Slashdot Mirror
Intel Launches 16 and 18-Core Core i9 Desktop Chips To Take On AMD Threadripper (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: Intel has officially launched its Skylake-X processor offering in response to AMD's Ryzen Threadripper series of desktop CPUs. The new Core i9-7980XE and Core i9-7960X are 18 and 16-core configurations respectively, with 2.6GHz and 2.8GHz base clocks and 4.4GHz max boost clocks. Both chips support Intel HyperThreading, with 36 threads of processing for the 7980XE and 32 for the 7960X, while both also have 44 lanes of PCI Express connectivity and support for DDR4-2666MHz memory. Both chips also utilize Intel's X299 chipset platform and are LGA 2066 socket compatible. The Core i9-7980XE has 24.75MB of shared L3 cache, 1MB of L2 cache per core, and a TDP of 165W. The Core i9-7960X's details are essentially same, though two processor cores and the cache associated with them have been lopped off. The Core i9-7960X has a couple of advantages, however, in that its base clock is 200MHz higher than the flagship Core i9-7980XE and it has higher all-core frequency boost to 3.6GHz, while the 7908XE tops out at 3.4GHz on all cores. The new chips are multi-threaded beasts in the benchmarks, posting the highest scores seen to date in heavily threaded workloads. They also offer strong single-threaded performance that outpaces AMD's Ryzen processors. Power consumption is surprisingly good as well and only marginally higher than the 10-core Core i9-7900X. However, at $1999 for the Core i9-7980XE and $1699 for the Core i9-7960X, as usual with Intel high-end chips, they're certainly not cheap.
Just one bj?
You're either reaaaally good or know some very cash loose johns.
Sorry Intel, the new AMD procs offer great performance for the money. No reason to go Intel for at least a generation.
Imagine how fast this Rust fanbot will run, as long as itâ(TM)s written in Rust! With this new processor family, the Rust bot will post up to 4 million odes to Rust per Slashdot story, per second! Youâ(TM)ll see no Rust gathering on this processor! Rust!!
So, it's a Xeon that can't do ECC. Seems totally worth it.
"Power consumption is surprisingly good". I wouldn't like to see the power bill at the end of the month and what sort of passive cooling is used to achieve a quiet workspace?
I can see why the review website is called Hot Hardware.
Threadripper has more pci-e and $700 less
What makes you think the next bug will be in HT?
You can say this with respect to any feature of the CPUs...
>> 2.6GHz and 2.8GHz base clocks and 4.4GHz max boost clocks.
They obviously did that for heat/power consumption but single thread performance is gonna suck. My guess is you're only gonna actually see 4.4 Ghz once in a blue moon, and even then it won't be sustainable for more than a few seconds.
This is a desktop processor not a server chip. Single threaded performance is critical.
Not really. Software has also slowed as a result. Things still load as fast as they did two decades ago. An SSD makes a nice improvement but software never feels any faster.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Why the hell are you running iTunes? As a media player?? Really??
How many of you "heard" the summary being read in Linus Tech Tips style? I know I did. It certainly read like some of their "content" lately.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
44 lanes of PCIe? That is only four more lanes than my first generation Xeon E5 workstation that I'm using right now, which is only a quad-core chip. Granted though, this machine is pretty maxed out with that tho, even with just one GPU, thanks to PCIe SSD, dedicated sound card, and 10gbe networking.
I think we will really see Rust shine
Isn't this an oxymoron?
I'm not trolling. Just punning.
The language has good features, but why did they call it Rust? Why do programmers choose self-defeating names? Gimp is another example. Malwarebytes is not malware, it is anti-malware software.
Depends on what you are doing. Is single-threaded? Multi-threaded? Needs ECC, Memory bound? Computer bound? etc.
For gaming? Nope. An i7-7700K is still faster then the iCore 9. LOL.
For rendering? Yep 2:07 vs 7:19
However, it is important to point out:
* Intel CPU's are the fastest CPU's around but you literally PAY through the nose 2x- 5x for a measly ~10% increase in performance.
* AMD's Ryzen and Threadripper CPUs have WAY better bang/buck. i.e. In Blender 2.78c AMD's Theadripper 1950X ($999) is faster then the Xeon E5 2699 v4 ($4,115). LOL.
Conclusion:
Is the i9-7960X worth a whopping $700 more then Threadripper 1950X?
For many people, the answer is no. That is money that could be spent into a better GPU or more RAM/SSD.
What CPU is "best" depends on your workload.
Competition is a good thing. Without AMD, and all the people who helped keep them alive, Intel would have sat on things like this.
In the long run, Intel parts are likely going to be better. They have more money, more chip desigers, and un-fortunantly more customers, (some that will pay outragous prices).
Lady Galadriel
It's about time high-end and even commodity PCs moved to supporting ECC and using it as common practice. When total RAM fit in a PC was 1 or 2GB and data rates were a few hundred MB per second at best a bit error rate of 1 per trillion reads or writes was acceptable. Now that common motherboards can accept 64GB and more and RAM access speeds have also escalated the chances of a problematic bit error occurring in code or data have shot up, especially as the RAM's die mask sizes have decreased.
As an aside I've used commodity mobos in the past that accepted and would run ECC RAM but only as regular memory, the chipset didn't implement any kind of error-correcting capability. My workhorse machines for bit-bashing all have ECC properly implemented on server-grade hardware.
The goal of this report is to make the existence of Intel CPU backdoors a common knowledge and provide information on backdoor removal.
What we know about Intel CPU backdoors so far:
TL;DR version
Your Intel CPU and Chipset is running a backdoor as we speak.
The backdoor hardware is inside the CPU/Bridge and the backdoor firmware (Intel Management Engine) is in the chipset flash memory.
30C3 Intel ME live hack:
@21m43s, keystrokes leaked from Intel ME above the OS, wireshark failed to detect packets.
[Video Link] 30C3: Persistent, Stealthy, Remote-controlled Dedicated Hardware Malware
[Quotes] Vortrag:
"DAGGER exploits Intel's Manageability Engine (ME), that executes firmware code such as Intel's Active Management Technology (iAMT), as well as its OOB network channel."
"the ME provides a perfect environment for undetectable sensitive data leakage on behalf of the attacker. Our presentation consists of three parts. The first part addresses how to find valuable data in the main memory of the host. The second part exploits the ME's OOB network channel to exfiltrate captured data to an external platform and to inject new attack code to target other interesting data structures available in the host runtime memory. The last part deals with the implementation of a covert network channel based on JitterBug."
"We have recently improved DAGGER's capabilites to include support for 64-bit operating systems and a stealthy update mechanism to download new attack code."
"To be more precise, we show how to conduct a DMA attack using Intel's Manageability Engine (ME)."
"We can permanently monitor the keyboard buffer on both operating system targets."
Backdoor removal:
The backdoor firmware can be removed by following this guide [github.io] using the me_cleaner [github.com] script.
Removal requires a Raspberry Pi (with GPIO pins) and a SOIC clip.
Decoding Intel backdoors:
The situation is out of control and the Libreboot/Coreboot community is looking for BIOS/Firmware experts to help with the Intel ME decoding effort.
If you are skilled in these areas, download Intel ME firmwares from this collection [win-raid.com] and have a go at them, beware Intel is using a lot of counter measures to prevent their backdoors from being decoded (explained below).
Useful links:
The Intel ME subsystem can take over your machine, can't be audited
REcon 2014 - Intel Management Engine Secrets
Untrusting the CPU (33c3)
Towards (reasonably) trustworthy x86 laptops
30C3 To Protect And Infect - The militarization of the Internet
30c3: To Protect And Infect Part 2 - Mass Surveillance Tools & Software
1. Introduction, what is Intel ME
Short version, from Intel staff:
Re: What Intel CPUs lack Intel ME secondary processor?
Amy_Intel Feb 8, 2016 9:27 AM
The Management Engine (ME) is an isolated and protected coprocessor, embedded as a non-optional part in all current Intel chipsets, I even checked with the engineering department and they confirmed it.
Long version:
ME: Management Engine
The Intel Management Engine (ME) is a separate computing environment physically loca
Beyond a certain point, adding more cores doesn't add any performance. On the desktop, your average user is only *actively* using one or two applications. A typical application can't really make use of more than 2-3 threads, and probably doesn't make full use of those. Four cores is plenty, 8 is luxury that will mostly be idle. Anything over 8 is just nonsense on a typical desktop.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Things still load as fast as they did two decades ago. An SSD makes a nice improvement but software never feels any faster.
No way. Game load times are way better, because PC developers always sucked at seek optimization and seek times used to beat you down hard. No more. Both initial load and level load are way better these days. Gaming is the most demanding type of application users typically run on their PCs.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
More like 32 or 36 blowjobs simultaneously... on film.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
if you track Moore's Law, it hasn't been followed in ages. performance of chips used to double about every year. the "GHz" doubled, or equivalent suchs as instructions per second, transistor count, fill rate, bandwidth, core count, etc.
This stopped along time ago. Around the year 2005, the first quad core process landed- transistor counts hit 1 billion. Then they sat at quad core and 1 billion transistors for ages, barely adjusting clock rates, making small under the hood tweaks that amounted to marginal performance boosts each year. After 10 years of quad core, and 1 billion transistor counts, the first 6-core hit the market, just a couple of years ago. But in reality, by 2006-2007, we should have had 8 core chips. And by 2008 we should have had 16 core chips. And by 2010 32 core chips, and so on. By 2011 64 chips. By 2013 we should have had 256 core chips. By 2016 we should have hit 1024 core chips. This is because technology at least doubles in capacity every 18 months or less. There's a hint here: someone, something, hindered the market, and stopped competing.
Intel's first extreme edition processor was $1000 10 years ago or so. Now they have coffered up their first real performance chip upgrade in ages, they expect double that price. And trust me: $1000 was seen as unobtainable in price once. It's a monster of a price. $2000 certainly is double that. My argue is, since Moore's Law was abandoned years ago, and each new generation of chip barely improves upon the old, this new $2000 chip should really be $1000 at best. It's bringing the performance we should have been at 10 years ago to the table today basically, and thus is a rip off and outdated even before it hit the market.
My understanding is capitalism is at work here. They're not competing or bringing new technology to the market, except for military applications.
https://www.trumpsweapon.com/
"Gaming is the most demanding type of application users typically run on their PCs."
You mean on YOUR PC. You are not "users". You are a case of one.
No, I mean you're a typically idiotic AC. The vast majority of users will never do anything as taxing as gaming, period. Please don't comment again until you learn to read, if not think.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Am I the only one who is amused by the name Intel chose to name their CPUs? Core? Really? It has been a source of amusement since the first one they made.
It just sounds silly to say 4 core Core i5 or 18 core Core i9. It's nearly as amusing as "https colon slash slash slash dot dot org".