Try as you might but - new Intel 8-core still behind AMD

[spartaman64]

6 hours ago, AluminiumTech said:

It's a little bit sad that we've got to this point but it explains the 5800X's quite terrible price especially in relation to 5900X for only $100 more with 50% more cores.

 

Yes but Intel can't go beyond 8 cores in Rocket Lake so there's that. A 5GHz 8 core is still an 8 core.

 

I'd personally be interested to see if they skip i9 for Rocket Lake and make i5 8C/8T and i7 8C/16T. i3 could then be 6C/6T and Pentium could then be 4C/4T.

they are probably going to release a 5700/x at some point. its common for companies to release the budget skus later

[AlTech]

6 minutes ago, spartaman64 said:

they are probably going to release a 5700/x at some point. its common for companies to release the budget skus later

5700X isn't a budget SKU. And if they wanted to withhold budget SKUs then why did they release the 5600X? which I would still argue isn't a budget SKU, it's about $100 too expensive and even at $200 I'd call it Value as opposed to Budget.

[porina]

I love that in a next gen Intel CPU thread the discussion managed to transition to AMD chipset cooling fan  

 

15 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

5700X isn't a budget SKU. And if they wanted to withhold budget SKUs then why did they release the 5600X? which I would still argue isn't a budget SKU, it's about $100 too expensive and even at $200 I'd call it Value as opposed to Budget.

It is an interesting strategy from AMD, they're offering the top end CPU at each core count. It kinda makes sense if they're production limited. Concentrate on the higher end first. What many like myself would have wanted is the more value offerings at each core count. I don't want the best 6 core, I want a latest gen value 8 core, and not a 3700X.

[porina]

 

Another bench result featuring the new CPU(s). Unlike the previous ones, this does show i9-11900k and 3.5 GHz. The clock is interesting, presuming it is the base clock, it is 100 MHz higher than the earlier two leaks. Maybe this is the final clock since the CPU is actually identified, the earlier ones may be ES/QS chips.

[StDragon]

5 hours ago, Blademaster91 said:

It could be something with the X570 taichi, not sure, but most boards allow you to set chipset fan so its off unless the chipset hits a certain temp.

It's the same with the X570 Taichi.

 

As I've said before, it can be silent if the computer is idle or just casually browsing the web, light duty work, etc. But once you start doing anything CPU and GPU intensive, the noise gets louder and louder as the SB get hotter and RPM of the fan having to keep up.

 

The GPU should be talking directly to the CPU and not through the SB. So I can't imaging what other I/O activity there could be that would warrant the SB getting hotter. Almost assuredly it's raising in temp because the air in the case is getting warmer (GPU dumping heat right into the case) and the relative ambient is raising the temp of the SB in relation. Because frankly, the SB fan isn't really doing that good of a job anyways; poor engineering. That, and the thermal pad material between the SB and dissipation plate does a poor job at heat transfer anyways. So yeah, piss-poor SB thermal management all around.

[CarlBar]

On 12/4/2020 at 12:00 AM, Bombastinator said:

The 6 core thing is currently true.  For 8core to matter there have to be games that run the top off 6/12, and currently there aren’t any.  4/4 has had this happen already. 4/8 is reaching the end but hasn’t gotten there quite yet.  My personal prediction is 4/8 could hit that as early as Q2 2021.  I had previously been predicting Q1 2020 though so who knows how long that will go for.  Consoles are going from 6/6 directly to 8/16 though, so it is still outside possible 6/12 may simply get jumped. 

 

Given development cycles, console influences and developers probably being a bit slow in adapting to Zen's bringing of moar cores to the dektop i'd guess about another year and a half before 8c/16T optimised gaming starts coming out as released products, probably another couple fo years before it becomes the standard.

 

8 hours ago, StDragon said:

X570 Chipset fans are loud! It's basically a Matisse IO die at 14nm consuming anywhere from 11w 15w of power. All others are about in the 5w range which is why it can be passively cooled.

 

Unless this is a one-off solution from AMD, this doesn't bode well going into the rumored X670 chipset. Some have speculated it might run around 8w. We shall see.

 

Given it's apparently related in part to the PCIE 4.0 issues and that 5.0 is expected to make those even worse i don't see this getting better, (barring them copying their server-side methodology and just dumping chipsets altogether, but that probably has a lot of issues), in fact once PCI-E 5.0 comes along i suspect intel might have to start putting fans back on it's boards. 

[thechinchinsong]

5 hours ago, porina said:

I love that in a next gen Intel CPU thread the discussion managed to transition to AMD chipset cooling fan  

 

It is an interesting strategy from AMD, they're offering the top end CPU at each core count. It kinda makes sense if they're production limited. Concentrate on the higher end first. What many like myself would have wanted is the more value offerings at each core count. I don't want the best 6 core, I want a latest gen value 8 core, and not a 3700X.

Exactly. In an interesting kind of reversal, if Intel can give the latest gen value 8 core or latest gen value 6 core, it'll be the new price to performance leaders compared to the current 5000 series. Maybe that'll finally get AMD to accelerate on releasing their non-x SKUs.

[Bombastinator]

So by that timeline the lifespan of 6/12 to some degree depends on the lifespan of 4/8. It will in any case be short. 

[RejZoR]

4 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

So by that timeline the lifespan of 6/12 to some degree depends on the lifespan of 4/8. It will in any case be short. 

6c/12t is really the new mainstream now as people have been buying Ryzen 5 x600 series for years now and they've all been 6c/12t configurations. I really don't know anyone who would even consider Ryzen 3 at any point other than in low end laptops. Are there even Ryzen 3's on desktops lol, if there are, they must be the least talked about or interested in CPU I've ever heard when Ryzen 5 is such a great value and also performer.

[Bombastinator]

9 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

6c/12t is really the new mainstream now as people have been buying Ryzen 5 x600 series for years now and they've all been 6c/12t configurations. I really don't know anyone who would even consider Ryzen 3 at any point other than in low end laptops. Are there even Ryzen 3's on desktops lol, if there are, they must be the least talked about or interested in CPU I've ever heard when Ryzen 5 is such a great value and also performer.

6/12 has been around for a while.  I just don’t know how much longer it will be.  Intel has done several for example.  As for desktop 4/4, 6/6, and 4/8 there are desktop chips that are still sold.  There is even 1 2/4 desktop apu sold by AMD.  It’s not even ryzen. 3000g? I forget the name.  There seems to be a divide developing between power users systems and non-power user systems. A non-power user may very well not need more than 2/4. Power users on the other hand generally need the biggest system they can get their hands on, and that hasn’t been a 6/12 system for a while.

[RejZoR]

18 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

6/12 has been around for a while.  I just don’t know how much longer it will be.  Intel has done several for example.  As for desktop 4/4, 6/6, and 4/8 there are desktop chips that are still sold.  There is even 1 2/4 desktop apu sold by AMD.  It’s not even ryzen. 3000g? I forget the name.  There seems to be a divide developing between power users systems and non-power user systems. A non-power user may very well not need more than 2/4. Power users on the other hand generally need the biggest system they can get their hands on, and that hasn’t been a 6/12 system for a while.

But really, we don't really need all that much more. I've been on 6c/12t for years and didn't feel the need to have more being a gamer, but per core performance improvements are a requirement to raise framerate. Had 5900X in my sights, but at last minute figured, I don't really need that many threads and availability with price was also sort of a factor. 5900X was largely unavailable and like 200€ more than 5800X. I'll rather offset the difference into new 1440p monitor or M.2 PCIe4.0 SSD replacing the SATA one to benefit from DirectStorage at later time. Should last me fine for next 5 years when I'll probably make another platform swap. I'll have top of the line AM4 motherboard so I can still upgrade to 5950X at any time or if AMD gods are willing, we might even get Zen 4 on AM4. Unlikely, but maybe. Still, 5950X would present a massive upgrade, doubling what 5800X offers in core count. But again, I don't think it'll happen as I think Zen 4 will be on AM5.

[Bombastinator]

7 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

But really, we don't really need all that much more. I've been on 6c/12t for years and didn't feel the need to have more being a gamer, but per core performance improvements are a requirement to raise framerate. Had 5900X in my sights, but at last minute figured, I don't really need that many threads and availability with price was also sort of a factor. 5900X was largely unavailable and like 200€ more than 5800X. I'll rather offset the difference into new 1440p monitor or M.2 PCIe4.0 SSD replacing the SATA one to benefit from DirectStorage at later time. Should last me fine for next 5 years when I'll probably make another platform swap. I'll have top of the line AM4 motherboard so I can still upgrade to 5950X at any time or if AMD gods are willing, we might even get Zen 4 on AM4. Unlikely, but maybe. Still, 5950X would present a massive upgrade, doubling what 5800X offers in core count. But again, I don't think it'll happen as I think Zen 4 will be on AM5.

The reason to have more than 4 threads is mostly about “multi-threading” type programming over “multi-tasking” type programming.  Multi-threading won some years ago.  Mostly because microsoft wrote an unbelievably shitty multitasker for windows.  Multi-threading was mostly a way to get around Microsoft’s crap to non existent multi-tasker.  There is supposition that simply because jaguar2 is 8/16 it may become necessary simply because developers will write specifically for it. 

Edited December 5, 2020 by Bombastinator

[porina]

2 hours ago, RejZoR said:

6c/12t is really the new mainstream now as people have been buying Ryzen 5 x600 series for years now and they've all been 6c/12t configurations. I really don't know anyone who would even consider Ryzen 3 at any point other than in low end laptops. Are there even Ryzen 3's on desktops lol, if there are, they must be the least talked about or interested in CPU I've ever heard when Ryzen 5 is such a great value and also performer.

I'd put 6c12t in the value performance bucket. It's the entry level for a high level of performance. If you want best, you look at 8 or more cores, but 6 is still plenty to have a high end experience.

 

The AMD quad cores are very much still around. Look around this forum and you'll still see gaming builds using quads, usually for people on very limited budgets. It's not like you can't game on 4c8t today, although if you're that budget constrained, you have to accept some limitations especially in more modern and demanding games.

 

2 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

6/12 has been around for a while.  I just don’t know how much longer it will be.

They'll be around for a very long time. Quad cores are far from gone even today.

 

2 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

Power users on the other hand generally need the biggest system they can get their hands on, and that hasn’t been a 6/12 system for a while.

Depends on how you define power user. I'd consider myself one, yet my main gaming system which is also used for video editing remains a 6c12t system, even though I've own other 8 and 12 core systems. Actually, I am thinking of switching the video editing to the 12c, but given the encoding is a mix of CPU and GPU time, I don't expect gains to scale as simply as it might first appear.

 

1 hour ago, Bombastinator said:

The reason to have more than 4 threads is mostly about “multi-threading” type programming over “multi-tasking” type programming.  Multi-threading won some years ago.  Mostly because microsoft wrote an unbelievably shitty multitasker for windows.  Multi-threading was mostly a way to get around Microsoft’s crap to non existent multi-tasker. 

I don't even know where to start with this... multi-tasking in the Win9x days I think was done through time slices allocated to each program, so that wasn't great. But 9x didn't support more than one CPU anyway. I'm not sure if it supported more than one thread or not, which first came along with later Pentium 4 CPUs. I do recall that in order to use my dual Celeron 366 system, I had to move to Windows 2000 (based on the NT series, not to be confused with Millenium Edition based on 9x). Any power user would be on the NT branch anyway as the 9x series had severe resource limitations. Pentium 4 HT was apparently launched in 2003 so it would be after most had transitioned away from 9x anyway. WinXP which was also based on the NT line was released in 2001. AMD was the first to go multi-core in one socket, but that was much later in 2007.

[leadeater]

5 hours ago, RejZoR said:

Are there even Ryzen 3's on desktops lol, if there are, they must be the least talked about or interested in CPU I've ever heard when Ryzen 5 is such a great value and also performer.

The 3300X was a pretty sweet deal, if you only play esports titles and would never pair with a GPU above xx50 Ti/xx60 then it's a very good value combination. Only slightly better than the APUs but if you are looking for the absolute lowest possible spend then the 3300X is the pick of choice for this situation.

[CarlBar]

2 hours ago, leadeater said:

The 3300X was a pretty sweet deal, if you only play esports titles and would never pair with a GPU above xx50 Ti/xx60 then it's a very good value combination. Only slightly better than the APUs but if you are looking for the absolute lowest possible spend then the 3300X is the pick of choice for this situation.

 

I also built my NAS with a quad core, (3400G).

 

In terms of core count i thing sub 6 core is limited to super budget and office level tasks, 6 core is your solid gaming or light rendering range, but can't multi-task. 8 core is a 6 core with more room for extraneous stuff running in the background and anything about that is serious mixed loads or heavy rendering/CPU Compute space.

 

What Ryzen has done there is brign some previously HEDT stuff down onto the upper end of the mainstream stack whilst scaling gaming into somwhere in between the low end office and web browser stuff and said downshifted HEDT stuff, whilst also providing a better space for HEDT-Lite use cases.

[Bombastinator]

4 hours ago, porina said:

I'd put 6c12t in the value performance bucket. It's the entry level for a high level of performance. If you want best, you look at 8 or more cores, but 6 is still plenty to have a high end experience.

 

The AMD quad cores are very much still around. Look around this forum and you'll still see gaming builds using quads, usually for people on very limited budgets. It's not like you can't game on 4c8t today, although if you're that budget constrained, you have to accept some limitations especially in more modern and demanding games.

 

They'll be around for a very long time. Quad cores are far from gone even today.

 

Depends on how you define power user. I'd consider myself one, yet my main gaming system which is also used for video editing remains a 6c12t system, even though I've own other 8 and 12 core systems. Actually, I am thinking of switching the video editing to the 12c, but given the encoding is a mix of CPU and GPU time, I don't expect gains to scale as simply as it might first appear.

 

I don't even know where to start with this... multi-tasking in the Win9x days I think was done through time slices allocated to each program, so that wasn't great. But 9x didn't support more than one CPU anyway. I'm not sure if it supported more than one thread or not, which first came along with later Pentium 4 CPUs. I do recall that in order to use my dual Celeron 366 system, I had to move to Windows 2000 (based on the NT series, not to be confused with Millenium Edition based on 9x). Any power user would be on the NT branch anyway as the 9x series had severe resource limitations. Pentium 4 HT was apparently launched in 2003 so it would be after most had transitioned away from 9x anyway. WinXP which was also based on the NT line was released in 2001. AMD was the first to go multi-core in one socket, but that was much later in 2007.

Whereas during that entire time Unix systems had decent multitasking.  Sounds like we agree.  It was a massive oversimplification.

Edited December 5, 2020 by Bombastinator

[leadeater]

21 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

Whereas during that entire time Unix systems had decent multitasking.  Sounds like we agree.  It was a massive oversimplification.

Well it's not as if CPUs, or threads specifically can multitask at all. Unix and NT, even DOS, all use Semaphores, Mutexes and Context Switching to time share CPU threads. Windows NT added preemption in the 90's which was something Unix could do that Windows could not in the past while based on DOS.

 

Windows today has perfectly fine multitasking, right now my system that isn't doing much at all has 219 process and 2700+ threads with 94000+ handles sharing 6 cores and 12 threads without any effort or impact to user experience.

 

What people can mistake as not being good multitasking is that for one you simply do not have enough CPU resources while you have a heavy task running and secondly often these comparisons are made against Unix server systems that have no graphical interface. More often that not you can overwhelm a Windows system to be able to provide an adequate user interactive experience but all the running services are running and responding as they should, which also means you can remotely kill an offending process if you need to for what ever reason.

 

There's a difference between not having enough resources to run the GUI anymore and the OS not being able to multitask well, unless you flag a process as higher or lower priority the OS has no idea how to tell which processes are more or less important than another. If you want to ensure you can interact with your system like this and you know the workloads you are going to run or the combination of you can set the priority of them to low or add a switch to the shortcut so they are always run with low and you'll not have any issues.

 

No matter what though it all boils down to time sharing on threads so way back in the single core single thread days computers were strictly speaking not multitasking at all.

[Bombastinator]

3 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Well it's not as if CPUs, or threads specifically can multitask at all. Unix and NT, even DOS, all use Semaphores, Mutexes and Context Switching to time share CPU threads. Windows NT added preemption in the 90's which was something Unix could do that Windows could not in the past while based on DOS.

 

Windows today has perfectly fine multitasking, right now my system that isn't doing much at all has 219 process and 2700+ threads with 94000+ handles sharing 6 cores and 12 threads without any effort or impact to user experience.

 

What people can mistake as not being good multitasking is that for one you simply do not have enough CPU resources while you have a heavy task running and secondly often these comparisons are made against Unix server systems that have no graphical interface. More often that not you can overwhelm a Windows system to be able to provide an adequate user interactive experience but all the running services are running and responding as they should, which also means you can remotely kill an offending process if you need to for what ever reason.

 

There's a difference between not having enough resources to run the GUI anymore and the OS not being able to multitask well, unless you flag a process as higher or lower priority the OS has no idea how to tell which processes are more or less important than another. If you want to ensure you can interact with your system like this and you know the workloads you are going to run or the combination of you can set the priority of them to low or add a switch to the shortcut so they are always run with low and you'll not have any issues.

 

No matter what though it all boils down to time sharing on threads so way back in the single core single thread days computers were strictly speaking not multitasking at all.

It is fine now.  It wasn’t for a long time though.  NT did have it in theory.  In practice it want very good though.  I guess I’m saying without windows multitask issues multi thread likely wouldn’t have even been developed.  It’s all dead history though.  Multi thread is here, and people have to put up with its limitations which are different than multitasking limitations.  Thread crashes vs overhead. 

[thechinchinsong]

6 hours ago, leadeater said:

The 3300X was a pretty sweet deal, if you only play esports titles and would never pair with a GPU above xx50 Ti/xx60 then it's a very good value combination. Only slightly better than the APUs but if you are looking for the absolute lowest possible spend then the 3300X is the pick of choice for this situation.

It's a shame that the 3300x was the beginning of the availability apocalypse we're experiencing now. Even when it launched before all the latest generation CPUs and GPUs, it was near impossible to find at MRSP if at all.

[Kisai]

On 12/4/2020 at 3:12 AM, porina said:

You'd be stupid to pick Ryzen 5000 unless you know why you need a Ryzen 5000. No doubt, if you want the best generally performing x86 CPU at a given core count today, that is where you go. How many people fall into that category? For sure there will be many, but as a proportion of the enthusiast market, it is still small. If you're not after "the best" then everything else, even Intel, remains a viable option using whatever biased value metric you pick. Zen 2 is still a great option. Zen 3 still needs lower models released before it can be considered a wider option.

 

I'll disagree. If you are buying a system that you intend to hang onto for 5+ years, you are better off buying the "best" or closest to it (eg the i9/R9 K part) and maxing it out. That's what I did when I built the system I have now both when it had the z87(2013) on DDR3 and the p35 (2007) on DDR2. I'm overdue to replace the system, but lack of availability of the AMD R9 parts and the i9 parts being kind of a joke for the price being asked just makes me want to wait until DDR5/PCIe5 comes out. But I can't see holding onto this until 2023. I am running headfirst into usage cases which require either a dual-gpu system and the CPU-only solutions don't scale. I'm only surviving on this platform for now as Haswell supports AVX2. AMD does not support AVX512 on current parts, and may be discontinuing the AM4+/DDR4/PCIe4 platform soon, which also gives me pause to buying something on this platform unless I don't intend to upgrade it.

 

 

 

 

On 12/3/2020 at 5:08 PM, Trik'Stari said:

Do people actually expect good performance out of OEM machines? Because that makes me sad.

  Reveal hidden contents

I've worked on Dell, Lenovo, Apple, and HP machines for a while. None of them use thermal paste that is what I would describe as "adequate", in either their application method, or consistency. ALL of them have the consistency, at best, of chewing gum. At least that's been my experience.

OEM machines are usually not designed for gaming, they are designed for stability, and one of the telling problems is that the chassis are designed to be as small as possible. The exception being the high end Alienware-like systems which also end up being overpriced relative to just building it yourself. Like I would absolutely not buy a system that "requires a liquid cooling solution" pre-built, because you can see how quickly that goes wrong when shipped. However unlike your white-box PC's, Dell and HP systems are usually over-engineered for being shipped. Like every HP and Dell Desktop that got recycled had additional cooling shrouds and GPU/CPU retaining clips/mounts that usually made replacing those parts much more of a pain than a whitebox system.

 

 

[leadeater]

10 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

I guess I’m saying without windows multitask issues multi thread likely wouldn’t have even been developed.

I hope you realize Unix has threading as well? This wasn't developed for Windows or because of Windows. Threads exist because it's faster to switch between threads than it is processes and threads share the same virtual memory space so it's also about memory management too. When you switch between a thread or a process that is a Context Switch, when you Context Switch between processes the CPU TLB and some caches are flushed however when you Context Switch between Threads the TLB is not flushed so it is both faster and has minimal performance and cache hit impact.

[Rym]

Well the cpu is both an engineering sample and appears to be 0.5GHz slower than it's rated single core performance speed.

 

Coupled with the fact that it's in a prebuilt from HP, I'd take the results with a truck of salt and wait for reviews.

[Akolyte]

On 12/4/2020 at 7:17 AM, HairlessMonkeyBoy said:

If Intel can't compete, it's bad news for everyone. Less competition always means less innovation and more stagnation.

I can remember when we said the same thing about AMD.  I'm not saying it's good Intel can't compete, but it's good the tables have turned.  

 

Hopefully Intel uses these as a motivation to improve their processors.  A lot of organisations are partnering nowadays, and I think Intel is going to have to develop strategic partnerships with companies like Nvidia or Samsung or something like that to regain their footing in the desktop processor market.