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

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

[Joe_Dragon]

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

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

[Solandri]

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.

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

[TomR teh Pirate]

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.

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.

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

[prisoner-of-enigma]

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.

Desperation...

[Type44Q]

Desperation calls for desperate measures.

Re:Desperation...

[alvinrod]

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.

Re: Desperation...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Desperation...

[Anubis IV]

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.

Comparison to Apple

[TFlan91]

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".

Re:it's a no brainer.

[butzwonker]

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.

Some more speculation

[thegarbz]

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.

Re:Corporate shills

[Anonymous Coward]

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

TL;DR

[rsilvergun]

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.

Re:TL;DR

[thegarbz]

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.

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. :)

Dell also likes these guys

[cloud.pt]

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?

Re:Game performance increase is a bad benchmark.

[thegarbz]

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.

Re:Are tuned benchmarks really applicable

[thegarbz]

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.

Is that with or without Meltdown & TLBleed?

[Lady Galadriel]

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.