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Leaked Benchmarks Suggest Intel Will Drop Hyperthreading From Core i7 Chips (arstechnica.com)
According to leaked benchmarks found in the SiSoft Sandra database, there is an Intel Core i7-9700K processor that doesn't appear to have hyperthreading available. "This increases the core count from the current six cores in the 8th generation Coffee Lake parts to eight cores, but, even though it's an i7 chip, it doesn't appear to have hyperthreading available," reports Ars Technica. "It's base clock speed is 3.6GHz, peak turbo is 4.9GHz, and it has 12MB cache. The price is expected to be around the same $350 level as the current top-end i7s." From the report: For the chip that will sit above the i7-9700K in the product lineup, Intel is extending the use of its i9 branding, initially reserved for the X-series High-End Desktop Platform. The i9-9900K will be an eight-core, 16-thread processor. This bumps the cache up to 16MB and the peak turbo up to 5GHz -- and the price up to an expected $450. Below the i7s will be i5s with six cores and six threads and below them, i3s with four cores and four threads. Even without hyperthreading, the new i7s should be faster than old i7s. A part with eight cores is going to be faster than the four-core/eight-thread chips of a couple of generations ago and should in general also be faster than the six-core/12-thread 8th generation chips. Peak clock speeds are pushed slightly higher than they were for the 8th generation chips, too.
I've always seen them as "pseudo" cpu's, and not been all that happy with them overall. Yeah, some workloads benefit from it just fine, but others get tanked, but you'll never know because it just looks like those CPU's are flying along (according to task mangler or whatever).
Anyway, glad to see that there will be some parts out there that people can choose to buy that don't have it.
spectre-related attacks rely on predictive execution in hyperthreading.
could this be a mitigation, while providing improved performance so the new part still exceeds the outgoing part?
Will these still need to have Meltdown and Spectre patches? If Intel are just pooping out new chips with no fix for the root cause then it's kind of a moot point to talk about it's speed.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Can we get more pci-e lanes on the desktop?
Not pay more or get less.
AMD FOR THE WIN!!!!!!!!!!
I know we have to disable CPU level Hyper Threading anyway. Too many false cache swaps when it's on.
So to recap the 8th gen of Intel. The i7 had the most cores at six with HT enabled. i5 was just like the i7 but with HT turned off. The i3 had HT in gen 7 so it was two cores/four threads, in 8th gen they gave it two more cores and turned off HT. So: i7=6/12, i5=6/6, i3=4/4. The i9 in gen 8 was really weird. The clock would scale down the more cores you used, it was very odd and minus the fact that the 18 core version was roughly the price of a used car, it was expensive. The price per performance with the i9 was incredibly low. A 3.4 Ghz i7 would give you a better CPU mark / $ by almost 200%, not to mention that an AMD six core FX-6300 would give you better CPU mark/$ by almost 800%. So clearly the i9 wasn't going to win you an award for price sensitive consumers.
So all that said, and this is my opinion so it's literally worth whatever value you choose to give it, I think Intel is going to reposition the line up to disable HT on all "consumer" processors and focus on just keeping HT and "pro" features in the i9. I personally think it's a back hand to Intel consumers, but I'm an AMD fanboy so full disclosure there. But yeah, I think the i3, i5, and i7 are all going to eventually be labelled as the "cheapy", "actual desktop", "gamer" CPUs in that order and the i9 is going to be viewed as "workstation" and thus the i9 isn't going to focus on price/performance balance. So, i3 will be 4/4, i5 will be 6/6, and i7 will be 8/8 with the i9 being whatever crazy numbers they throw at the chips with hopefully not any of that weird scaling core/HT/Ghz stuff.
That's just my hot take on this, open to hear what others think.
If this is how they plan to deal with the Spectre/Meltdown issues permanently, I'm ok with that.
HT has nothing to do with that issue. That's part of the instruction pipeline within the CPU. The core of it is a thing called speculative execution, where a CPU goes and fetches things before the actual instruction hits the core. The true fix will be to detect unprivileged instructions in the pipe (because actually getting rid of the pipe is *NOT* ever going to be an option) and then act on that.
And the end of the day, if I can still play my games, I really don't care what's inside that hunk of silicon, as long as my games still work as good as they always have.
Yeah I think that's ultimately what matters most here so I wouldn't worry too much about it anyway, just stay up to date on patches, which I'm sure you do.
HT on the old P4's was pretty shit. In most cases the overhead outweighed the benefits.
Modern CPU's have a higher number of execution units per core now. the only way to keep them all running at once is speculative execution or hyperthreading. Using both is even better.
Surely you mean "Its base clock speed is 3.6GHz" and not "It is base clock speed is 3.6GHz".
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I am referring to some non-gaming tasks that can also move to the GPU.
Some can, most can't. Many parallel loads could in theory be ported to GPU but this is a specialized, prohibitively expensive engineering task. Many parallel loads do not parallelize at the SIMD level. Without SIMD, a GPU becomes a fairly small number of low-clocked and non-superscaler CPUs with crappy branching characteristics and severely limited cache, basically turning the GPU into a decellerator. For these and other reasons, the vast majority of parallel loads will stay on the CPU for the forseeable future.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.