The 7740X retaining dominance in browser-oriented tests demonstrates the continued bottleneck we suffer due to the "single-threaded" (or nominally single-threaded) predilection of web browsers, the DOM, and JavaScript. Servo and other concurrency-oriented innovations are going to be very welcome when they arrive in earnest.
I don't understand why anyone would design a website so complex that there is a noticeable benchmark difference between $100 processors and $1000 processors.
Servo is a layout engine but the benchmarks are mostly testing javascript performance. Extra cpu cores are not going to speed up JS benchmarks, not because JS is single-threaded but because the benchmarks themselves have to be designed to test multiple threads. The same would be true if the benchmarks were written in C, if you want to test multithreading you have to write code to do it. Javascript benchmarks could test multithreading via Web Workers but for whatever reasons they don't seem to.
TL;DR: Intel is having hard time to keep up against AMD. It reminds me the Pentium 4 era, when Intel had to push clock and power consumption to crazy levels [1]
It's a pretty natural consequence of how much crap Intel piled in on this release. Cache, mesh, and AVX512 all consume a great deal of power.
Contrary to what the sibling comment says, Ryzen is nowhere near Intel's performance here. Even in very parallel tasks like x264 video encoding, the 7800K (6-cores) is beating the highest-clocked 8C Ryzens by almost 6%. Comparing apples to apples, the 7820X (8C) is 33% faster than the 1800X.
That's a very good place for Intel to be overall, even if their power consumption is higher than I'd like to see. Downclocked Xeons will probably beat Ryzen's efficiency. And there may be some UEFI/microcode gains to be made here as well, both in efficiency and total performance.
The bigger problem (for the enthusiast market) is the thermals. Intel just switched from solder to TIM on the HEDT processors and it's very clear that they cannot move heat out of the package fast enough and it's limiting the total OC, which would likely reach 5 GHz a good chunk of the time.
The[1] biggest take away to me in the review. The AMD at 95W was within striking distance of the 140W Intel part. Then a 65W snuck above a 140W part. Yes TDP is measured differently, etc. But still interesting.
In the meantime, the 6 core Broadwell-E I7-6850K has seen a big price drop - down from $650 to $480 on several sites. It's still expensive compared to the Kaby Lake I7-7700K, but if you wanted two more cores then it's now a much more reasonable option. People seem to have very good results overclocking it, too.
Edit: Having just seen that the i7-7800X is priced at $389, I'm thinking the I7-6850K is still overpriced, unless you need 40 PCI-E lanes.
I'm surprised at how well Ryzen is holding up in FP terms despite the relative lack of flops on paper. I guess having a separate floating point cluster is enough of an advantage to make up for that? It really makes me want to see how it works with robot motion planning at work.
Saw some test results on Chinese website claiming that once fully loaded the temp can jump to 100+ degrees when running at stock frequency without any form of overclocking.
These are the first Intel HEDT chips to not have a soldered heat-spreader. Instead they are using thermal paste between the chip and the heat-spreader. This is generally accepted to be bad practice since they use cheap paste and it's dependent on how the paste was spread on each chip. I also believe that Intel has basically said water cooling is a must for these chips.
i7 7820X is the CPU is probably the best system price/performance overall in the long run right now. Threadripper might be competing it depending on what you do but we don't know about it yet. For software developers having over 50% lead in compilation performance compared to ryzen 7 1800X (nightly build of chromium on visual studio) should make it a good choice.
A) In system price there are many components and that
makes ultra cheap CPU:s in other vice identical configurations not so good price-performance.
B) Performance is really the performance differential from what you upgrade. And even more importantly the performance differential years from now to systems of that time, if you upgrade to a system that lasts 5 years before you upgrade or to a system that lasts 7 years before you upgrade is significant in terms of price/performance because later means you get the high performance early and price last longer.
C) Significantly higher single threaded performance compared to Ryzen 7 the main contender. There are still many tasks that are single threaded, especially if you run legacy code.
D) AVX-512 I doubt the review benchmarks are in AVX-512 but some legacy code. AVX-512 increases both width of vector and fraction of code and algorithms that can be parallerized significantly. Once compilers are well tuned to use AVX-512 the code compiled with AVX-512 optimizations turned on should be significantly faster than what it was before hand. Simply being able to do 8-16 times work per cycle in large variety of tasks is significant advantage even if that is for a good fraction of time instead of all the time.
Personally I7-920 has given me far better price-performance compared to people who bought dual core at the time simply because it has lasted LONGER so it had superior price/(time between CPU upgrades) measurement. Right now in that same measurement I7-7820X is the king.
So in conclusion I7-7820X is faster in both real legacy code and the future code, and gives good enough performance longer simply because code that you run when you would start considering upgrades run much faster on it simply because of extensions.
I wonder if it's linking the huge binaries at the end of the compile that makes all the difference, especially with the difference in L3 caches? I'd be surprised if the individual compile units were that much larger as to make a difference.
The chrome compile test doesn't like L3 victim caches. Ryzen does badly as a result. Clock for Clock the Skylake-SP cores do bad as well, but Skylake-X is well clocked with cores, so it's still top of the charts.
Well, if you look at the power consumption and the price, they really aren't. The article compares Ryzen processors against Intel's high-core offerings, which makes sense in some ways but not in others.
This is something Intel has said for over 2 years now, AVX512 has several instruction sets under it.
CD is probably the biggest gamechanger since it now allows you to vectorize code that you couldn't before due to memory conflicts that arise from identical elements in the array.
But the difference between Skylake-EP/X and XeonPhi in relation to AVX-512 support were known way in advance.
Looks like we're back to P4-style levels of power use. Not sure how I feel about consumer chips running 150 watts on the regular. That's a lot more carbon in the atmosphere for questionable reasons.
Incredibly, the 7900X is hitting 240 watts. When was the last time we had a chip that burned that much energy? Granted, its destined for the server room, but a 2U quad CPU box will be hitting 1000 watts on CPU usage alone at 100% utilization. That's close to a medium-sized window AC unit.
Yes, those TDPs made them dead on arrival for me. I moved to mini-ITX for my main system and won't be going back. There's no room in my case for any watercooling hardware. I run a Ryzen 7 1700 which is a 65W TDP 8 core, 16 thread CPU.
I was going to hold off for Intel's response, but I knew they wouldn't have anything with 8 cores that was anywhere near 65W TDP. CoffeeLake should offer lower TDPs, but with 6 cores max which seems unappealing compared to 8C.
I'm going to revisit Intel after they've had time to prepare a real response to Ryzen in ~2020 or so.
Intel has changed the voltage regulation this time its back on the CPU.
Skylark-EP gets nowhere near those power draw levels even at similar clocks I have a strong suspension that this is a BIOS issue and the CPU voltage regulator is running full steam (this is equivalent of locking the phase frequency of your VRMs on the motherboard to the max).
I dont think that an additional 100W under load 20W idle is going to have a meaningful effect on global warming?
Lets imagine it spends 4 hours per day under load and 6 hours idle and the rest of the time sleeping. We are talking about 0.5 kwh or 15ish per month. The average us household uses by comparison around 900 kwh in the average month.
Upgrading to one of these will in that scenario increase your household energy budget 1.6%.
Those are only technically consumer chips; you're never going to see any computer without the word "workstation" on it running those chips from any OEM.
Those Base/Turbo numbers seem off 3.6 / 4.0 GHz (6 core) 3.3 / 4.3 GHz (8 core) while they both are 140W parts.
ED: looks like it's missing the favored core mode which is probably important for gaming. Which brings up an interesting question if CPU's are now going to last ~5 years, is buying a 500+$ CPU reasonable?
Intel treats TDP numbers as more of a vague classification than an actual indication of power consumption. "140W" is basically code for "tons of power".
In PCPerspectives i9-7900X review you can see it uses significantly more power than the i7-6950X despite them both ostensibly being 140W parts.
Intel isn't really circling the drain and their future woes are more likely to be caused by overall shrinking of the PC market, not by loss of market share to slower chips. As good as Ryzen is, it will probably only increase AMD's market share from 5% to 10% due to inertia and such.
Speaking of browsers, they aren't really a good benchmark for 6-10 core processors since anything is going to be fast enough. Also, existing JS can't really be parallelized so I suspect even a magical browser would still benefit from single-thread performance.
I've enjoyed some comments you've made elsewhere, and don't want you to run afoul of HN rules and culture. I believe that discussing the fact of the downvotes is strongly discouraged on HN.
Wow. From multiple sites releasing reviews it's clear that an embargo was just lifted.
And anandtech couldn't bother writing a proper article? Sentence after sentence just hard to read, with extra commas and just poor sentence structures. Did they not have time during the embargo?
[+] [-] bhauer|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bo1024|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guelo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] mtgx|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] faragon|8 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/11550/the-intel-skylakex-revie...
[+] [-] paulmd|8 years ago|reply
Contrary to what the sibling comment says, Ryzen is nowhere near Intel's performance here. Even in very parallel tasks like x264 video encoding, the 7800K (6-cores) is beating the highest-clocked 8C Ryzens by almost 6%. Comparing apples to apples, the 7820X (8C) is 33% faster than the 1800X.
That's a very good place for Intel to be overall, even if their power consumption is higher than I'd like to see. Downclocked Xeons will probably beat Ryzen's efficiency. And there may be some UEFI/microcode gains to be made here as well, both in efficiency and total performance.
The bigger problem (for the enthusiast market) is the thermals. Intel just switched from solder to TIM on the HEDT processors and it's very clear that they cannot move heat out of the package fast enough and it's limiting the total OC, which would likely reach 5 GHz a good chunk of the time.
http://i.imgur.com/9e8Trr3.png
[+] [-] soulnothing|8 years ago|reply
[1] http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph11550/87127.png
[+] [-] vosper|8 years ago|reply
Edit: Having just seen that the i7-7800X is priced at $389, I'm thinking the I7-6850K is still overpriced, unless you need 40 PCI-E lanes.
[+] [-] jhasse|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Symmetry|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dis-sys|8 years ago|reply
It that true?
http://img1.mydrivers.com/img/20170620/0ff9382549894c64a9989...
[+] [-] en4bz|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bratao|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noir_lord|8 years ago|reply
It's just fantastic at the price point.
[+] [-] osmala|8 years ago|reply
A) In system price there are many components and that makes ultra cheap CPU:s in other vice identical configurations not so good price-performance.
B) Performance is really the performance differential from what you upgrade. And even more importantly the performance differential years from now to systems of that time, if you upgrade to a system that lasts 5 years before you upgrade or to a system that lasts 7 years before you upgrade is significant in terms of price/performance because later means you get the high performance early and price last longer.
C) Significantly higher single threaded performance compared to Ryzen 7 the main contender. There are still many tasks that are single threaded, especially if you run legacy code.
D) AVX-512 I doubt the review benchmarks are in AVX-512 but some legacy code. AVX-512 increases both width of vector and fraction of code and algorithms that can be parallerized significantly. Once compilers are well tuned to use AVX-512 the code compiled with AVX-512 optimizations turned on should be significantly faster than what it was before hand. Simply being able to do 8-16 times work per cycle in large variety of tasks is significant advantage even if that is for a good fraction of time instead of all the time.
Personally I7-920 has given me far better price-performance compared to people who bought dual core at the time simply because it has lasted LONGER so it had superior price/(time between CPU upgrades) measurement. Right now in that same measurement I7-7820X is the king.
So in conclusion I7-7820X is faster in both real legacy code and the future code, and gives good enough performance longer simply because code that you run when you would start considering upgrades run much faster on it simply because of extensions.
[+] [-] satai|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gsnedders|8 years ago|reply
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ryzen-18... has the Ryzen 7 1800X beating even the i7 5960X when compiling the Linux kernel.
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/956-13/compilation-visual-st... has the Ryzen 7 1800X drawing around even when compiling Boost (under both MSVC and MinGW gcc, so it isn't just a compiler difference).
I wonder if it's linking the huge binaries at the end of the compile that makes all the difference, especially with the difference in L3 caches? I'd be surprised if the individual compile units were that much larger as to make a difference.
[+] [-] IanCutress|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Synaesthesia|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Symmetry|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] tormeh|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gbrown_|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dogma1138|8 years ago|reply
But the difference between Skylake-EP/X and XeonPhi in relation to AVX-512 support were known way in advance.
[+] [-] Symmetry|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drzaiusapelord|8 years ago|reply
https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/Intel-Core-i9-7900X...
Incredibly, the 7900X is hitting 240 watts. When was the last time we had a chip that burned that much energy? Granted, its destined for the server room, but a 2U quad CPU box will be hitting 1000 watts on CPU usage alone at 100% utilization. That's close to a medium-sized window AC unit.
[+] [-] BuckRogers|8 years ago|reply
I was going to hold off for Intel's response, but I knew they wouldn't have anything with 8 cores that was anywhere near 65W TDP. CoffeeLake should offer lower TDPs, but with 6 cores max which seems unappealing compared to 8C.
I'm going to revisit Intel after they've had time to prepare a real response to Ryzen in ~2020 or so.
[+] [-] hyperbovine|8 years ago|reply
Which you are also going to need, to cool your new 1800W computational space heater.
[+] [-] dom0|8 years ago|reply
Since Intel is still using thermal gunk on it's HEDT processors, thermal resistance is ridiculous (0.3 K/W Rthjc).
[+] [-] dogma1138|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelmrose|8 years ago|reply
Lets imagine it spends 4 hours per day under load and 6 hours idle and the rest of the time sleeping. We are talking about 0.5 kwh or 15ish per month. The average us household uses by comparison around 900 kwh in the average month.
Upgrading to one of these will in that scenario increase your household energy budget 1.6%.
[+] [-] Godel_unicode|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryao|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Retric|8 years ago|reply
ED: looks like it's missing the favored core mode which is probably important for gaming. Which brings up an interesting question if CPU's are now going to last ~5 years, is buying a 500+$ CPU reasonable?
[+] [-] jsheard|8 years ago|reply
In PCPerspectives i9-7900X review you can see it uses significantly more power than the i7-6950X despite them both ostensibly being 140W parts.
https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/Intel-Core-i9-7900X...
[+] [-] myrandomcomment|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryao|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dom0|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jjawssd|8 years ago|reply
EDIT: why the downvotes? explain yourselves
[+] [-] wmf|8 years ago|reply
Speaking of browsers, they aren't really a good benchmark for 6-10 core processors since anything is going to be fast enough. Also, existing JS can't really be parallelized so I suspect even a magical browser would still benefit from single-thread performance.
[+] [-] jshevek|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] knorker|8 years ago|reply
And anandtech couldn't bother writing a proper article? Sentence after sentence just hard to read, with extra commas and just poor sentence structures. Did they not have time during the embargo?