AMD announces 5.7ghz Ryzen 9 7950X chip retailing for $699 this month, meanwhile Intel hints at vapor chip that theoretically might hit 6ghz with no release date and no price. This stinks of desperation on Intel’s part.
To be honest, I'm disappointed by the new Ryzen 7000 series power consumption, enough so that I'll be sticking with my 5000 series CPUs for as long as I can. Not everyone wants their PC to double as a space heater.
All these power hungry beasts coming out of Intel and NVIDIA feel quite out of sync with the zeitgeist in a world that's worried about the power bill - especially when the M1/M2 is there to provide contrast. I'm getting Pentium 4 vs Core architecture vibes.
Between this and the ridiculous TDP expectations for this generations latest graphic cards people are going to have to start thinking about using dedicated circuits per gaming computer.
That's not a TDP, which is a sustained metric (originally designed for board/cooling design integration) and shows 125W for that part. The 250W number is a new thing they're calling "Processor Boost Power" and I guess it's intended to represent some kind of "maximum short term draw" number. That's not something that's been historically reported for other parts, so it's kinda wrong to try to compare them 1:1.
It sounds high, but we’ve had plenty of AMD and Intel workstation CPUs with even higher TDPs for a long time. Overclockers have also routinely pushed well past that number.
235W is well within the range of what a decent air cooler like the Noctua NH-D15 can handle without excessive fan noise.
Wow... my whole desktop setup, with 3 screens, a 7-year-old intel CPU, a gaming GPU, and a grip of hard drives is showing a draw of 143W right now, up to 289W under stress (prime95). 235W just for the CPU is nuts.
These designs pretty much demand a setup with a water cooling loop implemented via radiator sized for two 140mm fans (280 mm length).
Thankfully all-in-one kits for that which are pre filled and sealed are much more commonplace than they used to be, and even fairly cheap midtower ATX cases I see on newegg in the $60-70 range will have a top panel mounting place for a 280mm radiator.
And definitely any "gaming" marketed ATX case above that price range will have the capability for it.
You possibly could get away with a 240mm length radiator (dual 120mm fans) on something like this but I really wouldn't recommend it, and the savings for an AIO kit would be only $50-60.
From the perspective of noise annoyance, fan pitch and sound is somewhat proportional to size. 140mm fans can be a lot quieter and move more air than 120mm with less perceptible noise to the human sitting next to it.
Higher end stuff will be implemented by 360mm length radiator (3 x 140mm) which I am pleasantly surprised to see not ridiculously priced ATX cases having options mounting now.
I would figure you have to budget an additional $150-200 on top of the CPU cost for a capable water cooling loop setup. Which is not absolutely ridiculous considering that a really good skived copper heatsink/heatpipe/fan setup for pure air cooling on a 130W TDP CPU could easily be $65.
One of the things I'm not happy about on my current machine (Ryzen 1800X, RTX 2070S) is the heat and noise. I'm going to invest in a better case and fans next time, but new hardware is trying to make the problem even worse. The new hardware is supposed to be very efficient if you limit the max power, but they don't make it easy to do.
From what I can tell the only way to change power limits and fan curves for CPU/GPU are either to reboot into BIOS or use multiple separate manufacturer's shitty bloated windows GUI utilities. AMD's Ryzen Master software is supposed to be good but it doesn't work at all if you have Hyper-V enabled which is basically mandatory for developers nowadays. My GPU's default fan curves have them turn on/off around typical idle desktop temperatures so they continuously cycle on/off and have worn out the bearings and now make a scraping noise every time they do this. The only way to fix this is to launch a bloated windows GUI utility every boot. I was surprised to not find an open source Linux library or kernel driver that lets you read and write fan speeds for GPU and motherboard controlled fans.
I want two things:
1. A simple, unobtrusive button in my system tray that lets me toggle power limits of my CPU and GPU from "silent" to "performance".
2. A simple, unobtrusive way to configure fan curves with averaging and hysteresis that, crucially, lets the case fan speeds be controlled by a combination of GPU and CPU temperatures.
As far as I know neither of those are possible today. I've considered buying or making a USB fan speed controller and even plugging my GPU fans into it because there's no other good way to control them.
I have found it much more difficult to tune fan curves for quiet operation on Ryzen than on Intel chips. There are frequent short surges in fan speed, presumably caused by frequent short surges in core temperature. This happens at normal load just above idle, e.g just web browsing and YouTube.
This has happened with a few different brands of motherboards, in multiple chassis with different brands of fans, so I think it's a characteristic of the Ryzen platform rather than a specific motherboard brand or BIOS.
It's really odd and annoying, and I've resorted to fan curves that keep the fan on low RPM until just before the CPU hits 90C -- basically flat with a big hockey stick inflection at the end.
Pretty average as far as bloat goes, ~150-200 MB of RAM used, about as much as JetBrains Toolbox takes up in the tray, or Mattermost, Discord or other apps like that.
Lets me switch between GPU power/fan profiles (Performance > Tuning) so I can run my GPU at 50% of its maximum power most of the time (as well as different fan curves), for longevity/noise related reasons, especially when dealing with badly optimized software/games.
The CPU just seems to do its own thing and throttles up/down based on system load, haven't really needed to tune it for any particular reason yet.
It's passable but you're right that things could be way better, more usable and user friendly! I guess in a way, when everything is bloated, nothing is. Wirth's law at its finest.
> they continuously cycle on/off and have worn out the bearings
Does cycling a fan on/off wear bearings faster than being on all the time? Naively I would have assumed that bearing wear is a function of time enabled and speed, with # of spinups a negligible factor.
I use this for my radeon RX 5700XT: https://gitlab.com/corectrl/corectrl
You can use it for cpu as well, but i havent felt the need to fiddle with any settings there.
These are crazy frequencies and I am sure they have the thermals to match, but this is also the sign that competition is tight. Both companies are trying to get every bit of performance out of their designs. Advanced cooling systems that are now common on enthusiast machines are helping.
Regardless if you think they can pull it off or not, Intel's roadmap is fascinating. They expect pretty tremendous growth not just in the processor space, but in the US foundry space. They are aiming to be able to compete with TSMC and Samsung in this space.
I believe AMD's technology and furthermore strategy is superior to intel's. Now with Xilinx on board I am curious if we will see GPU's or APU's with FPGA's which allow custom hardware instructions.
AMD is also in the process of being a toaster oven. The new Ryzen 9 7950x will use considerably higher power (105W -> 170W) for a smaller die area, which is making people worry about air-powered cooling being not enough (previously a Noctua D15 was enough to cool a 5950x). And I really don't want high-end CPUs to require water cooling since it's more unreliable and requires more maintenance.
Intel power scaling works very well. My 12th-gen 12700K says its is drawing 660mW at the moment, and its complete silence is consistent with that estimate. If there's some power level that you prefer, you can just enter it in the BIOS and leave it that way.
Personally, I do not pretend that CPUs are light bulbs. If my CPU could draw 1000W for 10ms and that made short tasks like web page rendering twice as fast, that's a trade I would happily take. The short-term power consumption of CPUs is pure benefit to the user, and the rarer sustained tasks that run all the cores flat out for more than 1 second are always going to level off at about 125W because of the long-term cooling situation.
Intel CPUs have better idle power consumption that even the latest Ryzen CPUs. It caught me off guard when I switched from Intel to AMD and the idle draw of my PC went up by a significant amount.
Given that our computers spend more time idle than at 100% peak load, my AMD CPU draws more power (and therefore heats up my room) more then my Intel setup. That wasn’t an outcome I was expecting, but then again I was only looking at peak, not idle, numbers at the time.
I really hope AMD can start bringing their idle power consumption down in this next gen.
Why do we focus so much on TDP or max boost? How often and for how long are you running your CPU at max? I'd like to have the performance there when I need it but for most of the day I am sitting near idle.
I think an underappreciated thing in these conversations is that +200W of TDP of top end products nets a very small increase in actual performance, especially if you're not maxing out all 24 cores. The "halo" models are there purely for the enthusiast that want the absolute fastest CPU regardless of other tradeoffs not those concerned about things like air cooling or electricity cost. E.g. the 13700k is a 125W/253W CPU. The 13700T is a 35W/~105W? CPU. They have ~identical single thread performance and are within <25% on 24 core performance.
What the article doesn't cover is the actual performance uplift but that seems a given being an article about this newly rumoured model not an overview of 13th gen performance as a whole.
I love my power efficient M1 macbook and I love my number crunching Zen 3 CPU. The 2 SKUs I have aren't serving the same market and where the architectures overlap the differences aren't as profound as comparing extremes from each family would lead you to believe.
My NUC ECE board can reach 5ghz. But I throttle all cores down to 3.2 GHz so it can run without the helicopter sounds from all the fans running full tilt. This sounds the same.
how on earth does this not melt all matter in the known universe?
forgive my laymen knowledge, I am just a humble software person but isn't the equation of power -> speed exponential which is why CPU speeds clocked out around 4ghz and we moved to multi core processing? what sorcery exists that lets us suddenly break that barrier?
In all seriousness, hasn't Intel been hanging on to their current architecture for way too long at this point? IIRC Ryzen consumes less power and does more per Watt on the high end and ARM is eating them up on the low end. It feels like Intel is just trying to squeeze out a little more from a much-delayed 10nm process and their existing architecture.
It sort of reminds me of Pentium 4 just outstaying its welcome.
Genuinely curious: what's on the horizon for Intel as their next big change and not something that's just a marketing clock speed boost?
Snark aside, I have a couple of 3700x machines and an itch. Kind of split between upgrading my gaming machine (not entirely worth it) or changing the mini-ITX and severely undervolting a 7700x.
Or, I can just wait for the zen 5 which was my original plan but as I said, I've the captains itch
Apparently this is a stopgap until Meteor Lake, which will use the "Intel 7" process, hopefully improving on power efficiency. However Meteor Lake isn't scheduled until 2nd half of 2023.
These 13 gen are Raptor lake, which uses the same process as Alder Lake.
[+] [-] jscipione|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] m12k|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SketchySeaBeast|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajross|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] STRML|3 years ago|reply
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-raptor-lake-to-featu...
[+] [-] PragmaticPulp|3 years ago|reply
235W is well within the range of what a decent air cooler like the Noctua NH-D15 can handle without excessive fan noise.
[+] [-] irthomasthomas|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pdntspa|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wyager|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walrus01|3 years ago|reply
Thankfully all-in-one kits for that which are pre filled and sealed are much more commonplace than they used to be, and even fairly cheap midtower ATX cases I see on newegg in the $60-70 range will have a top panel mounting place for a 280mm radiator.
And definitely any "gaming" marketed ATX case above that price range will have the capability for it.
You possibly could get away with a 240mm length radiator (dual 120mm fans) on something like this but I really wouldn't recommend it, and the savings for an AIO kit would be only $50-60.
From the perspective of noise annoyance, fan pitch and sound is somewhat proportional to size. 140mm fans can be a lot quieter and move more air than 120mm with less perceptible noise to the human sitting next to it.
Higher end stuff will be implemented by 360mm length radiator (3 x 140mm) which I am pleasantly surprised to see not ridiculously priced ATX cases having options mounting now.
I would figure you have to budget an additional $150-200 on top of the CPU cost for a capable water cooling loop setup. Which is not absolutely ridiculous considering that a really good skived copper heatsink/heatpipe/fan setup for pure air cooling on a 130W TDP CPU could easily be $65.
[+] [-] hulitu|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mastax|3 years ago|reply
One of the things I'm not happy about on my current machine (Ryzen 1800X, RTX 2070S) is the heat and noise. I'm going to invest in a better case and fans next time, but new hardware is trying to make the problem even worse. The new hardware is supposed to be very efficient if you limit the max power, but they don't make it easy to do.
From what I can tell the only way to change power limits and fan curves for CPU/GPU are either to reboot into BIOS or use multiple separate manufacturer's shitty bloated windows GUI utilities. AMD's Ryzen Master software is supposed to be good but it doesn't work at all if you have Hyper-V enabled which is basically mandatory for developers nowadays. My GPU's default fan curves have them turn on/off around typical idle desktop temperatures so they continuously cycle on/off and have worn out the bearings and now make a scraping noise every time they do this. The only way to fix this is to launch a bloated windows GUI utility every boot. I was surprised to not find an open source Linux library or kernel driver that lets you read and write fan speeds for GPU and motherboard controlled fans.
I want two things:
1. A simple, unobtrusive button in my system tray that lets me toggle power limits of my CPU and GPU from "silent" to "performance".
2. A simple, unobtrusive way to configure fan curves with averaging and hysteresis that, crucially, lets the case fan speeds be controlled by a combination of GPU and CPU temperatures.
As far as I know neither of those are possible today. I've considered buying or making a USB fan speed controller and even plugging my GPU fans into it because there's no other good way to control them.
[+] [-] twblalock|3 years ago|reply
This has happened with a few different brands of motherboards, in multiple chassis with different brands of fans, so I think it's a characteristic of the Ryzen platform rather than a specific motherboard brand or BIOS.
It's really odd and annoying, and I've resorted to fan curves that keep the fan on low RPM until just before the CPU hits 90C -- basically flat with a big hockey stick inflection at the end.
[+] [-] KronisLV|3 years ago|reply
Pretty average as far as bloat goes, ~150-200 MB of RAM used, about as much as JetBrains Toolbox takes up in the tray, or Mattermost, Discord or other apps like that.
Lets me switch between GPU power/fan profiles (Performance > Tuning) so I can run my GPU at 50% of its maximum power most of the time (as well as different fan curves), for longevity/noise related reasons, especially when dealing with badly optimized software/games.
The CPU just seems to do its own thing and throttles up/down based on system load, haven't really needed to tune it for any particular reason yet.
It's passable but you're right that things could be way better, more usable and user friendly! I guess in a way, when everything is bloated, nothing is. Wirth's law at its finest.
[+] [-] mwint|3 years ago|reply
Does cycling a fan on/off wear bearings faster than being on all the time? Naively I would have assumed that bearing wear is a function of time enabled and speed, with # of spinups a negligible factor.
[+] [-] strich|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cameronhowe|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] morepork|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GeekyBear|3 years ago|reply
>Raptor Lake to Offer ‘Unlimited Power’ Mode for Those Who Don’t Care About Heat, Electric Bills
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/338748-raptor-lake-to-...
[+] [-] etempleton|3 years ago|reply
Regardless if you think they can pull it off or not, Intel's roadmap is fascinating. They expect pretty tremendous growth not just in the processor space, but in the US foundry space. They are aiming to be able to compete with TSMC and Samsung in this space.
[+] [-] de6u99er|3 years ago|reply
I believe AMD's technology and furthermore strategy is superior to intel's. Now with Xilinx on board I am curious if we will see GPU's or APU's with FPGA's which allow custom hardware instructions.
[+] [-] uni_rule|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cyber_kinetist|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffbee|3 years ago|reply
Personally, I do not pretend that CPUs are light bulbs. If my CPU could draw 1000W for 10ms and that made short tasks like web page rendering twice as fast, that's a trade I would happily take. The short-term power consumption of CPUs is pure benefit to the user, and the rarer sustained tasks that run all the cores flat out for more than 1 second are always going to level off at about 125W because of the long-term cooling situation.
[+] [-] PragmaticPulp|3 years ago|reply
Given that our computers spend more time idle than at 100% peak load, my AMD CPU draws more power (and therefore heats up my room) more then my Intel setup. That wasn’t an outcome I was expecting, but then again I was only looking at peak, not idle, numbers at the time.
I really hope AMD can start bringing their idle power consumption down in this next gen.
[+] [-] 2OEH8eoCRo0|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tambourine_man|3 years ago|reply
Warning: required power station not included.
[+] [-] zamadatix|3 years ago|reply
What the article doesn't cover is the actual performance uplift but that seems a given being an article about this newly rumoured model not an overview of 13th gen performance as a whole.
I love my power efficient M1 macbook and I love my number crunching Zen 3 CPU. The 2 SKUs I have aren't serving the same market and where the architectures overlap the differences aren't as profound as comparing extremes from each family would lead you to believe.
[+] [-] crest|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jvanderbot|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eminence32|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hk1337|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whoomp12342|3 years ago|reply
forgive my laymen knowledge, I am just a humble software person but isn't the equation of power -> speed exponential which is why CPU speeds clocked out around 4ghz and we moved to multi core processing? what sorcery exists that lets us suddenly break that barrier?
[+] [-] jhickok|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jlpom|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmyeet|3 years ago|reply
In all seriousness, hasn't Intel been hanging on to their current architecture for way too long at this point? IIRC Ryzen consumes less power and does more per Watt on the high end and ARM is eating them up on the low end. It feels like Intel is just trying to squeeze out a little more from a much-delayed 10nm process and their existing architecture.
It sort of reminds me of Pentium 4 just outstaying its welcome.
Genuinely curious: what's on the horizon for Intel as their next big change and not something that's just a marketing clock speed boost?
[+] [-] oblak|3 years ago|reply
Snark aside, I have a couple of 3700x machines and an itch. Kind of split between upgrading my gaming machine (not entirely worth it) or changing the mini-ITX and severely undervolting a 7700x.
Or, I can just wait for the zen 5 which was my original plan but as I said, I've the captains itch
[+] [-] kristianp|3 years ago|reply
These 13 gen are Raptor lake, which uses the same process as Alder Lake.
[+] [-] bilsbie|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanmarsh|3 years ago|reply