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

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the bad-faith dept.

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.

61 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. Intel any thing to win other then more pci-e or by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Intel any thing to win other then more pci-e lanes or no raid keys

    1. Re:Intel any thing to win other then more pci-e or by Solandri · · Score: 2, Insightful

      What you need to understand is that Intel's CPU business (and thus the bulk of their profit margin) is extremely fragile. The silicon needed for a typical CPU only costs about $5 - similar size ARM processors with similar transistor counts typically cost about $10-$20. So when Intel sells a CPU for $300+, over 95% of that is profit. Admittedly a lot of it is used to recoup their enormous R&D costs (typically over 20% of revenue). But the fact remains that if their CPU sales start dropping, the business model they've been using for 30+ years (overpriced CPUs to generate enormous revenue which they sink into R&D to develop leading CPUs so they can sell them overpriced) stops working.

      So they will do anything to protect their CPU sales. Not saying this justifies some of their shenanigans, just explaining why the motivation for them to do illegal/immoral things is so high.

    2. Re:Intel any thing to win other then more pci-e or by TomR+teh+Pirate · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It may be $5.00 worth of silicon, but the $1billion+ factory and the thousands of employees it took to design and QA that silicon must be amortized across each and every piece of silicon sold. It's not as though CPUs and software have similar capital expenses.

    3. Re:Intel any thing to win other then more pci-e or by FrankSchwab · · Score: 4, Interesting

      >>> 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.

      --
      And the worms ate into his brain.
    4. Re:Intel any thing to win other then more pci-e or by prisoner-of-enigma · · Score: 2

      The silicon needed for a typical CPU only costs about $5

      While I'm no fan of Intel and their underhanded tactics vis-a-vis these benchmarks, this statement is so horrifically misleading can't let it stand.

      The cost of a typical CPU is not just the cost of the silicon it's printed on. Literally thousands of engineers labor for years -- sometimes decades -- to develop the CPU design, the lithographic technologies, the fab designs, the materials design, and countless other tasks required to produce a modern CPU. The aggregate cost for such endeavors runs into the billions of dollars. These costs must be recouped by amortizing them across each and every CPU sold otherwise the entire process loses money, bankrupts the company, and no further CPU development occurs.

      Please try to understand how R&D works and how those costs are integrated into the price of every product you consume, everywhere, all the time.

      --
      In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
    5. Re:Intel any thing to win other then more pci-e or by geekoid · · Score: 1

      I like how you think all the employees, cost of the fab, and the cost of running the fab is all free for Intel.

      --
      The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
    6. Re:Intel any thing to win other then more pci-e or by epine · · Score: 1

      The silicon needed for a typical CPU only costs about $5 - similar size ARM processors with similar transistor counts typically cost about $10-$20.

      It's not just transistor count or silicon area which determines how much your production process actually costs on a marginal basis. Volumes, layers, process steps, interconnects (pin counts), yields, testing and a lot more can dominate the cost equation.

      Two cars with a V8 engine: sometimes one of them costs a lot more than the other.

      Two chips with 3 billion transistors. Would it surprise you that sometimes one of these chips costs a lot more than the other?

      More to the point, if the chips are well designed, they can achieve a very long service life (say ten years, instead of three years). So now Intel's engineers are struggling to provide enough value add to turn today's chips into yesterday's chips at anywhere near the conventional turn rate.

      * Data centers love density, so innovation continues there.
      * Broken security models have the potential to drive all-new waves of chip adoption (think Volkswagon).
      * Raw performance increases across the board are mostly off the table.
      * Targeted performance increases still appeal to many niche sectors (who then flip their old chips on eBay to the less demanding).

      In all of this (which I've barely explored), marginal production costs (abstracting out infrastructural sunk costs, engineering sunk costs, validation, testing, marketing, software tooling, and support) is the least informative term.

  2. Desperation... by Type44Q · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Desperation calls for desperate measures.

    1. Re:Desperation... by hcs_$reboot · · Score: 1

      half or full?

      --
      Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
    2. Re:Desperation... by alvinrod · · Score: 4, Informative

      They must be pretty desperate as Hardware Unboxed just found that the report includes results where the AMD chip had one of the CCX modules disabled making it essentially a quad-core (as opposed to 8) chip. That's on top of the other shenanigans mentioned in the summary or in other posts.

    3. Re: Desperation... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      Game mode is designed for threadripper cpus. It disables half the cores so that it will perform better in gaming as games aren't extremely multithreaded and won't scale up that well past 8 cores.

    4. Re:Desperation... by Anubis+IV · · Score: 2

      I'll say. I was able to pick up a new 2700X for $297.68 after tax a few weeks ago from a local retailer. Most online stores list the 2700X at $320 without any specials or discounts. The summary is saying the i9-9900K is supposed to compete with that, but the 9900K's MSRP is a whopping $488. At those prices, the 9900K needs to stomp all over the 2700X. Anything less would be a disaster. Simply trading blows with the 2700X wouldn't be anywhere close to good enough.

      But that's probably because it's a silly comparison to make in the first place. The current i7-8700K is already trading blows with/is coming out ahead of the 2700X and is priced much more comparably at $380. It came out ahead of the 2700X in the majority of real world tests I've seen (as it should, given that it's more expensive), but it falls behind in certain workflows and games (i.e. ones benefitting from more cores). I'd be much more interested in hearing how the 9900K compares to the 8700K, since it's a known quantity and not a comparison that they're as likely to rig.

      Regardless, I sincerely hope the 9900K is 30-50% faster than the 2700X in real world usage, but that's a tall order. This is Intel's fifth generation at 14nm and their third generation with this microarchitecture. Anandtech even referred to it as "Skylake Refresh Refresh Refresh". The low hanging fruit was culled long ago. They had to toss some more cores in, but otherwise it looks to be more of the same incremental improvements we've been seeing.

    5. Re: Desperation... by DamnOregonian · · Score: 1

      It is designed for all NUMA Ryzen (Multiple CCX) CPUs.
      This includes the CPUs tested.
      "Game Mode" improved the performance of every game they tested, minus Ashes of the Singularity.
      It has nothing to do with games scaling past 8 cores. It has to do with preventing high-performance low-thread-count applications (usually games) from being moved across a NUMA barrier and hurting the performance of that application.

  3. Comparison to Apple by TFlan91 · · Score: 2

    I saw the prices for the new core, and I feel like Intel is trying to be the Apple of CPUs. Inflated price just because "Intel" rather than those other guys "AMD".

    1. Re:Comparison to Apple by fred6666 · · Score: 1

      Except that Intel has what, 80% of the market and Apple 10%?

    2. Re:Comparison to Apple by geekoid · · Score: 1

      480 for the technology isn't a bad price.

      Comparing it to apple is pretty foolish.

      --
      The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
  4. Re:it's a no brainer. by ravenshrike · · Score: 1

    By on average 3% IPC not counting AVX and AVX 512. Their biggest advantage at the consumer level is the ring bus, not IPC or even clock speed, which becomes significantly less useful as they add more cores. Meanwhile clock speeds above 4.6 GHz get diminishing returns.

  5. Re:it's a no brainer. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    amd fanbois can try to argue their case all they want, but they'll still be w.r.o.n.g. intel's architecture is more efficient, more speed per core and per megahertz (even a fucking pentium 'gold' has faster single core speed than the fastest ryzen), and has been for over a decade. the new chips are no different, even with the recent strides amd has made, intel still kicks amd's ass, especially where cost is no object. period. end of thread.

    If all that were true, why the NDA/embargo and this early "cooked books" review?

    PS - There's this concept in the English language called "capitalization". Learn how to use them, and you won't come across as an ignorant backwoods doofus. Communication skills matter...

  6. Corporate shills by 110010001000 · · Score: 1

    Corporate and brand shills running around and hyping their brand and products. Nothing like it. It can be Apple, Tesla, AMD, Intel, Sony, etc. All corporate shills posting extraordinary claims which never pan out.

    1. Re:Corporate shills by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'm not sure why this is news. Have manufacturer supplied benchmarks EVER been a reliable measure of real world performance?

    2. Re:Corporate shills by ravenshrike · · Score: 1

      Yep. Never pan out. Zen being 40% faster than their previous chip was totally false. Oh wait, that's because it was over 50% faster.

    3. Re:Corporate shills by 110010001000 · · Score: 1

      Totally dude. Because physics got over 50% faster and stuff between their previous chip and this new one.

    4. Re:Corporate shills by 110010001000 · · Score: 1

      Maybe the next one they will add 50% more cores and it will be 50% faster. Yeah, thats a good idea!

    5. Re:Corporate shills by fazig · · Score: 1

      Let's not pretend AMD didn't release their own gaming benchmark numbers for Ryzen (1st gen), where they ran games in a GPU bottlenecked scenario at 2160p resolutions. These things are apparently done for marketing reasons?
      Of course this doesn't make what Intel did here any better. The way I see it, they showed either some pretty bad incompetence by claiming the numbers of such a questionable testing method or knew that they were mostly worthless and didn't care.
      In any case we should wait for benchmarks from multiple independent sources to get a clearer picture.

    6. Re:Corporate shills by ravenshrike · · Score: 1

      Except for the minor fact that both were 8 core chips, you're totally right.

    7. Re: Corporate shills by aybiss · · Score: 1

      Yeah maths does really work that way. If that chip does 2 MIPS and you add 50% more speed then it will end up with 3 MIPS. That's a one third increase, not a half.

      --
      It's OK Bender, there's no such thing as 2.
  7. Re:it's a no brainer. by butzwonker · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I switched from intel to some Amd box with 1800X CPU and it works very fine. I could have never gotten the bang for bucks with another Intel machine, and then there were also the serious security flaws of Intel chips. My machine handles everything including flight simulation and every game very well, so getting even more speed would be pointless at this time.

    It's a pragmatic decision and it's stupid to get emotionally attached to companies. A PC is nothing but a tool (or a fun toy, when we speak about gaming). If Intel produces something better in 5 years from now, maybe I'll switch back to them.

  8. Some more speculation by thegarbz · · Score: 4, Informative

    Speculation on Reddit about this seems to suggest they may have enabled the gaming profile* in Ryzen Master for games that don't benefit it (threadded / multi-core friendly games), and disabled it for those (single threadded dependent games).

    For a multi-threadded suddenly loosing access to 4 cores, and for a single threadded game suddenly losing access to an additional 200MHz will give you some of those gimped benchmarks.

    *For those who don't know, Gaming profile disables half the cores on a Ryzen 2, specifically targetting the poorest performing cores, and then raises the boost frequency thanks to the additional thermal / power headroom available. This is of great benefit to games that don't take advantage of multi-core processors.

  9. Are tuned benchmarks really applicable by MobyDisk · · Score: 1

    Instead they just set the memory frequency to 2933 and left the ridiculously loose default memory timings in place.

    For the purpose of a review, is it more or less representative to tune every aspect of the system like this? When a reviewer tunes and tweaks every possible setting, the results really are only applicable to that motherboard + RAM combination. I would rather have apples-to-apples comparisons.

    1. Re:Are tuned benchmarks really applicable by thegarbz · · Score: 3, Insightful

      is it more or less representative to tune every aspect of the system like this?

      To tune it like this? Less representative. They've effectively overclocked one system while underclocked the other. Not to mention disabled half the cores on AMD chip.

    2. Re:Are tuned benchmarks really applicable by prisoner-of-enigma · · Score: 1

      For the purpose of a review, is it more or less representative to tune every aspect of the system like this? When a reviewer tunes and tweaks every possible setting, the results really are only applicable to that motherboard + RAM combination. I would rather have apples-to-apples comparisons.

      Apples-to-apples is the obvious ideal but that's not what happened here. The Intel platform was tuned; the AMD platform was left at the defaults.

      --
      In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
    3. Re:Are tuned benchmarks really applicable by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      The Ryzen performs better in most games with half of its cores disabled, so that's not a bad thing for gaming benchmarks.

      Not quite. It is highly dependent on the game. Quite specifically it is a feature which should be used selectively to gain the best performance. For example in Ashes of the Singularity you will get an approximately 40% performance hit when enabling Game mode. Likewise for any other game that makes liberal use of multi-threadding, of which there are a few in that list.

      This benchmark may not have been great, but I'm not sold that it was intentionally misleading.

      Regardless of the specifics of *how* they performed the test, the important part is the results, and as plenty of others have said the actual results for the AMD chips are not remotely representative of AMD chips even if simply left in their "Optimised defaults" configuration in the BIOS, and when the actual AMD based features are properly used the gaps between the slightly faster performing Intel chips and the AMD ones are just that, slight.

      They seemed to step on a few of the Ryzen landmines, that only the people who are seriously fanatic over the chips know every detail of and how to mitigate.

      I disagree. They have gone out of their way to disable functionality (fast clocking profiles) that is a core feature of AMDs Ryzen platform (sub millisecond automated core speed / voltage control). They load optimised defaults in a BIOS and then proceed to make a series of changes that serve no purpose than to negatively impact performance. Had they done nothing the benchmarks would have been higher.

    4. Re:Are tuned benchmarks really applicable by DamnOregonian · · Score: 1

      Not quite. It is highly dependent on the game. Quite specifically it is a feature which should be used selectively to gain the best performance. For example in Ashes of the Singularity you will get an approximately 40% performance hit when enabling Game mode. Likewise for any other game that makes liberal use of multi-threadding, of which there are a few in that list.

      I quite literally said exactly that. AoS is actually one of a limited amount of games that will perform better. The idea is that IPC between cores on different CCX modules is *expensive*. Game Mode essentially allows a non-NUMA aware application perform better, which is most games.

      Regardless of the specifics of *how* they performed the test, the important part is the results, and as plenty of others have said the actual results for the AMD chips are not remotely representative of AMD chips even if simply left in their "Optimised defaults" configuration in the BIOS, and when the actual AMD based features are properly used the gaps between the slightly faster performing Intel chips and the AMD ones are just that, slight.

      No, sorry. The configuration of the benchmarks did nothing but hurt the top-end multicore side of the benchmarks. Single-core performance was about on par with most other benchmarks for these two chip families. Throw away the AoS results- they were a mistake. Everything else is just about right. The Intel chips have always been ~15% faster per-core. This is hardly news.

      I disagree. They have gone out of their way to disable functionality (fast clocking profiles) that is a core feature of AMDs Ryzen platform (sub millisecond automated core speed / voltage control). They load optimised defaults in a BIOS and then proceed to make a series of changes that serve no purpose than to negatively impact performance. Had they done nothing the benchmarks would have been higher.

      Which has precisely no bearing on the throughput of a loaded core running a game.

      Sorry, but you're a shill.

    5. Re:Are tuned benchmarks really applicable by DamnOregonian · · Score: 1

      Game Mode is for every Ryzen with multiple CCX modules. These are NUMA chips, and non-NUMA aware applications (see: Games) that aren't utilizing parallelized throughput of the entire package can see significant performance degradations if there is cross-CCX IPC, or thread migration to the other CCX.

      This includes the Ryzen 7.

      I'm sorry your mom dropped you when you were a baby.

    6. Re:Are tuned benchmarks really applicable by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      No, sorry. The configuration of the benchmarks did nothing but hurt the top-end multicore side of the benchmarks. Single-core performance was about on par with most other benchmarks for these two chip families.

      Yeah because purposefully gimping memory latency and bandwidth really affects multi-core gaming. Look you can say what you want. The results however speak for themselves. Go online and compare how these benchmarks *ACROSS ALL THE GAMES TESTED* are not representative of the chip.

      And regardless what you think about game mode, it's a specific mode created for Threadripper CPUs, and Ryzen Master will actually mention that it shouldn't be used unless you have a Threaddripper when you hover over the button.

      Sorry, but you're a shill.

      Shill: adjective: A term used by idiots on Slashdot to describe everything they disagree with.

      I have to apologise. I thought we were having an intelligent conversation, but as it turns out from your language I was wrong, and for that I am truly sorry that you wasted everyone's time.

    7. Re:Are tuned benchmarks really applicable by DamnOregonian · · Score: 1

      Yeah because purposefully gimping memory latency and bandwidth really affects multi-core gaming. Look you can say what you want. The results however speak for themselves. Go online and compare how these benchmarks *ACROSS ALL THE GAMES TESTED* are not representative of the chip.

      Purposefully gimping is a stretch, but I think everyone agrees it was uneven. However, amateur retests of the subject test have been done, and more aggressive but supported memory profiles are predictably barely a rounding error in benchmark performance improvement.

      And regardless what you think about game mode, it's a specific mode created for Threadripper CPUs, and Ryzen Master will actually mention that it shouldn't be used unless you have a Threaddripper when you hover over the button.

      Every processor with more than 4 cores supports Game Mode, as of the Feb 2018 "AMD Ryzen ThreadRipper and AMD Ryzen" whitepaper. This would make sense, because again, any Ryzen with multiple CCXs can show better performance with lower-thread-count games if they're isolated to a single NUMA domain.

      Shill: adjective: A term used by idiots on Slashdot to describe everything they disagree with.

      In this case I was using it to describe someone who is mindlessly defending a company without actually educating himself on the topic at hand.

      I have to apologise. I thought we were having an intelligent conversation

      No, you didn't. Otherwise you would have bothered educating yourself as to at least feign some form of intelligence.

  10. TL;DR by rsilvergun · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Modern RAM settings need to be tweaked a bit or the performance is meh. The company did the tweaks on the Intel platform but not the AMD one.

    They had to know they'd be called out by the benchmarking community. That and Youtubers hungry for video content.

    --
    Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
    1. Re:TL;DR by thegarbz · · Score: 3, Informative

      Also "Gaming mode" doesn't benefit all games. Effectively it disables half the cores on a Ryzen chip in favour of a small MHz boost on the remainder. E.g. This could account for a close to 40% performance drop in Ashes of the Singularity during conditions just perfect to be CPU bound.

  11. This has been going on for 35+ years by mykepredko · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Mimetics Inc. Twitter
    1. Re:This has been going on for 35+ years by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      However the 68k series was a pleasure to program in assembler. And for high level languages it was easy to create efficient code!

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    2. Re:This has been going on for 35+ years by aybiss · · Score: 1

      It truly was the betamax of CPU architectures. Imagine what it would be like now with heaps of nice wide registers. Those were the days. :-(

      --
      It's OK Bender, there's no such thing as 2.
    3. Re:This has been going on for 35+ years by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      Unfortunately the better technology is not always winning at the market :(

      But many architectures are remotely similar to 68k ... ARM, SPARC, PowerPC ...

      I guess even modern x86 copied much of it :D (never dug into the current ISA)

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
  12. Re: out of the box testing is wrong?? by Pascoea · · Score: 1

    I'm a gamer; but i just want to game; not fill out memory banks; change clock speed; & do other tinker-stuff with it.

    https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/desktops/area-51-threadripper/spd/alienware-area51-r6
    https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/desktops/area-51/spd/alienware-area51-r5

    Tell me; if i buy that AMD processor; & fill the memory banks; WHERE do i get the warning that that is not a good idea?

    https://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/74814-amd-ryzen-7-1800x-performance-review-5.html

    From the 2 minutes I've researched, it seems like these issues have largely been fixed by BIOS updates.

    Go. Game. Have fun.

  13. Re: Ryzen doesn't like fully populated DIMMs? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Official memory speed with 4 Dimms is lower than with two. However it overclocks quite well and the 4 dimms give you extra performance due to additional memory interleaving. Whoever wrote that sentence has never tried it themselves

  14. Only if you tune the one that pays you only. by Grog6 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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. :)

    --
    Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
    1. Re:Only if you tune the one that pays you only. by Grog6 · · Score: 1

      This is true, but the overall memory bandwidth to the actual processor hasn't increased a lot over the years.

      The system I'm using is about 55GBps, same as the x5670 I'm using on another system.

      I haven't seen DDR4 systems running faster than that, but I don't own any yet.

      Adding memory channels does help, but at some point, the internal processor architecture runs out of bandwidth.

      --
      Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
  15. Game performance increase is a bad benchmark. by sbaker · · Score: 1

    The thing is - some games are GPU-bound and others are CPU-bound.

    If it's the former - then you can replace your CPU with DeepThought, Holly or HAL and your frame rate won't move an inch.

    So whether this contraption does you any good depends sensitively on the games you play and the performance of your GPU.

    Even the performance of your GPU will depend on your screen resolution.

    The ONLY reliable benchmark is the actual application you're running on the actual Before and After hardware setups.

    --
    www.sjbaker.org
    1. Re:Game performance increase is a bad benchmark. by thegarbz · · Score: 3, Informative

      The thing is - some games are GPU-bound

      With a 1080TI playing at 1080p there's not a game out there that is GPU bound.

      However games are incredibly variable in how they utilise their CPU. Ashes of the Singularity is a good example. It's a very well threaded game that happily smashes all cores on a typical Ryzen process for benchmark purposes, but by enabling "Game mode" in Ryzen master they successfully disabled half the CPU. Youtube videos aplenty show that this incurs a huge performance hit in this particular game, as well as any other game that relies heavily on multi-threading.

  16. Who could have foreseen this? by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 1

    If only someone had known Intel was going to do this, maybe we could have stopped them.

    If you are not detecting the sarcasm then it's probably because you've died.

    --
    Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
  17. Dell also likes these guys by cloud.pt · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's the second time I hear this company's name in less than a month. Some days ago I read a press release by Dell about a panoplia of new products, and the entire list, ranging from laptops to server computers was full of performance improvements (vs competitors) claims. all of them referring to paid-for reviews by this same company.

    I personally find their motto - "win the attention war" - amusing. Also of interest is the fact (pun setup) they interchange links with their main domain and with a redirect from my country's TLD subdomain "facts.pt" (pun successful..?), as a subtle way to include their initials as something factual, and for the unsuspecting eye to believe it's a different company or to provide credit to their reviews with such a "reputable" subdomain. Genius stuff.

    These companies are the audit companies of tangible products. Usually, you have Big Four conducting external audits for finantial institutions, country elections and whatnot, gathering data only these auditors are given access. The process is usually compulsory, but still paid by the targets of the audit, and there's always the sense the best auditors are usually the more positive. Now we get these paid product reviewers acting exactly the same way, getting paid to review products before they come out so companies can make bold claims. Then just NDA every other actually independant party interested in reviewing the product. See a pattern?

    1. Re:Dell also likes these guys by nuckfuts · · Score: 1

      Also of interest is the fact (pun setup) they interchange links with their main domain and with a redirect from my country's TLD subdomain "facts.pt" (pun successful..?)

      Nope.

    2. Re:Dell also likes these guys by cloud.pt · · Score: 1

      :'(

    3. Re:Dell also likes these guys by cloud.pt · · Score: 1

      I'll be fair and correct myself: apparently the only PT's-backed claims were about laptops, from 3 separate PDF files (all separately commissioned from the looks of the them). All other product text appears either unsubstantiated or based on internal testing.

  18. Re:it's a no brainer. by thegarbz · · Score: 1

    even a fucking pentium 'gold' has faster single core speed than the fastest ryzen

    With a statement like this I'm sure "fanbois" could argue all they won't. It's not like you would listen, your paycheck won't allow you to. Or braindamage. I dare not call you a shill without proof. Mental illness is a very real problem these days.

  19. Is that with or without Meltdown & TLBleed? by Lady+Galadriel · · Score: 3, Insightful
    So, does the new chip require Meldown and TLBleed mitigation?
    That would be;
    • - Meltdown mitigation envolves kernel page table isolation
    • - TLBleed mitigation requires disabling Hyperthreading

    Neither Meltdown nor TLBleed affect AMD and AMD's Ryzen processors, as far as we know now...

    So any benchmark of an Intel CPU without those security mitigations, (if needed), would be showing that they still want to abuse security for the performance gain. Something AMD appears not to want to do.

    --
    Lady Galadriel
  20. Kiddy ram does NOT improve performance by WaffleMonster · · Score: 1

    One hard learned lesson I've learned over the years is never ever think about buying kiddy ram.

    Kiddy ram can be identified by aggressive timings, "XMP" profiles and "crazy looking heat spreaders" often marketed to "gamers". Basically companies that produce these things scrape chips they didn't produce from the bottom of the bin and do insufficient integration testing of the final result. Some vendors have previously allowed chips with a threshold of detected bit errors to pass QA and make their way into shipping product. I guess they figure if it works for stuck pixels in displays what the heck why not ram?

    I always run a 24hr memtest before booting a new system and the problem with Kiddy ram installed often won't show up. It shows up as subtle errors in job result and eventually system crashes when cores are pegged for weeks at a time.

    Do yourself a favor and never buy kiddy ram. Get dimms produced by Samsung or equivalent tested by grown ups. Every time I've done that my problems disappeared.

    Equally as important don't drink timing koolaid. Latency especially in DDR4 has no meaningful impact on performance given pipelines of modern hardware. Differences barely exceeds the margin of error in comparative benchmarking tests. Worrying about this crap won't win you anything but headaches.

  21. But... by Grog6 · · Score: 1

    Very few PC games perform worse with more cores, mostly recent console ports.

    Additional cores allow other programs to run on them, so your game doesn't get paused/swapped out while some windows housekeeping thing needs a few cycles.

    The more modern games I'm playing love having 12 cores; Doom, for one.

    Yes, the new one, lol.

    Go try Arcade mode, then turn off half the cores, and see how that works out.

    --
    Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
    1. Re:But... by DamnOregonian · · Score: 1

      Sigh. There is so much ignorance at play.
      Ryzens are NUMA parts. That means memory access is non-uniform. If your application is not NUMA aware, you can see actual performance degradation on single-threaded applications (when the OS scheduler moves them to a core on the other side of the NUMA barrier) or multithreaded applications that have significant IPC across that barrier, but not enough parallelization to overcome that cost.

      This is why game mode exists. Because the AMD, the guys who designed the chip, are smarter than you. There is a reason they call it "Game Mode"
      You are of course correct that some games are heavily multithreaded, and can overcome the cost of cross-CCX scheduling fuckery and come out ahead, but for *most* (roughly defined as, almost every fucking game you can buy) performance will be better with one half of the package prevented from being scheduled.

  22. Re:it's a no brainer. by Shaitan · · Score: 1

    "It's a pragmatic decision and it's stupid to get emotionally attached to companies."

    Yes it is stupid to get emotionally attached but considering the historical track record of the company isn't necessarily emotional. AMD has always kept price/performance as an important metric. They've also been very focused on supporting open platforms. And yes, right now they've got the best line-up for most use cases, even in the server market which is definitely something new.

    There is a point where the gap grows too large to ignore but there is definitely a point where the difference isn't worth fundiing a company that moves in the direction that is counter to your interests down the road. Being objective doesn't mean being short-sighted.

  23. Re:it's a no brainer. by hyades1 · · Score: 1

    Well said.

    --
    I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
  24. Gamers Nexus covered this pretty well by Hazelnut · · Score: 1

    Check out the videos, first with Steve going through the test report and saying how shoddy it seems and the second he actually rocked up to the company who did the benchmark tests for Intel and interviews them.

    Intel's Gross Incompetence & Principled Technologies (Intel Responds) https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

    Exclusive: Interview w/ Principled Technologies on Intel Testing (9900K) https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

    Not much else needs saying, other than what a ridiculous move from Intel. How dumb do they think people are... oh, right. :-)

    As far as I am concerned, wouldn't buy Intel before and double wouldn't buy em now.