57 ms·

Intel's flagship 10th-gen desktop CPU has 10 cores, reaches 5.3GHz

223 points by redm 6y ago

bzb3 6y ago
Once again crushing the competition in single core performance, which is what matters.
- ido 6y ago
  Matters for whom? For a lot of use cases (web servers, compiling, databases...) having lots of cores matters (and total = performance of core * number of cores), for others it doesn't.
  - globular-toast 6y ago
    No, it does not matter. That's a common misconception. If you double your core count you can run double the number of threads in the same amount of time. That's it. If you double your single core speed you can still run double the number of threads in the same amount of time or the same amount of threads in half the time. Single core performance is always preferable for CPUs. The CPU manufacturers basically conned everyone into thinking multi-core was "good enough". Software people who knew what they were talking about back in the day called them out on it but nobody listened. Now here we are on Hacker News in 2020 and people still not understanding this.
    - gpm 6y ago
      We all know that a single core with twice the performance and twice the cache space is generally better than two cores (though a sibling comment does raise a good point that poorly written software can lock up an entire core regardless of it's Hz, also some VM scenarios would prefer extra cores over faster cores). We also all know that a single core with twice the performance and twice the cache space costs a lot more than two cores. It's a lot more expensive than even 3 cores. I'd rather have 3 4Ghz cores than 1 8Ghz core (except for the novelty value).
      - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
        We all know that a single core with twice the performance and twice the cache space is generally better than two cores I'm not sure that's actually true, even if you want performance (although it's dependent on whether your workload can use more than 1 thread, of course): A single core at a higher clock speed might be better if it can hold that clock speed. But the faster you run, the more power you use and the more heat you produce, and worse, the relationship isn't linear. So ex. 1 core at 4ghz won't stay at 4 ghz, where 2 cores at 2 ghz can hold that speed forever.
        gpm 6y ago
        Right, when I say an xGhz core I'm pretending to live in a simpler world where they can all hold that speed forever. Consider an 8Ghz core to be a core + cooling that can consistently hold a speed twice as fast as the 4Ghz core + cooling can hold.
      - globular-toast 6y ago
        > We also all know that a single core with twice the performance and twice the cache space costs a lot more than two cores. It's a lot more expensive than even 3 cores. I'm a programmer, I don't care how much it costs the hardware manufacturer. I want a single core. Multi-threaded programming sucks. I don't care if that's implemented via multiple cores acting together and only presents itself as a single core. I just want a single core. > I'd rather have 3 4Ghz cores than 1 8Ghz core (except for the novelty value). I'd much rather avoid multi-threaded programming and get the 8GHz core. But your comment is missing the point, really, which is that single-core performance matters. If the 8GHz core existed then you'd still be able to get 3 8GHz cores. Still want the 3x4GHz?
        gpm 6y ago
        8Ghz cores do exist if you have enough money to hire someone to deal with the overclocking for you (or enough liquid nitrogen and time to do it yourself). I, on the other hand, care about the cost of my computers a bit more than that, not having infinite money. Which is why even if 8Ghz cores were commercially available I suspect I would still be buying 3 times as many 4Ghz ones.
    - sk0g 6y ago
      So say I'm close to maxing out my 8c/16t CPU, would a better alternative be a 16*4; 64Ghz single core processor? Why? You wouldn't have true parallelism then, would you? So if you have something, for whatever reason, blocking further processing, the entire computer would lock up. Why is this a better scenario again?
      - globular-toast 6y ago
        You don't care about parallelism, you care about concurrency. Operating systems have handled that just fine for many decades now.
      - paulmd 6y ago
        > You wouldn't have true parallelism then, would you? So if you have something, for whatever reason, blocking further processing, the entire computer would lock up That doesn't occur because the OS scheduler will eventually pre-empt your thread and swap to another task. You don't really have control over that. All modern OSs use pre-emptive multitasking and there's not a ton you can do to prevent it. (read: anything in the last 30 years, last cooperative multitasking I remember was MacOS Classic (probably like OS7 or so.) Single-core processors were the norm up until 15 years ago, and people routinely ran more than one process on them. Yes, we ran Discord (we called it Roger Wilco or Teamspeak back then) and played music in the background too, without 4 dedicated cores for the background tasks. Yes, in the abstract it would be preferable to have a 64 GHz processor instead of 16 4 GHz processors, because then you can have all that speed devoted to a single task. Context switching is not that expensive (particularly if you have hyperthreads/SMT to soak up the wasted cycles). The physics of transistors make that impossible, but we absolutely would not do any of this multithreading crap if we didn't have to. Single-threaded code is easier to write and usually faster (in terms of less total cycles - multithreaded programs waste extra cycles on synchronization, overhead, spinning for locks, etc that single-threaded programs don't have to).
        theandrewbailey 6y ago
        > (read: anything in the last 30 years, last cooperative multitasking I remember was MacOS Classic (probably like OS7 or so.) I remember reading about that a while ago. Wasn't everything up to and including Mac OS 9 cooperatively multitasked?
    - ben-schaaf 6y ago
      Turns out this has been tested, and the results are clear: Running a single core 9900k is pretty bad in comparison to 8 heavily downclocked cores on the same CPU. While single threaded tasks are obviously slower, frame rates are much more stable, windows is more usable with 8 cores. Several games simply didn't work with a single core, or took ages to load. Reference: https://youtu.be/feO54CBUJCk https://youtu.be/feO54CBUJCk
      - tylerhou 6y ago
        The video you linked is pretty weak; there was (understandably) no performance tuning done on both configurations (Windows scheduler, game scheduling). https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/36448.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...
      - SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
        This is because for a fair comparison you need to scale the L1/L2 cache size as well. More cores - more cache. It is also important to not scale below 2 cores, because servicing interrupts causes performance hiccups. It is enough to have the second core heavily downclocked, and you'll still have better performance then with just a single core.
    - madushan1000 6y ago
      > same amount of threads in half the time Sure, if you forget all the additional cache evictions, memory reads and writes and TLB flushes caused by all the competing threads on a single core. Not to mention that one shitty bit of code in one thread can poison the cache enough to re-read the data from memory every context switch.
- SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
  Depends on workload, and we've seen that with the latest round of AMD offerings. As a gamer, yes, but that's really it.
  - gpm 6y ago
    Are there actually games that take advantage of a CPU this fast? I would imagine that all the game developers would be targeting the more modest hardware that most of their players actually have.
    - zamadatix 6y ago
      Generally those with the top end CPU have the top end GPU and the top end monitor. In that regard all the game has to do to "take advantage" of the CPU is support high or unlocked framerates and high resolutions.
      - leetcrew 6y ago
        > Generally those with the top end CPU have the top end GPU and the top end monitor I sort of doubt this is true, if only for the reason that most people don't buy a new CPU, GPU, and monitor at the same time. monitor and pc are probably going to be on different upgrade cycles, unless the monitor came with the pc (in which case, probably not "top end"). for DIYers, the GPU and CPU+RAM+mobo are likely also on different upgrade cycles. I bought my current 4K monitor about four years ago, but I ran most games at 1080p until I had enough spare cash to buy a 1080 ti. I finally upgraded my CPU, RAM, and motherboard this year, mainly because I was tired of having 8GB of DDR3. in any case, it's usually not a rational use of funds to buy the fastest CPU and GPU for a 4K monitor unless your budget is unlimited. with a constrained budget, it's usually better to drop a tier or two on the CPU if it gets you the next higher tier GPU.
    - InvaderFizz 6y ago
      Anything high refresh rate(120+Hz) benefits immensely from these high clock rates. The high clocks result in less pipeline stalls meaning your high frame rates are more achievable as well as significantly reducing the dips (0.1% lows is what every reviewer hates). This isnt about "average", this is about having the best experience possible, which Intel provides in this very specific scenario. Intel has three things going for it(in the consumer space), which matter a lot or not at all to different folks: - better idle/low usage power consumption than AMD (low load laptop battery life) - Intel's QuickSync is fantastic for media encode/decode (NVENC is typically better, AMD is basically non-existent) - Intel has the highest clock rates. Outside of these niches, AMD is dominating at every level of the product stack.
- dralley 6y ago
  The gap is pretty small, even now, and Zen 3 comes out in a few months. The value proposition of these chips is pretty bad, as well. Enormous power and cooling requirements, short-lived motherboard sockets, and sheer price/performance ratio are all not great in comparison.
- mschuetz 6y ago
  /s ? For my computer graphics and processing work, multithreaded tasks scale amazingly well with the number of cores so single core performance doesn't matter all that much. A single thread isn't even be able to process all the data that's streamed from an SSD. I need three threads just to process/prepare the data in the background, in addition to the main thread that keeps rendering. I suspect it's only a matter of time until multithreading is a must for games. The additional programming effort may not have paid off if players only have 2 or 4 core CPUs, but now that 8 cores with 16 threads are increasingly common, it's going to make a difference.
  - ido 6y ago
    AAA games have all but required quad cores (or at least 2c/4t) for years now. I think a lot of games already scale well to 4c/8t today.
    - Uehreka 6y ago
      Do they use those cores? Sure. But when I’m playing a game (even a game that feels like it should be ripping threads like Factorio) I usually see that one core is pegged at 100% while the others are chilling around 40-60% (I have an overclocked 8700K). In my experience, single core performance is still the bottleneck (as far as CPUs are concerned) for gaming.
      - driverdan 6y ago
        Yes, recent games do. For example, Doom Eternal can max out all CPU cores.
      - skocznymroczny 6y ago
        Factorio is an indie game, I guess it might not be easy for indie developers to make use of multithreading, whereas AAA game developers have entire teams dedicated to engine development and multithreading. Anyway, traditional graphics APIs like OpenGL are practically single-threaded. Modern APIs like DX12 and Vulkan have been designed with multithreading in mind and support scaling with number of cores much better (with added overhead of having to do manual synchronization).
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  ... for gamers playing single-threaded games.
  - ajross 6y ago
    To be fair, that's exactly the target market for high end desktop CPUs like this. This isn't a datacenter part, and other parallel workloads tend not to make up much share of the personal workstation market. If you want to max out gaming benchmarks right now, this is your CPU. And there are a decent number of people who do, so heavily tuning existing dies (I mean, let's be honest, this a rebinned and overclocked 10900X) makes sense.
  - paulmd 6y ago
    When people say "single-threaded performance" they don't mean literally one single thread will ever be used. The single-core performance is a proxy for performance-per-core and that's a certainly a very important number. Intel's per-core performance is decently higher in gaming, between their lower latency giving them slightly higher IPC in gaming tasks[1] (as these are latency sensitive) and the much higher all-core clocks they are pushing (at least 10% higher than AMD at present). That still gives them an edge in gaming, although certainly much less of an edge against Zen2 than it was against Zen1 (which was much worse than people were willing to admit at the time, people at the time were benching it with a GTX 1080 (the fastest card available at the time) at 1440p and 4K and claiming there was "no noticeable difference", but faster GPUs showed the weakness). I think the 10700F looks good, 4.6 GHz all-core 8C16T part for under $300 looks compelling for gaming customers if you can keep it cool. The 10900K fills the "I want the top gaming performance first and foremost, with as many cores as I can get, and I'm not super concerned about budget" but is definitely on the expensive side. Other than that, nothing terribly impressive here IMO, the other chips fall into a range between "not fast enough" and "not cheap enough". [1] https://www.techspot.com/article/1876-4ghz-ryzen-3rd-gen-vs-core-i9/ https://www.techspot.com/article/1876-4ghz-ryzen-3rd-gen-vs-...
    - zozbot234 6y ago
      > The single-core performance is a proxy for performance-per-core A very bad proxy then, since performance-per-core with multiple cores in use will almost certainly be limited by constraints on (1) memory bandwidth and (2) power/thermals. "Single-core performance" only applies when you're literally pegging one core at 100% cpu.
- specto 6y ago
  Not really... If you look at the FPS numbers, sure AMD is slightly lower. However AMD can also perform other functions like encoding/decoding. If you want pure FPS, sure Intel will win. For general computing AND gaming, AMD wins every time per dollar.
- tpmx 6y ago
  It is what matters to web browsing performance. Web browsing is no longer a "light" thing to do. You need solid integer single core computing performance to have a snappy browsing experience. AFAIK, there is not yet a web browser core that can parallelize tasks in a meaningful way.
  - gpm 6y ago
    Mozilla has been making pretty good progress with parallelization of firefox with their oxidation project. All browsers are splitting different tabs into different processes which means they are taking advantage of multithreading if you have more than one compute intensive tab/window open.
    - tpmx 6y ago
      Splitting tabs into separate processes is mainstream these days, but it doesn't really help that much. You only need the focused tab to be snappy.
      - gpm 6y ago
        You only need the focused tab to be snappy, but to let it be snappy you need to keep all the other work away from that core. Gmail updating emails, youtube playing a video in the background, discord pinging chat messages at you, and so and and so forth.
        tpmx 6y ago
        With a modern javascript engine you can throttle the activity of tabs that are not focused. (And browsers do indeed do that. Pretty aggressively, too.)
        Marsymars 6y ago
        I wish there was some extension that blocked any non-focused tabs from performing any javascript execution unless I whitelist the domain.
- loufe 6y ago
  While I agree this post should be downvoted I do think it's worth mentioning at least two different reasons why higher clock speed would push me to intel this generation: AutoCAD and Europa Universalis IV. Those are my two principal demanding softwares where they cannot see any real means of moving past single core for the vast majority of processing.
- anthony_doan 6y ago
  We should all wait for real world testing. IIRC AMD and Intel test their performance differently. Intel tend to give turbo performance which can only run for so long before heat becomes a problem.
  - sq_ 6y ago
    Looks like GN already has a video out, so I imagine the rest of the big hardware channels will follow along quickly. Don't have time to watch GN's video now, but I bet they'll have taken a nice in-depth look at the performance.
- lawrenceyan 6y ago
  I think part of the reason why you may be being downvoted has to do with the tone you're using in making your statement as well as the newness of your account. Also, though you're statement is technically correct, it fails to account for the nuance that increasingly across all applications, not just gaming, multi-threaded processing performance is becoming the far more important benchmark to look at.
  - ksec 6y ago
    > crushing... crushing adjective [usually before noun] used to emphasise how bad or severe something is I had to check the dictionary just in case. And in this case neither was it technically correct, or downvoted because of the tone. I downvoted it because it was factually wrong. Zen 2 actually has better IPC than Skylake in many cases, on a sustained single thread performance they are likely to be on a similar level despite having a slightly lower clock speed disadvantage on a much lower TDP. Hardly crushing.
- redisman 6y ago
  Just the fact that it's yet another socket for basically the same process is insane. On AM4 I've been able to use their low-end to very-high end CPUs for the last several years and most likely will be able to use the ones coming out this year too.
zamadatix 6y ago
It'll be interesting to see what Intel looks like in performance after they get past their 14 nm node for HEDT.
Dunedan 6y ago
This article states the following power consumption: > The 10900K has a 125-watt TDP, for example, while AMD's Ryzen 9 3900X's is just 105-watts. My understanding from other articles (like [1]) is however that Intel had to _massively_ increase the amount of power the CPU consumes when turboing under load: > Not only that, despite the 125 W TDP listed on the box, Intel states that the turbo power recommendation is 250 W – the motherboard manufacturers we’ve spoken to have prepared for 320-350 W from their own testing, in order to maintain that top turbo for as long as possible. Somehow it feels like back in the Pentium 4 days again. [1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15758/intels-10th-gen-comet-lake-desktop https://www.anandtech.com/show/15758/intels-10th-gen-comet-l...
- johncalvinyoung 6y ago
  Came here to post the more-helpful Anandtech article.
- anthony_doan 6y ago
  Didn't we have XDR ram around that time?
- celim307 6y ago
  How the tables have turned since the and bulldozer days
  - close04 6y ago
    It looks almost identical to the AthlonXP/64 vs Pentium 4 days when Intel just kept bumping the clocks and power consumption. Until they came out with Conroe. Jim Keller might be doing just that with Intel right now. I only hope whatever they come up with, AMD is ready and able to keep up. Otherwise we're going to see a rerun of the following period too: Intel tweaking the same architecture for years at a time, and squeezing low single digit performance improvements that come with questionable security sacrifices and deeply unpleasant sticker prices.
    - xoa 6y ago
henriquez 6y ago
I'm surprised they _still_ don't have a working 10nm desktop chip. They're 5 years behind schedule (and still counting) at this point! This is just a reskinned 9900k with 2 more cores and a much higher (> 25%) TDP at 125-watts, which is a generously low estimate of how much power it will actually suck. I briefly had their "140 watt" 7820x chip (returned for refund) that would gladly suck down more than 200 watts under sustained load. Intel plays such games with their single core turbo at this point that the 5.3ghz means very little, and it's the same tired architecture they've been rehashing since Sandy Bridge (2011). This is an incredibly poor showing and if I were an investor I would be seriously questioning the future of Intel as a company.
- superpermutat0r 6y ago
  I believe Jim Keller is currently at Intel, maybe they'll have some surprises soon.
  - oAlbe 6y ago
    I've always been puzzled by this whole Jim Keller situation. Is one man literally the only reason we have technological advancements in microprocessors?
    - MengerSponge 6y ago
      Five tops: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi
    - blihp 6y ago
      Obviously not the only reason, but he appears to be a helpful ingredient in the mix with good things tending to happen with him around. No idea how much of it is due to his technical vs. management skill, but there definitely seems to be some there there.
      - patrec 6y ago
        In that light AMD losing him to Intel via Tesla sounds like a potential few billion dollar blunder. I wonder how difficult/expensive it would have been to prevent that.
nimbius 6y ago
is this 5.3GHz with, or without spectre, RIDL, meltdown, zombieload, fallout, MDS, TAA, and whatever other mitigations for vulnerabilities inherent in Intel chips?
- vasco 6y ago
  Clock speed is clock speed, you're thinking about operations per cycle.
  - saiya-jin 6y ago
    You are of course correct, but it's a very important point - theoretical performance on paper is +-meaningless, only real, end performance after things are set safely is relevant to normal use cases. Which is basically all of us. Strangely, not all cpu reviews take this into consideration.
  - greggyb 6y ago
    You are correct. Just a nit: it's usually referred to as "instructions per cycle" or IPC, rather than "operations per cycle."
    - hermitdev 6y ago
      Operations per cycle also matters. Circa P4, an instruction took around 40-50 cycles to complete. Yeah, it was +5GHz, though. Core architecture brought it down to around 8 cycles to complete an op. Clock speeds dropped, but more shit got done at lower clock speeds.
      - CyberDildonics 6y ago
        That is still IPC, which refers to instructions per clock as an average throughput and not the instruction latency. > Circa P4, an instruction took around 40-50 cycles to complete Different instructions can have wildly different latencies. Even then an instruction taking 50 cycles sounds like double precision division or an 80 bit floating point operation. Most operations on the P4 had a latency of 1 - 7 cycles, but the P4's high clocks made memory latency and branch mispredictions a bigger issue. Some instruction latency might have been part of the overall pipeline shortening that made the core architecture fast, but this is an oversimplification, and the numbers here don't apply to the vast majority of common instructions. Caches, deep out of order buffers, prefetching and branch prediction all play a part.
riazrizvi 6y ago
So about 400,000X faster than my first computer console, the 8bit 1Mhz Atari 2600, which cost $200 at that, time 40 years ago. Or 600X faster than the 64-bit 80 MHz Cray-1 which was $8mm at the same time.
- ahefner 6y ago
  The Atari ST was 16-bit and ran around 7 or 8 MHz. Maybe you're thinking of the 8-bit line (400/800/XL/XE).
  - riazrizvi 6y ago
    was thinking 2600 and typing ST, fixed it
- sixothree 6y ago
  My first computer was a TRS-80 Color Computer with 4KB. The pace of doubling has been a part of my life since home pong. And now a generation provides <20% boost over the previous leaves me with an uneasy feeling.
  - riazrizvi 6y ago
    I get excited as much about economic and eco-political axes in technology, with this multidimensional perspective there is still so much room to grow. Look at how interesting OS's became when Richard Stallman started to open source them. Look at the price difference between the Atari and Cray in terms of $/speed, albeit a 70's example. Chips are still in patent-impregnable territory, they are proprietary and boring. In the next years, if these technologies open up, we could see some amazing stuff...
    - sixothree 6y ago
      I am excited mostly about AR. _If_ we can solve the hardware, it promises to be one of the most useful and astounding technologies ever promised.
- 6y ago
zaptheimpaler 6y ago
It feels like we are moving towards ARM becoming the primary consumer CPU, and x86/x64 being used to power only niche use cases (dev, audio/video, gaming etc.) or servers only. Can anyone working in the space confirm/deny?
- greggyb 6y ago
  Define "moving toward". We're nowhere close to that at this point.
  - Skunkleton 6y ago
    Define "nowhere close"? Apple's cpu's are competitive with x86 when looking at low power applications. Microsoft has multiple examples of windows running on arm. This seems pretty close in the grand scheme of things.
    - wmf 6y ago
      Arm has zero percent market share in PCs. It would take ten years or more to hit 50%.
      - lostlogin 6y ago
        The number of computers in use in 10 years will be a lot larger. According to the below link between 2002 and 2014 computer numbers doubled to 2 billion. So if things continued in even vaguely similar form ARM would have to sell about as many machines as are currently used. But there are an awful lot of people who will take a low power, cool machine. Even if slower I’d like some. https://www.reference.com/world-view/many-computers-world-e2e980daa5e128d0 https://www.reference.com/world-view/many-computers-world-e2...
      - freehunter 6y ago
        Well they said “consumer CPU”, not “PC CPU”. So the question is, do most consumers do their computing on PC CPUs or ARM CPUs? Which then raises the question, what does “computing” mean...
antongribok 6y ago
So, $488 for 10x 3.7 GHz Intel vs. $409 for 12x 3.8 GHz AMD? I'll take one AMD Ryzen 9 3900X, thanks MicroCenter!
- paulmd 6y ago
  Base clocks are irrelevant on desktop, it's not Sandy Bridge days anymore. No modern (desktop) processor runs at baseclock in practice. The 10900KF will do 4.8 GHz all-core at $472, the 3900X will do it at around 4-4.1 GHz[0]. AMD has a slight IPC advantage in productivity, Intel has a slight IPC advantage in gaming[1]. The market for the 10900K/KF is basically someone who wants the fastest gaming rig, but then as a secondary priority wants more cores for productivity. Kind of an overlap with the 3900X, sure, but the 10900K/KF will still outperform it in gaming, where the 3900X tilts a little more towards productivity. There are of course exceptions, CS:GO loves Zen2's cache and Zen2's latency makes DAWs run like trash, so your specific task may vary. I'd personally point at the 10700F as being the winner from the specs, 4.6 GHz all-core 8C16T with slightly higher IPC in gaming than AMD, for under $300. That's competitive with the 3700X: little higher cost, and more heat, but more gaming performance too. The 10900 series and 10600 series are a little too expensive for what they offer, the lower chips are too slow to really have an advantage. But really it's not a good time to buy these anyway. Rocket Lake and Zen3 will probably launch within the next 6 months, if you can stretch another 6 months there will be discounts on Zen2 and more options for higher performance if you want to pay. [0] https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/ryzen-9-3900x-overclock https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/ryzen-9-3900x-overclock [1] https://www.techspot.com/article/1876-4ghz-ryzen-3rd-gen-vs-core-i9/ https://www.techspot.com/article/1876-4ghz-ryzen-3rd-gen-vs-...
  - fermienrico 6y ago
    These days you can't say anything positive about Intel even if it is factually true. I am personally excited about the 10900K and the competition with AMD is bringing Intel prices down. People seem to have a deep hatred for Intel, exactly the way they had deep hatred for AMD (pre-Conroe days, when Intel released Conroe in 2005/06, people were rooting so hard for Intel, it was hard to find any positive comments about AMD). I don't get it. Both are multi-billion dollar companies and innovating like crazy. We can't just sit back, and feel the utter awe of what it takes to make computer chips whether it is Intel or AMD. You know, its engineers like anyone else - they have good intentions and work hard to make all of this possible, the fans have this egregious entitlement that is so infuriating and dismissive.
readwind 6y ago
I have subjective reasons to believe either interest party contacts triple A producers, of AAA games, to sabotage the performance of arbitrary partners. Intel, ie, not to name names, might tell the triple A producer, or GFX producer, or whatever, to compile with a certain compiler, or settings, to promote, or dispromote, certain brands, and configurations. I am tired but you get the point, some firms sabotage, and pay money, etc, or subsidise hardwares, etc, to get their rotten foot across, it's happening all the time. Can't really deny it. The whole commercial field is a pos when you get down to every bread and crumb. Anyone who downvotes me should be logged, they're invested in this shitty business. I know you need food for your kids, but, let's acknowledge the truths, my post won't rob you of incomes or anything. Let's paint the kettles black. We all need to eat, but, on which corpses, right. Lagerkommandants fucking assholes. Fucking faggots man
- dang 6y ago
  You've broken the site guidelines, both here and in other comments. We ban accounts that do that, so would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended?
  - readwind 6y ago
    I'm really sorry, dang, I didn't intend to do that/it. Good that you're noticing and monitoring, it was not my intents.
- wmf 6y ago
  It's publicly known that Nvidia and AMD pay game developers to optimize for their chips; you can see the logos when the game launches. Yet you're presenting this as some kind of conspiracy with a persecution complex tacked on.
  - readwind 6y ago
    Words run short some times. I know the history though, didn't mean to pin it as a conspiracy, but in desparate times, which I do not keep track of, things can happen, since I follow histories. Don't take this as a rebuke, is that the word, yeah, don't whatever man. <3 Who cares
andy_ppp 6y ago
What’s the betting that when Apple move to ARM processors AMD and Intel both start developing their own ARM CPUs. I have a feeling it’s going to be extremely hard for x86 to compete once Apple show the way on this.
- makomk 6y ago
  AMD were developing their own ARM CPU for a while. They dropped it to focus on Zen 2, and after looking at the results it's easy to see why.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  Intel sold their XScale ARM design to Marvell.
- robdachshund 6y ago
  They don't really need to, they are already making the most powerful RISC chips on the planet. They both were looking at arm for mobile devices but stopped/divested when qualcomm became dominant. It really makes no sense for them to license arm patents and designs when AMD already has stuff like their new 4xxx laptop chips. I think rather than switching to arm, they will just continue making super efficient designs, er, amd will at least haha.
- kllrnohj 6y ago
  Why would they? Instruction set is basically irrelevant. Almost nothing about the CPU design has anything to do with ARM or x86 or whatever. Apple may drag the OSX ecosystem kicking and screaming, battered & bloody over to ARM so Apple can control more of the stack, but why would that have any impact whatsoever outside of Apple's corner of the market?
ksec 6y ago
This may be just good enough to hold off AMD from further gaining market shares on Desktop. For certain group of user that doesn't need a GPU, the iGPU included is a good enough solution. One thing that bothers me a lot is the 2.5Gbps Ethernet that is supposed to come with those new Intel motherboard ( assuming MB vendors uses it ). Why not 5Gbps Ethernet? How much more expensive is it? It seems we still dont have a clear path on how to move forward from 1Gbps Ethernet. Personally I would have liked 10Gbps, but the price is still insanely expensive.
- tylerhou 6y ago
  2.5 Gbps will be an intermediary standard for consumer ethernet applications because existing CAT5(e) cabling can usually carry 2.5 Gbps (but not 5 Gbps or 10 Gbps).
  - eropple 6y ago
    Cat6/Cat6a can, however, and that's become a standard run--so the 2.5G "stepping stone" doesn't make a lot of sense to me. (House is a mix of Cat6a and optical/SFP+ 10G networking and it is tremendous.)
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    For 100 meters. A typical consumer doesn't need that much length, and can use higher speeds even over bad cables. Especially if the cables aren't bundled for a significant distance.
  - paulmd 6y ago
    CAT5e is not in-spec for 10 Gbps but it will usually do it for short runs. Under ten meters, worth a try. The official spec is 100m and the transceivers are pretty solid at pulling a signal out of the noise. Personally I'm with the other guy, I think this is a dumb half-measure and we should just move straight to 10 Gbps. Right now the single biggest cost in your household multi-gig deployment will be switches, a switch with 4-8 10Gbase-T ports will run you around $500, and this figure is not really any cheaper with multi-gig. You are paying through the nose for something that is a watered-down version of the "real standard". Say you have two switches, one is upstairs and one is downstairs, are you really going to drop $1000 on a half-baked deployment? People need to try it, figure out if their existing cable is stable enough for their needs (maybe that segment can run at 5gbit speeds and it can be 10 gbit on your machines and on the switch), and just pull cable where it's not.
ineedasername 6y ago
Are the gigahertz wars making a comeback?
- sq_ 6y ago
  Seems to me that all Intel can do at this point with their 14nm++++ is pump the Ghz and power consumption (when actually turboed to that high clock) up as far as they can.
  - gsnedders 6y ago
    The power consumption isn't going up quite as quickly as we'd expect; we're seeing a return to high frequencies partly because we're seeing high-end CPUs manufactured on a vastly more mature process than we typically have part.
    - kllrnohj 6y ago
      > The power consumption isn't going up quite as quickly as we'd expect Eh? From anandtech's coverage: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15758/intels-10th-gen-comet-lake-desktop https://www.anandtech.com/show/15758/intels-10th-gen-comet-l... "Users wanting the 10-core 5.3 GHz will need to purchase the new top Core i9-10900K processor, which has a unit price of $488, and keep it under 70 ºC to enable Intel’s new Thermal Velocity Boost. Not only that, despite the 125 W TDP listed on the box, Intel states that the turbo power recommendation is 250 W – the motherboard manufacturers we’ve spoken to have prepared for 320-350 W from their own testing, in order to maintain that top turbo for as long as possible." Power is going up and by a lot to hit that 5.3Ghz. And requires a much lower temperature to do it.
      - blattimwind 6y ago
        Keeping a CPU under 70 °C while dissipating 300+ Watts is going to be tough even for high end custom loops. Air just isn't an option for these CPUs at all.
      - gsnedders 6y ago
MageSlayer 6y ago
Too bad they have only 2 channel memory controllers and same 32/32 L1 cache. That means all that power is still wasted waiting for memory (Max Memory Bandwidth 45.8 GB/s, seriously?). Not sure why feeling so excited about those processors.
- vbezhenar 6y ago
  For typical desktop workloads memory bandwidth is not that important. They likely will release Xeon-W counterparts later with similar frequencies but higher memory channels and PCI-E lanes for those who need it.
  - MageSlayer 6y ago
    > For typical desktop workloads memory bandwidth is not that important. Perhaps, I need to take that as an axiom, right? i7 5820K was non-typical for that matter then. And yes, Xeon-W with 5.3GHz frequency? Tell me more :)
    - chapplap 6y ago
      The i7-5820K is from the "high end desktop" line of chips, derived from Xeon workstation chips. The modern equivalent is chips like the i9-10900X (note X not K), which does have quad channel DDR4-2933 and 48 PCIe lanes. Clock speeds are a bit lower though.
- kllrnohj 6y ago
  They also still only have 16 PCI-E lanes from the CPU, which is disappointing. Ryzen's 20 isn't exactly lavish, but it's enough for the pair of x16 for the GPU + x4 for the primary NVME drive.
jobseeker990 6y ago
So how is this possible now and not 5 years ago? Are there new discoveries that let us bring up the clock speed again? (Will they go even higher in the future?)
- hedora 6y ago
  They’re basically factory overclocked. Intel has been backed into a corner by AMD, so they’re pushing clockspeed over balancing against TDP and bus. Also, the multi-year delays in the next process shrink gave them lots of time to improve yields and micro-optimize the fabrication generation these are running on.
api 6y ago
This is still inferior to AMD's high-end offerings in terms of price/performance and performance/watt, but it does have one edge: single-threaded performance. There are certain applications where that matters a lot. Other than those, I'd pass.
greendave 6y ago
Somewhat surprised at the lack of PCIe 4.0. Is there really no demand for more PCI bandwidth on high-end desktops?
- Tenoke 6y ago
  PCIe 4.0 is likely to be short lived given that PCIe 5.0 seems to be around the corner. On the AMD side where they already have 4.0, few care for it (I do though - just ordered a mobo and processor that use it) - 4.0 nvmes aren't faster for common use cases, and it mostly matters when going multi-gpu which is only seen in some professional use (and even then you can use a threadripper and just have a lot of 3.0 lanes). Then next ~year ryzen 5000 which will require a new socket seems likely to already support 5.0. I'm guessing Intel will just altogether skip 4.0.
- kllrnohj 6y ago
  There is, but keep in mind this is yet another refresh of Skylake, not really a "new" CPU. Supposedly the new socket is PCI-E 4.0 capable, which the next CPU "Rocket Lake" will supposedly enable. But since it's still 16 lanes from the CPU only, that means you'll only get PCI-E 4.0 to likely a single slot. And likely not any of the M.2 drives, which typically are connected to the chipset instead.
- yxhuvud 6y ago
  Odds are that is coupled to either CPU architecture or mobo standard, and they didnt touch either. You should go AMD if you want PCIe4 currently. Which is a bit funny as Intel sells certain peripherals that supports it.
dchyrdvh 6y ago
Does anybody need those 5.3 GHz at 300 watts? I believe the next big thing is "massively parallel distributed processing": thousands or maybe even millions of tiny processing units with their own memory and reasonable set of instructions run in parallel and communicate with each other over some sort of high bandwidth bus. It's like a datacenter on a chip. A bit like GPU, but bigger. I think this will take ML and various number crunching fields to the next level.
- motoboi 6y ago
  Those are desktop processors. Most applications won’t even use 64 cores. But I agree this is this future, but today faster single core will speed up your day a lot.
fortran77 6y ago
I can't wait for the Xeon version of this to be released. There have been unofficial reports.
stevespang 6y ago
. . and you can barbeque on it !
gok 6y ago
I'm kind of surprised at this point that Intel didn't just bite the bullet and go with TSMC or Samsung for fabrication for a year or two until they figured their in-house sub-14nm story out.
unnouinceput 6y ago
As desktop user I don't care about power consumption, I care very little that it has x% more power then last year processors (at least when the x < 100) because current processors have enough power for anything you throw at them, but what I do really care is this: -Do they still pack that PoS Intel management inside the CPU? And are these new CPU still vulnerable to Meltdown? Because if any of those questions are answered with "yes" then no amount of cores, GHz and performance % is going to change my mind from Ryzen
- sdflhasjd 6y ago
  Well, power consumption is still kinda important on a desktop. All that power has to go somewhere and you need a cooler that can keep up or you'll be losing more performance from thermal throttling.
  - unnouinceput 6y ago
    Water cooling. Desktops can afford that space generously.
    - sdflhasjd 6y ago
      True, but when you're approaching 300W, you can only take heat away so fast.
      - unnouinceput 6y ago
        My current desktop water cooling setup can handle 700W under load easily. After setting it up my test was to actually spin everything up under 100% load with 2 crypto miners (1 for GPU and one for CPU, in 2014) and did it for 10 hours straight. Peak temp was 60 degree Celsius in hot July. Why I never continued with that? Because at the time bitcoin was 120 dollars and the electricity was 10 times more expensive. According to worker pool I joined at the time in those 10 hours I've earned 3 cents. Anyway, back to topic - I trust my water cooling 100% (also I made it manually because I like to build things).
- 6y ago

223 points by redm 6y ago

bzb3 6y ago

Once again crushing the competition in single core performance, which is what matters.

ido 6y ago
Matters for whom? For a lot of use cases (web servers, compiling, databases...) having lots of cores matters (and total = performance of core * number of cores), for others it doesn't.
- globular-toast 6y ago
  No, it does not matter. That's a common misconception. If you double your core count you can run double the number of threads in the same amount of time. That's it. If you double your single core speed you can still run double the number of threads in the same amount of time or the same amount of threads in half the time. Single core performance is always preferable for CPUs. The CPU manufacturers basically conned everyone into thinking multi-core was "good enough". Software people who knew what they were talking about back in the day called them out on it but nobody listened. Now here we are on Hacker News in 2020 and people still not understanding this.
  - gpm 6y ago
    We all know that a single core with twice the performance and twice the cache space is generally better than two cores (though a sibling comment does raise a good point that poorly written software can lock up an entire core regardless of it's Hz, also some VM scenarios would prefer extra cores over faster cores). We also all know that a single core with twice the performance and twice the cache space costs a lot more than two cores. It's a lot more expensive than even 3 cores. I'd rather have 3 4Ghz cores than 1 8Ghz core (except for the novelty value).
    - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
      We all know that a single core with twice the performance and twice the cache space is generally better than two cores I'm not sure that's actually true, even if you want performance (although it's dependent on whether your workload can use more than 1 thread, of course): A single core at a higher clock speed might be better if it can hold that clock speed. But the faster you run, the more power you use and the more heat you produce, and worse, the relationship isn't linear. So ex. 1 core at 4ghz won't stay at 4 ghz, where 2 cores at 2 ghz can hold that speed forever.
      - gpm 6y ago
        Right, when I say an xGhz core I'm pretending to live in a simpler world where they can all hold that speed forever. Consider an 8Ghz core to be a core + cooling that can consistently hold a speed twice as fast as the 4Ghz core + cooling can hold.
    - globular-toast 6y ago
      > We also all know that a single core with twice the performance and twice the cache space costs a lot more than two cores. It's a lot more expensive than even 3 cores. I'm a programmer, I don't care how much it costs the hardware manufacturer. I want a single core. Multi-threaded programming sucks. I don't care if that's implemented via multiple cores acting together and only presents itself as a single core. I just want a single core. > I'd rather have 3 4Ghz cores than 1 8Ghz core (except for the novelty value). I'd much rather avoid multi-threaded programming and get the 8GHz core. But your comment is missing the point, really, which is that single-core performance matters. If the 8GHz core existed then you'd still be able to get 3 8GHz cores. Still want the 3x4GHz?
      - gpm 6y ago
        8Ghz cores do exist if you have enough money to hire someone to deal with the overclocking for you (or enough liquid nitrogen and time to do it yourself). I, on the other hand, care about the cost of my computers a bit more than that, not having infinite money. Which is why even if 8Ghz cores were commercially available I suspect I would still be buying 3 times as many 4Ghz ones.
  - sk0g 6y ago
    So say I'm close to maxing out my 8c/16t CPU, would a better alternative be a 16*4; 64Ghz single core processor? Why? You wouldn't have true parallelism then, would you? So if you have something, for whatever reason, blocking further processing, the entire computer would lock up. Why is this a better scenario again?
    - globular-toast 6y ago
      You don't care about parallelism, you care about concurrency. Operating systems have handled that just fine for many decades now.
    - paulmd 6y ago
      > You wouldn't have true parallelism then, would you? So if you have something, for whatever reason, blocking further processing, the entire computer would lock up That doesn't occur because the OS scheduler will eventually pre-empt your thread and swap to another task. You don't really have control over that. All modern OSs use pre-emptive multitasking and there's not a ton you can do to prevent it. (read: anything in the last 30 years, last cooperative multitasking I remember was MacOS Classic (probably like OS7 or so.) Single-core processors were the norm up until 15 years ago, and people routinely ran more than one process on them. Yes, we ran Discord (we called it Roger Wilco or Teamspeak back then) and played music in the background too, without 4 dedicated cores for the background tasks. Yes, in the abstract it would be preferable to have a 64 GHz processor instead of 16 4 GHz processors, because then you can have all that speed devoted to a single task. Context switching is not that expensive (particularly if you have hyperthreads/SMT to soak up the wasted cycles). The physics of transistors make that impossible, but we absolutely would not do any of this multithreading crap if we didn't have to. Single-threaded code is easier to write and usually faster (in terms of less total cycles - multithreaded programs waste extra cycles on synchronization, overhead, spinning for locks, etc that single-threaded programs don't have to).
      - theandrewbailey 6y ago
        > (read: anything in the last 30 years, last cooperative multitasking I remember was MacOS Classic (probably like OS7 or so.) I remember reading about that a while ago. Wasn't everything up to and including Mac OS 9 cooperatively multitasked?
  - ben-schaaf 6y ago
    Turns out this has been tested, and the results are clear: Running a single core 9900k is pretty bad in comparison to 8 heavily downclocked cores on the same CPU. While single threaded tasks are obviously slower, frame rates are much more stable, windows is more usable with 8 cores. Several games simply didn't work with a single core, or took ages to load. Reference: https://youtu.be/feO54CBUJCk https://youtu.be/feO54CBUJCk
    - tylerhou 6y ago
      The video you linked is pretty weak; there was (understandably) no performance tuning done on both configurations (Windows scheduler, game scheduling). https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/36448.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...
    - SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
      This is because for a fair comparison you need to scale the L1/L2 cache size as well. More cores - more cache. It is also important to not scale below 2 cores, because servicing interrupts causes performance hiccups. It is enough to have the second core heavily downclocked, and you'll still have better performance then with just a single core.
  - madushan1000 6y ago
    > same amount of threads in half the time Sure, if you forget all the additional cache evictions, memory reads and writes and TLB flushes caused by all the competing threads on a single core. Not to mention that one shitty bit of code in one thread can poison the cache enough to re-read the data from memory every context switch.
SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
Depends on workload, and we've seen that with the latest round of AMD offerings. As a gamer, yes, but that's really it.
- gpm 6y ago
  Are there actually games that take advantage of a CPU this fast? I would imagine that all the game developers would be targeting the more modest hardware that most of their players actually have.
  - zamadatix 6y ago
    Generally those with the top end CPU have the top end GPU and the top end monitor. In that regard all the game has to do to "take advantage" of the CPU is support high or unlocked framerates and high resolutions.
    - leetcrew 6y ago
      > Generally those with the top end CPU have the top end GPU and the top end monitor I sort of doubt this is true, if only for the reason that most people don't buy a new CPU, GPU, and monitor at the same time. monitor and pc are probably going to be on different upgrade cycles, unless the monitor came with the pc (in which case, probably not "top end"). for DIYers, the GPU and CPU+RAM+mobo are likely also on different upgrade cycles. I bought my current 4K monitor about four years ago, but I ran most games at 1080p until I had enough spare cash to buy a 1080 ti. I finally upgraded my CPU, RAM, and motherboard this year, mainly because I was tired of having 8GB of DDR3. in any case, it's usually not a rational use of funds to buy the fastest CPU and GPU for a 4K monitor unless your budget is unlimited. with a constrained budget, it's usually better to drop a tier or two on the CPU if it gets you the next higher tier GPU.
  - InvaderFizz 6y ago
    Anything high refresh rate(120+Hz) benefits immensely from these high clock rates. The high clocks result in less pipeline stalls meaning your high frame rates are more achievable as well as significantly reducing the dips (0.1% lows is what every reviewer hates). This isnt about "average", this is about having the best experience possible, which Intel provides in this very specific scenario. Intel has three things going for it(in the consumer space), which matter a lot or not at all to different folks: - better idle/low usage power consumption than AMD (low load laptop battery life) - Intel's QuickSync is fantastic for media encode/decode (NVENC is typically better, AMD is basically non-existent) - Intel has the highest clock rates. Outside of these niches, AMD is dominating at every level of the product stack.
dralley 6y ago
The gap is pretty small, even now, and Zen 3 comes out in a few months. The value proposition of these chips is pretty bad, as well. Enormous power and cooling requirements, short-lived motherboard sockets, and sheer price/performance ratio are all not great in comparison.
mschuetz 6y ago
/s ? For my computer graphics and processing work, multithreaded tasks scale amazingly well with the number of cores so single core performance doesn't matter all that much. A single thread isn't even be able to process all the data that's streamed from an SSD. I need three threads just to process/prepare the data in the background, in addition to the main thread that keeps rendering. I suspect it's only a matter of time until multithreading is a must for games. The additional programming effort may not have paid off if players only have 2 or 4 core CPUs, but now that 8 cores with 16 threads are increasingly common, it's going to make a difference.
- ido 6y ago
  AAA games have all but required quad cores (or at least 2c/4t) for years now. I think a lot of games already scale well to 4c/8t today.
  - Uehreka 6y ago
    Do they use those cores? Sure. But when I’m playing a game (even a game that feels like it should be ripping threads like Factorio) I usually see that one core is pegged at 100% while the others are chilling around 40-60% (I have an overclocked 8700K). In my experience, single core performance is still the bottleneck (as far as CPUs are concerned) for gaming.
    - driverdan 6y ago
      Yes, recent games do. For example, Doom Eternal can max out all CPU cores.
    - skocznymroczny 6y ago
      Factorio is an indie game, I guess it might not be easy for indie developers to make use of multithreading, whereas AAA game developers have entire teams dedicated to engine development and multithreading. Anyway, traditional graphics APIs like OpenGL are practically single-threaded. Modern APIs like DX12 and Vulkan have been designed with multithreading in mind and support scaling with number of cores much better (with added overhead of having to do manual synchronization).
kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
... for gamers playing single-threaded games.
- ajross 6y ago
  To be fair, that's exactly the target market for high end desktop CPUs like this. This isn't a datacenter part, and other parallel workloads tend not to make up much share of the personal workstation market. If you want to max out gaming benchmarks right now, this is your CPU. And there are a decent number of people who do, so heavily tuning existing dies (I mean, let's be honest, this a rebinned and overclocked 10900X) makes sense.
- paulmd 6y ago
  When people say "single-threaded performance" they don't mean literally one single thread will ever be used. The single-core performance is a proxy for performance-per-core and that's a certainly a very important number. Intel's per-core performance is decently higher in gaming, between their lower latency giving them slightly higher IPC in gaming tasks[1] (as these are latency sensitive) and the much higher all-core clocks they are pushing (at least 10% higher than AMD at present). That still gives them an edge in gaming, although certainly much less of an edge against Zen2 than it was against Zen1 (which was much worse than people were willing to admit at the time, people at the time were benching it with a GTX 1080 (the fastest card available at the time) at 1440p and 4K and claiming there was "no noticeable difference", but faster GPUs showed the weakness). I think the 10700F looks good, 4.6 GHz all-core 8C16T part for under $300 looks compelling for gaming customers if you can keep it cool. The 10900K fills the "I want the top gaming performance first and foremost, with as many cores as I can get, and I'm not super concerned about budget" but is definitely on the expensive side. Other than that, nothing terribly impressive here IMO, the other chips fall into a range between "not fast enough" and "not cheap enough". [1] https://www.techspot.com/article/1876-4ghz-ryzen-3rd-gen-vs-core-i9/ https://www.techspot.com/article/1876-4ghz-ryzen-3rd-gen-vs-...
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    > The single-core performance is a proxy for performance-per-core A very bad proxy then, since performance-per-core with multiple cores in use will almost certainly be limited by constraints on (1) memory bandwidth and (2) power/thermals. "Single-core performance" only applies when you're literally pegging one core at 100% cpu.
specto 6y ago
Not really... If you look at the FPS numbers, sure AMD is slightly lower. However AMD can also perform other functions like encoding/decoding. If you want pure FPS, sure Intel will win. For general computing AND gaming, AMD wins every time per dollar.
tpmx 6y ago
It is what matters to web browsing performance. Web browsing is no longer a "light" thing to do. You need solid integer single core computing performance to have a snappy browsing experience. AFAIK, there is not yet a web browser core that can parallelize tasks in a meaningful way.
- gpm 6y ago
  Mozilla has been making pretty good progress with parallelization of firefox with their oxidation project. All browsers are splitting different tabs into different processes which means they are taking advantage of multithreading if you have more than one compute intensive tab/window open.
  - tpmx 6y ago
    Splitting tabs into separate processes is mainstream these days, but it doesn't really help that much. You only need the focused tab to be snappy.
    - gpm 6y ago
      You only need the focused tab to be snappy, but to let it be snappy you need to keep all the other work away from that core. Gmail updating emails, youtube playing a video in the background, discord pinging chat messages at you, and so and and so forth.
      - tpmx 6y ago
        With a modern javascript engine you can throttle the activity of tabs that are not focused. (And browsers do indeed do that. Pretty aggressively, too.)
        Marsymars 6y ago
        I wish there was some extension that blocked any non-focused tabs from performing any javascript execution unless I whitelist the domain.
loufe 6y ago
While I agree this post should be downvoted I do think it's worth mentioning at least two different reasons why higher clock speed would push me to intel this generation: AutoCAD and Europa Universalis IV. Those are my two principal demanding softwares where they cannot see any real means of moving past single core for the vast majority of processing.
anthony_doan 6y ago
We should all wait for real world testing. IIRC AMD and Intel test their performance differently. Intel tend to give turbo performance which can only run for so long before heat becomes a problem.
- sq_ 6y ago
  Looks like GN already has a video out, so I imagine the rest of the big hardware channels will follow along quickly. Don't have time to watch GN's video now, but I bet they'll have taken a nice in-depth look at the performance.
lawrenceyan 6y ago
I think part of the reason why you may be being downvoted has to do with the tone you're using in making your statement as well as the newness of your account. Also, though you're statement is technically correct, it fails to account for the nuance that increasingly across all applications, not just gaming, multi-threaded processing performance is becoming the far more important benchmark to look at.
- ksec 6y ago
  > crushing... crushing adjective [usually before noun] used to emphasise how bad or severe something is I had to check the dictionary just in case. And in this case neither was it technically correct, or downvoted because of the tone. I downvoted it because it was factually wrong. Zen 2 actually has better IPC than Skylake in many cases, on a sustained single thread performance they are likely to be on a similar level despite having a slightly lower clock speed disadvantage on a much lower TDP. Hardly crushing.
redisman 6y ago
Just the fact that it's yet another socket for basically the same process is insane. On AM4 I've been able to use their low-end to very-high end CPUs for the last several years and most likely will be able to use the ones coming out this year too.

zamadatix 6y ago

It'll be interesting to see what Intel looks like in performance after they get past their 14 nm node for HEDT.

Dunedan 6y ago

This article states the following power consumption: > The 10900K has a 125-watt TDP, for example, while AMD's Ryzen 9 3900X's is just 105-watts. My understanding from other articles (like [1]) is however that Intel had to _massively_ increase the amount of power the CPU consumes when turboing under load: > Not only that, despite the 125 W TDP listed on the box, Intel states that the turbo power recommendation is 250 W – the motherboard manufacturers we’ve spoken to have prepared for 320-350 W from their own testing, in order to maintain that top turbo for as long as possible. Somehow it feels like back in the Pentium 4 days again. [1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15758/intels-10th-gen-comet-lake-desktop https://www.anandtech.com/show/15758/intels-10th-gen-comet-l...

johncalvinyoung 6y ago
Came here to post the more-helpful Anandtech article.
anthony_doan 6y ago
Didn't we have XDR ram around that time?
celim307 6y ago
How the tables have turned since the and bulldozer days
- close04 6y ago
  It looks almost identical to the AthlonXP/64 vs Pentium 4 days when Intel just kept bumping the clocks and power consumption. Until they came out with Conroe. Jim Keller might be doing just that with Intel right now. I only hope whatever they come up with, AMD is ready and able to keep up. Otherwise we're going to see a rerun of the following period too: Intel tweaking the same architecture for years at a time, and squeezing low single digit performance improvements that come with questionable security sacrifices and deeply unpleasant sticker prices.
  - xoa 6y ago

henriquez 6y ago

I'm surprised they _still_ don't have a working 10nm desktop chip. They're 5 years behind schedule (and still counting) at this point! This is just a reskinned 9900k with 2 more cores and a much higher (> 25%) TDP at 125-watts, which is a generously low estimate of how much power it will actually suck. I briefly had their "140 watt" 7820x chip (returned for refund) that would gladly suck down more than 200 watts under sustained load. Intel plays such games with their single core turbo at this point that the 5.3ghz means very little, and it's the same tired architecture they've been rehashing since Sandy Bridge (2011). This is an incredibly poor showing and if I were an investor I would be seriously questioning the future of Intel as a company.

superpermutat0r 6y ago
I believe Jim Keller is currently at Intel, maybe they'll have some surprises soon.
- oAlbe 6y ago
  I've always been puzzled by this whole Jim Keller situation. Is one man literally the only reason we have technological advancements in microprocessors?
  - MengerSponge 6y ago
    Five tops: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi
  - blihp 6y ago
    Obviously not the only reason, but he appears to be a helpful ingredient in the mix with good things tending to happen with him around. No idea how much of it is due to his technical vs. management skill, but there definitely seems to be some there there.
    - patrec 6y ago
      In that light AMD losing him to Intel via Tesla sounds like a potential few billion dollar blunder. I wonder how difficult/expensive it would have been to prevent that.

nimbius 6y ago

is this 5.3GHz with, or without spectre, RIDL, meltdown, zombieload, fallout, MDS, TAA, and whatever other mitigations for vulnerabilities inherent in Intel chips?

vasco 6y ago
Clock speed is clock speed, you're thinking about operations per cycle.
- saiya-jin 6y ago
  You are of course correct, but it's a very important point - theoretical performance on paper is +-meaningless, only real, end performance after things are set safely is relevant to normal use cases. Which is basically all of us. Strangely, not all cpu reviews take this into consideration.
- greggyb 6y ago
  You are correct. Just a nit: it's usually referred to as "instructions per cycle" or IPC, rather than "operations per cycle."
  - hermitdev 6y ago
    Operations per cycle also matters. Circa P4, an instruction took around 40-50 cycles to complete. Yeah, it was +5GHz, though. Core architecture brought it down to around 8 cycles to complete an op. Clock speeds dropped, but more shit got done at lower clock speeds.
    - CyberDildonics 6y ago
      That is still IPC, which refers to instructions per clock as an average throughput and not the instruction latency. > Circa P4, an instruction took around 40-50 cycles to complete Different instructions can have wildly different latencies. Even then an instruction taking 50 cycles sounds like double precision division or an 80 bit floating point operation. Most operations on the P4 had a latency of 1 - 7 cycles, but the P4's high clocks made memory latency and branch mispredictions a bigger issue. Some instruction latency might have been part of the overall pipeline shortening that made the core architecture fast, but this is an oversimplification, and the numbers here don't apply to the vast majority of common instructions. Caches, deep out of order buffers, prefetching and branch prediction all play a part.

riazrizvi 6y ago

So about 400,000X faster than my first computer console, the 8bit 1Mhz Atari 2600, which cost $200 at that, time 40 years ago. Or 600X faster than the 64-bit 80 MHz Cray-1 which was $8mm at the same time.

ahefner 6y ago
The Atari ST was 16-bit and ran around 7 or 8 MHz. Maybe you're thinking of the 8-bit line (400/800/XL/XE).
- riazrizvi 6y ago
  was thinking 2600 and typing ST, fixed it
sixothree 6y ago
My first computer was a TRS-80 Color Computer with 4KB. The pace of doubling has been a part of my life since home pong. And now a generation provides <20% boost over the previous leaves me with an uneasy feeling.
- riazrizvi 6y ago
  I get excited as much about economic and eco-political axes in technology, with this multidimensional perspective there is still so much room to grow. Look at how interesting OS's became when Richard Stallman started to open source them. Look at the price difference between the Atari and Cray in terms of $/speed, albeit a 70's example. Chips are still in patent-impregnable territory, they are proprietary and boring. In the next years, if these technologies open up, we could see some amazing stuff...
  - sixothree 6y ago
    I am excited mostly about AR. _If_ we can solve the hardware, it promises to be one of the most useful and astounding technologies ever promised.
6y ago

zaptheimpaler 6y ago

It feels like we are moving towards ARM becoming the primary consumer CPU, and x86/x64 being used to power only niche use cases (dev, audio/video, gaming etc.) or servers only. Can anyone working in the space confirm/deny?

greggyb 6y ago
Define "moving toward". We're nowhere close to that at this point.
- Skunkleton 6y ago
  Define "nowhere close"? Apple's cpu's are competitive with x86 when looking at low power applications. Microsoft has multiple examples of windows running on arm. This seems pretty close in the grand scheme of things.
  - wmf 6y ago
    Arm has zero percent market share in PCs. It would take ten years or more to hit 50%.
    - lostlogin 6y ago
      The number of computers in use in 10 years will be a lot larger. According to the below link between 2002 and 2014 computer numbers doubled to 2 billion. So if things continued in even vaguely similar form ARM would have to sell about as many machines as are currently used. But there are an awful lot of people who will take a low power, cool machine. Even if slower I’d like some. https://www.reference.com/world-view/many-computers-world-e2e980daa5e128d0 https://www.reference.com/world-view/many-computers-world-e2...
    - freehunter 6y ago
      Well they said “consumer CPU”, not “PC CPU”. So the question is, do most consumers do their computing on PC CPUs or ARM CPUs? Which then raises the question, what does “computing” mean...

antongribok 6y ago

So, $488 for 10x 3.7 GHz Intel vs. $409 for 12x 3.8 GHz AMD? I'll take one AMD Ryzen 9 3900X, thanks MicroCenter!

paulmd 6y ago
Base clocks are irrelevant on desktop, it's not Sandy Bridge days anymore. No modern (desktop) processor runs at baseclock in practice. The 10900KF will do 4.8 GHz all-core at $472, the 3900X will do it at around 4-4.1 GHz[0]. AMD has a slight IPC advantage in productivity, Intel has a slight IPC advantage in gaming[1]. The market for the 10900K/KF is basically someone who wants the fastest gaming rig, but then as a secondary priority wants more cores for productivity. Kind of an overlap with the 3900X, sure, but the 10900K/KF will still outperform it in gaming, where the 3900X tilts a little more towards productivity. There are of course exceptions, CS:GO loves Zen2's cache and Zen2's latency makes DAWs run like trash, so your specific task may vary. I'd personally point at the 10700F as being the winner from the specs, 4.6 GHz all-core 8C16T with slightly higher IPC in gaming than AMD, for under $300. That's competitive with the 3700X: little higher cost, and more heat, but more gaming performance too. The 10900 series and 10600 series are a little too expensive for what they offer, the lower chips are too slow to really have an advantage. But really it's not a good time to buy these anyway. Rocket Lake and Zen3 will probably launch within the next 6 months, if you can stretch another 6 months there will be discounts on Zen2 and more options for higher performance if you want to pay. [0] https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/ryzen-9-3900x-overclock https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/ryzen-9-3900x-overclock [1] https://www.techspot.com/article/1876-4ghz-ryzen-3rd-gen-vs-core-i9/ https://www.techspot.com/article/1876-4ghz-ryzen-3rd-gen-vs-...
- fermienrico 6y ago
  These days you can't say anything positive about Intel even if it is factually true. I am personally excited about the 10900K and the competition with AMD is bringing Intel prices down. People seem to have a deep hatred for Intel, exactly the way they had deep hatred for AMD (pre-Conroe days, when Intel released Conroe in 2005/06, people were rooting so hard for Intel, it was hard to find any positive comments about AMD). I don't get it. Both are multi-billion dollar companies and innovating like crazy. We can't just sit back, and feel the utter awe of what it takes to make computer chips whether it is Intel or AMD. You know, its engineers like anyone else - they have good intentions and work hard to make all of this possible, the fans have this egregious entitlement that is so infuriating and dismissive.

readwind 6y ago

I have subjective reasons to believe either interest party contacts triple A producers, of AAA games, to sabotage the performance of arbitrary partners. Intel, ie, not to name names, might tell the triple A producer, or GFX producer, or whatever, to compile with a certain compiler, or settings, to promote, or dispromote, certain brands, and configurations. I am tired but you get the point, some firms sabotage, and pay money, etc, or subsidise hardwares, etc, to get their rotten foot across, it's happening all the time. Can't really deny it. The whole commercial field is a pos when you get down to every bread and crumb. Anyone who downvotes me should be logged, they're invested in this shitty business. I know you need food for your kids, but, let's acknowledge the truths, my post won't rob you of incomes or anything. Let's paint the kettles black. We all need to eat, but, on which corpses, right. Lagerkommandants fucking assholes. Fucking faggots man

dang 6y ago
You've broken the site guidelines, both here and in other comments. We ban accounts that do that, so would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended?
- readwind 6y ago
  I'm really sorry, dang, I didn't intend to do that/it. Good that you're noticing and monitoring, it was not my intents.
wmf 6y ago
It's publicly known that Nvidia and AMD pay game developers to optimize for their chips; you can see the logos when the game launches. Yet you're presenting this as some kind of conspiracy with a persecution complex tacked on.
- readwind 6y ago
  Words run short some times. I know the history though, didn't mean to pin it as a conspiracy, but in desparate times, which I do not keep track of, things can happen, since I follow histories. Don't take this as a rebuke, is that the word, yeah, don't whatever man. <3 Who cares

andy_ppp 6y ago

What’s the betting that when Apple move to ARM processors AMD and Intel both start developing their own ARM CPUs. I have a feeling it’s going to be extremely hard for x86 to compete once Apple show the way on this.

makomk 6y ago
AMD were developing their own ARM CPU for a while. They dropped it to focus on Zen 2, and after looking at the results it's easy to see why.
zozbot234 6y ago
Intel sold their XScale ARM design to Marvell.
robdachshund 6y ago
They don't really need to, they are already making the most powerful RISC chips on the planet. They both were looking at arm for mobile devices but stopped/divested when qualcomm became dominant. It really makes no sense for them to license arm patents and designs when AMD already has stuff like their new 4xxx laptop chips. I think rather than switching to arm, they will just continue making super efficient designs, er, amd will at least haha.
kllrnohj 6y ago
Why would they? Instruction set is basically irrelevant. Almost nothing about the CPU design has anything to do with ARM or x86 or whatever. Apple may drag the OSX ecosystem kicking and screaming, battered & bloody over to ARM so Apple can control more of the stack, but why would that have any impact whatsoever outside of Apple's corner of the market?

ksec 6y ago

This may be just good enough to hold off AMD from further gaining market shares on Desktop. For certain group of user that doesn't need a GPU, the iGPU included is a good enough solution. One thing that bothers me a lot is the 2.5Gbps Ethernet that is supposed to come with those new Intel motherboard ( assuming MB vendors uses it ). Why not 5Gbps Ethernet? How much more expensive is it? It seems we still dont have a clear path on how to move forward from 1Gbps Ethernet. Personally I would have liked 10Gbps, but the price is still insanely expensive.

tylerhou 6y ago
2.5 Gbps will be an intermediary standard for consumer ethernet applications because existing CAT5(e) cabling can usually carry 2.5 Gbps (but not 5 Gbps or 10 Gbps).
- eropple 6y ago
  Cat6/Cat6a can, however, and that's become a standard run--so the 2.5G "stepping stone" doesn't make a lot of sense to me. (House is a mix of Cat6a and optical/SFP+ 10G networking and it is tremendous.)
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  For 100 meters. A typical consumer doesn't need that much length, and can use higher speeds even over bad cables. Especially if the cables aren't bundled for a significant distance.
- paulmd 6y ago
  CAT5e is not in-spec for 10 Gbps but it will usually do it for short runs. Under ten meters, worth a try. The official spec is 100m and the transceivers are pretty solid at pulling a signal out of the noise. Personally I'm with the other guy, I think this is a dumb half-measure and we should just move straight to 10 Gbps. Right now the single biggest cost in your household multi-gig deployment will be switches, a switch with 4-8 10Gbase-T ports will run you around $500, and this figure is not really any cheaper with multi-gig. You are paying through the nose for something that is a watered-down version of the "real standard". Say you have two switches, one is upstairs and one is downstairs, are you really going to drop $1000 on a half-baked deployment? People need to try it, figure out if their existing cable is stable enough for their needs (maybe that segment can run at 5gbit speeds and it can be 10 gbit on your machines and on the switch), and just pull cable where it's not.

ineedasername 6y ago

Are the gigahertz wars making a comeback?

sq_ 6y ago
Seems to me that all Intel can do at this point with their 14nm++++ is pump the Ghz and power consumption (when actually turboed to that high clock) up as far as they can.
- gsnedders 6y ago
  The power consumption isn't going up quite as quickly as we'd expect; we're seeing a return to high frequencies partly because we're seeing high-end CPUs manufactured on a vastly more mature process than we typically have part.
  - kllrnohj 6y ago
    > The power consumption isn't going up quite as quickly as we'd expect Eh? From anandtech's coverage: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15758/intels-10th-gen-comet-lake-desktop https://www.anandtech.com/show/15758/intels-10th-gen-comet-l... "Users wanting the 10-core 5.3 GHz will need to purchase the new top Core i9-10900K processor, which has a unit price of $488, and keep it under 70 ºC to enable Intel’s new Thermal Velocity Boost. Not only that, despite the 125 W TDP listed on the box, Intel states that the turbo power recommendation is 250 W – the motherboard manufacturers we’ve spoken to have prepared for 320-350 W from their own testing, in order to maintain that top turbo for as long as possible." Power is going up and by a lot to hit that 5.3Ghz. And requires a much lower temperature to do it.
    - blattimwind 6y ago
      Keeping a CPU under 70 °C while dissipating 300+ Watts is going to be tough even for high end custom loops. Air just isn't an option for these CPUs at all.
    - gsnedders 6y ago

MageSlayer 6y ago

Too bad they have only 2 channel memory controllers and same 32/32 L1 cache. That means all that power is still wasted waiting for memory (Max Memory Bandwidth 45.8 GB/s, seriously?). Not sure why feeling so excited about those processors.

vbezhenar 6y ago
For typical desktop workloads memory bandwidth is not that important. They likely will release Xeon-W counterparts later with similar frequencies but higher memory channels and PCI-E lanes for those who need it.
- MageSlayer 6y ago
  > For typical desktop workloads memory bandwidth is not that important. Perhaps, I need to take that as an axiom, right? i7 5820K was non-typical for that matter then. And yes, Xeon-W with 5.3GHz frequency? Tell me more :)
  - chapplap 6y ago
    The i7-5820K is from the "high end desktop" line of chips, derived from Xeon workstation chips. The modern equivalent is chips like the i9-10900X (note X not K), which does have quad channel DDR4-2933 and 48 PCIe lanes. Clock speeds are a bit lower though.
kllrnohj 6y ago
They also still only have 16 PCI-E lanes from the CPU, which is disappointing. Ryzen's 20 isn't exactly lavish, but it's enough for the pair of x16 for the GPU + x4 for the primary NVME drive.

jobseeker990 6y ago

So how is this possible now and not 5 years ago? Are there new discoveries that let us bring up the clock speed again? (Will they go even higher in the future?)

hedora 6y ago
They’re basically factory overclocked. Intel has been backed into a corner by AMD, so they’re pushing clockspeed over balancing against TDP and bus. Also, the multi-year delays in the next process shrink gave them lots of time to improve yields and micro-optimize the fabrication generation these are running on.

api 6y ago

This is still inferior to AMD's high-end offerings in terms of price/performance and performance/watt, but it does have one edge: single-threaded performance. There are certain applications where that matters a lot. Other than those, I'd pass.

greendave 6y ago

Somewhat surprised at the lack of PCIe 4.0. Is there really no demand for more PCI bandwidth on high-end desktops?

Tenoke 6y ago
PCIe 4.0 is likely to be short lived given that PCIe 5.0 seems to be around the corner. On the AMD side where they already have 4.0, few care for it (I do though - just ordered a mobo and processor that use it) - 4.0 nvmes aren't faster for common use cases, and it mostly matters when going multi-gpu which is only seen in some professional use (and even then you can use a threadripper and just have a lot of 3.0 lanes). Then next ~year ryzen 5000 which will require a new socket seems likely to already support 5.0. I'm guessing Intel will just altogether skip 4.0.
kllrnohj 6y ago
There is, but keep in mind this is yet another refresh of Skylake, not really a "new" CPU. Supposedly the new socket is PCI-E 4.0 capable, which the next CPU "Rocket Lake" will supposedly enable. But since it's still 16 lanes from the CPU only, that means you'll only get PCI-E 4.0 to likely a single slot. And likely not any of the M.2 drives, which typically are connected to the chipset instead.
yxhuvud 6y ago
Odds are that is coupled to either CPU architecture or mobo standard, and they didnt touch either. You should go AMD if you want PCIe4 currently. Which is a bit funny as Intel sells certain peripherals that supports it.

dchyrdvh 6y ago

Does anybody need those 5.3 GHz at 300 watts? I believe the next big thing is "massively parallel distributed processing": thousands or maybe even millions of tiny processing units with their own memory and reasonable set of instructions run in parallel and communicate with each other over some sort of high bandwidth bus. It's like a datacenter on a chip. A bit like GPU, but bigger. I think this will take ML and various number crunching fields to the next level.

motoboi 6y ago
Those are desktop processors. Most applications won’t even use 64 cores. But I agree this is this future, but today faster single core will speed up your day a lot.

fortran77 6y ago

I can't wait for the Xeon version of this to be released. There have been unofficial reports.

stevespang 6y ago

. . and you can barbeque on it !

gok 6y ago

I'm kind of surprised at this point that Intel didn't just bite the bullet and go with TSMC or Samsung for fabrication for a year or two until they figured their in-house sub-14nm story out.

unnouinceput 6y ago

As desktop user I don't care about power consumption, I care very little that it has x% more power then last year processors (at least when the x < 100) because current processors have enough power for anything you throw at them, but what I do really care is this: -Do they still pack that PoS Intel management inside the CPU? And are these new CPU still vulnerable to Meltdown? Because if any of those questions are answered with "yes" then no amount of cores, GHz and performance % is going to change my mind from Ryzen

sdflhasjd 6y ago
Well, power consumption is still kinda important on a desktop. All that power has to go somewhere and you need a cooler that can keep up or you'll be losing more performance from thermal throttling.
- unnouinceput 6y ago
  Water cooling. Desktops can afford that space generously.
  - sdflhasjd 6y ago
    True, but when you're approaching 300W, you can only take heat away so fast.
    - unnouinceput 6y ago
      My current desktop water cooling setup can handle 700W under load easily. After setting it up my test was to actually spin everything up under 100% load with 2 crypto miners (1 for GPU and one for CPU, in 2014) and did it for 10 hours straight. Peak temp was 60 degree Celsius in hot July. Why I never continued with that? Because at the time bitcoin was 120 dollars and the electricity was 10 times more expensive. According to worker pool I joined at the time in those 10 hours I've earned 3 cents. Anyway, back to topic - I trust my water cooling 100% (also I made it manually because I like to build things).
6y ago