There's no doubt about it: this will be a beast of a gaming chip. It will also likely cost an arm-and-a-leg (it has to, it's binned silicon meaning it's supply constrained) and likely have a really high TDP.
Intel Announces 8 Core I9-9900KS: Every Core at 5Ghz, All the Time
251–260 of 277 posts
Re: Intel Announces 8 Core I9-9900KS: Every Core at 5Ghz, All the Time
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
pc enthusiasts aren’t really into running javascript either.
Because downloading and running binaries of applications is much safer? From what i've seen web browser teams have taken the recent risks extremely seriously - I have sure had a worse track record of infection via downloading and installing software versus visiting sites with JS running
> web browser teams have taken the recent risks extremely seriously
Not really. They didn't even properly apply band-aids.
Chrome and Firefox disabled number of features, that allow Javascript code to create high-precision timers. This makes exploiting slightly more difficult, but the gaping hole is still there — there is infinite number of ways to create a high-precision timer, just not as obvious as closed ones.
Chrome has enabled Site Isolation on desktop, but haven't done it on Android (presumably, because of associated increase in memory consumption).
All major browsers still allow Javascript to run in background, create CPU threads and consume unrestricted amount of CPU time. I don't believe, that any of them have mounted instruction-based defenses (lfence etc.), but I may be mistaken here.
Re: Intel Announces 8 Core I9-9900KS: Every Core at 5Ghz, All the Time
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
The switching speed of silicon has also some upper limit. When you drive silicon faster, it starts to make mistakes. i.e. not all electrons go the where you want them to go. This causes soft-faults and CPU re-executes the part at best, or gives you a BSOD, oops or panic at worst. This upper limit depends on process, layout, power design and power limits of the CPU. Last but, not the least, not all CPUs are created eq…
Why are chips in the centre plain blue and better?
Plain blue is not a reason but a result.
Center of a silicon wafer is said to be have a higher quality (due to lithography, physical stresses and other processes which I don't know exact details of), and the result is a die with more homogeneous properties and color reflection. Since the die's tolerances were lower around the center of the wafer, the performance of the resulting chip was better.
AMD was also sub-binning most of these parts (they were sold as Athlon 1700 @ 1433MHz regardless of their performance level), so people were buying these unlocked sleepers and overclocking them to insane levels without voltage increases.
However, today the processes is so different and node sizes are so small that the dies' color are different and not perceivable anyway.
In the older days, this issue was more of an obscure, collective wisdom which resulted from trial and error days of overclocking wars.
Re: Intel Announces 8 Core I9-9900KS: Every Core at 5Ghz, All the Time
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just Anandtech. I feel like the entire "PC enthusiast" review space has dropped the ball on hardware vulnerabilities. Reevaluating performance between microcode and OS patches is an afterthought, and when a new CPU hits the market the numbers are presented without the obvious disclaimer that these performance gains may evaporate within months. Some even perpetuate the "only relevant to datacenter" myth despi…
I'm glad the PC enthusiast space hasn't succumbed to the wild hysteria caused elsewhere by the side channel issues. It's tiresome to see every new variation people come up with reported as a new apocalypse all over again. Half the reason I still pay attention is to find if there's a new Linux boot switch I need to turn on to disable some new performance regression. Even though I'm personally in the fortunate position…
> Half the reason I still pay attention is to find if there's a new Linux boot switch I need to turn on to disable some new performance regression.
No need, if you really want to disable all mitigations, including future ones, use mitigations=off.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Spectre-...
Re: Intel Announces 8 Core I9-9900KS: Every Core at 5Ghz, All the Time
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Considering we are referring to attacks that can bypass your PC's security, "prudence" is a better word than hysteria. That statement can be made about any vulnerability whatsoever. The merit of any mitigation can only be determined by a cost/benefit analysis that takes into account the potential impact of the vulnerability as well as the very real costs of mitigating it. > Yes, if they are left alone, it is the "e…
> Not a single one of these vulnerabilities has been used to cause any measurable damage anywhere that we know of, whereas the mitigations deployed have significant costs that everyone must pay. That's like saying: "nobody was drowned that we know of, whereas there was a significant cost to building the dam that everyone paid". (And also not dissimilar to arguments about doing no major industry/lifestyle changes rega…
> That's like saying: "nobody was drowned that we know of, whereas there was a significant cost to building the dam that everyone paid". (And also not dissimilar to arguments about doing no major industry/lifestyle changes regarding climate change).
It is very dissimilar indeed - the sentence you quoted does not constitute an argument by itself. It is an observation regarding the present state of affairs (which you have not disputed), which to me indicates a need to take a breath and do a reasoned cost/benefit analysis as opposed to the hysterical "this must be fixed at any cost, externalities be damned" mindset that is fairly common in many circles.
If you really want a climate change analogy, though, consider this - however many mitigating workarounds you invent, as long as speculative execution exists there will always be side channel attacks, and eventually some of them will probably succeed to some extent. Perhaps, as you noted, some major industry/lifestyle changes are indeed in order - people could stop living in the delusion that a perfect sandbox is possible and realize that arbitrary code execution will always entail risks. Rather than turning every website into a potential security risk, perhaps it is our approach to software (rather than hardware) that needs re-evaluation.
Re: Intel Announces 8 Core I9-9900KS: Every Core at 5Ghz, All the Time
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see how the act of taking and publishing measurements after microcode and OS updates constitutes hysteria. It's my understanding, at least on Windows, you pretty much have to opt-out of these patches or manually install an update that disables the mitigations. I fully support a users right to bypass these mitigations, and you're correct that your typical desktop user, at least today, isn't a target. But it se…
> I don't see how the act of taking and publishing measurements after microcode and OS updates constitutes hysteria. It's quite easy to sensationalize benchmark results even unintentionally. The average reader of PC hardware review sites is totally willing to latch on to a microbenchmark result that shows a 20% performance drop and claim that it's disastrous for performance, even if the actual added delay to real-wor…
Did you just make an argument against PC review sites publishing any benchmarks at all because readers can't be trusted to interpret them correctly?
That would kind of defeat the point.
If they published a benchmark in the past and don't bother to correct the benchmark when it becomes out of sync with reality - that is just bad journalism.
Nobody is saying you should go and cherry-pick benchmarks after the mitigations hit, but you should definitely check the benchmarks you already published once.
These sites can and should expect an informed reader.
In any case: Leaving wrong information up uncontested helps neither "experts" nor laymen.
Re: Intel Announces 8 Core I9-9900KS: Every Core at 5Ghz, All the Time
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their audience is not mainstream but enthousiast And professionals. They do not provide in depth analysis since they probably know the reader can do that for themselves.
That may have been true at one time, but the class of people who would consider themselves to be enthusiasts has broadened well beyond the class of people who can accurately judge how their workload corresponds to the benchmark results they're reading. The recent improvements in the Linux gaming situation have been a big contributor and has undoubtedly skewed the Phoronix audience.
Phoronix serves two important purposes that nobody else does. 1) It serves as a news aggregator for a lot of different open source communities. You'd think that a site called hacker news would do that, but ironically it doesn't. Most content here is either heavily web dominated, or just random drivel about being excellent in life. 2) He runs his standard battery of tests on everything. A lot of upstream projects don't seem to have that much emphasis on performance regression testing. He has uncovered a few regressions and reported them upstream on a few occasions.
Re: Intel Announces 8 Core I9-9900KS: Every Core at 5Ghz, All the Time
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't see how the act of taking and publishing measurements after microcode and OS updates constitutes hysteria. It's quite easy to sensationalize benchmark results even unintentionally. The average reader of PC hardware review sites is totally willing to latch on to a microbenchmark result that shows a 20% performance drop and claim that it's disastrous for performance, even if the actual added delay to real-wor…
Did you just make an argument against PC review sites publishing any benchmarks at all because readers can't be trusted to interpret them correctly? That would kind of defeat the point. If they published a benchmark in the past and don't bother to correct the benchmark when it becomes out of sync with reality - that is just bad journalism. Nobody is saying you should go and cherry-pick benchmarks after the mitigation…
> Did you just make an argument against PC review sites publishing any benchmarks at all because readers can't be trusted to interpret them correctly?
No, and you should know better.
> If they published a benchmark in the past and don't bother to correct the benchmark when it becomes out of sync with reality - that is just bad journalism.
Proper practice is to publish the full test conditions, including software, firmware and nowadays also microcode versions. The availability of newer versions does not make older results any less true.
At AnandTech, we make all reasonable attempts to keep a thorough database of older hardware tested on newer benchmark suites, but the time this requires means we cannot re-test everything multiple times per year. I have over 200 SSDs and counting in the collection, and that test suite is over 30 hours long. The collection of CPUs is much larger. GPU reviews typically have fewer back-catalog hardware entries because updating to new drivers a few times a year is often unavoidable. You can browse the results for current and previous test suites at https://www.anandtech.com/bench/
> These sites can and should expect an informed reader.
You don't read the comments as often as we do.
Re: Intel Announces 8 Core I9-9900KS: Every Core at 5Ghz, All the Time
#259Re: Intel Announces 8 Core I9-9900KS: Every Core at 5Ghz, All the Time
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
That may have been true at one time, but the class of people who would consider themselves to be enthusiasts has broadened well beyond the class of people who can accurately judge how their workload corresponds to the benchmark results they're reading. The recent improvements in the Linux gaming situation have been a big contributor and has undoubtedly skewed the Phoronix audience.
Phoronix serves two important purposes that nobody else does. 1) It serves as a news aggregator for a lot of different open source communities. You'd think that a site called hacker news would do that, but ironically it doesn't. Most content here is either heavily web dominated, or just random drivel about being excellent in life. 2) He runs his standard battery of tests on everything. A lot of upstream projects don'…
I greatly value Phoronix for both of those things; it's a great resource for both my work and personal computer usage. But it does mean that the traditional hardware reviews themselves are something of an afterthought.