9 ms·

4-Core i3-9350KF 2% more perf than 18-Core i9-9980XE according to UserBenchmark

26 points by mschuetz 7y ago

mschuetz 7y ago
Wrote "more perf" than "higher effective speed" due to title length limits. Also see discussion on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/chaofa/psa_userbenchmarkcom_have_updated_their_cpu/ https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/chaofa/psa_userbe...
kup0 7y ago
Not really all that surprising. i3 is Coffee Lake, i9 is Skylake. Even clock-for-clock, the process possibly improved enough for a slight IPC advantage to the i3. The 2% here is heavily weighted on single-core performance and the results are IMHO what one would expect from these two parts (the moment more than four cores are in a test, the i9 wins by a mile). Also, the Reddit link posted seems to be all about a whole different side of the discussion (the calculation changes at userbenchmark, AMD/Intel favoring, etc).
- mschuetz 7y ago
  Yes, that new algorithm disproportionally disadvantages AMD CPUs which are largely about multi-core performance. The new score weighting basically ignores the main advantages of the Ryzen series.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - kup0 7y ago
    I'm curious if they're just catering to their most common readers. If they have a high percentage of people that use the site that use workloads where single-core performance or low-count-multi-core performance is most important (gaming, apps that take advantage of 4 cores but not 18, etc) then maybe they thought that their algorithm originally favored Ryzen too much, and this is a balancing correction, not a favoring of Intel? Also, I don't understand the uproar over one small little overall percentage number- the rest of the numbers are there for anyone to easily weigh one against the other. Just a few lines down it's clear than the 18-core part demolishes the 4-core part in multi-core workloads (as anyone would expect without even visiting the website in the first place). Being able to handle more programs at a time/etc really has no bearing on "effective speed"- if their workloads are not apps that take advantage of 18 cores (encoders, etc), it's possible a 4-core part could "feel" just as fast, or faster, than an 18-core part if it does their workload faster. That said, the whole AMD/Intel war is less important to me because fanboyism in any amount is toxic and worth avoiding. People biased heavily enough towards one company will always see anything like this as some kind of conspiracy or attack, regardless of whether or not it's true (something I don't know in this case)
    - rowanG077 7y ago
      What do you most people use their computer for? Web browsing, word. Maybe some foto or video editing. With the exception of word all of these things MASSIVELY gain from having lots of cores. Not sure where the myth that most people have single threaded workloads comes from because it's not true at all at this time.
      - la_barba 7y ago
        I don't think its true that most people do web browsing. Its just an easy generalization to make. The world has thousands of industries and each specialty domain has their set of software suites that they need for their business. In my industry (pharma), and I'll adda caveat here that I haven't done a rigorous scientific analysis of every single workload, but off hand, all of our software is heavily dependent on single-thread perf. To be sure, there is some stuff that benefits from multiple cores.. dna sequencing/alignment/processing comes to mind, primarily because we're processing hundreds of GBs of data. But by and large, I would pick a CPU that has better single-thread perf. For our accounting folks who use quickbooks a lot, are not going to benefit "massively" from a high core count. For our facilities team that uses autocad.. again same thing .. I don't find a massive benefit from 10-12+ core systems. Sure you can always on a case-by-case basis invent scenarios which could potentially benefit from more cores, but this massive gain across the board that you claim is a bit of an exaggeration. IMHO/IME/YMMV/$0.02 etc..
        rowanG077 7y ago
        99% of single threaded industry software doesn't need more power. That's why all of these cheap office pc have i3 processors that are years old. Single threaded performance has only one real advantage at this time and that is gaming. I think multi threading performance is way more important in the real world.
        la_barba 7y ago
        >99% of single threaded industry software doesn't need more power. Again, I don't know if that is true. I'd love to see stats on that. My gut tells me improved single-threaded perf will always be welcome in most software because most data transforms are not not easily parallelizable. Certainly for me, more single threaded perf is always welcome in all the software I use daily.. from office suites to compilers to IDEs to photoshop to soft-PLCs/SCADA/HMI or even when opening a super large excel file with crazy forumlas. I don't think its just gaming. The specifications of budget/cheap computers are not really an indicator of what will or wont benefit from single-threaded perf. Whether the benefit is worth paying for will obviously depend on other factors. For me its a nobrainer.
- zamadatix 7y ago
  <2 points of the difference is due to 2 generations of improvements on IPC, the other ~6 are due to the boost clock rate being 200 MHz higher from manufacturing refinement.
brian_herman__ 7y ago
They changed their weighting of multicore performance recently....
- mschuetz 7y ago
  To a weighting that virtually ignores multi core performance entirely. Multi-Core weighting is now downgraded from 10% to 2%, single-core is at 40% and quad-core at 58%: https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Faq/What-is-the-effective-CPU-speed-index/55 https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Faq/What-is-the-effective-CPU-... Counting 58% for four cores yet only 2% for >4 cores in effective speed is nothing short of an outright lie. And this change coming 2 weeks after benchmark results that put Ryzen ahead in multi-core and value proposition.
  - la_barba 7y ago
    What is the "outright lie" here? Its their opinion on what they think is important for the needs of their audience. Taking advantage of so many extra cores by a single process is not all that easy or common. In a multi-process scenario the extra cores are obviously very useful. A person intending to buy a CPU for server loads would look at the appropriate benchmarks...
    - geezerjay 7y ago
      > Taking advantage of so many extra cores by a single process is not all that easy or common. Browsers are both multiprocess and multithreaded. The ability to run a few webapps without having your system drag to a halt is a feature that's important to essentially everyone.
      - la_barba 7y ago
        >The ability to run a few webapps without having your system drag to a halt is a feature that's important to essentially everyone. Webapps such as? I have a 4 core CPU from 2014 (i7-4790K) and I can't recall that ever happening to me. Primarily because any modern OS will throttle crazy runaway threads to ensure UI responsiveness, so the system doesn't 'drag to a halt' as you claim. Also honestly.. how many people are looking at CPU benchmarks to run browsers better? I'd wager a twenty that its mostly gaming nerds who are obsessed with CPU benchmarks. Then.. its also a question of knowing your audience. I'm sure they have a better idea of who their audience is than you or I.
WarOnPrivacy 7y ago
The single threaded performance of the i3 is about 3% higher than the i9. Factoring in all the cores tho, the i9 performance is about 3x the i3 - but at about 9x the cost. ref: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i9-9980XE-vs-Intel-i3-9350KF/3373vs3459 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i9-9980XE-vs-Inte... On balance, the i3 looks like a solid chip if a bit pricey for an i3.
imtringued 7y ago
So the 18 core chip is 5.48 times faster than the 4 core chip in multicore performance and it has almost the same single core performance as a i3 chip which is purely optimized for single core performance. Just by looking at the core count you would expect it to have 4.5 times the performance. Very impressive.
- zamadatix 7y ago
  It's either not a linear scale with the 1 or 4 core benchmarks or just plain incorrect. Treating it linearly results in the paradox that at stock the 18 cores each run significantly faster than if 1 core were running. This is the opposite of what the boost algorithm would do. The quad core scores seem reasonable though, just mildly lower per core than the single core bench.
ummm32 7y ago
Can't somebody just invent a pluggable PC architecture, ala Kubernetes? So you would connect several PCs, notebooks to a switch, or by wifi, then you run a desktop, gnome or something, but there's a layer, heck it can be even a wrapper before running the binary. The layer or the wrapper would just check how's going your load, memory and would the app from whatever machine has enough free resources available, the it would show you a window with you app running there (in a PC/notebook different from you "main" one), as fast as the network connection you're using to cluster up your assembled PCs / notebooks. I think Xwindow and some go code could do the trick? There's some experience sharing clipboards/mouse/keyboard input (synergy). What would be really necessary is a scheduler ala kubernetes (but a somewhat clever bash script could the job as well), to be able to orderly tap the free resources in several connected PCs/notebooks. No need to rewrite thousands of apps, or design a new desktop environment completely from scratch, and you could actually would be able to run Chrome in its own hardware, just to use a hundred of tabs if you feel like to do it
- myrandomcomment 7y ago
  They got close...look at Plan9. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs Everything on the network was just a mount, file system, sound, cpu, etc.
ryuukk_ 7y ago
maybe some benchmark of old CPUs doesn't take into account the crappy named exploits recently found

26 points by mschuetz 7y ago

Wrote "more perf" than "higher effective speed" due to title length limits. Also see discussion on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/chaofa/psa_userbenchmarkcom_have_updated_their_cpu/ https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/chaofa/psa_userbe...

kup0 7y ago

Not really all that surprising. i3 is Coffee Lake, i9 is Skylake. Even clock-for-clock, the process possibly improved enough for a slight IPC advantage to the i3. The 2% here is heavily weighted on single-core performance and the results are IMHO what one would expect from these two parts (the moment more than four cores are in a test, the i9 wins by a mile). Also, the Reddit link posted seems to be all about a whole different side of the discussion (the calculation changes at userbenchmark, AMD/Intel favoring, etc).

mschuetz 7y ago
Yes, that new algorithm disproportionally disadvantages AMD CPUs which are largely about multi-core performance. The new score weighting basically ignores the main advantages of the Ryzen series.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- kup0 7y ago
  I'm curious if they're just catering to their most common readers. If they have a high percentage of people that use the site that use workloads where single-core performance or low-count-multi-core performance is most important (gaming, apps that take advantage of 4 cores but not 18, etc) then maybe they thought that their algorithm originally favored Ryzen too much, and this is a balancing correction, not a favoring of Intel? Also, I don't understand the uproar over one small little overall percentage number- the rest of the numbers are there for anyone to easily weigh one against the other. Just a few lines down it's clear than the 18-core part demolishes the 4-core part in multi-core workloads (as anyone would expect without even visiting the website in the first place). Being able to handle more programs at a time/etc really has no bearing on "effective speed"- if their workloads are not apps that take advantage of 18 cores (encoders, etc), it's possible a 4-core part could "feel" just as fast, or faster, than an 18-core part if it does their workload faster. That said, the whole AMD/Intel war is less important to me because fanboyism in any amount is toxic and worth avoiding. People biased heavily enough towards one company will always see anything like this as some kind of conspiracy or attack, regardless of whether or not it's true (something I don't know in this case)
  - rowanG077 7y ago
    What do you most people use their computer for? Web browsing, word. Maybe some foto or video editing. With the exception of word all of these things MASSIVELY gain from having lots of cores. Not sure where the myth that most people have single threaded workloads comes from because it's not true at all at this time.
    - la_barba 7y ago
      I don't think its true that most people do web browsing. Its just an easy generalization to make. The world has thousands of industries and each specialty domain has their set of software suites that they need for their business. In my industry (pharma), and I'll adda caveat here that I haven't done a rigorous scientific analysis of every single workload, but off hand, all of our software is heavily dependent on single-thread perf. To be sure, there is some stuff that benefits from multiple cores.. dna sequencing/alignment/processing comes to mind, primarily because we're processing hundreds of GBs of data. But by and large, I would pick a CPU that has better single-thread perf. For our accounting folks who use quickbooks a lot, are not going to benefit "massively" from a high core count. For our facilities team that uses autocad.. again same thing .. I don't find a massive benefit from 10-12+ core systems. Sure you can always on a case-by-case basis invent scenarios which could potentially benefit from more cores, but this massive gain across the board that you claim is a bit of an exaggeration. IMHO/IME/YMMV/$0.02 etc..
      - rowanG077 7y ago
        99% of single threaded industry software doesn't need more power. That's why all of these cheap office pc have i3 processors that are years old. Single threaded performance has only one real advantage at this time and that is gaming. I think multi threading performance is way more important in the real world.
        la_barba 7y ago
        >99% of single threaded industry software doesn't need more power. Again, I don't know if that is true. I'd love to see stats on that. My gut tells me improved single-threaded perf will always be welcome in most software because most data transforms are not not easily parallelizable. Certainly for me, more single threaded perf is always welcome in all the software I use daily.. from office suites to compilers to IDEs to photoshop to soft-PLCs/SCADA/HMI or even when opening a super large excel file with crazy forumlas. I don't think its just gaming. The specifications of budget/cheap computers are not really an indicator of what will or wont benefit from single-threaded perf. Whether the benefit is worth paying for will obviously depend on other factors. For me its a nobrainer.
zamadatix 7y ago
<2 points of the difference is due to 2 generations of improvements on IPC, the other ~6 are due to the boost clock rate being 200 MHz higher from manufacturing refinement.

brian_herman__ 7y ago

They changed their weighting of multicore performance recently....

mschuetz 7y ago
To a weighting that virtually ignores multi core performance entirely. Multi-Core weighting is now downgraded from 10% to 2%, single-core is at 40% and quad-core at 58%: https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Faq/What-is-the-effective-CPU-speed-index/55 https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Faq/What-is-the-effective-CPU-... Counting 58% for four cores yet only 2% for >4 cores in effective speed is nothing short of an outright lie. And this change coming 2 weeks after benchmark results that put Ryzen ahead in multi-core and value proposition.
- la_barba 7y ago
  What is the "outright lie" here? Its their opinion on what they think is important for the needs of their audience. Taking advantage of so many extra cores by a single process is not all that easy or common. In a multi-process scenario the extra cores are obviously very useful. A person intending to buy a CPU for server loads would look at the appropriate benchmarks...
  - geezerjay 7y ago
    > Taking advantage of so many extra cores by a single process is not all that easy or common. Browsers are both multiprocess and multithreaded. The ability to run a few webapps without having your system drag to a halt is a feature that's important to essentially everyone.
    - la_barba 7y ago
      >The ability to run a few webapps without having your system drag to a halt is a feature that's important to essentially everyone. Webapps such as? I have a 4 core CPU from 2014 (i7-4790K) and I can't recall that ever happening to me. Primarily because any modern OS will throttle crazy runaway threads to ensure UI responsiveness, so the system doesn't 'drag to a halt' as you claim. Also honestly.. how many people are looking at CPU benchmarks to run browsers better? I'd wager a twenty that its mostly gaming nerds who are obsessed with CPU benchmarks. Then.. its also a question of knowing your audience. I'm sure they have a better idea of who their audience is than you or I.

WarOnPrivacy 7y ago

The single threaded performance of the i3 is about 3% higher than the i9. Factoring in all the cores tho, the i9 performance is about 3x the i3 - but at about 9x the cost. ref: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i9-9980XE-vs-Intel-i3-9350KF/3373vs3459 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i9-9980XE-vs-Inte... On balance, the i3 looks like a solid chip if a bit pricey for an i3.

imtringued 7y ago

So the 18 core chip is 5.48 times faster than the 4 core chip in multicore performance and it has almost the same single core performance as a i3 chip which is purely optimized for single core performance. Just by looking at the core count you would expect it to have 4.5 times the performance. Very impressive.

zamadatix 7y ago
It's either not a linear scale with the 1 or 4 core benchmarks or just plain incorrect. Treating it linearly results in the paradox that at stock the 18 cores each run significantly faster than if 1 core were running. This is the opposite of what the boost algorithm would do. The quad core scores seem reasonable though, just mildly lower per core than the single core bench.

ummm32 7y ago

Can't somebody just invent a pluggable PC architecture, ala Kubernetes? So you would connect several PCs, notebooks to a switch, or by wifi, then you run a desktop, gnome or something, but there's a layer, heck it can be even a wrapper before running the binary. The layer or the wrapper would just check how's going your load, memory and would the app from whatever machine has enough free resources available, the it would show you a window with you app running there (in a PC/notebook different from you "main" one), as fast as the network connection you're using to cluster up your assembled PCs / notebooks. I think Xwindow and some go code could do the trick? There's some experience sharing clipboards/mouse/keyboard input (synergy). What would be really necessary is a scheduler ala kubernetes (but a somewhat clever bash script could the job as well), to be able to orderly tap the free resources in several connected PCs/notebooks. No need to rewrite thousands of apps, or design a new desktop environment completely from scratch, and you could actually would be able to run Chrome in its own hardware, just to use a hundred of tabs if you feel like to do it

myrandomcomment 7y ago
They got close...look at Plan9. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs Everything on the network was just a mount, file system, sound, cpu, etc.

ryuukk_ 7y ago

maybe some benchmark of old CPUs doesn't take into account the crappy named exploits recently found