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Intel Core i9-13900T CPU benchmarks show faster than 12900K 125W performance
- rektide 4y agoStunning performance, especially for a (heavily iterated on) 10nm node. Alas I doubt we'll see many mini-pc/1L PCs configured with such a top tier node but what an epic mini-server that would make! So many cores (8p+16e)!
- whatever1 4y agoAny idea how these heterogeneous processors compare to regular processors with identical cores for server workloads ? Do workers get stuck in efficiency cores?
- layer8 4y agoI can’t wait to see a Cirrus7 [0] fanless build with that CPU. It just needs a suitable Mini-ITX board. [0] https://www.cirrus7.com/en/ https://www.cirrus7.com/en/
- loxias 4y agoYou may also be interested in the DB4 [0]. I can't justify the cost for the aesthetics of fanless but perhaps you can. :) 0. https://streacom.com/products/db4-fanless-mini-itx-case/ https://streacom.com/products/db4-fanless-mini-itx-case/
- layer8 4y agoThanks, yes, I'm aware of those, but they are quite a bit bulkier than the Cirrus7 cases, at least triple the volume. What I also like about Cirrus7 is that you can get a complete build, even though it isn't cheap.
- metadat 4y agoThe performance ratio relative to power consumption places this in new territory for Intel. While the T-series isn't new, I don't recall seeing it competing with the likes of K processors and Ryzens. Also the 1.x GHz base clock which turbo boosts to 5GHz, wow. Do other professors scale across such a wide band?
- suprjami 4y agoI have a 12400F which idles at 600 MHz and boosts to 4.4 GHz, so I guess this is the new normal now. Mine also has a massive heatsink and never gets above 25C.
- gjsman-1000 4y agoWow... I only have to ask, what was wrong with the 10nm node before? This seems like an impossible leap.
- downvotetruth 4y agoGiven the locked microcode only time will tell if Intel will backport the dynamic prefetch algorithm to isolate the cache & frequency bump: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Cove#Raptor_Cove https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Cove#Raptor_Cove
- MR4D 4y agoFor AMD reference, it’s almost 10% faster than a Ryzen 9 5950X.
- ZeroCool2u 4y agoI'm not sure it's fair to say the 5950X is a good point of reference. The 7950X has been out for quite some time at this point and the 7950X3D is announced and expected to be available next month.
- Godel_unicode 4y agoAnd a ton of people are cross-shopping more expensive newer parts with still-available 5000 series CPUs which are much cheaper. There’s an interesting question about whether absolute performance is more important or if you should weight that against cost and/or power. The GN benchmarks recently have done a good with explaining both the cost perspective and the performance-per-watt. Edit: for reference, Newegg currently has the 5950x and 7950x at $500 and $600 respectively. And that’s before the higher platform cost for AM5/DDR5.
- vondur 4y agoThe 5950x uses DDR4. The 7000 Ryzen series uses DDR5.
- Godel_unicode 4y agoHow is that different than what I said? To quote myself: > higher platform cost for AM5/DDR5
- fbdab103 4y agoIf reading a review of the newest vendor's product, it is only fair to give the performance of the competitor's similar generation release. If there are strong availability/price concerns (eg generation N+1 is triple the cost of generation N) those should be noted as to why not performing the most appropriate apples-to-apples comparison. Calculating performance / dollar is an entirely different exercise (though valuable, and rare is it the newest generation that hits the sweet spot).
- chx 4y agoSomeone did a power analysis of the 13900K https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/10bna5r/13900k_power_scaling_analysis/ https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/10bna5r/13900k_po... and the CPU scales very well with power limit up to around 100W where the returns are rapidly diminishing.
- jeffbee 4y ago100W is also my observed sweet spot on C++ project build times. At 100W I got the minimum build time. At higher limits the cpu draws more power indeed but the build takes just as long.
- moffkalast 4y agoIt still feels insane that a CPU can draw that much power. I mean that's like over 8 amps at 12 volts for doing... well nothing really. It's 100 watts of pointless resistance losses. Something that could've powered like half of an electric scooter at top speed. And GPUs are like 3-4 times worse.
- jeffbee 4y agoWith its 8 amps—more like 80A at typical core voltages—it retires potentially hundreds of billions of instructions per second. That is a long way from nothing in my book.
- moffkalast 4y agoWell sure, but would you count that as actual "work" in terms of physics? I think not, at least not to any degree that should be notable. There's no practical work being done in a CPU, it's just throwing away charge so it can redirect it around and do some calculations in the process, like a river flowing downhill with some mechanical logic gates in the stream.
- kzrdude 4y ago
- adamsmith143 4y agoWhy can't we get efficiency leaps like this in GPUs? Tired of my 3080 heating my entire office up...
- jnwatson 4y agoThe 4090 is a lot better in terms of heat.
- Godel_unicode 4y agoDepends what you mean. It generates more heat, it’s just more effective at getting that heat off the die and into your room. Edit: since it’s performance per watt is higher, if you’re capping frame rates then you can get less heat out of the 4090. Like I said, depends what you mean.
- MikusR 4y agoAt half of power usage it only loses 10% performance. https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4090-power-limiting-and-undervolting-test-shows-only-8-performance-drop-at-half-the-tdp https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4090-power-li...
- Dylan16807 4y agoIt's hard to frame that as 'better' though. It's more badly tuned, so it's more fixable.
- tarnith 4y agoUndervolt/downclock it? Afterburner or GPU Tweak, etc, will do this relatively easily. (I've undervolted AMD cards that come with ridiculous core voltages without having to drop clocks at all in past) Almost everything is stock clocked past the point of diminishing returns right now. This Intel part looks to mostly be a downclocked version of existing 13900. Look at the recent AMD 7900 vs 7900X. You can get 90-95% of the performance for far less power by just backing off the voltage and clocks a bit. (In their TDP terms going from 115w to 65w TDP, loses less than 5-10%) Everyone's fighting for chart king/significant generational improvement number they can point to and missing the sweet spot on the efficiency curve, but you can bring it back yourself. I bet the 3080 still runs great at 50-100w less power limit/TDP depending on your use case and I doubt that will result in anywhere near a 1:1 perf/power reduction.
- wtallis 4y agoThe article's title says "at 35W", but the article text says "the T-series chip is rated at up to 106 Watts". That appears to refer to the chip's short-term turbo power limit (PL2 in Intel parlance), typically effective for a default of 28 seconds if thermal limits don't kick in—but the time parameter can be adjusted by the end user (and this benchmark run has unknown provenance, so who knows what power management settings were in effect). Since the benchmark in question (Geekbench 5) only runs for a minute or two, it does most of its work before the chip even attempts to throttle down to anywhere near 35W. An actual power measurement averaged over the entire benchmark run would yield a significantly higher value than 35W.
- mise_en_place 4y agoI always get confused with Intel’s clock speeds and power draw now. Because depending on the p-state or c-state it’s in, it can be severely underclocked. Even trying to set “performance” p-state doesn’t work all the time, at least on my Ice Lake Xeon.
- htk 4y agoThat's disappointing, I thought they were closer to Apple Silicon's performance/watt ratio. The deceptive nature of such benchmarks is also troubling.
- runnerup 4y agoThe benchmarks themselves aren't really deceptive, but wccftech's reporting on them is misleading. These aren't claims being made by Intel, but just random user benchmarks that appeared online. For all benchmarks, context matters. These days, most in-depth reviewers understand how to work with transient power and thermal limits with respect to time. For example, measuring the MacBook Air M1's peak speed/time vs. its lower sustained speed after it hits thermal throttling around the 5-7 minute mark.
- toast0 4y agoIt's kind of hard to compare performance/watt meaningfully when the wattages aren't at all similar. If you limit power on current generation Intel/AMD processors, the perf/watt is pretty good; depending on the specific load, sometimes better, sometimes worse than M2. When you allow more watts, perf goes up, but perf/watt goes down as you see diminishing returns. (With some loads, you may also have a point where more watts reduces performance, whoops) Geekbench isn't great as it doesn't even attempt to capture power usage, but that may not be available or accurate on all systems anyway.
- htk 4y agoWith the processor being rated "up to 106 watts" I would expect to see M1 Ultra in the list.
- zython 4y agoNewer CPU faster than older CPU; can someone explain if I am missing something or if thats the whole story here ?
- bhouston 4y agoIt seems that AMD is losing the performance crown for consumer PCs for both single threaded and multithreaded workloads at high efficiencies. I love AMD, but it does seem that Intel is back and at worse neck and neck. It isn't clear if it can clearly pull ahead. This isn't great for AMD's stock, the boom times may be over? What confuses me is that AMD still has a huge lead for server CPUs. I have not seen massive adoption of AMD in the cloud yet.
- vvillena 4y agoEach brand has its strengths and weaknesses. AMD isn't dominating anymore, but they are still ahead in areas such as AVX512 (absent in Intel Core), the ability to mount more than 8 performant cores in a chip (Intel's intra-core communication architecture is difficult to scale, hence their new P+E approach, which fortunately seems to work well), and their ability to take advantage of the multi-chip process to mount absurd amounts of cache. The multi-chip approach is also a tech advantage that allows them to cut costs.
- smileybarry 4y ago> What confuses me is that AMD still has a huge lead for server CPUs. I have not seen massive adoption of AMD in the cloud yet. This was years ago so the tide may've shifted but: part of it could still be vendor experience and "it works"-experience? When EPYC gen 1 & 2 came out, we were shopping for a bare metal megaserver spec at work. I got a budget and free rein (except it had to be Dell), and I really wanted to pick EPYC for the better core clocks (which were significant in our build architecture) and more cores and better cost. With one EPYC spec and one Xeon Gold spec built (EPYC was I think $13k vs $15k?), work was a bit uneasy about AMD processors just yet. Our workload was MSVC compilation but they were concerned about architecture differences, since all of our workstations & laptops were Intels. They preferred paying more because "we already have Xeon servers and they're proven". So, we ended up getting the Xeon Gold spec instead.
- varispeed 4y agoAm I the only one who is no longer excited about Intel releases? Until they release something substantially better than M1/M2, I'll pass. It's a shame that Intel is wasting their energy and fabs on something that offers such mediocre improvements.
- bhouston 4y agoThis has better single threaded performance that M1/M2 by a significant margin, but at a higher total power. When the M1 was released I believe it has the fastest single threaded performance of any CPU. That is no longer the case by quite a bit now.
- vondur 4y agoFor the most part it seems like in Intel are throwing a ton of power into their CPUs to get these results.
- wongarsu 4y agoThere's the hope that this is just a stopgap measure from Intel to deal with AMD and Apple competition, and power demands go back to normal once Intel had time to push a couple of architecture improvements through the pipeline.
- PragmaticPulp 4y agoIf power efficiency is a concern, you wouldn’t want to look at the absolute top of the line enthusiast-targeted chips. I care greatly about power consumption in my laptop, but I don’t really care at all in my desktop. If they can make my compiles finish 10% faster by doubling the power usage, bring it on. My CPU is rarely ever running at these 100% usage levels, so it’s not like it makes a difference in my power bill. Modern coolers are plenty quiet.
- MikusR 4y agoFor example fastest AMD consumer cpu 7950X is really efficient and fast in eco mode.
- PaulWaldman 4y agoWhat is the difference between an i9-13900T and an i9-13900 when limiting P1 and P2? Curiously, the i9-13900T scored better than the i9-13900 in single threaded performance.
- smileybarry 4y agoMy guess is (slightly?) better binning in addition to "forced" PL1 and PL2 limits. Better silicon can run stable at lower voltage, ergo lower power, ergo lower temps, so I bet there's some binning for T SKUs so Dell & co. can ship not-overheating micro PCs.
- PaulWaldman 4y agoMakes sense. T series chips generally aren't as widely available as individual components as their mainstream higher power counterparts. To your point, they are available from OEMs as complete systems, who seem to get priority. There is advice to just buy the non-T series and limit power. Interesting to see that, at least in this example, they aren't quite equal.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 4y agoI see this frequently, but what is “better silicon”? Physically something is off about the manufacturing which impacts performance, but does not kill the chip. What are those defects? There are 0.1% bad transistors instead of 0.2%? Heat output is more uniform? The bad transistors are clustered in such a way that signal routing is more efficient and leads to a measurable throughout difference?
- dihydro 4y agoVery slight changes in the transistor junctions will make them slightly more resistive, more inductive, physical variance will make them narrower, wider, etc. All of these factors, although extremely slight, will add up to different response curves of switching time vs current vs voltage.
- imtringued 4y ago
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- Aissen 4y agoIMHO, any benchmark should run with Turbo disabled. And come with additional tests about how much turbo brings, and how long it can stay on within a given thermal setup. Otherwise all you have is garbage, not data.
- brokencode 4y agoWhy? It’s not like turbo is not a real performance enhancement. With enough thermal headroom, there’s no reason why turbo can’t be sustained, as heat is the limiting factor. Good CPU reviews include long render and compile benchmarks that would suffer if the turbo performance couldn’t be sustained. If a CPU can sustain high performance, then it doesn’t matter if it’s using a turbo mode.
- Aissen 4y agoIt's all about the "With enough thermal headroom". If this isn't specified in the benchmark, then the benchmark is useless because you can't compare with your setup. It's even truer in laptops, but this is true of servers and desktops as well. In addition, recent CPUs will use this thermal headroom to the limit.
- sz4kerto 4y agoTurbo is such an inherent feature of new CPUs that turning them off would make the benchmark completely unrepresentative for real world usage. For example - a 16 core CPU might run a single core at extremely high clock rates during single threaded workloads. What would be the point of turning it off? Complex devices need complex benchmarking, unfortunately. You won't get a simple, single number that shows how powerful a cpu is.
- Aissen 4y ago> Complex devices need complex benchmarking, unfortunately. You won't get a simple, single number that shows how powerful a cpu is. This is the gist of my comment (see after the first phrase), so I think we agree.
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- ribit 4y agoWhat’s the actual power consumption? Without those figures the article is just a clickbait. Looking at those multicore results I don’t believe for a second that the CPU was drawing less than 90 watts, probably more.
- simonebrunozzi 4y agoI might want to buy a new powerful 2023 laptop, but there's ton of confusion about CPUs, graphic cards, etc. As usual, there's no simple way for a buyer to understand what's best.
- xen2xen1 4y agoPassmark. Always passmark.
- 867-5309 4y agothe same can also be said for the 12900K at 125W; having a TDP(PL2) of 241W
- kristianp 4y agoThe 13th gen i9 in question has 8 performance cores and 16 efficiency cores, and 36MB of cache, whereas the 12th gen has 8 and 8, with 30M of cache, so it's not that surprising it performs better.
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- henriquez 4y agoThis isn’t due to some “amazing process improvement” for Intel that some wealth managers will shill to their clueless clients. Undervolting and underclocking is a thing. Par for the course for any new generation of chips other than Intel’s which are still way behind the curve. It’s like cheering a city bus because the driver wasn’t drunk for their shift.
- ac130kz 4y agoThe 7900's 50C° is what should be impressive, also the article is misleading, the 13900T is actually rated at 106W