The good news for performance junkies is that the top-end i9 should end up as the world’s best chip yet for both single-threaded and multi-threaded performance, especially as it is the world’s first mainstream processor to hit the 5 Ghz mark. Intel also decided to finally ditch the tim and new reports on Guru3d even point to hardware fixes for the Meltdown bug.
The bad news, Intel continues to operate under the assumption that AMD is still hopelessly behind and as a result are still a monopoly. For instance, you now have to pay nearly 500 USD for a chip with multithreading (due to only the new i9’s having them) and the general price points in the rest of the lineup have been raised once again. Intel has also made the decision to not bring about a significant bump in the total available PCI-E lanes, which means big premiums once again if you want a truly beefy machine.
If money is no object though and you don’t want to wait for Ryzen 2, then Intel has a nice treat for you this time around. Otherwise, early reports suggest AMD’s Ryzen2 will contain a significantly higher level of performance compared to Ryzen+.
With the CPU wars heating up, it is now a great time to get a new machine (if only the RAM and GPU prices would go down).
Suggested price from Intel is 488$, pre orders are already available on Amazon at 499$, and here in Europe, prices, for now at least, are going to range from 550-600€ with a perspective to settle at 500€ at some point in the future. Terrible value for money, unfortunately. But still people are going to buy it for its top STP out of the box. I would pay 450€ for this chip, it this was its price, but it’s not…
The price of the 9900k is a joke i expect Intel will cut the price when amd launch ryzen 2
On the other hand the 9700k seems ok
Generally speaking the last two years was a phenomenal years for CPU market, we see a huge increase in cpu power in the consumers and high end desktops, now for a average gamer or content creator a six core CPU is the minimum and 8 core a max ,we enter the age of multithread workloads so very exited especially for the games will come with the next gen consoles
Speaking of rigged benchmarks, Principled Technologies came out with a statement claiming they did nothing wrong.
One thing that sticks out right away is how they don’t realize the “game mode” is mainly for AMD Threadripper and not AMD Ryzen, and that it’s only useful for Ryzen in the case of playing a handful of older games. I know there’s something fishy here because the official review benchmarks showed a 10 percent increase in frames at most in Coffee Lake compared to Ryzen+, and the new i9 is barely faster yet in multiple cases.
Extreme tech. has also verified they did something wrong by comparing the Principled benchmark results with their own (for the 8700K).
It also looks like AMD is not taking this lying down, they just cut the price of the Ryzen 2700X by 10 percent (placing it below 300 USD).
Now this is more or less expected considering how the first generation Ryzen dropped in price over time, but it makes the i9 look like a bad deal when a 12-17% performance advantage is yours for nearly double the price.
Fortunately for AMD, the modular design of the Ryzen processor allows them to fab the thing for a much lower cost compared to Intel’s monolithic design (so they can slash the price and still make a nice profit).
A note to Intel as a result, the age of the monolithic CPU chip design is over. Ice Lake will almost have to be a modular design with something like the Infinity Fabric if they want to crush AMD again.
The major problem still remains. The battle for the highest core count between AMD and Intel is not going to have a meaningful impact in real life use in apps. Only specific tasks can absorb these resources, and, except for cpu rendering, the exorbitant number of cores now available in HEDT of both brands is literally useless for professionals with even the most demanding tasks (ex. content creators, video editors etc). It’s going to take a long long time before the software developers can find ways to make cpu bound tasks more scalable to numerous cores. In some mysterious way, 2-3 years ago 4-6 cores were more than enough, but now they’re considered to be the absolute minimum for even common users. Applications, on the other hand, still remain, more or less, static in terms of scalability.
I don’t know, I’m starting to see more and more indie games in the works with multi-threading built into them, hell the addon for it for ue4 is free. I’m thinking in the next few years we will start to see some more multi threading games and applications.
Next year AMD is going to bring a 64c/128t processor in the HEDT platform (these core numbers already exist in SP3 EPYC), and if Intel addapts a modular configuration like @Ace_Dragon said, she will soon follow in core numbers. How on earth will developers manage to keep up with this core frenziness?
I’m not so optimistic about it, and I don’t think it’s a good thing for us consumers in general. 2-3 years ago AMD was selling cpus at ridiculous prices and 300-400$ Intel cpus were overkill choices for most users. Now we see 1.5-2K$ AMD processors and we consider them to be the absolute vfm, a real bargain… Technology isn’t getting cheaper through time, I’m afraid.
Honestly, for the most part you just do a check to see how many cores/threads you have at your disposal, scale it down by one or two and then just assign your worker threads tasks, a popular task for worker threads is AI’s for games, loading files, crunching physics, handling network overhead.
Processors are not going to get much faster then they are now due to the limitations of physics so if we can’t build up, then building sideways is the next best option and just googling around there is already quite a bit in the works to make that happen, truthfully I’ve been somewhat appalled that the gaming industry has not adopted multithreading more, but they do tend to be very phobic of change…to the point where games are more and more just cookie cutter clones of what came out a year or so ago.
But no, when it comes to multi threading it is more of a viable thing then most people think right now for gaming.
I hope you’re right, but the fact is we pay more right now, and will pay much more in the future as consumers. Technology should be getting cheaper as time passes, not the other way around. I think that this core count “bra-de-fer” will primarily harm our pockets, way faster than it’s going to positively affect our workflows. I hope you get what I mean (I could be more laconic in Greek )
I think what we will see (and I hope this is true) is that soon something like 8 cores will become a standard, and then as devs start to push the multi threading then people will go for more and more cores to get that sacred 60 fps.
Two of the best deciding factors for technology tends to be gaming and porn.
In short, the high 5 Ghz single-core clock speed (with the help of actual solder) allows it to clock the Ryzen 2700X with an up to 25 percent performance advantage. However, it only eclipses the 2700X by a few percentage points in multi-core tasks, meaning it becomes an expensive proposition if your purpose is to use it for workstation tasks.
Now the benchmarks also show how the lack of hyperthreading punishes the i7 chip in multi-core tasks, meaning a chip already costing more than the Ryzen 2700X only manages to pull up to its first-generation equivalent. It still stands strong against the i9 in single-threaded tasks like most games so for many it won’t be a bad option (as long as you’re willing to pay the premium).
Though Anandtech has comments about the i9 guzzling power compared to the 2700X, so that’s another price you have to consider if you want the best-in-class performance.
as long as intel move they cpu lines in 8/16 threads iam pretty sure the future its full multithreaded for games, we are 2 years before the next gen consoles with 8 core ryzen cpus,
we gonna see amazing things
Intel’s i9 chip can give you the best overall performance as of now, that is if you can even get one.
The shortage is so bad that Intel is resorting to their older 22nm process to increase the supply of chipsets. So not only are the 9th generation processors hard to find, they are likely at inflated prices too. This could mean a massive opening for AMD if the shortage continues past the launch of Zen2.
The thing about multi threading (what apparently a lot of people don’t understand) is: not everything can be spread out into several threads. A lot of computations have to be done in sequence, so there is zero benefit of having more than one core per application.
As an example: we develop a water simulation software which takes quite some time to finish (can be hours, days or weeks). It has been suggested many times to ‘simply’ spread out the work on multiple cores but it’s impossible. The reason is: Element A has to finish calculating before element B can start because it requires the information from element A. So nothing can be done in parallel because it always requires information from the previous elements. This actually applies to many tasks I came across in my career.
So whats the bottom line? More cores is not as useful as many seem to think.
And saying ‘Make your app use all cores’ simply doesn’t work this way.
Many tasks, even split up, take different amounts of time. So it’s overall faster, but not 2x increase as many people seem to think.
In Blender, having many cores already has a major benefit in areas that can end up being major bottlenecks (rendering, physics simulation, certain modifier types, ect…).
There are a lot of areas that can be accelerated with multiple threads (not just rendering), you only need to look through the Blender release notes to find examples. Let us also not forget the multitasking aspect, you can set Cycles to not quite use all available threads on your system and have good performance with enough juice for internet and general lightweight work.
One final note, the fact that 8 cores are becoming mainstream will accelerate the push for more and more areas of more and more applications to take advantage of threaded processing (so having 8 cores and 16 threads for instance makes your machine more future-proof).
More bad news on the supply/pricing side. If your preference is to not buy a machine from one of the big OEM companies (Dell, HP, Lenovo, ect…) or your preference is to simply build one yourself, you will be squeezed even harder than before.
In a sense, the article states you could get your Intel machine now (if you want one) because it might be a long wait if you don’t. On the flipside, this throws the door open even wider for AMD.
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