9 ms·

Intel is still the king in single threaded performance. However, single threaded performance will end up being the bottle neck for fewer and fewer workloads.

Intel is still the king in single threaded performance. However, single threaded performance will end up being the bottle neck for fewer and fewer workloads. I have to wonder, with a $690 price tag and a 320 watt power budget who is this chip for? Team red wins most of the benchmarks with cheaper silicon.

Kluggy 3y ago
Isn’t most games still dominated by single thread performance?
- kevingadd 3y ago
  To a degree, but it's typically more like 'this workload uses 2-4 cores and wants peak performance on all of them', not really 'this workload uses a single core' on modern games. And then some games will happily use 8+ cores now The user-mode video driver and kernel mode driver both use other cores as well
- dralley 3y ago
  Most games love cache. AMD's X3D CPUs tend to be either better, or at worst extremely competitive with Intel's top chips for games, at a far lower power budget.
- aloknnikhil 3y ago
  But with all the background OS activity, will this chip ever sustain turbo to 6.2 for noticeable periods? Pure benchmarking win imo.
  - vbezhenar 3y ago
    You think 16 efficient cores will not make it?
    - happycube 3y ago
      They're clocked lower.
- hatch_q 3y ago
  Not anymore. Modern games do multi-threading quite good.
- lhl 3y ago
  Largely yes, but the 7800X3D ($370->$300 on sale, 120W TDP) still beats the 14900KS since the extra L3 cache is more important than clock for most games: https://www.techpowerup.com/review/intel-core-i9-14900ks/18.html https://www.techpowerup.com/review/intel-core-i9-14900ks/18.... (As mentioned another post here, for even more CPU-intensive games like Factorio, the difference is even starker.) For general mixed workloads (assuming you need more threads), I think the 7950X3D is the way to go - 8 3D VCache cores for similar gaming, 20% cheaper than the 14900KS, generally neck and neck on development workloads but also has AVX512 support, and of course all while using significantly less power (also 120W TDP, 160W PPT - you can do even better w/ PBO+UV or Eco mode). Here's the OOTB power consumption comparison, it's a bit bonkers: https://www.techpowerup.com/review/intel-core-i9-14900ks/23.html https://www.techpowerup.com/review/intel-core-i9-14900ks/23....
  - teaearlgraycold 3y ago
    Do the X3D chips with mixed 3D and normal cache still have scheduling issues where games can use the slow cache? Back when they were new I heard you want the 8 core version so you have no chance of that happening.
    - merb 3y ago
      That is still a problem, that is the reason why the 7800x3d is as good as the 7950x3d, but if you do other things, you can go with the 7950x3d it’s more expensive tough
    - lhl 3y ago
      There have been updates on core parking ("Game mode") in Windows so it's probably fine, but I think for max perf, people are still using Process Lasso (I don't use a mixed X3D chip myself, so I haven't paid super close attention to it).
      - noir_lord 3y ago
        I do have a 7950X3D. It’s improved a lot, I still use Lasso but strictly speaking I don’t really need to.
huytersd 3y ago
As a home consumer though why would I care about power consumption. What is that like a few extra dollars in power per month?
- aurareturn 3y ago
  Maybe you don’t. But most other people do and so does Intel. It’s not good business to have a poor perf per watt chip in 2024. Everything from phones, laptops, to servers care very much about perf per watt except the very hardcore DIY niche that you might belong to.
  - Unfrozen0688 3y ago
    Normal people dont know what perf per watt means dont be like that
    - Dalewyn 3y ago
      I'm upvoting this to counter the downvotes because, unfortunately, normal people don't know. Specifically, normal people don't know what "watt" is. Seriously. There is a reason electrician is a skilled profession. Most of us here do know watts and the like, so it's easy to forget that normal people aren't like us.
      - Jonnax 3y ago
        Normal people understand watts. Because they know what an electric heater is. And using 2x to 3x more electricity means more heat in their room. Also many countries have smart electricity meters with in home units which tell them exactly how many watts are currently being consumed and how much that costs them.
        callalex 3y ago
        I’m going to push back on this with a simple example. Go to your local hardware store and check out the electric space heater section. There will be a wide variety of units rated for small rooms, medium rooms, and large rooms, based on square footage. The heaters will have a variety of form factors and physical dimensions. Many of them will have mentions of “eco” and “efficiency”. Every single one of them, and I mean literally, will be a 1500W heater (or whatever your region’s equivalent maximum load per plug is which may vary in 240v countries). Exact same wattage, all 100% efficient because their only job is to produce heat, with wildly different dimensions and text on the box. Customers will swear up and down about the difference between these units.
smolder 3y ago
Not quite: even single threaded, the workload matters.
- lemurien 3y ago
  „Single threaded“ IS the work load, right? I‘m confused.
  - NekkoDroid 3y ago
    Different types of single threaded work stress different parts of the Core. Some might be throughput heavy, some might require a lot of cache, ...
dr_kiszonka 3y ago
I use 13900k (5.8 GHz) and will say this: Chrome/Brave with 50+ tabs opens instantly : - ) And I mean it. You click the icon and it is opened. (Work paid for it for ML prototyping.)
- echoangle 3y ago
  Isn’t that mostly IO limited anyways?
  - KiwiJohnno 3y ago
    If you can afford a 13900k you most likely have a ludicrous amount of ram and a decent % of your HD is cached in RAM anyway.
  - dr_kiszonka 3y ago
    It depends on the algorithm that I am designing or working with. Having said that, I do have 128 GB of DDR5, which helps with IO.
- ajolly 3y ago
  This has been exactly my experience, and why I love single thread perf. I've had 12900k, 12900ks,13900k processors, I'm going to build a new one with either a 14900k or ks. I own a P5800x optane ssd to match.
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  How many windows are the tabs in? That's a much bigger factor since they added lazy loading years ago.
automatic6131 3y ago
>I have to wonder, with a $690 price tag and a 320 watt power budget who is this chip for? There used to be a business in selling these ultra performant ST chips to high frequency traders, who'd overclock the absolute crap out of them. Luckily, this is no longer a business. But these kind of products used to be the "waste stream" from them, left overs. But now, the KS-series intel chips are for slightly insane gamers and overclocking enthusiasts with more money than sense. That's okay, there's a real market segment there. At our work, we buy the 14700K for dev machines like sane people.
- happycube 3y ago
  Case in point, the Xeon X5698, which was a 2-core 4.4ghz base freq Westmere made just for HFT. The regular ones were 3.6@4C and 3.467@6C, so it was quite a boost.
- leguy 3y ago
  >There used to be a business in selling these ultra performant ST chips to high frequency traders, who'd overclock the absolute crap out of them. Luckily, this is no longer a business. HF trading is no longer a business?
  - supertrope 3y ago
    FPGAs have even lower latency than general purpose processors.
Ekaros 3y ago
I think they are in similar segment as sport or super cars just slightly lower bracket. Those with disposable income that just want to get the top tier thing. You can get performant enough parts for half and reasonable enough parts for even less than that. But some people have hobby where they just want the fastest thing.
867-5309 3y ago
>single threaded performance will end up being the bottle neck for fewer and fewer workloads the bottleneck will always be the fact that software is either unable or unwilling to be paralellised
bheadmaster 3y ago
> However, single threaded performance will end up being the bottle neck for fewer and fewer workloads. True, the bottleneck will shrink - but according to Amdahl's law [0], it will never really go away. Also, the more cores you have, the more the single-threaded performance increase multiplies. Imagine a million-core CPUs in the future - even a tiny increase in single-threaded performance will yield millionfold. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law
ajolly 3y ago
Intel beats AMD on idle consumption though

Kluggy 3y ago

Isn’t most games still dominated by single thread performance?

kevingadd 3y ago
To a degree, but it's typically more like 'this workload uses 2-4 cores and wants peak performance on all of them', not really 'this workload uses a single core' on modern games. And then some games will happily use 8+ cores now The user-mode video driver and kernel mode driver both use other cores as well
dralley 3y ago
Most games love cache. AMD's X3D CPUs tend to be either better, or at worst extremely competitive with Intel's top chips for games, at a far lower power budget.
aloknnikhil 3y ago
But with all the background OS activity, will this chip ever sustain turbo to 6.2 for noticeable periods? Pure benchmarking win imo.
- vbezhenar 3y ago
  You think 16 efficient cores will not make it?
  - happycube 3y ago
    They're clocked lower.
hatch_q 3y ago
Not anymore. Modern games do multi-threading quite good.
lhl 3y ago
Largely yes, but the 7800X3D ($370->$300 on sale, 120W TDP) still beats the 14900KS since the extra L3 cache is more important than clock for most games: https://www.techpowerup.com/review/intel-core-i9-14900ks/18.html https://www.techpowerup.com/review/intel-core-i9-14900ks/18.... (As mentioned another post here, for even more CPU-intensive games like Factorio, the difference is even starker.) For general mixed workloads (assuming you need more threads), I think the 7950X3D is the way to go - 8 3D VCache cores for similar gaming, 20% cheaper than the 14900KS, generally neck and neck on development workloads but also has AVX512 support, and of course all while using significantly less power (also 120W TDP, 160W PPT - you can do even better w/ PBO+UV or Eco mode). Here's the OOTB power consumption comparison, it's a bit bonkers: https://www.techpowerup.com/review/intel-core-i9-14900ks/23.html https://www.techpowerup.com/review/intel-core-i9-14900ks/23....
- teaearlgraycold 3y ago
  Do the X3D chips with mixed 3D and normal cache still have scheduling issues where games can use the slow cache? Back when they were new I heard you want the 8 core version so you have no chance of that happening.
  - merb 3y ago
    That is still a problem, that is the reason why the 7800x3d is as good as the 7950x3d, but if you do other things, you can go with the 7950x3d it’s more expensive tough
  - lhl 3y ago
    There have been updates on core parking ("Game mode") in Windows so it's probably fine, but I think for max perf, people are still using Process Lasso (I don't use a mixed X3D chip myself, so I haven't paid super close attention to it).
    - noir_lord 3y ago
      I do have a 7950X3D. It’s improved a lot, I still use Lasso but strictly speaking I don’t really need to.

huytersd 3y ago

As a home consumer though why would I care about power consumption. What is that like a few extra dollars in power per month?

aurareturn 3y ago
Maybe you don’t. But most other people do and so does Intel. It’s not good business to have a poor perf per watt chip in 2024. Everything from phones, laptops, to servers care very much about perf per watt except the very hardcore DIY niche that you might belong to.
- Unfrozen0688 3y ago
  Normal people dont know what perf per watt means dont be like that
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    I'm upvoting this to counter the downvotes because, unfortunately, normal people don't know. Specifically, normal people don't know what "watt" is. Seriously. There is a reason electrician is a skilled profession. Most of us here do know watts and the like, so it's easy to forget that normal people aren't like us.
    - Jonnax 3y ago
      Normal people understand watts. Because they know what an electric heater is. And using 2x to 3x more electricity means more heat in their room. Also many countries have smart electricity meters with in home units which tell them exactly how many watts are currently being consumed and how much that costs them.
      - callalex 3y ago
        I’m going to push back on this with a simple example. Go to your local hardware store and check out the electric space heater section. There will be a wide variety of units rated for small rooms, medium rooms, and large rooms, based on square footage. The heaters will have a variety of form factors and physical dimensions. Many of them will have mentions of “eco” and “efficiency”. Every single one of them, and I mean literally, will be a 1500W heater (or whatever your region’s equivalent maximum load per plug is which may vary in 240v countries). Exact same wattage, all 100% efficient because their only job is to produce heat, with wildly different dimensions and text on the box. Customers will swear up and down about the difference between these units.

smolder 3y ago

Not quite: even single threaded, the workload matters.

lemurien 3y ago
„Single threaded“ IS the work load, right? I‘m confused.
- NekkoDroid 3y ago
  Different types of single threaded work stress different parts of the Core. Some might be throughput heavy, some might require a lot of cache, ...

dr_kiszonka 3y ago

I use 13900k (5.8 GHz) and will say this: Chrome/Brave with 50+ tabs opens instantly : - ) And I mean it. You click the icon and it is opened. (Work paid for it for ML prototyping.)

echoangle 3y ago
Isn’t that mostly IO limited anyways?
- KiwiJohnno 3y ago
  If you can afford a 13900k you most likely have a ludicrous amount of ram and a decent % of your HD is cached in RAM anyway.
- dr_kiszonka 3y ago
  It depends on the algorithm that I am designing or working with. Having said that, I do have 128 GB of DDR5, which helps with IO.
ajolly 3y ago
This has been exactly my experience, and why I love single thread perf. I've had 12900k, 12900ks,13900k processors, I'm going to build a new one with either a 14900k or ks. I own a P5800x optane ssd to match.
Dylan16807 3y ago
How many windows are the tabs in? That's a much bigger factor since they added lazy loading years ago.

automatic6131 3y ago

>I have to wonder, with a $690 price tag and a 320 watt power budget who is this chip for? There used to be a business in selling these ultra performant ST chips to high frequency traders, who'd overclock the absolute crap out of them. Luckily, this is no longer a business. But these kind of products used to be the "waste stream" from them, left overs. But now, the KS-series intel chips are for slightly insane gamers and overclocking enthusiasts with more money than sense. That's okay, there's a real market segment there. At our work, we buy the 14700K for dev machines like sane people.

happycube 3y ago
Case in point, the Xeon X5698, which was a 2-core 4.4ghz base freq Westmere made just for HFT. The regular ones were 3.6@4C and 3.467@6C, so it was quite a boost.
leguy 3y ago
>There used to be a business in selling these ultra performant ST chips to high frequency traders, who'd overclock the absolute crap out of them. Luckily, this is no longer a business. HF trading is no longer a business?
- supertrope 3y ago
  FPGAs have even lower latency than general purpose processors.

Ekaros 3y ago

I think they are in similar segment as sport or super cars just slightly lower bracket. Those with disposable income that just want to get the top tier thing. You can get performant enough parts for half and reasonable enough parts for even less than that. But some people have hobby where they just want the fastest thing.

867-5309 3y ago

>single threaded performance will end up being the bottle neck for fewer and fewer workloads the bottleneck will always be the fact that software is either unable or unwilling to be paralellised

bheadmaster 3y ago

> However, single threaded performance will end up being the bottle neck for fewer and fewer workloads. True, the bottleneck will shrink - but according to Amdahl's law [0], it will never really go away. Also, the more cores you have, the more the single-threaded performance increase multiplies. Imagine a million-core CPUs in the future - even a tiny increase in single-threaded performance will yield millionfold. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law

ajolly 3y ago

Intel beats AMD on idle consumption though