Commissioning Misleading Core i9-9900K Benchmarks (techspot.com)

On Monday, Intel unveiled the 9th Gen Core i9-9900K, which will rival AMD's Ryzen 2700X when it goes on sale in two weeks. We will soon be reading reviews of the 9th Gen Core i9-9900K, which Intel claims is the "world's best gaming processor," to see how exactly it fares against its AMD counterpart. But as reviewers test the new CPU and comply with an NDA/embargo (non-disclosure agreement) with Intel, which requires them to not share performance data of Intel's new CPU for another few days, surprisingly, one publication has already made a bold claim. In a story published this week, news outlet PCGamesN said, "Intel's Core i9 9900K is up to 50% faster than AMD's Ryzen 7 2700X in games." The publication cites data from an Intel-commissioned report [PDF] by third-party firm Principle Technologies to make the claim. TechSpot explains the issues with this: So Intel can go and publish their own "testing" done suspiciously through a third party ten days before reviews, while reviewers are prohibited from refuting the claims due to the NDA. First bad sign. Scrolling down PCGamesN says the following when looking over Intel's commissioned benchmarks. "But the real point of all this is for Intel to be able to hold out the 9900K as hands down the best gaming processor compared with the AMD competition, and in that it seems to have excelled. On some games, such as Civ 6 and PUBG, the performance delta isn't necessarily that great, but for the most part you're looking at between 30 and 50% higher frame rates from the 9900K versus the 2700X."

Right away many of the results looked very suspect to me, having spent countless hours benchmarking both the 2700X and 8700K, I have a good idea of how they compare in a wide range of titles and these results looked very off. Having spotted a few dodgy looking results my next thought was, why is PCGamesN publishing this misleading data and why aren't they not tearing the paid benchmark report apart? Do they simply not know better?

Over at the Principled Technologies website you can find the full report which states how they tested and the hardware used. Official memory speeds were used which isn't a particularly big deal, though they have gone out of their way to handicap Ryzen, or at the very least expose its weaknesses. Ryzen doesn't perform that well with fully populated memory DIMMs, two modules is optimal. However timings are also important and they used Corsair Vengeance memory without loading the extreme memory profile or XMP setting, instead they just set the memory frequency to 2933 and left the ridiculously loose default memory timings in place. These loose timings ensure compatibility so systems will boot up, but after that point you need to enable the memory profile. It's misleading to conduct benchmarks without executing this crucial step.

Comments

This has been going on for 35+ years

[mykepredko]

Seriously. I remember in the 1981/1982 time frame when the Motorola 68000 was starting to make some inroads in desktops and Intel released their own performance reviews showing how the 8086/8088 was better at user (Intel specified benchmark) tasks. Motorola's response was to fight fire with fire showing that the 68k was better in a highly subjective benchmark. This has been going on between Intel and whomever is their current main competition since then.

It sounds like actual hardware will be available in a week or so with actual standard benchmarks being available a couple of weeks after that.

Avoid the hype and just wait for tests on actual hardware.

Only if you tune the one that pays you only.

[Grog6]

An even benchmark would have used stock timings on both boards, not XMP on intel, and no optimization on AMD.

That's an obvious Fail on their part; to me, that means this is the only way they can compete now.

And these chips still have ALL the flaws, and require software mitigations that drop performance 20-40%.

When they fix those, and stop being lying douchebags, I may buy intel again.

I'm still using a 17-3930k at 4.8GHz; it's been running that on ALL cores since about 2011 or so.

A chip that's only 10 or 20% faster really doesn't impress me enough to upgrade; it still plays Quake2 just fine, and Crysis works great. :)

Re:Intel any thing to win other then more pci-e or

[FrankSchwab]

>>> will you discard it and build a new one to manufacture a new chip?

Generally, yes you will. A large part of the cost of the factory is the machines in it - and generally they all need to be replaced when you move from one process node to the next.
Let's say you spent $1B to build a 40 nm fab. You start building state-of-the-art wafers in it, and (being a good businessman) after a year are running it near 100% capacity. Next year, the bleeding edge wafers need to be at 32 nm. Your choices are:
1. Shut down production, spend 6 months retooling for 32 nm, then re-open. Cost: Six months of production plus new machines. End result: One fab producing 32nm wafers.
2. Keep the plant running, and build a new 32 nm fab. Cost: New fab with new machines. End Result: you still have the old fab cranking out 40nm wafers which everyone who doesn't need the bleeding edge will be buying for the next several years. In fact, you might have 55 nm, 40 nm, and 32 nm fabs all running in parallel. And those state-of-the-art 250 nm fabs from 20 years ago? Some are still running, putting out dirt-cheap wafers for people whose needs are met by low-performance, dirt-cheap ASICs.