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Intel Releases Final Core i9 Specs and Release Dates -- And Threadripper Is Faster (Sometimes) (pcworld.com)

Posted by msmash on from the footprints dept.

On Monday, Intel took the wraps of final details of its Core i9 microprocessors. From a report: Remember that Intel's Core X-series family (also called the Core i9) was announced with several key omissions: namely the clock speeds of the 12-core Core i9-7920X and above, as well as the thermal design power, or TDP. On Monday, Intel filled those in. The 12-core Core i9-7920X launches Aug. 28 while the 14-, 16-, and 18-core Core i9 chips ship on Sept. 25. Perhaps most important, though, is that we now know how fast Intel's Core i9s will run. When Intel inadvertently revealed that its 12-core Core i9-7920X was 2.9-GHz -- slower than the comparable AMD Threadripper -- a subset of the internet had a small freakout. We now know that that will be true for the remaining Core i9s as well, but with a big caveat. Here are the remaining speeds and feeds for the high-end Core i9 chips:
Core i9-7980XE (18 cores, 36 threads): 2.6GHz; Boost, 4.2GHz to 4.4 GHz.
Core i9-7960X (16 cores, 32 threads): 2.8GHz; Boost, 4.2GHz to 4.4 GHz.
Core i9-7940X 14 cores, 28 threads: 3.1GHz; Boost: 4.3GHz to 4.4GHz.
Core i9-7920X (12 cores, 24 threads): 2.9-GHz; Boost: 4.3-GHz to 4.4GHz.

Note that the boost speeds refer to both Intel's Turbo Boost Technology 2.0 and 3.0. [...] Essentially, both Intel and AMD can claim the title of fastest processor. Threadripper's base clock speeds are faster, but Intel's boost speeds climb higher than Threadripper can. It's also important to note that while Threadripper consumes 180 watts, even the fastest Core i9 chips Intel has announced have a lower TDP of 165 watts.

16 of 91 comments (clear)

  1. The Megahertz Myth is alive and well by Balial · · Score: 3

    ... on slashdot no less. How about some real workload comparisons?

    1. Re:The Megahertz Myth is alive and well by kronix1986 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      In real workloads, the 16-core Threadripper (16 cores, 3.4GHz) @ $1000 destroys the 10-core i9 (also $1000)

      The problem for Intel is it also destroys the the 12-core i9 ($1200) and 14-core i9 ($1400). In all likelihood it's going to match the 16-core i9 ($1700) and lose overall (by a small margin) to the 18-core i9, which is $2000.

      The fact that PCWorld haven't explictly mentioned price, or even implicitly mentioned TR's 64 PCIe lanes and the other benefits (a stable socket, cheaper boards, lower power draw than the i9s by a huge distance, etc.) is just testamanet to how much the mainstream tech press shill for Intel.

      There is essentially no reason to buy the i9s. If you want the best workstation performance, you buy Threadripper. If you want the best gaming performance, you buy the i7-7700K. The i9s are an absurdity, and a panicked reaction to AMD's massive performance gains.

      People forget that Intel had only planned to release a 10-core i7 based on Skylake-EP. Once they got wind of Threadripper they bolted on a 12-core, then a 14-core, then a 16-core, and finally (when TR was shown to have incredible workstation performance) the $2000 waste of space that is the 18-core 2.6GHz i9-7980XE with only 44 PCIe lanes.

      Meanwhile, for half that cost AMD give you 16 cores @ 3.4GHz, 64 PCIe lanes, cheaper motherboards, and most importantly amazing workstation performance. It's not even a contest.

    2. Re:The Megahertz Myth is alive and well by AmiMoJo · · Score: 4, Informative

      The bottom line is that they are both blazingly fast, especially for multi-threaded workloads. So when building a workstation there are more important things to worry about than a few percent in this benchmark or that benchmark.

      Threadripper has more PCIe lanes, a definite bonus. Not only useful now for things like NVMe SSDs and RAID cards, but in future for adding a USB 4.0 card or whatever. If you want your system to last longer then expandability is key.

      Threadripper motherboards also seem to be a bit cheaper, and of course the CPUs themselves are. For the longer term, AMD tend to stick by their sockets for longer so chances are if there is a major CPU upgrade option available (unlikely) you will be able to drop it in.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    3. Re:The Megahertz Myth is alive and well by Rockoon · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Maybe because Intel is a generation behind on interconnects between cores.

      AMD dumps FSB in favor of HT in 2001
      Intel dumps FSB in favor of QPI in 2009.
      AMD switches from HT to Infinity Fabric in 2017.
      Intel switches from QPI to ????? in ????

      Intel had a few good wins in the past several decades, especially getting 14nm out the door so much sooner than any other fab company could get 14nm workable, but Intel has not had any wins afaict in actual processor design in that same period. When AMD went dual core, Intel had to go frankenchip with double-die solutions as well as hyper-threading in order to come close to keeping up in processor design.

      The processor design space of Intel is littered with failures starting with Pentium 4. The start of the Core series was just Intel scrapping the Pentium 4 design completely and going back to the Pentium 3 design.

      Intel needs a lithography breakthrough, and they need it yesterday. They have proven that they dont do actual design well.

      --
      "His name was James Damore."
    4. Re:The Megahertz Myth is alive and well by Ramze · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Handbrake's outdated documentation says it has diminishing returns past 6 cores. Current users post that the diminishing returns start after 10 cores. The highest core count for Threadripper is 16, so there's definitely some overkill there on the high end... but, that just means that you've got 6 cores to do something else with. Maybe even transcode more than one video simultaneously.

      You're absolutely right that 4-6 cores is perfectly fine for most people, but in order to make the leap to the next generation of computing with the next generation of applications, we need to move beyond that.

      A/V, 3D-rendering, VR, and AI all benefit from multi-core... and Firefox is being re-written in Rust to better take advantage of multi-core.

      Personally, I'd love to have my own Jarvis AI straight out of Iron Man on my 64-core supercomputer I got in the $2,000 range and runs google's open-source AI. I'd like to have it power my VR setup right out of Lawnmower Man, but with modern graphics. Love to have my own Industrial Light & Magic / Pixar 3D animation studio that my nephews can play with to make movies for our entertainment... and render things that would normally take months or years on today's average computers.

      CPUs aren't going to get much faster GHz-wise with current techniques, but we can cram in more cores to do things that no one ever dreamed they could do with a home PC. These threadrippers are game-changers. It's not fair to judge their usefulness by what people use their current CPUs for. That's sort of like judging modern 4 and 6 core CPUs by what single-core Pentiums were used for 20 years ago back when multimedia on PCs was still in its infancy.

  2. Intel can't help themselves can they? by H3lldr0p · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That market segmentation is like a parasite to their thinking. They can't do anything without chopping the product line into as small as bites as they're able.

  3. Re: Accumulation of bad karma... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Intel compilers are used for a lot of backend libraries (eg. parts of Matlab), and tens to turn off some SSE extensions even on AMD processors that support them. Lack of vectorization leads to worse performance, 'nuff said.

  4. Intel's TDP lies by kronix1986 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "It's also important to note that while Threadripper consumes 180 watts, even the fastest Core i9 chips Intel has announced have a lower TDP of 165 watts."

    The actual power draw of even the 10-core i9 is >200W. Intel are deceiving us yet again.

    1. Re:Intel's TDP lies by bongey · · Score: 2

      What they hell are you talking about? Tom's hardware,the Ryzen chips came UNDER there TDP ratings. http://www.tomshardware.com/re...

  5. Software is the real bottleneck by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    We're talking about CPUs with 24 or more threads of execution here. The bottleneck isn't hardware, it's the software. Most software just doesn't support that high degree of threading. That's why we need to start using programming languages built around concurrency, like Rust and Erlang. Rust is a great example. Look at the innovation we're seeing from Mozilla with their new Servo web browser engine. It is being designed from the ground up using Rust so that it can make full use of CPUs with many simultaneous threads of execution. We need to leave uni-threaded languages like C behind, even if they've tried to naively add half-baked threading support (like pthreads). We need to move to languages like Rust where the language itself is built with concurrency and thread safety as core features.

  6. Re:Accumulation of bad karma... by Junta · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Depends on longevity in the market.

    Back in the Netburst days, you marvelled at how Intel did so poorly despite 'looking' like it should be faster.

    From Conroe to about Bulldozer, things were about the same.

    The bulldozer screwed up AMD in the same way that Netburst screwed up Intel for a while. Meanwhile Intel progressed well.

    Now with Zen, at least on desktop it's back to mostly neck and neck. In high end server, it's a mixed bag, Epyc having more memory channels means better capacity, but individual memory performance is equal to their desktop product. This is fine for a lot of applications (e.g. VDI, similar virtualization) and gets more aggregate performance and capacity, though single thread/process memory throughput takes a hit.

    --
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  7. Threadripper Is half the cost with more pci-e lane by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 5, Informative

    Threadripper Is half the cost with more pci-e lanes.

    On Intel it's about $1000 min to get 48 pci-e lanes. AMD $550 for there 64 pci-e lane one.

  8. Core i9 is just too dam hot by ZippyTheChicken · · Score: 2, Interesting

    How can you justify this many cores at that temperature? Sure if you are running a single gaming rig in your home you can water cool your computer but if you are running anything else I can imagine the cooling problems for a room of these things will be astounding.. I am just not sure of the applications in servers or regular business or home units at this wattage.

    1. Re:Core i9 is just too dam hot by MrFlibbs · · Score: 3, Informative

      Data centers don't care about noise or heating like an oven, they have massive power supplies and massive cooling. At worst you'll replace one 4P server with one 2P server with 2x the cores. Or two 2P VM platforms with one 2P VM platform with the same number of cores. I very much doubt they'll ever feel it's too much processing power in one place.

      This is just plain wrong -- data centers care very deeply about power consumption. Since data centers pack thousands of CPUs into warehouse-size rooms, even a single extra watt per CPU is a big deal. Higher power consumption means a greater power delivery requirement for the room, more cooling, a bigger UPS requirement, and a bigger power bill. Operating costs are driven by transactions per second per watt.

      High performance computing and high-end desktops are pretty much the only remaining markets where power consumption is a secondary concern. This has not been true for data centers in a long time.

  9. Re:How could this possibly happen? by TJ_Phazerhacki · · Score: 3, Insightful

    For the same reason that carriers don't upgrade infrastructure unless it literally crashes, why companies like HP got rid of expensive engineers, and why small oil companies don't dig lots of exploration bores. You don't need 'real' growth if quarterly profits look good on paper because you are slashing costs, and everyone at the top of the pile is going to be gone in 3 years when the old wells run dry.

    --
    Physics is nothing like religion. If it was, we'd have an easier time trying to raise money!
  10. Great timing for spreading that FUD, Intel... by yodleboy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Threadripper officially launches on 8/10. Expect reviews to hit the internet first thing that morning as most hardware sites have had a week or two to play with their samples. Intel is trying desperately to make some last minute noise I suppose. Makes me suspect the official reviews of TR will be quite positive. Intel is going to find that having bigger numbers (Mhz, core count), is going to count for little when the other guy gets you 90% or more of the performance for half the price.