Intel Core i9-7900X review: The fastest chip in the world • Hacker News Board

Re: Intel Core i9-7900X review: The fastest chip in the world

#91

Post by josteink » Thu, Jul 06, 2017, 1:21 PM UTC

NamTaf wrote: post #18

tracker1 wrote: post #5

Another issue beyond the fact that the X299 boards are problematic in terms of how many, and/or what slots you can and can't use seems to be excessive heat and stability in some of the reviews I've seen. I'm still running a i7-4790K at home, and though I'd like something with more cores... nothing is compelling enough to bring me to switch given the costs involved. If I were building new, would most likely go with an…

CPU gains for the last few gens have mainly been in perf/watt and, now, core count in lower-class chips thanks to AMD. The biggest benefit of a system upgrade for the last few gens, from a user perspective, has been for the chipset's gains - NVMe, USB3, USB-C, etc. more than raw performance. That's slowly trickled up but the real-world gains in many tasks haven't been enough to really justify it. I know many people s…

> I upgraded last year and it was from a 920 to a 6600K. Even the 920 did much of what I wanted, honestly, it was more a luxury upgrade.

The 920 is a solid performer, but oh my does it need efficient cooling. At launch it almost felt like a return to the Pentium 4 era in terms of power consumption.

If I were to upgrade my 920 anytime soon, it would be to reduce the need for cooling fans and to get a quieter system. As a programmer, I don't need more ultra-cores or jigga-hertz.

Re: Intel Core i9-7900X review: The fastest chip in the world

#92

Post by paulmd » Thu, Jul 06, 2017, 1:21 PM UTC

dsr_ wrote: post #77

ido wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i had an i5-2500k that my nephew got a couple years ago simply cause we moved to a different country and i didn't want to lug a big-ass desktop with me. I suspect most people wouldn't notice the difference between it and a brand new CPU.

I just replaced my work desktop i5-2500 with an i5-4570. Same SSDs, 16GB RAM instead of 24GB. (Not a voluntary move.) There's no perceivable difference. If you have enough RAM to avoid swapping and cheap SATA SSDs, all the requirements for fast/large CPUs or graphics cards are special applications of some sort. Browsers and editors and terminal windows and video playback don't count.

Even with a very intense overclock, Sandy Bridge is starting to fall behind the pack in gaming. Not obsolete by any means but 5 years of even incremental IPC gains do add up, and Sandy Bridge is still running PCIe 2.0. The 2500k is starting to come out 30-50% behind the 7600K in many titles let alone a 7700K, which is a very perceptible difference.

http://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/2773-intel-i5-2500k-revisi...

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2016-is-it-...

For "work" workloads, Sandy Bridge is still quite potent though. Honestly in that segment the gains have mostly been coming from moving to more cores. A hexacore or octacore with hyperthreading/SMT knocks the stuffing out of an i5.

Re: Intel Core i9-7900X review: The fastest chip in the world

#93

Post by dis-sys » Thu, Jul 06, 2017, 1:28 PM UTC

Sorreah wrote: post #72

dis-sys wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. the Xeon I am using can Turbo to 3.1Ghz, sure, it is slower than 4G, but the sheer core count makes it much faster in the day to day development tasks many people face. consumer grade or not, it doesn't matter when there is no special requirements. you just buy components from your favourite vendors and put it together, that is all. 2. you can buy a pair of such 10-core Xeon for almost the same price of a single i…

You are comparing 2 chips to a single chip and trying to argue against the claim that the single chip is the fastest yet. I'll humour you however. Your Xeon turbos to 3.1 if only 1 core is stressed, but it's all core boost is 2.4 as per https://www.pugetsystems.com/blog/2015/07/09/Actual-CPU-Spee... I don't see how your 10core part boosting to 2.4 Ghz is "much faster in the day to day development tasks" given that it…

The link I provided contains detailed benchmark results of the mentioned system against 6950x. In quite a few workloads, e.g. SPECwpc, it is beating 6950x by up to 42%. See page 4. The maths is really simple here - i9-7900x need to beat i7-6950x by 40% to match that performance.

i9-7900x is _NOT_ the fastest chip in the world, not even the fastest intel chip. Consumer/server difference is purely a marketing thing, my Xeon based workstation running CS:GO on daily basis is not a server.

Re: Intel Core i9-7900X review: The fastest chip in the world

#94

Post by lostapathy » Thu, Jul 06, 2017, 1:30 PM UTC

chx wrote: post #30

NamTaf wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CPU gains for the last few gens have mainly been in perf/watt and, now, core count in lower-class chips thanks to AMD. The biggest benefit of a system upgrade for the last few gens, from a user perspective, has been for the chipset's gains - NVMe, USB3, USB-C, etc. more than raw performance. That's slowly trickled up but the real-world gains in many tasks haven't been enough to really justify it. I know many people s…

> NVMe While NVMe benchmarks are stunning I really am curious whether in an ordinary setting the difference to SATA can be felt at all. Not measured -- felt. When the era of swap ended because CPUs / chipsets finally could handle enough RAM and when we went from HDD to SDD, those could be felt for sure. > This is marginally different for laptops In laptop world, the problem is that with the spread of thin craze most…

NVMe definitely feels faster.

I have an NVMe and a SATA SSD in my workstation. I do most of my work off the NVME, but occasionally work on projects that live on the SATA disk. I definitely notice a difference in things with a lot of disk access.

Re: Intel Core i9-7900X review: The fastest chip in the world

#95

Post by josteink » Thu, Jul 06, 2017, 1:31 PM UTC

btb wrote: post #65

vosper wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the desktop level I don't get why people care that much about power consumption? It means you have to dissipate more heat, okay, that means you can't use a cheap cooler. But it AFAIK even an extra 100w is cheap in the most expensive areas, especially when contrasted against productivity or cigarette breaks, or people sometimes being 20 minutes late to work...

For me its purely a noise issue. Less heat to dissipate means less fan noise(Only speaking about home use here. In an office setting the difference would be unnoticeable).

> In an office setting the difference would be unnoticeable

If you have a hall full of developers, having lots of noisy PCs can be annoying.

Where I work, we optimized for more silent PCs, because all these things do add up, and given the perf/watt-ratio you can get out of modern CPUs, there's no reason for people to need to have noisy PCs.

Even at home, optimizing watt-usage, even for a desktop build, is not completely without merits. All my future projects are planned as fanless as possible. And I know others who do the same. And if Intel can't deliver that, they'll just go buy something Arm-based, like an Rpi 3, which these days are getting good enough to actually do production loads.

I'm not even getting close to wanting a system where the CPU alone can draw 400+ watts.

Re: Intel Core i9-7900X review: The fastest chip in the world

#96

Post by fasterthanjim » Thu, Jul 06, 2017, 1:32 PM UTC

"I wanna go fast!" - Ricky Bobby

Re: Intel Core i9-7900X review: The fastest chip in the world

#97

Post by fasterthanjim » Thu, Jul 06, 2017, 1:33 PM UTC

fasterthanjim wrote: post #96

"I wanna go fast!" - Ricky Bobby

What do you think this is, Reddit?

Re: Intel Core i9-7900X review: The fastest chip in the world

#98

Post by paulmd » Thu, Jul 06, 2017, 1:38 PM UTC

cyphar wrote: post #31

... until ThreadRipper. I'm not a fan of either megacorp (though I prefer Intel because their stuff works much better historically on GNU/Linux), but it should be painfully obvious that "i9" is just a reaction to the threat of ThreadRipper from AMD (which is still going to be more powerful and far more affordable than i9 when it launches). EDIT: To be fair, they do mention this in TFA: > That these chips are currentl…

> it should be painfully obvious that "i9" is just a reaction to the threat of ThreadRipper from AMD

Maybe the branding but the HEDT lineup has been around since 2010. Shockingly, this lineup escaped the notice of AMD loyalists, or was assumed to be equivalent to Bulldozer's CMT (which is much more like a SMT/hyperthread than most people would admit at the time) - however they have always been excellent at gaming, particularly compared to Bulldozer's miserable IPC.

The high-core-count lineup are probably a reaction to Threadripper but these chips have been around in the Xeon lineup since forever and really should have stayed there. These chips (including Threadripper) are really multi-socket-in-a-package and don't perform particularly well in gaming workloads (despite AMD advertising them for such). Games don't scale well given the latency. They will be nice for things like CAD rendering workstations but that's a much narrower niche.

The i9 branding also slices off ECC, which is a significant feature for many things these will actually be good at. Threadripper will be at a significant advantage for actual server usage (even home-server) as a result. Intel is trying to avoid cannibalizing sales in their more expensive Xeon lineup but it does kill a bunch of the utility of the processor as a result.

Re: Intel Core i9-7900X review: The fastest chip in the world

#99

Post by noir_lord » Thu, Jul 06, 2017, 1:50 PM UTC

brianwawok wrote: post #81

msimpson wrote: post #78

Between the Intel Core i9-7900X and AMD Ryzen 7 1800X there is a $540 price difference. But for that extra cost you get four more threads at a higher clock rate, twenty extra PCIE lanes, a 500 MHz higher turbo clock speed, and double the memory bandwidth. Even with the lesser Intel Core i7-7820X you will get the same thread count but with a higher clock rate, four extra PCIE lanes, still a 500 MHz higher turbo clock…

Are there really that many people doing 3d model rendering? My guess would be PC users by count are gamers > programmers > 3d renderers For most gamers, seems like i7 or maybe i9 wins in current benchmarks. For programmers maybe ryzen is a better fit, but I bet it depends on your language.

> but I bet it depends on your language.

Not as much as you would think, I have a ryzen 1700 I use for dev, mostly PHP (not a language that threads well) in an Enterprise environment.

Those extra cores/threads come in incredibly handy for virtualization, both dev environments and things like running windows for testing

Even VS2017 inside virtual box absolutely flies when given 16GB of RAM and 4 cores (8T).

For my day to day the cores are useful even if my primary language isn't using all of them.

I'm currently in the strange situation where my desktop running the main system in virtual box is faster than our production/spare servers.

Re: Intel Core i9-7900X review: The fastest chip in the world

#100

Post by paulmd » Thu, Jul 06, 2017, 1:51 PM UTC

glenndebacker wrote: post #64

paulmd wrote: post #20

The real problems with Skylake-X are chipset cost, power consumption, shitty partner boards, and TIM. All of these are forgivable given the performance - except the TIM. Chipset cost will come down in 6-12 months after launch like it always does. This is part for the course, at launch X370 boards for Ryzen were going for well over $250 as well. Power consumption is a consequence of AVX512 and the mesh interconnect al…

"This thing absolutely smokes Ryzen in gaming at stock clocks let alone OC'd - single-thread performance is still a dominant factor in good gaming performance and this chip delivers in spades." That if you are limiting yourself to 1080p... At the resolution that I game (3440 x 1440) those performance differences disappear very fast. And even at 1080p 150 vs 180 frames don't matter that much for the majority of people…

The 6C version is priced directly against Ryzen (~$350), and the 8C version is only modestly more expensive (~$500), and they have a huge lead in gaming performance. That's perfectly affordable for the performance they give - virtually the same prices Ryzen launched at, in fact.

With this much of a lead in single-thread performance (~33%) a 6C Intel is actually outperforming an 8C Ryzen even in multi-thread performance and it's stomping it in games because single-thread performance is still so critical.

And the 8C Intels are just 33% faster than Ryzen across the board.

High-refresh gaming requires excellent single-threaded performance regardless of resolution, and 144 Hz is basically the new standard for midrange/high-end gaming builds at this point. A 144 Hz monitor starts at literally $150 and a very nice IPS 144 Hz FreeSync/GSync monitor can be had for $400-600.

It's not just 1080p - CPU single-thread-performance requirements scale with the framerate, it's just easier to hit higher framerates at lower resolutions. So 1080p benchmarks are a "leading indicator" of future high-refresh gaming performance as GPU tech improves and you upgrade in a year or two.

On the flip side, 4K benchmarks really mean almost nothing for CPUs. A Pentium G4560 is within a stone's throw of a 7700K at 4K because everything is GPU-bottlenecked at a very low framerate that virtually any processor can deliver. But that G4560 will fall behind in no time at all as GPU performance continues to improve and its actual performance (or lack thereof) is laid bare.