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The Intel Comet Lake Core i9-10900K, i7-10700K, i5-10500K CPU Review

83 points by willis936 6y ago

neogodless 6y ago
It's not all bad. > On the face of it, the Core i9-10900K with its ability to boost all ten cores to 4.9 GHz sustained (in the right motherboard) as well as offering 5.3 GHz turbo will be a welcome recommendation to some users. It offers some of the best frame rates in our more CPU-limited gaming tests, and it competes at a similar price against an AMD processor that offers two more cores at a lower frequency. If you don't mind your CPU drawing 254W of power. > For recommendations, Intel’s Core i9 is currently performing the best in a lot of tests, and that’s hard to ignore. But will the end-user want that extra percent of performance, for the sake of spending more on cooling and more in power? In my experience, I prefer cool running hardware as much as possible. I don't need the absolute most powerful if the costs, heat and noise are going to move the balance too far. But I hope we see Intel succeed in improving their process and innovating a bit more instead of just shoving more cylinders in the engine and adding nitrous. Disclaimer: Happy AMD Ryzen CPU owner
- lasagnaphil 6y ago
  Oof, that CPU is going to be hot on full load. I imagine running an air-cooler is impossible on that one, making this a no-go for me.
  - Twirrim 6y ago
    The Prescott era chip used to get complaints about the amount of heat it produced. "PresHot", "Toaster" etc were slung about. A quick bit of searching dug up that it used to have a TDP of 115... and now we're talking about chips that more than double that. Yikes.
    - selectodude 6y ago
      Prescott had one core though, this has ten. 115W was with an order of magnitude fewer transistors. Even back then, that was terrible performance.
    - baq 6y ago
      enthusiast cooling tech has advanced quite a bit, too.
    - ac29 6y ago
      The TDP on this chip is only 125W, its just that TDP has started to lose its meaning. These days the peak power consumption is "as much as we can get into the chip without exceeding temperature limits".
  - madengr 6y ago
    Looking at the reviews of the Noctua air cooler, it does better than those giant water coolers.
    - eropple 6y ago
      Air coolers can do a better job than AIOs depending on the situation, for sure. I use a Noctua air cooler on my 3900X, and it's great. But when I had the same cooler on a 2700X, it was awful, and moving to a Corsair H60 (120mm radiator with a single fan) was a huge improvement. ...because the 3900X is in a full-tower Fractal Design case and the 2700X is in a cramped 4U HTPC case by Silverstone which is rackmounted into a Gator traveling case. There's just no airflow inside the case and the AIO specific heat transfer is critical.
- txcwpalpha 6y ago
  The whole situation is reminiscent of the FX9370, where AMD didn't have a new architecture yet and just cranked their existing chips up to insane amounts of power draw to eek out the last bit of performance. Of course, the 9370 had all sorts of memes about how it would catch your house on fire. I wonder if the i9-10900k will have the same. Hopefully, like with Ryzen following up on the 9370, the next line of chips from Intel after this will be game changers.
- deng 6y ago
  Please someone correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAICS the core voltage of the i9 1,52V. So with 254W, that thing really draws 167 amps? I guess every μΩ of resistance counts here or the board just explodes?
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    That's already been a problem for a long time. When CPU speed changes the transient currents are ridiculous, and the dI/dt is bananas, too. This is one reason why a few generations ago Intel had to go with a fully-integrated voltage regulator. The mainboard people were unable to build good, efficient VRMs off-chip.
    - eggsnbacon1 6y ago
      Maybe its not possible to regulate such a high current at gigahertz speeds off chip? The board traces and pins might have inductance high enough to negate smoothing capacitors at these speeds?
      - jeffbee 6y ago
        Yeah I mean there's no way a part on the other side of a CPU socket is doing anything in the gigahertz range. Those frequencies are covered by layers and capacitors in or on the package itself. What's hard about modern VRMs is being able to step from Icc(max) to zero while overshooting < 25mv, or the forward load step from nothing to ~200A in an instant without dropping. The specs are in Intel's VRxx docs (eg VR13).
  - eggsnbacon1 6y ago
    can someone calculate the watts/meter^2 on this chip, for science? Eyeballing the chip, it looks like ~5cm^2? This would mean it puts out 500,000watt-meter^2 or about 50 times the heat of the surface of the sun. Do we have cameras fast enough to see this explode if the heatsink falls off?
    - gruez 6y ago
- lliamander 6y ago
  Indeed. The CPUs aren't that much off in terms of price now, but between motherboards, cooling solutions, and power consumed, I would guess an Intel build is going to cost hundreds of dollars more than an equivalent AMD build.
- StillBored 6y ago
  Well it doesn't really bother me if they have an end to end pipeline. Why shouldn't the top of the line CPU consume 250 watts? If AMD "overclocked" their existing design up to 250W and 5+ ghz it would just be another part in the product line. If you want the absolute best perf, they you buy it. Otherwise you buy one the less expensive, lower wattage parts.
  - fomine3 6y ago
    Because Zen2 chips can't be overclocked so much, and Intel *lake chips can be overclocked and Intel needs to ship virtually overclocked chips to make it competitive to Ryzen.
    - StillBored 6y ago
      Overclocking has always been about eating into the design/binning margins. So sorta by definition if a CPU doesn't "overclock" its because its already overclocked. What intel is doing here isn't "overclocking" they are just tightening their CPU margins up to the same levels that AMD has. AKA, intel isn't overclocking their cpu anymore than AMD is. The only real difference is what the fmax of the design is, which in this case appears higher for the intel parts. Now if you want to argue about how efficient a design is at a certain power level, that is more logical. And its a semi interesting case (aka downclock the intel slightly so that the perf on a given benchmark is identical to the AMD, then measure the power utilization).
throwphoton 6y ago
It's becoming really difficult to figure out whether an X-core i5 is better or worse (even for a specific purpose) than a Y-core i7 or any other combination of [model, clock_speed, num_cores]. Last time I bought a machine I cut this Gordian Knot by not giving a shit, which has to count as some kind of failure of branding.
- duxup 6y ago
  After GHz stopped mattering (and maybe to some extent it never did)... I lost track of all things CPU and what matters. Anytime I looked into it I felt like I got a lot of truisms and mixed advice, and the PC enthusiast crowd seems equivalent to the 'pixel peeper' crowd of photography, obsessed with misc stats that I'm not sure will matter to me, or anyone.
  - theevilsharpie 6y ago
    > I lost track of all things CPU and what matters. The things that matter vary based on your use case. Your best bet would be to find benchmarks for an application that matters to you. If that's too much work, AMD's Ryzen platform is the best general-purpose platform at this point.
  - snazz 6y ago
    These days, choose a processor that meets your core count needs and budget. Some applications are primarily single-threaded, so for those you might want a processor with fewer, faster cores. For parallelizable tasks like compiling code (up until the linking stage), more cores is better. It might also be worth buying an AMD just to support them, but OEMs still mostly favor Intel. Performance per dollar is usually a lot better on the AMD side.
    - harpratap 6y ago
      Depends on the form factor. On desktop yes AMD might be better for your money but as an owner of Ryzen 3500u laptop I'd recommend Intel to anyone. For some reason Chrome is more janky than my old i5 4300u and it lags when playing 1080p x265 files in every player I've tried.
joenathanone 6y ago
Money quote: >"As mentioned, 10th Gen Comet Lake is, by and large, the same CPU core design as 6th Gen Skylake from 2015. This is, for lack of a better explanation, Skylake++++ built on 14++. Aside from increasing the core count, the frequency, the memory support, some of the turbo responses, and enabling more voltage/frequency customization (more on the next page), there has been no significant increase in IPC from Intel all while AMD has gone from Excavator to Zen to Zen 2, with sizable IPC increases and efficiency improvements. With Intel late on 10nm, Comet Lake does feel like another hold-over until Intel can either get its 10nm process right for the desktop market or backport its newer architectures to 14nm; so Intel should be trying its best to avoid a sixth generation of the same core design after this."
- localhost 6y ago
  I would imagine that this is what Jim Keller is working day and night at Intel to avoid. I’m really looking forward to what comes out of his work at Intel. Competition is good.
  - quantummkv 6y ago
    I don't think so. Intel's problem here is not that they were unable to design new architectures with all the cool features. Intel's problem here is that they were unable to actually manufacture that design. Jim Keller is a chip designer. But even if he manages to design something that is leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else, it won't matter if Intel is unable to manufacture it.
    - localhost 6y ago
      Totally understand that Intel's manufacturing problems are a really important factor here, but GP was talking about their lack of IPC gains, which is exactly the kind of thing I would imagine they hired Jim to solve.
      - eloff 6y ago
        I think the confusion is because the chip design is tied to the manufacturing process. Intel likely has IPC gains in their new architecture for 10nm, but they can't manufacture that yet, and they can't just build it on 14nm instead without significant work to port the design to the new process node.
tibbydudeza 6y ago
The price is usually the problem.
- Synaesthesia 6y ago
  Frankly these look competitive with AMD price wise.
  - lostmsu 6y ago
    That's because AMD prices in the article are from the corresponding processor release date, not today's.
  - gruez 6y ago
    Are they? The i5-10600K sells for $262. Its closest competitor is ryzen 3600/3600x, which currently sell for $172/$200 respectively. For $62 (33%) more, is it really 33% faster than AMD? There are lower tier skus (eg. i5-10500) that match AMD's pricepoint, but I doubt they match 3600/3600x's performance. At the high end, the i9-10900K ($488) is competing against the ryzen 3900x, which currently sells for $400 and has 20% more cores.
    - gamegod 6y ago
      It's the motherboard prices that will make the difference. Intel motherboards are always super overpriced, and you have to buy a new mobo with every generation.
      - ben-schaaf 6y ago
        That and you also need to factor in the cooler. The consumer Ryzen chips all come with an adequate cooler, which can save you a significant amount over the Intel chips especially considering the extra heat output you'd need to handle.
    - mastax 6y ago
      Keep in mind that the prices quoted in the article for Intel are 1ku prices, I'd assume that the retail price would be higher unless Intel were doing some retail promotion.
nojito 6y ago
The difference between CPU's at similiar price points is getting to be negligible. https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph15785/116023.png https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph15785/116023.png For 50% of the price, you're only losing 30% in performance.
- navbaker 6y ago
  Any clue on why that $1700 CPU is performing so poorly relative to the rest in the chart?
  - nullifidian 6y ago
    it's a 10 core from the time (2016) when that core count was somewhat exotic.
- AnotherGoodName 6y ago
  I'd always make a point of adding in the motherboard and RAM cost as a baseline here. Say an extra $300 (assuming we're not going completely low end). So instead of $262 vs $488 your comparison should be $562 vs $788. Which means you pay ~30% more for ~30% more performance from your motherboard+RAM+CPU (the CPU being the dominant performance factor to these components).
css 6y ago
> The new CPUs have the LGA1200 socket, which means that current 300-series motherboards are not sufficient, and users will require new LGA1200 motherboards. This is despite the socket being the same size. Well that is disappointing.
- eemil 6y ago
  With Intel's track record, I would expect nothing less.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  seems like a dumb move, but I'm sure they have their reasons. I bought z390 mobo last year with some very beefy VRMs. it was near the end of the cycle for the 9th gen parts, so I was thinking I would consider upgrading whenever they released the next line of chips. I would honestly consider buying the 10900K if it were compatible with my motherboard, especially now that I'm compiling code at home, but I'm not willing to also pay $200-300 for another high-end motherboard. I sort of suspect they looked at the last gen motherboards and worried that they wouldn't all be able to handle the increased power demands. maybe they decided not to support that to avoid making people look up each SKU to see if it could handle the new processors.
  - willis936 6y ago
    The list of reasons are pretty short when they are not adding support for any new interconnects or changing the microarchitecture.
  - Denvercoder9 6y ago
    > but I'm sure they have their reasons. Making money by selling new chipsets.
  - blattimwind 6y ago
    > seems like a dumb move, but I'm sure they have their reasons. Uhm, Intel has been doing this since always. One generation of boards for one generation of CPUs. At most two.
greendave 6y ago
> Through our tests, we saw the Intel Core i9-10900K peak at 254 W during our AVX2-accelerated y-cruncher test. LINPACK and 3DPMavx did not push the processor as hard. That's a lot of power. Granted, on non-AVX code, the max they measured looks closer to 190W but that's still dramatically more than the 140W max that the 16-core Ryzen needs.
- Synaesthesia 6y ago
  That is but not beyond what most PSU’s can do these days. Also it’s only when you’re stressing all 10 cores. But it is significant.
  - dijit 6y ago
    I am not worried about the PSU, I'm worried about the VRM's (and cooling of them). Maybe I'm also a little worried about PSU fans spinning more, as my current PSU doesn't spin it's fan unless it's over 45% load.
    - BoorishBears 6y ago
      Then this CPU is not for you. It's for people who want the maximum performance outside of a Cinebench and rendering videos, the presumption is you can get a motherboard that actually supports the CPUs it lists on the box, power demands and all.
      - dijit 6y ago
        This is a /relatively/ fair comment, in isolation. But a couple of things stick out. 1) Intel generally hides power draw by talking averages not totals. 2) Power/Performance ratios are generally used to compare against AMD, and in this case, AMD is winning.
        BoorishBears 6y ago
        Power/Performance ratios were used against AMD when AMD was already lagging behind in performance, and power was actively hindering performance (via heat generated which was actively limiting headroom for clock speeds) No one complains when a chip is performing extremely well and taking a lot of power like the i9 clearly is, they complain when a chip is taking a lot of power and underperforming - And honestly the whole TDP debate is a joke, everyone wants their own deeply flawed benchmark, some people want it to be TDP with AVX-512 instructions which is not a realistic workload for most people, some people want what Intel puts on the box. TDP is like process nodes. It used to be easy to just compare two numbers, but with complex boosting rules, increased core counts, weird interactions with AVX and all those cores, it's pointless to just compare. What matters in non-commercial consumer land is can it be cooled by a reasonable cooling solution. When you're talking about a $100 CPU "reasonable" is what usually comes in the box. When you're talking about $500+ I would say a 2 fan AIO or a high-end air cooler is what's reasonable (that's why there's no cooler in the box once you get to this performance point), and reviews are showing it performs just fine with both Actually... as if to make my point about TDP, some reviewers were finding this not to be the case. Turns out some mobo manufacturers enabled "MCE", which essentially throws voltage at the CPU to try and get higher clocks with more cores enabled. It doesn't follow Intel's specs to do this either: https://www.anandtech.com/show/6214/multicore-enhancement-the-debate-about-free-mhz https://www.anandtech.com/show/6214/multicore-enhancement-th... So just like almost every "automatic overclocking" solution for a CPU that's been shipped, it throws the TDP completely out the window. And so if you did expect Intel's TDP to be correct you'd be sorely disappointed, but if you based the TDP on what those motherboards will dump you'd also have an unfair comparison, yet I promise people will be holering from the mountaintops that those numbers those reviewers found are the real numbers...
tryptophan 6y ago
Does anyone know of a good article that explains why intel is having these problems with crappy 5 year old CPUs? Is 10nm going to be competitive with AMD when it finally comes out?
- blihp 6y ago
  Considering we've been hearing that story for the last 5 years (and they have 10nm now, just apparently not at a volume/price point Intel is happy with), I wouldn't bet on 10nm turning things around for Intel. In the most optimistic scenario for Intel, AMD will be talking about 5nm by the time Intel can stop talking about 14nm.
- lliamander 6y ago
  For servers, maybe. I don't think it will be for frequency-bound tasks (even with the increased IPC). Intel expects to be in a better position when they ship their 7nm node in a couple years.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  The Intel part is on top of every single-threaded benchmark in this article, with a 5-year-old microarchitecture. Whatever you want to say about their failure to scale out the core count or to shrink the lithography, they are still in an enviable position of being able to spend the massive lead they had banked. What's going to be really interesting from here on is the cadence of innovation from both camps. Will Intel ship real product and leap ahead again? Will they ship a new product that's a turd? Will AMD ship another generation of improvements while Intel grinds out another Skylake SKU?
- vbezhenar 6y ago
  At this point I think that they'll just skip 10nm for desktop CPUs and move on 7nm.
Causality1 6y ago
Its ridiculous that a brand new 10600K only has at best 33% better single-thread performance than my seven year old 4670K.
- Synaesthesia 6y ago
  In what benchmark?
  - Causality1 6y ago
    Cinebench. The Geekbench results are even closer.
    - Synaesthesia 6y ago
      Yeah frankly I’m sticking with my old 4th gen Intel too. I’m not doing anything hardcore that needs 10 cores. I’m sure glad about the AMD resurgence and expecting some response from Intel now.
      - Causality1 6y ago
        I mean I'd love to build a new computer, but there's just no point. The only genuinely difficult thing I want my CPU to do is game console emulation, and for that single-thread performance is king and I can't justify the expense for a 1/3 performance increase regardless of how long it's been.
      - 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
        I want to upgrade but there just isn't a reason to yet. I'm still on a 4930k
- rb808 6y ago
  I have a six year old i5-2500 and a 10700K is quicker but still not twice as fast as the 2500. Its really not worth the upgrade. https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-2500-vs-Intel-Core-i7-10700K/m517vs4070 https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-2500-vs-...
samfisher83 6y ago
I guess you got to give the skylake architecture some credit. Their 5 year old uarch is still pretty competitive. This is is almost like Pentium 4 vs amd64 days. Wonder if intel will pull out a core2duo.
- theevilsharpie 6y ago
  Skylake (and its derivatives) is only competitive if you disregard power usage. For environments where performance/watt matters (e.g., servers, laptops, etc.), Skylake is significantly behind Zen 2.
  - Drew_ 6y ago
    Sure but none of these desktop processors are used in any of these environments.
  - Denvercoder9 6y ago
    Skylake is 4 years older than Zen 2, though.
    - theevilsharpie 6y ago
      It doesn't really matter if the Skylake architecture is still what Intel is offering in its contemporary products.
  - fomine3 6y ago
    Skylake (or Intel platform) is still has advantage in laptop/tablet area because of optimization for idle power usage than Ryzen.
    - blattimwind 6y ago
      The 4xxxHS parts seem to be rather competitive there as well. Note that these are monolithic Zen 2 APUs, I suspect this is the same silicon that will ship as 4xxxG parts on the desktop.
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Aardwolf 6y ago
How comes that the fastest desktop CPU's from Intel don't have AVX-512? The Xeon CPU's have AVX-512. Laptop CPU's like i3-8121U have AVX-512. Why not desktop too? This has been going on for years.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  Perhaps this tells us something about the relative size of the high-performance desktop market compared to the market for MacBook Pros, which have Ice Lake CPUs with AVX-512.
  - willis936 6y ago
    Why speculate? If we take i9s to be considered par equivalents to high-end CPUs we find in MacBook Pros, and the market distribution of cheap to expensive CPUs is similar in both desktop and notebook segments, then we can simply look at earnings reports. https://s21.q4cdn.com/600692695/files/doc_financials/2019/2019-Annual-Report.pdf https://s21.q4cdn.com/600692695/files/doc_financials/2019/20... From page 34: 6% of Intel's Desktop platform volume is $705Mn, so total volume is $11.75Bn. 5% of Intel's Notebook platform volume is $1080Mn, so total volume is $21.6Bn. So the desktop market is slightly larger than half the size of the notebook market, but $12Bn is a lot of money to leave on the table then turn your back to. Especially since an aged microarchitecture threatens all CPU-related revenue streams.
- mastax 6y ago
  This is still using the skylake microarchitecture from 2015. I'm sure if Intel were shipping the design they wanted to be shpping it would have AVX512.
- dolphin1986 6y ago
  Because the ring bus architecture doesn’t support avx512 but ring bus has better latency which is why many prefer it for gaming or audio production work.
- vbezhenar 6y ago
  What desktop applications use AVX-512?
Jonnax 6y ago
These CPUs don't have PCIe 4. With Microsoft and Sony going all in with their consoles and high speed gen4 SSDs, I'm imagining there's going to be a lot of faster drives on the market soon. Unless it's an upgrade, I feel buying this CPU for a new build is a bad idea. If I needed Intel I'd wait until their next generation at least.
- ebg13 6y ago
  > These CPUs don't have PCIe 4. I'm fine with PCIe 4 not hitting mainstream for a few more years. AMD X570 motherboards all integrate noisy and failure-prone active fans directly on the motherboard because the chips get so hot. The only one I know about that didn't was wildly expensive, basically all heatsink, and apparently no longer in production.
  - r00fus 6y ago
    > The one I know about that doesn't is basically all heatsink. I'd love to see that one.
    - Cu3PO42 6y ago
      That would be the Gigabyte AORUS X570 XTREME: https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/X570-AORUS-XTREME-rev-1x https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/X570-AORUS-XTREME-rev-1...
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - ben-schaaf 6y ago
    Motherboards used to have issues with the fan running when it didn't need to, but to my knowledge that's been fixed. Unless you're running massive amounts of data through the chipset it doesn't get hot and on most motherboards the fan should stay off.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
m0xte 6y ago
I was humming and hawing over moving back to Intel until I read this. So the conclusion I took from this is to wait for Zen 3 to come out and then use the price dumping on Zen 2 cores to get a 65W TDP Ryzen 7 3700X for considerably less coin than a 9700K. Then do the same with Zen 3 when Zen vNext comes out because I'm not having to buy a new board and socket just to get a miniscule increase in grunt this time or next time.
StillBored 6y ago
Color me massively confused, but why on earth does the chipset have a 2.5G Ethernet interface that doesn't support 5G/10G?
- jeffbee 6y ago
  They can do it this way and only use a single PCIe lane; 2.5g works over existing cat5e cable plants and 10g doesn't; their 10g and 40g controllers cost $40 and this one costs $2?
  - StillBored 6y ago
    PCIe gen3 is nearly a GB/sec in each direction per lane (actual bandwidth obviously less). Which is nearly enough to get to line rate with 10Gbit ethernet, particularly if TSO is employed to remove the framing/etc overhead. Getting 750MB/sec out of a 10G interface because its constricted by PCIe is a lot better than getting 220MB/sec out of 2.5G. Consider the difference when running a VM image from a NAS. Further, the point with the multimode 1/2.5/5/10 phy's is they do line quality detection and downgrade. So you plug in cat5, and it downgrades to 2.5 if the line quality is bad. Someone runs a 10 foot cat6A cable they are going to get the full speed. But in actuality, as I said on this board before, 10G requires cat6a for 200 meter runs. If your in a house, small office, etc where the runs are 5-10 meters or less cat5e works just fine. I've seen switch vendors mention that quality cat5e can be good up to 45M, which is farther than cat8 is specified for 40GbaseT. It just looks like more product segmentation since the 10GbaseT spec has been around for about 15 years now. edit: When it comes to UTP, the frequency response and cross talk specifications effectively end up being per foot. So the line attenuation and noise increases with cable length until it falls below the threshold required to reconstruct the signal at the far end given a standard compliant part. The length and cabling requirements also include the possibility of loss from additional wall jacks or patch panels. So many of the bulk cat 5e cable packs were sold for a long time as 350mhz (or similar) which in name is better than basic cat6 at 250mhz because its actually pretty hard to screw up the twist/etc requirements of the cable. The problems happen when it is poorly terminated. So the whole thing ends up being a bit of a crapshoot whether any given cable works to specification (most aren't) but because they are far below the maximum line lengths it never matters. Plus, in the decade(s) since the specs were initially created semiconductor advances have allowed advances in the receiver sensitivity and efficiency of the drive signal. Meaning if one went back at this point and tweaked the 1G spec its quite likely that the max transmission lengths could at least be doubled due to specifying it with cat5e and tighter margins. This is also what allows 10GbaseT SFP's today, which weren't initially possible (that and mandating that they aren't compliant to the full 200M).
madengr 6y ago
I’m more interested in the Xeon W-1260P, which seems to be an i9-10900K with ECC enabled. It should work very well for my engineering software (which uses Intel math libraries that are slow on AMD). Hopefully they come out with it soon.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  Thanks for pointing it out. I was trying to figure out if we had to settle for the core i3-10100e if we want ECC. Apparently no. The 1290 has higher clocks than anything in this article, plus ECC.
  - madengr 6y ago
    You caught my typo. I meant W-1290P. Should be about $50 more than the i9-10900K.
    - jeffbee 6y ago
      $50 + a motherboard you can't buy yet.
- lliamander 6y ago
  Those are pretty interesting, especially with 40 PCIE lanes. I wonder if (like the z490) the W480 motherboards will support PCIE gen4, and whether there will be Rocket Lake Xeon W 1300 CPUs.
  - madengr 6y ago
    W480 is still PCIE 3.0, from what I have read. I’ll probably end up getting one of these: https://www.asus.com/uk/Motherboards/Pro-WS-W480-ACE/ https://www.asus.com/uk/Motherboards/Pro-WS-W480-ACE/
    - lliamander 6y ago
      Nice. What interests you about these Xeon CPUs specifically?
talmr 6y ago
Each time I see these kinds of reviews, I take comfort in knowing my eight year old i7 3770k is still chugging along at 4.7ghz OC. Its matched with 16gb ram and a 980 TI, and it handles most modern games at 60fps just fine albeit on lower settings. I also sometimes boot into Ubuntu to write some code while my girlfriend wants to use the macbook, and I just mostly use VSC and write Node or Go apps. Maybe in the future I'll just get a newer GPU, but for my needs of primarily gaming and coding I don't yet see a reason to upgrade the CPU and motherboard.
- eropple 6y ago
  This is not an unreasonable spot to be in, but it's going to change in the next year or so I think for most gaming stuff. The Ivy Bridge stuff is a little on the pokey side now; my i5-3570K was in my HTPC until earlier this year when I replaced it with an i7-6700K. But a higher-end Ivy Bridge will still be OK for most games for a little while yet. And a 980Ti is still a great card; I upgraded to a 2070 Super because I needed Turing NVENC but the 980Ti was playing everything great at 1080p and most things very well at 1440p. As things start to target the PS5 and Xbox Series X as their lead platforms, however, I would expect that to change. The PS5 will field eight Zen 2 cores and that's going to be a significant step up. Modern game engines are already really happy with multicore systems (the 3900X in my desktop gets put to work by Doom Eternal) and this will only increase. Increases in expected throughput is going to put the 980Ti in a bad spot, too. That said, Ivy Bridge and Haswell really have to take the crown for "longest-lived worthwhile CPUs". That HTPC (which was formerly my desktop, and had 32GB of RAM because of it) is now a NAS, and it's great. I wonder how long it'll last.
  - fishtacos 6y ago
    "That said, Ivy Bridge and Haswell really have to take the crown for "longest-lived worthwhile CPUs"". Sandy Bridge era CPUs (i5-2500/k, i7-2600/k, etc) were the ones that really shook up the market. Much lower power envelope and a large jump in performance from Nehalem. Ivy Bridge was the Tick-Tock iteration of SB, providing higher power usage/heat output (counterintuitively), with about a 5% IPC increase IIRC, based on the famous 3D Tri-Gate process. It was widely considered a bust at the time.
znpy 6y ago
The i9-10900T is interesting at 10C/20T at 35W tdp. But I'm afraid that it's going to be one of those parts reserved to OEMs, like the 45W Ryzen 3600 (non-X).
coronadisaster 6y ago
I wonder if they will dare to go to i11?
fomine3 6y ago
> We know that AMD’s Zen 2 has as a slight 10-15% IPC advantage over 9th Gen Coffee Lake, How they calculated it? I had only heard that Zen2 IPC is 15% increased from Zen+. And from Single threaded benchmark, Zen2 not seems like 10% over Skylake.

83 points by willis936 6y ago

It's not all bad. > On the face of it, the Core i9-10900K with its ability to boost all ten cores to 4.9 GHz sustained (in the right motherboard) as well as offering 5.3 GHz turbo will be a welcome recommendation to some users. It offers some of the best frame rates in our more CPU-limited gaming tests, and it competes at a similar price against an AMD processor that offers two more cores at a lower frequency. If you don't mind your CPU drawing 254W of power. > For recommendations, Intel’s Core i9 is currently performing the best in a lot of tests, and that’s hard to ignore. But will the end-user want that extra percent of performance, for the sake of spending more on cooling and more in power? In my experience, I prefer cool running hardware as much as possible. I don't need the absolute most powerful if the costs, heat and noise are going to move the balance too far. But I hope we see Intel succeed in improving their process and innovating a bit more instead of just shoving more cylinders in the engine and adding nitrous. Disclaimer: Happy AMD Ryzen CPU owner

lasagnaphil 6y ago
Oof, that CPU is going to be hot on full load. I imagine running an air-cooler is impossible on that one, making this a no-go for me.
- Twirrim 6y ago
  The Prescott era chip used to get complaints about the amount of heat it produced. "PresHot", "Toaster" etc were slung about. A quick bit of searching dug up that it used to have a TDP of 115... and now we're talking about chips that more than double that. Yikes.
  - selectodude 6y ago
    Prescott had one core though, this has ten. 115W was with an order of magnitude fewer transistors. Even back then, that was terrible performance.
  - baq 6y ago
    enthusiast cooling tech has advanced quite a bit, too.
  - ac29 6y ago
    The TDP on this chip is only 125W, its just that TDP has started to lose its meaning. These days the peak power consumption is "as much as we can get into the chip without exceeding temperature limits".
- madengr 6y ago
  Looking at the reviews of the Noctua air cooler, it does better than those giant water coolers.
  - eropple 6y ago
    Air coolers can do a better job than AIOs depending on the situation, for sure. I use a Noctua air cooler on my 3900X, and it's great. But when I had the same cooler on a 2700X, it was awful, and moving to a Corsair H60 (120mm radiator with a single fan) was a huge improvement. ...because the 3900X is in a full-tower Fractal Design case and the 2700X is in a cramped 4U HTPC case by Silverstone which is rackmounted into a Gator traveling case. There's just no airflow inside the case and the AIO specific heat transfer is critical.
txcwpalpha 6y ago
The whole situation is reminiscent of the FX9370, where AMD didn't have a new architecture yet and just cranked their existing chips up to insane amounts of power draw to eek out the last bit of performance. Of course, the 9370 had all sorts of memes about how it would catch your house on fire. I wonder if the i9-10900k will have the same. Hopefully, like with Ryzen following up on the 9370, the next line of chips from Intel after this will be game changers.
deng 6y ago
Please someone correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAICS the core voltage of the i9 1,52V. So with 254W, that thing really draws 167 amps? I guess every μΩ of resistance counts here or the board just explodes?
- jeffbee 6y ago
  That's already been a problem for a long time. When CPU speed changes the transient currents are ridiculous, and the dI/dt is bananas, too. This is one reason why a few generations ago Intel had to go with a fully-integrated voltage regulator. The mainboard people were unable to build good, efficient VRMs off-chip.
  - eggsnbacon1 6y ago
    Maybe its not possible to regulate such a high current at gigahertz speeds off chip? The board traces and pins might have inductance high enough to negate smoothing capacitors at these speeds?
    - jeffbee 6y ago
      Yeah I mean there's no way a part on the other side of a CPU socket is doing anything in the gigahertz range. Those frequencies are covered by layers and capacitors in or on the package itself. What's hard about modern VRMs is being able to step from Icc(max) to zero while overshooting < 25mv, or the forward load step from nothing to ~200A in an instant without dropping. The specs are in Intel's VRxx docs (eg VR13).
- eggsnbacon1 6y ago
  can someone calculate the watts/meter^2 on this chip, for science? Eyeballing the chip, it looks like ~5cm^2? This would mean it puts out 500,000watt-meter^2 or about 50 times the heat of the surface of the sun. Do we have cameras fast enough to see this explode if the heatsink falls off?
  - gruez 6y ago
lliamander 6y ago
Indeed. The CPUs aren't that much off in terms of price now, but between motherboards, cooling solutions, and power consumed, I would guess an Intel build is going to cost hundreds of dollars more than an equivalent AMD build.
StillBored 6y ago
Well it doesn't really bother me if they have an end to end pipeline. Why shouldn't the top of the line CPU consume 250 watts? If AMD "overclocked" their existing design up to 250W and 5+ ghz it would just be another part in the product line. If you want the absolute best perf, they you buy it. Otherwise you buy one the less expensive, lower wattage parts.
- fomine3 6y ago
  Because Zen2 chips can't be overclocked so much, and Intel *lake chips can be overclocked and Intel needs to ship virtually overclocked chips to make it competitive to Ryzen.
  - StillBored 6y ago
    Overclocking has always been about eating into the design/binning margins. So sorta by definition if a CPU doesn't "overclock" its because its already overclocked. What intel is doing here isn't "overclocking" they are just tightening their CPU margins up to the same levels that AMD has. AKA, intel isn't overclocking their cpu anymore than AMD is. The only real difference is what the fmax of the design is, which in this case appears higher for the intel parts. Now if you want to argue about how efficient a design is at a certain power level, that is more logical. And its a semi interesting case (aka downclock the intel slightly so that the perf on a given benchmark is identical to the AMD, then measure the power utilization).

throwphoton 6y ago

It's becoming really difficult to figure out whether an X-core i5 is better or worse (even for a specific purpose) than a Y-core i7 or any other combination of [model, clock_speed, num_cores]. Last time I bought a machine I cut this Gordian Knot by not giving a shit, which has to count as some kind of failure of branding.

duxup 6y ago
After GHz stopped mattering (and maybe to some extent it never did)... I lost track of all things CPU and what matters. Anytime I looked into it I felt like I got a lot of truisms and mixed advice, and the PC enthusiast crowd seems equivalent to the 'pixel peeper' crowd of photography, obsessed with misc stats that I'm not sure will matter to me, or anyone.
- theevilsharpie 6y ago
  > I lost track of all things CPU and what matters. The things that matter vary based on your use case. Your best bet would be to find benchmarks for an application that matters to you. If that's too much work, AMD's Ryzen platform is the best general-purpose platform at this point.
- snazz 6y ago
  These days, choose a processor that meets your core count needs and budget. Some applications are primarily single-threaded, so for those you might want a processor with fewer, faster cores. For parallelizable tasks like compiling code (up until the linking stage), more cores is better. It might also be worth buying an AMD just to support them, but OEMs still mostly favor Intel. Performance per dollar is usually a lot better on the AMD side.
  - harpratap 6y ago
    Depends on the form factor. On desktop yes AMD might be better for your money but as an owner of Ryzen 3500u laptop I'd recommend Intel to anyone. For some reason Chrome is more janky than my old i5 4300u and it lags when playing 1080p x265 files in every player I've tried.

joenathanone 6y ago

Money quote: >"As mentioned, 10th Gen Comet Lake is, by and large, the same CPU core design as 6th Gen Skylake from 2015. This is, for lack of a better explanation, Skylake++++ built on 14++. Aside from increasing the core count, the frequency, the memory support, some of the turbo responses, and enabling more voltage/frequency customization (more on the next page), there has been no significant increase in IPC from Intel all while AMD has gone from Excavator to Zen to Zen 2, with sizable IPC increases and efficiency improvements. With Intel late on 10nm, Comet Lake does feel like another hold-over until Intel can either get its 10nm process right for the desktop market or backport its newer architectures to 14nm; so Intel should be trying its best to avoid a sixth generation of the same core design after this."

localhost 6y ago
I would imagine that this is what Jim Keller is working day and night at Intel to avoid. I’m really looking forward to what comes out of his work at Intel. Competition is good.
- quantummkv 6y ago
  I don't think so. Intel's problem here is not that they were unable to design new architectures with all the cool features. Intel's problem here is that they were unable to actually manufacture that design. Jim Keller is a chip designer. But even if he manages to design something that is leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else, it won't matter if Intel is unable to manufacture it.
  - localhost 6y ago
    Totally understand that Intel's manufacturing problems are a really important factor here, but GP was talking about their lack of IPC gains, which is exactly the kind of thing I would imagine they hired Jim to solve.
    - eloff 6y ago
      I think the confusion is because the chip design is tied to the manufacturing process. Intel likely has IPC gains in their new architecture for 10nm, but they can't manufacture that yet, and they can't just build it on 14nm instead without significant work to port the design to the new process node.

tibbydudeza 6y ago

The price is usually the problem.

Synaesthesia 6y ago
Frankly these look competitive with AMD price wise.
- lostmsu 6y ago
  That's because AMD prices in the article are from the corresponding processor release date, not today's.
- gruez 6y ago
  Are they? The i5-10600K sells for $262. Its closest competitor is ryzen 3600/3600x, which currently sell for $172/$200 respectively. For $62 (33%) more, is it really 33% faster than AMD? There are lower tier skus (eg. i5-10500) that match AMD's pricepoint, but I doubt they match 3600/3600x's performance. At the high end, the i9-10900K ($488) is competing against the ryzen 3900x, which currently sells for $400 and has 20% more cores.
  - gamegod 6y ago
    It's the motherboard prices that will make the difference. Intel motherboards are always super overpriced, and you have to buy a new mobo with every generation.
    - ben-schaaf 6y ago
      That and you also need to factor in the cooler. The consumer Ryzen chips all come with an adequate cooler, which can save you a significant amount over the Intel chips especially considering the extra heat output you'd need to handle.
  - mastax 6y ago
    Keep in mind that the prices quoted in the article for Intel are 1ku prices, I'd assume that the retail price would be higher unless Intel were doing some retail promotion.

nojito 6y ago

The difference between CPU's at similiar price points is getting to be negligible. https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph15785/116023.png https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph15785/116023.png For 50% of the price, you're only losing 30% in performance.

navbaker 6y ago
Any clue on why that $1700 CPU is performing so poorly relative to the rest in the chart?
- nullifidian 6y ago
  it's a 10 core from the time (2016) when that core count was somewhat exotic.
AnotherGoodName 6y ago
I'd always make a point of adding in the motherboard and RAM cost as a baseline here. Say an extra $300 (assuming we're not going completely low end). So instead of $262 vs $488 your comparison should be $562 vs $788. Which means you pay ~30% more for ~30% more performance from your motherboard+RAM+CPU (the CPU being the dominant performance factor to these components).

css 6y ago

> The new CPUs have the LGA1200 socket, which means that current 300-series motherboards are not sufficient, and users will require new LGA1200 motherboards. This is despite the socket being the same size. Well that is disappointing.

eemil 6y ago
With Intel's track record, I would expect nothing less.
leetcrew 6y ago
seems like a dumb move, but I'm sure they have their reasons. I bought z390 mobo last year with some very beefy VRMs. it was near the end of the cycle for the 9th gen parts, so I was thinking I would consider upgrading whenever they released the next line of chips. I would honestly consider buying the 10900K if it were compatible with my motherboard, especially now that I'm compiling code at home, but I'm not willing to also pay $200-300 for another high-end motherboard. I sort of suspect they looked at the last gen motherboards and worried that they wouldn't all be able to handle the increased power demands. maybe they decided not to support that to avoid making people look up each SKU to see if it could handle the new processors.
- willis936 6y ago
  The list of reasons are pretty short when they are not adding support for any new interconnects or changing the microarchitecture.
- Denvercoder9 6y ago
  > but I'm sure they have their reasons. Making money by selling new chipsets.
- blattimwind 6y ago
  > seems like a dumb move, but I'm sure they have their reasons. Uhm, Intel has been doing this since always. One generation of boards for one generation of CPUs. At most two.

greendave 6y ago

> Through our tests, we saw the Intel Core i9-10900K peak at 254 W during our AVX2-accelerated y-cruncher test. LINPACK and 3DPMavx did not push the processor as hard. That's a lot of power. Granted, on non-AVX code, the max they measured looks closer to 190W but that's still dramatically more than the 140W max that the 16-core Ryzen needs.

Synaesthesia 6y ago
That is but not beyond what most PSU’s can do these days. Also it’s only when you’re stressing all 10 cores. But it is significant.
- dijit 6y ago
  I am not worried about the PSU, I'm worried about the VRM's (and cooling of them). Maybe I'm also a little worried about PSU fans spinning more, as my current PSU doesn't spin it's fan unless it's over 45% load.
  - BoorishBears 6y ago
    Then this CPU is not for you. It's for people who want the maximum performance outside of a Cinebench and rendering videos, the presumption is you can get a motherboard that actually supports the CPUs it lists on the box, power demands and all.
    - dijit 6y ago
      This is a /relatively/ fair comment, in isolation. But a couple of things stick out. 1) Intel generally hides power draw by talking averages not totals. 2) Power/Performance ratios are generally used to compare against AMD, and in this case, AMD is winning.
      - BoorishBears 6y ago
        Power/Performance ratios were used against AMD when AMD was already lagging behind in performance, and power was actively hindering performance (via heat generated which was actively limiting headroom for clock speeds) No one complains when a chip is performing extremely well and taking a lot of power like the i9 clearly is, they complain when a chip is taking a lot of power and underperforming - And honestly the whole TDP debate is a joke, everyone wants their own deeply flawed benchmark, some people want it to be TDP with AVX-512 instructions which is not a realistic workload for most people, some people want what Intel puts on the box. TDP is like process nodes. It used to be easy to just compare two numbers, but with complex boosting rules, increased core counts, weird interactions with AVX and all those cores, it's pointless to just compare. What matters in non-commercial consumer land is can it be cooled by a reasonable cooling solution. When you're talking about a $100 CPU "reasonable" is what usually comes in the box. When you're talking about $500+ I would say a 2 fan AIO or a high-end air cooler is what's reasonable (that's why there's no cooler in the box once you get to this performance point), and reviews are showing it performs just fine with both Actually... as if to make my point about TDP, some reviewers were finding this not to be the case. Turns out some mobo manufacturers enabled "MCE", which essentially throws voltage at the CPU to try and get higher clocks with more cores enabled. It doesn't follow Intel's specs to do this either: https://www.anandtech.com/show/6214/multicore-enhancement-the-debate-about-free-mhz https://www.anandtech.com/show/6214/multicore-enhancement-th... So just like almost every "automatic overclocking" solution for a CPU that's been shipped, it throws the TDP completely out the window. And so if you did expect Intel's TDP to be correct you'd be sorely disappointed, but if you based the TDP on what those motherboards will dump you'd also have an unfair comparison, yet I promise people will be holering from the mountaintops that those numbers those reviewers found are the real numbers...

tryptophan 6y ago

Does anyone know of a good article that explains why intel is having these problems with crappy 5 year old CPUs? Is 10nm going to be competitive with AMD when it finally comes out?

blihp 6y ago
Considering we've been hearing that story for the last 5 years (and they have 10nm now, just apparently not at a volume/price point Intel is happy with), I wouldn't bet on 10nm turning things around for Intel. In the most optimistic scenario for Intel, AMD will be talking about 5nm by the time Intel can stop talking about 14nm.
lliamander 6y ago
For servers, maybe. I don't think it will be for frequency-bound tasks (even with the increased IPC). Intel expects to be in a better position when they ship their 7nm node in a couple years.
jeffbee 6y ago
The Intel part is on top of every single-threaded benchmark in this article, with a 5-year-old microarchitecture. Whatever you want to say about their failure to scale out the core count or to shrink the lithography, they are still in an enviable position of being able to spend the massive lead they had banked. What's going to be really interesting from here on is the cadence of innovation from both camps. Will Intel ship real product and leap ahead again? Will they ship a new product that's a turd? Will AMD ship another generation of improvements while Intel grinds out another Skylake SKU?
vbezhenar 6y ago
At this point I think that they'll just skip 10nm for desktop CPUs and move on 7nm.

Causality1 6y ago

Its ridiculous that a brand new 10600K only has at best 33% better single-thread performance than my seven year old 4670K.

Synaesthesia 6y ago
In what benchmark?
- Causality1 6y ago
  Cinebench. The Geekbench results are even closer.
  - Synaesthesia 6y ago
    Yeah frankly I’m sticking with my old 4th gen Intel too. I’m not doing anything hardcore that needs 10 cores. I’m sure glad about the AMD resurgence and expecting some response from Intel now.
    - Causality1 6y ago
      I mean I'd love to build a new computer, but there's just no point. The only genuinely difficult thing I want my CPU to do is game console emulation, and for that single-thread performance is king and I can't justify the expense for a 1/3 performance increase regardless of how long it's been.
    - 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
      I want to upgrade but there just isn't a reason to yet. I'm still on a 4930k
rb808 6y ago
I have a six year old i5-2500 and a 10700K is quicker but still not twice as fast as the 2500. Its really not worth the upgrade. https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-2500-vs-Intel-Core-i7-10700K/m517vs4070 https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-2500-vs-...

samfisher83 6y ago

I guess you got to give the skylake architecture some credit. Their 5 year old uarch is still pretty competitive. This is is almost like Pentium 4 vs amd64 days. Wonder if intel will pull out a core2duo.

theevilsharpie 6y ago
Skylake (and its derivatives) is only competitive if you disregard power usage. For environments where performance/watt matters (e.g., servers, laptops, etc.), Skylake is significantly behind Zen 2.
- Drew_ 6y ago
  Sure but none of these desktop processors are used in any of these environments.
- Denvercoder9 6y ago
  Skylake is 4 years older than Zen 2, though.
  - theevilsharpie 6y ago
    It doesn't really matter if the Skylake architecture is still what Intel is offering in its contemporary products.
- fomine3 6y ago
  Skylake (or Intel platform) is still has advantage in laptop/tablet area because of optimization for idle power usage than Ryzen.
  - blattimwind 6y ago
    The 4xxxHS parts seem to be rather competitive there as well. Note that these are monolithic Zen 2 APUs, I suspect this is the same silicon that will ship as 4xxxG parts on the desktop.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Aardwolf 6y ago

How comes that the fastest desktop CPU's from Intel don't have AVX-512? The Xeon CPU's have AVX-512. Laptop CPU's like i3-8121U have AVX-512. Why not desktop too? This has been going on for years.

jeffbee 6y ago
Perhaps this tells us something about the relative size of the high-performance desktop market compared to the market for MacBook Pros, which have Ice Lake CPUs with AVX-512.
- willis936 6y ago
  Why speculate? If we take i9s to be considered par equivalents to high-end CPUs we find in MacBook Pros, and the market distribution of cheap to expensive CPUs is similar in both desktop and notebook segments, then we can simply look at earnings reports. https://s21.q4cdn.com/600692695/files/doc_financials/2019/2019-Annual-Report.pdf https://s21.q4cdn.com/600692695/files/doc_financials/2019/20... From page 34: 6% of Intel's Desktop platform volume is $705Mn, so total volume is $11.75Bn. 5% of Intel's Notebook platform volume is $1080Mn, so total volume is $21.6Bn. So the desktop market is slightly larger than half the size of the notebook market, but $12Bn is a lot of money to leave on the table then turn your back to. Especially since an aged microarchitecture threatens all CPU-related revenue streams.
mastax 6y ago
This is still using the skylake microarchitecture from 2015. I'm sure if Intel were shipping the design they wanted to be shpping it would have AVX512.
dolphin1986 6y ago
Because the ring bus architecture doesn’t support avx512 but ring bus has better latency which is why many prefer it for gaming or audio production work.
vbezhenar 6y ago
What desktop applications use AVX-512?

Jonnax 6y ago

These CPUs don't have PCIe 4. With Microsoft and Sony going all in with their consoles and high speed gen4 SSDs, I'm imagining there's going to be a lot of faster drives on the market soon. Unless it's an upgrade, I feel buying this CPU for a new build is a bad idea. If I needed Intel I'd wait until their next generation at least.

ebg13 6y ago
> These CPUs don't have PCIe 4. I'm fine with PCIe 4 not hitting mainstream for a few more years. AMD X570 motherboards all integrate noisy and failure-prone active fans directly on the motherboard because the chips get so hot. The only one I know about that didn't was wildly expensive, basically all heatsink, and apparently no longer in production.
- r00fus 6y ago
  > The one I know about that doesn't is basically all heatsink. I'd love to see that one.
  - Cu3PO42 6y ago
    That would be the Gigabyte AORUS X570 XTREME: https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/X570-AORUS-XTREME-rev-1x https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/X570-AORUS-XTREME-rev-1...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- ben-schaaf 6y ago
  Motherboards used to have issues with the fan running when it didn't need to, but to my knowledge that's been fixed. Unless you're running massive amounts of data through the chipset it doesn't get hot and on most motherboards the fan should stay off.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

m0xte 6y ago

I was humming and hawing over moving back to Intel until I read this. So the conclusion I took from this is to wait for Zen 3 to come out and then use the price dumping on Zen 2 cores to get a 65W TDP Ryzen 7 3700X for considerably less coin than a 9700K. Then do the same with Zen 3 when Zen vNext comes out because I'm not having to buy a new board and socket just to get a miniscule increase in grunt this time or next time.

StillBored 6y ago

Color me massively confused, but why on earth does the chipset have a 2.5G Ethernet interface that doesn't support 5G/10G?

jeffbee 6y ago
They can do it this way and only use a single PCIe lane; 2.5g works over existing cat5e cable plants and 10g doesn't; their 10g and 40g controllers cost $40 and this one costs $2?
- StillBored 6y ago
  PCIe gen3 is nearly a GB/sec in each direction per lane (actual bandwidth obviously less). Which is nearly enough to get to line rate with 10Gbit ethernet, particularly if TSO is employed to remove the framing/etc overhead. Getting 750MB/sec out of a 10G interface because its constricted by PCIe is a lot better than getting 220MB/sec out of 2.5G. Consider the difference when running a VM image from a NAS. Further, the point with the multimode 1/2.5/5/10 phy's is they do line quality detection and downgrade. So you plug in cat5, and it downgrades to 2.5 if the line quality is bad. Someone runs a 10 foot cat6A cable they are going to get the full speed. But in actuality, as I said on this board before, 10G requires cat6a for 200 meter runs. If your in a house, small office, etc where the runs are 5-10 meters or less cat5e works just fine. I've seen switch vendors mention that quality cat5e can be good up to 45M, which is farther than cat8 is specified for 40GbaseT. It just looks like more product segmentation since the 10GbaseT spec has been around for about 15 years now. edit: When it comes to UTP, the frequency response and cross talk specifications effectively end up being per foot. So the line attenuation and noise increases with cable length until it falls below the threshold required to reconstruct the signal at the far end given a standard compliant part. The length and cabling requirements also include the possibility of loss from additional wall jacks or patch panels. So many of the bulk cat 5e cable packs were sold for a long time as 350mhz (or similar) which in name is better than basic cat6 at 250mhz because its actually pretty hard to screw up the twist/etc requirements of the cable. The problems happen when it is poorly terminated. So the whole thing ends up being a bit of a crapshoot whether any given cable works to specification (most aren't) but because they are far below the maximum line lengths it never matters. Plus, in the decade(s) since the specs were initially created semiconductor advances have allowed advances in the receiver sensitivity and efficiency of the drive signal. Meaning if one went back at this point and tweaked the 1G spec its quite likely that the max transmission lengths could at least be doubled due to specifying it with cat5e and tighter margins. This is also what allows 10GbaseT SFP's today, which weren't initially possible (that and mandating that they aren't compliant to the full 200M).

madengr 6y ago

I’m more interested in the Xeon W-1260P, which seems to be an i9-10900K with ECC enabled. It should work very well for my engineering software (which uses Intel math libraries that are slow on AMD). Hopefully they come out with it soon.

jeffbee 6y ago
Thanks for pointing it out. I was trying to figure out if we had to settle for the core i3-10100e if we want ECC. Apparently no. The 1290 has higher clocks than anything in this article, plus ECC.
- madengr 6y ago
  You caught my typo. I meant W-1290P. Should be about $50 more than the i9-10900K.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    $50 + a motherboard you can't buy yet.
lliamander 6y ago
Those are pretty interesting, especially with 40 PCIE lanes. I wonder if (like the z490) the W480 motherboards will support PCIE gen4, and whether there will be Rocket Lake Xeon W 1300 CPUs.
- madengr 6y ago
  W480 is still PCIE 3.0, from what I have read. I’ll probably end up getting one of these: https://www.asus.com/uk/Motherboards/Pro-WS-W480-ACE/ https://www.asus.com/uk/Motherboards/Pro-WS-W480-ACE/
  - lliamander 6y ago
    Nice. What interests you about these Xeon CPUs specifically?

talmr 6y ago

Each time I see these kinds of reviews, I take comfort in knowing my eight year old i7 3770k is still chugging along at 4.7ghz OC. Its matched with 16gb ram and a 980 TI, and it handles most modern games at 60fps just fine albeit on lower settings. I also sometimes boot into Ubuntu to write some code while my girlfriend wants to use the macbook, and I just mostly use VSC and write Node or Go apps. Maybe in the future I'll just get a newer GPU, but for my needs of primarily gaming and coding I don't yet see a reason to upgrade the CPU and motherboard.

eropple 6y ago
This is not an unreasonable spot to be in, but it's going to change in the next year or so I think for most gaming stuff. The Ivy Bridge stuff is a little on the pokey side now; my i5-3570K was in my HTPC until earlier this year when I replaced it with an i7-6700K. But a higher-end Ivy Bridge will still be OK for most games for a little while yet. And a 980Ti is still a great card; I upgraded to a 2070 Super because I needed Turing NVENC but the 980Ti was playing everything great at 1080p and most things very well at 1440p. As things start to target the PS5 and Xbox Series X as their lead platforms, however, I would expect that to change. The PS5 will field eight Zen 2 cores and that's going to be a significant step up. Modern game engines are already really happy with multicore systems (the 3900X in my desktop gets put to work by Doom Eternal) and this will only increase. Increases in expected throughput is going to put the 980Ti in a bad spot, too. That said, Ivy Bridge and Haswell really have to take the crown for "longest-lived worthwhile CPUs". That HTPC (which was formerly my desktop, and had 32GB of RAM because of it) is now a NAS, and it's great. I wonder how long it'll last.
- fishtacos 6y ago
  "That said, Ivy Bridge and Haswell really have to take the crown for "longest-lived worthwhile CPUs"". Sandy Bridge era CPUs (i5-2500/k, i7-2600/k, etc) were the ones that really shook up the market. Much lower power envelope and a large jump in performance from Nehalem. Ivy Bridge was the Tick-Tock iteration of SB, providing higher power usage/heat output (counterintuitively), with about a 5% IPC increase IIRC, based on the famous 3D Tri-Gate process. It was widely considered a bust at the time.

znpy 6y ago

The i9-10900T is interesting at 10C/20T at 35W tdp. But I'm afraid that it's going to be one of those parts reserved to OEMs, like the 45W Ryzen 3600 (non-X).

coronadisaster 6y ago

I wonder if they will dare to go to i11?

fomine3 6y ago

> We know that AMD’s Zen 2 has as a slight 10-15% IPC advantage over 9th Gen Coffee Lake, How they calculated it? I had only heard that Zen2 IPC is 15% increased from Zen+. And from Single threaded benchmark, Zen2 not seems like 10% over Skylake.