels is roughly the same speed as DDR3 4-channels. So that's how RAM scales: it gets faster without necessarily needing more sticks. In two or so years, DDR5 is going to double-bandwidth again. So 2-channel DDR5 will be the same bandwidth as 4-channel DDR4. Latencies are all going to be the same though, but that's the nature of the technology. ---------- If you need 4-channels of RAM, x299 exists (and x399 for AMD Threadripper). If you need 6-channels, you got Xeon Scalable, 8-channels got EPYC, 12-channels (or more) for higher-end Xeons. So these high-end systems exist for people who need them. But most consumers are fine with the ~40GB/s speeds that 2-sticks of modern DDR4 get you today.
- Coding_Cat 8y ago
  True enough, but I personally hit bandwidth limits on occasion for my most heavy processing jobs (data analysis, wouldn't be surprised if the same applied to people doing media editing or working with databases). Threadripper or cheap EPYC are looking quite attractive to me because of the high bandwidth per core and price-point. I just wish Intel would also compute on this point.
  - dragontamer 8y ago
    I agree that Threadripper / EPYC look good on that. Intel's main price/performance competition are Dual Xeon Silvers. Its not talked about very much, but 2x Silver 4114 (https://www.amazon.com/Intel-Xeon-4114-Deca-core-Processor/dp/B074G22N14 https://www.amazon.com/Intel-Xeon-4114-Deca-core-Processor/d...) isn't really that bad. 10-cores x2 == 20 cores at $1500 total. That's 12-memory channels too (6-channels per socket). You'd have to buy an expensive dual-socket motherboard, but its relatively high-end / server-class for a reason. Xeon Gold and Xeon Platinum are just WTF with the pricing though. I guess those are for people who stopped caring about price/performance. AMD EPYC still seems better on a price/performance front than Dual Xeon Silvers, if only because you can get a single-socket EPYC with 8-channel RAM. But Xeon Silvers aren't really that far away.

walterbell 8y ago

> Intel is also forgoing hyper-threading on most of its processors. The only Core processors to get hyper-threading will be the Core i9 parts, and perhaps the Pentiums as well ... The other angle is one of the recently discovered side-channel attacks that can occur when hyper-threading is in action. By disabling hyper-threading on the volume production chips, this security issue is no longer present. Does this give AMD an advantage with Ryzen and Threadripper, since AMD supports hyperthreads?

dragontamer 8y ago
AMD has a cost/performance advantage. The Ryzen 2700x sells under $280 with a free cooler for 8c/16 threads. The Intel i9-9900k sells for $550+ to $580+, requires an added cooler, and 8c/16 threads. The difference is that the i9-9900k can single-thread turbo to 5GHz, which makes a big difference in single-threaded situations. The i9-9900k also has 256-bit AVX pipelines, while AMD Ryzen is 128-bit based AVX pipelines. So any AVX-heavy code (H264 rendering, Blender benchmarks, etc. etc.) will be hugely beneficial on the Intel platform. ----------- AMD still wins price/performance. I'd personally still take a Threadripper 2950x for example. But the i9-9900k is impressive because of that 5GHz clock, even if its a bit restrictive to use. Anyone who cares about maximum single-threaded speeds is looking at the 5GHz clock. That's huge.
- leetcrew 8y ago
  > The difference is that the i9-9900k can single-thread turbo to 5GHz minor nitpick: the 9900k can actually turbo to 5GHz on two cores simultaneously.
blihp 8y ago
I think so. I'd bet that the reason Intel is removing HT is for market segmentation rather than architectural reasons.

IvyMike 8y ago

I'm comparing the i7 here to the i7 in my current computer, built in April 2011(!) https://ark.intel.com/compare/186604,52214 https://ark.intel.com/compare/186604,52214 Kinda though I would see a lot bigger differences. There was a time in my life when I expected I would have to build a new computer every two years. Weird.

dragontamer 8y ago
The i7-2600k doesn't even have 256-bit busses on the inside. The i7-2600k barely begun to implement AVX (and doesn't even implement AVX2). The i9-9900k is way better. 3x 256-bit execution ports, 64-byte (512-bit) messages going around the Ringbus, DDR4 RAM (double memory bandwidth). The raw clocks ignore the huge advancements in IPC that exist between Sandy Bridge and Coffee Lake. And even then, the 5GHz clock on the i9-9900k makes it completely incomparable to compare the ancient Sandy Bridge with the modern Coffee Lake.
- blihp 8y ago
  If you roll up all of the 'huge advancements' (IPC, clock speed, all of it) over the course of 7 years, that's probably in the neighborhood of what we used to call the 'annual upgrade.' Ancient? Yes. Incomparable? No.
  - dragontamer 8y ago
    The Pentium 4 Netburst architecture was relatively stagnant between the years 2000 and 2004. "Prescott" (2004) was still "Netburst" but Prescott includes AMD64 so I'd say that's a major change. Still, its reflective in the naming. Netburst, Willamette, Northwood, Prescott, and Tejas were all called "Pentium 4", and lasted from a time period from year 2000 to 2006. Sure, there were a few additions: Hyperthreading I guess. But otherwise, the main difference in this timeframe were the 250nm to 90nm scaling (which got "free" GHz upgrades back then without any effort) In short: > what we used to call the 'annual upgrade.' You're exaggerating. Progress has slowed but Willamette (year 2000 1.5GHz) vs Northwood (year 2002 2GHz) Pentium 4s weren't that dissimilar. Prescott (2004) is even more amusing, as it hit 3.8GHz (Intel Pentium 4 570J). But boy, oh boy... you really can't compare Prescott 3.8GHz against Sandy Bridge (2011, 3.6GHz) or Coffee Lake (2018, 3.6GHz ), even if the base clocks are all close.

gameswithgo 8y ago

At first I thought this was super unimpressive, not much faster than previous gen, often slower. Then I realized my own cpu is already 3 generations old! And it is quite a huge jump from mine to the new i9! It has only been a few years!

dxhdr 8y ago

Why aren't they benchmarking it against the latest Threadrippers? They've got a i9-7900X up there which costs the same as the 2950x.

Brockenstein 8y ago
I think to give you perspective against previous HEDT Intel chips that had more than 4 cores.

tedunangst 8y ago

Print link loads about 700 graphs and images and lacks internal navigation... Alt: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13400/intel-9th-gen-core-i9-9900k-i7-9700k-i5-9600k-review https://www.anandtech.com/show/13400/intel-9th-gen-core-i9-9...

rl3 8y ago

It's worth noting this is largely a paper launch thus far: https://www.reddit.com/r/intel/comments/9pidjh/any_9900k_amazon_orders_shipped_yet/ https://www.reddit.com/r/intel/comments/9pidjh/any_9900k_ama... The October 19th date that everyone was given thus far seems to be a fantasy. The new processors aren't in stock anywhere, and as of yesterday every single retailer said they were shipping today. After waiting weeks for the 19th to arrive, it's rather infuriating.

adameast9000 8y ago
I saw some 9700k in stock at Microcenter in Brooklyn this morning
- selectodude 8y ago
  9700k is in stock everywhere. 9900k (the i9 with hyperthreading) is still nowhere to be found.
  - rl3 8y ago
    Amazon doesn't even have the 9700k right now. Newegg does, however if memory serves they didn't earlier today.

patrickg_zill 8y ago

For server usage, where you have multiple processes involved, I seem to find that memory bandwidth is very important. If the CPU can not get the data it cannot work with it...

romed 8y ago
Probably that's why the Skylake Xeon CPUs have 6 channels.

martinpw 8y ago

> The other angle is one of the recently discovered side-channel attacks that can occur when hyper-threading is in action. By disabling hyper-threading on the volume production chips, this security issue is no longer present. This line of reasoning feels unconvincing. If there were really worried about this they should disable it everywhere.

derefr 8y ago
There's no conceptual vulnerability if the system the chip is being integrated into isn't multi-tenant (where a "tenant" can be a literal time-share user, or something like a website's Javascript code executing in a web browser.) So: cloud computing, and consumers that might be running dumb code from the internet (= i{3,5,7} and Xeon = volume production) should get chips with no hyperthreading; while HPC, locked-down workstations, and gaming PCs that probably don't have any important data on them (= i9 = low-batch-size production) should get chips with hyperthreading.
- Coding_Cat 8y ago
  Unfortunately, it's the multi-tenant applications that tend to gain the most from hyperthreading. For HPC it's usually turned off, and I think for gaming and workstations it also has little if any use.
  - derefr 8y ago
    I think I've seen either Intel or AMD explain hyperthreads as being useful in the case of a gamer who is also using a software encoder to stream their gameplay. Also, HPC doesn't necessarily imply a uniform workload; it just implies that all workloads are trusted. Really, modern HPC clusters are still "multi-tenant"; they're just tenants who are all e.g. employees of the same company, or researchers at the same university. So you can describe them, from a security perspective, as one "tenant." None of them would have anything to gain by doing a side-channel attack against one-another.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

gigatexal 8y ago

Would rather save the bucks and go with a Ryzen 2700 unless I was doing avx512 work but who’s doing that these days?

mrbonner 8y ago
Could you elaborate why AVX-512 is not important? I guess that you are referring to GPGPU programming is what everybody is doing right now instead of SIMD in the CPU.
- gigatexal 8y ago
  I could be talking out of my butt but it’s my understanding that AVX512 isn’t used in but few niche programs.
  - oconnor663 8y ago
    Isn't that niche the same as the niche of programs that can realistically max out a modern desktop CPU? Video encoding, compression, and things like that?
    - gigatexal 8y ago
      according to this only x265 uses AVX512: https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/accelerating-x265-with-intel-advanced-vector-extensions-512-intel-avx-512 https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/accelerating-x265-... But I wouldn't doubt that things like Video encoding / compression uses this. Again, I was not saying it's not valuable just saying that for my use case where I don't encode videos for a living or run a large Handbrake/Plex video farm / library the i9 cpu is not worth as much to me as the cheaper, cooler running Ryzen 2700.
- gigatexal 8y ago
  It’s important yes but hard to implement I think and not widely used is what I was getting at. For me compiling and running VMs I’d take the Ryzen over this.

noipv4 8y ago

Threadripper or Core i9 for my next Linux desktop build?

gameswithgo 8y ago
i7 8700K may be the most sensible choice overall really.
- tracker1 8y ago
  Not sure that I agree.. if you have truly multithreaded workloads, the R7-2700X is probably a better option... in the end, it depends on your use and how much you want to spend. System cost is also a consideration.
  - zepearl 8y ago
    On one hand I agree for "truly multithreaded workloads" - on the other hand having strong single-threaded performance is still a nice feature to have (e.g. when writing prototypes or simply when using simple SW). I did evaluate about 2 months ago if to go for a 2700X or the usual Intel, and based on the benchmarks I saw, the 2700X is still a bit too weak when running single-threaded SW => I then bought an i7-8700 (no "k") just to be "safe" when running semi-single threaded SW (e.g. my current prototype uses 10 threads but has a single coordination bottleneck). Let's see what happens in ~January (I think that's when AMD is supposed to present the new CPUs that are supposed to be the "real" next-gen with higher IPC?)
    - tracker1 8y ago
      A lot of the time I'm working multi-tier software so will have VM and/or docker containers running in support of what I'm specifically working on. And even then it's mostly node/js based, so the NVME is the single biggest boost to my productivity. In any case, it's often browser + app server + backend services running... so I notice the single-thread performance less. TBH my current CPU (i7-4790k) keeps up reasonably well, though I wouldn't mind more threads and more RAM. When the GTX 1080 came out, I bumped up to that with a 1TB NVME drive (Samsung) which has been fantastic in limited use. Mostly notice the difference in my npm scripts (ci and build). I'm mostly just itching to upgrade more than feeling pain at this point. I'm pretty sure the Ryzen 2 CPUs (not 2xxx) will be sufficient, as will the mid-upper Intel. However, unless Intel brings their pricing into better competitive range, I may go AMD on my next build.

vbezhenar 8y ago

How those 8 cores communicate? I remember that AMD uses NUMA architecture that can bite in rare cases. Does Intel uses something similar too?

hesdeadjim 8y ago
Only the Threadripper has to worry about NUMA and that's because it has two physical dies with 8 cores each. The regular Ryzen 8-core only has a single physical die and thus NUMA isn't an issue.
en4bz 8y ago
Intel consumer class CPUs still use a ringbuffer architecture. Server chips use a newer mesh architecture.

PHGamer 8y ago

so it looks like intel is having the same issues as amd where more cores means not necesarily better gaming. i5 is still the best it looks like lol. this puts amd in a better position because they are at least cheaper for their cores.

individualcell 8y ago

I can't wait for the Skylake-X refresh. I use my computer for real-time audio and although the processing scales to multiple cores the "real-timeness" is limited by the speed of the single-core. Sadly AMD still is nowhere near Intel in this regard. I was hoping 2990WX could be an upgrade to 1800X, but sadly it won't be as the single core can also be limited by not having access to local memory. It is Intel this year.

ksec 8y ago

140 Comments, and not s single word mentioned about TDP. It seems people are OK with Intel stating a 95W TDP when its max could be 225W. We knew TDP wasn't a reliable figure for a long time and had sort of expect 20 - 30% variant, but now we are looking at ~2.4x difference.... After all the lies Intel have told, after all the disappointment and anger that Intel has been sitting there not innovating, cost cutting in the simplest thermal measures, their near irresponsible sales pitch to enterprise, the cries for AMD to bring competition. And they still buy an Intel Chip. The lesson here is brand building and stickies. I could only wish AMD best of luck. I am waiting for Zen 2.

mcraiha 8y ago
Anandtech noticed error in power measurements and tested with another motherboard that provided better results https://twitter.com/IanCutress/status/1053427417052798977 https://twitter.com/IanCutress/status/1053427417052798977
- dis-sys 8y ago
  166w when fully loaded on a 95 TDP processor, for me, that is the textbook definition of dishonesty.
  - mtanski 8y ago
    It's pretty annoying... but in lot of Intel marketing and spec sheets you'll find small print language that TDP is measured at base clock speed. The base clock has fallen from the 6700k where it was 4.0Ghz. In the end, it seams to me like the intent is to deceive.
    - m45t3r 8y ago
      I don't think so, Turbo Clocks are Turbo since they're meant for burst usage. Getting above TDP for a few moments is fine, however keeping those clocks are the problem.
- std_throwawayay 8y ago

dis-sys 8y ago

I really like that Die Sizes from Wikichip chart. For a quad core processor, Die Size went down from almost 275mm2 (Nehalem) to 125mm2 (Kaby Lake) over the last decade, but that didn't translate to cheaper price or much better performance, Intel worked so hard to prevent any of these to happen in their mainstream desktop processor product line.