Intel's flagship 10th-gen desktop CPU has 10 cores, reaches 5.3GHz

https://www.engadget.com/intel-10th-gen-s-series-desktop-cpu-10900k-130000913.html

by redm • 6 years ago

223 328 6 years ago

bzb3• 6 years ago

Once again crushing the competition in single core performance, which is what matters.

ido2• 6 years ago

Matters for whom? For a lot of use cases (web servers, compiling, databases...) having lots of cores matters (and total = performance of core * number of cores), for others it doesn't.

globular-toast7• 6 years ago

No, it does not matter. That's a common misconception. If you double your core count you can run double the number of threads in the same amount of time. That's it. If you double your single core speed you can still run double the number of threads in the same amount of time or the same amount of threads in half the time.

Single core performance is always preferable for CPUs.

The CPU manufacturers basically conned everyone into thinking multi-core was "good enough". Software people who knew what they were talking about back in the day called them out on it but nobody listened. Now here we are on Hacker News in 2020 and people still not understanding this.

SketchySeaBeast• 6 years ago

Depends on workload, and we've seen that with the latest round of AMD offerings. As a gamer, yes, but that's really it.

gpm7• 6 years ago

Are there actually games that take advantage of a CPU this fast? I would imagine that all the game developers would be targeting the more modest hardware that most of their players actually have.

dralley2• 6 years ago

The gap is pretty small, even now, and Zen 3 comes out in a few months.

The value proposition of these chips is pretty bad, as well. Enormous power and cooling requirements, short-lived motherboard sockets, and sheer price/performance ratio are all not great in comparison.

mschuetz• 6 years ago

/s ?

For my computer graphics and processing work, multithreaded tasks scale amazingly well with the number of cores so single core performance doesn't matter all that much. A single thread isn't even be able to process all the data that's streamed from an SSD. I need three threads just to process/prepare the data in the background, in addition to the main thread that keeps rendering.

I suspect it's only a matter of time until multithreading is a must for games. The additional programming effort may not have paid off if players only have 2 or 4 core CPUs, but now that 8 cores with 16 threads are increasingly common, it's going to make a difference.

ido2• 6 years ago

AAA games have all but required quad cores (or at least 2c/4t) for years now. I think a lot of games already scale well to 4c/8t today.

fomine3• 6 years ago

It depends on workloads. Computer graphics and processing work may be easier to remove single-threaded bottlenecks.

kevin_thibedeau• 6 years ago

... for gamers playing single-threaded games.

ajross• 6 years ago

To be fair, that's exactly the target market for high end desktop CPUs like this. This isn't a datacenter part, and other parallel workloads tend not to make up much share of the personal workstation market.

If you want to max out gaming benchmarks right now, this is your CPU. And there are a decent number of people who do, so heavily tuning existing dies (I mean, let's be honest, this a rebinned and overclocked 10900X) makes sense.

paulmd13• 6 years ago

When people say "single-threaded performance" they don't mean literally one single thread will ever be used. The single-core performance is a proxy for performance-per-core and that's a certainly a very important number.

Intel's per-core performance is decently higher in gaming, between their lower latency giving them slightly higher IPC in gaming tasks[1] (as these are latency sensitive) and the much higher all-core clocks they are pushing (at least 10% higher than AMD at present). That still gives them an edge in gaming, although certainly much less of an edge against Zen2 than it was against Zen1 (which was much worse than people were willing to admit at the time, people at the time were benching it with a GTX 1080 (the fastest card available at the time) at 1440p and 4K and claiming there was "no noticeable difference", but faster GPUs showed the weakness).

I think the 10700F looks good, 4.6 GHz all-core 8C16T part for under $300 looks compelling for gaming customers if you can keep it cool. The 10900K fills the "I want the top gaming performance first and foremost, with as many cores as I can get, and I'm not super concerned about budget" but is definitely on the expensive side. Other than that, nothing terribly impressive here IMO, the other chips fall into a range between "not fast enough" and "not cheap enough".

[1] https://www.techspot.com/article/1876-4ghz-ryzen-3rd-gen-vs-...

specto• 6 years ago

Not really... If you look at the FPS numbers, sure AMD is slightly lower. However AMD can also perform other functions like encoding/decoding. If you want pure FPS, sure Intel will win. For general computing AND gaming, AMD wins every time per dollar.

tpmx6• 6 years ago

It is what matters to web browsing performance.

Web browsing is no longer a "light" thing to do. You need solid integer single core computing performance to have a snappy browsing experience.

AFAIK, there is not yet a web browser core that can parallelize tasks in a meaningful way.

gpm7• 6 years ago

Mozilla has been making pretty good progress with parallelization of firefox with their oxidation project. All browsers are splitting different tabs into different processes which means they are taking advantage of multithreading if you have more than one compute intensive tab/window open.

zozbot2344• 6 years ago

AFAIK, there is not yet a web browser core that can parallelize tasks in a meaningful way.

Firefox is getting there. The CSS style engine is parallelized already, and graphical compositing+rendering will follow shortly (already enabled experimentally in some configurations). Other parts of the browser will be next, including the DOM.

SomeoneFromCA4• 6 years ago

I have a crappy old Celeron 847 laptop, and my browsing experience is very much okay, not that different from even i3-8100. Yeah, I do sometimes hit very heavy sites, like bloomberg.com, but overall, experience is very much satisfactory.

zrm2• 6 years ago

It is what matters to web browsing performance.

Have a look at the web benchmarks though (starting at Mozilla Kraken 1.1):

https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2263?vs=2520

loufe• 6 years ago

While I agree this post should be downvoted I do think it's worth mentioning at least two different reasons why higher clock speed would push me to intel this generation: AutoCAD and Europa Universalis IV. Those are my two principal demanding softwares where they cannot see any real means of moving past single core for the vast majority of processing.

anthony_doan2• 6 years ago

We should all wait for real world testing. IIRC AMD and Intel test their performance differently.

Intel tend to give turbo performance which can only run for so long before heat becomes a problem.

sq_5• 6 years ago

Looks like GN already has a video out, so I imagine the rest of the big hardware channels will follow along quickly. Don't have time to watch GN's video now, but I bet they'll have taken a nice in-depth look at the performance.

lawrenceyan• 6 years ago

I think part of the reason why you may be being downvoted has to do with the tone you're using in making your statement as well as the newness of your account.

Also, though you're statement is technically correct, it fails to account for the nuance that increasingly across all applications, not just gaming, multi-threaded processing performance is becoming the far more important benchmark to look at.

ksec5• 6 years ago

crushing...

crushing adjective [usually before noun] used to emphasise how bad or severe something is

I had to check the dictionary just in case. And in this case neither was it technically correct, or downvoted because of the tone. I downvoted it because it was factually wrong.

Zen 2 actually has better IPC than Skylake in many cases, on a sustained single thread performance they are likely to be on a similar level despite having a slightly lower clock speed disadvantage on a much lower TDP.

Hardly crushing.

redisman• 6 years ago

Just the fact that it's yet another socket for basically the same process is insane. On AM4 I've been able to use their low-end to very-high end CPUs for the last several years and most likely will be able to use the ones coming out this year too.

zamadatix2• 6 years ago

It'll be interesting to see what Intel looks like in performance after they get past their 14 nm node for HEDT.

Dunedan• 6 years ago

This article states the following power consumption:

The 10900K has a 125-watt TDP, for example, while AMD's Ryzen 9 3900X's is just 105-watts.

My understanding from other articles (like [1]) is however that Intel had to _massively_ increase the amount of power the CPU consumes when turboing under load:

Not only that, despite the 125 W TDP listed on the box, Intel states that the turbo power recommendation is 250 W – the motherboard manufacturers we’ve spoken to have prepared for 320-350 W from their own testing, in order to maintain that top turbo for as long as possible.

Somehow it feels like back in the Pentium 4 days again.

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/15758/intels-10th-gen-comet-l...

johncalvinyoung• 6 years ago

Came here to post the more-helpful Anandtech article.

anthony_doan2• 6 years ago

Didn't we have XDR ram around that time?

celim307• 6 years ago

How the tables have turned since the and bulldozer days

close04• 6 years ago

It looks almost identical to the AthlonXP/64 vs Pentium 4 days when Intel just kept bumping the clocks and power consumption. Until they came out with Conroe.

Jim Keller might be doing just that with Intel right now. I only hope whatever they come up with, AMD is ready and able to keep up. Otherwise we're going to see a rerun of the following period too: Intel tweaking the same architecture for years at a time, and squeezing low single digit performance improvements that come with questionable security sacrifices and deeply unpleasant sticker prices.

jpgvm• 6 years ago

The real draw under turbo is likely much higher. My i9-9900k for instance has a rated TDP of 95W but it can only boost to about 4.5Ghz all-core when limited to that TDP.

I run it at a 5.2ghz all-core overlock and it pulls nearly 200W under load. (yes, beefy watercooling). From memory it was around 150W @ 5ghz but I haven't played around with the OC settings for a while after I got it tuned right.

wuunderbar• 6 years ago

What's your watercooling setup? Not AIO I presume?

winter_blue• 6 years ago

What sort of water cooling setup do you have? From all that I've read, the typical AIO water cooling setup is only barely better than a high-end air/fan cooling setup.

lostmsu3• 6 years ago

That sounds to be by design, and matches my expectations at least: they claim all-core turbo 3.6 base freq + 1.1 turbo.

When you overclock, no wonder you get more power draw than the official spec says.

xxs7• 6 years ago

Intel's TDP is just at base clock which Intel keeps at 3.7GHz. Pretty it's close to a hoax.

Power increases linearly with frequency and squarely with voltage. Higher freq. needs higher voltage. This applies to pretty much any CPU/GPU. Also AVX loads are significantly more power hungry.

230W would be a low estimate for a fully clocked one.

stcredzero2• 6 years ago

Power increases linearly with frequency and squarely with voltage.

Going by the common use of "squarely," the power usage might also be interpreted as being linearly with voltage. Rather, I understood you meant that power increases proportional to the voltage squared.

(For the lurkers: Friction increases proportional to velocity squared, as does kinetic energy. These are all quite useful things to know, and should be part of the takeaways from your basic science education.)

DeathArrow5• 6 years ago

It would be interesting if someone would take an Intel CPU and an AMD CPU and calculate the electricity bill difference someone would pay in a year considering 40 hours / week run time.

magila6• 6 years ago

AMD's not really any better when it comes to fudging specs. At least Intel CPUs actually limit their sustained power draw to the TDP when running in their factory default configuration, even if enthusiast motherboards usually override it.

AMD CPUs OTOH run significantly higher power than their spec'd TDP right out-of-the box. For example, that "105 W" 3900X actually ships with a power limit of 142 W and it is quite capable of sustaining that under an all-core load.

AMD's turbo numbers are also pure fantasy. If AMD rated turbo frequencies the same way Intel did that 3900X would have a max turbo of 4.2 or 4.3 GHz instead of 4.6 GHz. When Intel says their CPU can hit a given turbo frequency they mean it will actually hit that and stay there so long as power/temperature remains within limits. Meanwhile AMD CPUs may-or-may not ever hit their max turbo frequency, and if they do it's only for a fraction of a second while off full load.

The outrage over Intel CPU's power consumption is pretty silly when you realize that the only reason AMD CPUs don't draw just as much is because their chips would explode if you tried to pump that much power into them. If you care about power consumption just set your power limits as desired and Intel CPUs will deliver perfectly reasonable power efficiency and performance.

throwaway2048• 6 years ago

40% fudging is still significantly better than 100% or 200%

dralley2• 6 years ago

>AMD CPUs OTOH run significantly higher power than their spec'd TDP right out-of-the box. For example, that "105 W" 3900X actually ships with a power limit of 142 W and it is quite capable of sustaining that under an all-core load.

I'm pretty sure you've got that exactly reversed, AMD's power draw tends to stay closer to the rated TDP than Intel's.

>The outrage over Intel CPU's power consumption is pretty silly when you realize that the only reason AMD CPUs don't draw just as much is because their chips would explode if you tried to pump that much power into them. If you care about power consumption just set your power limits as desired and Intel CPUs will deliver perfectly reasonable power efficiency and performance.

I'm not even sure what this means. AMD CPUs are on a more advanced and physically smaller process, with smaller wires, and a different voltage-frequency-response curve. Of course they would "explode" if you try to pump them with voltages that the process isn't designed to operate with, that the Intel CPU with it's larger process can handle. But the power draw isn't really the "point" of the CPU -- performance is.

Imagine thinking that the Pentium 4 or Bulldozer was better than their contemporaries because they were capable of drawing incredible amounts of power.

sq_5• 6 years ago

AMD's turbo numbers are also pure fantasy.

I'm pretty certain that I remember watching videos from GN, LTT, or Bitwit (can't recall which) where they noted that AMD chips were turboing up to a few hundred MHz above the specced numbers.

jotm• 6 years ago

When Intel says their CPU can hit a given turbo frequency they mean it will actually hit that and stay there so long as power/temperature remains within limits.

Have you actually tried to do that? When Intel says their CPU can hit a Turbo frequency, it's usually pure fantasy because they can't actually do it within the power/temp constraints.

Yes, they'll get to 5-whatever GHz on maybe half the cores if you're lucky, but full all-core load at the top stated Turbo? No chip will stay there, it will throttle down, likely by a lot.

And AVX loads will bring it to, or close to, maximum non-turbo clocks, that's how hot they run.

It could maybe be done with extremely good cooling and undervolting, and completely removing power limits (in which case it will probably consume close to 500W if it doesn't fry something first :D).

egd• 6 years ago

This is the cycle with Intel, though. They innovate, blow out the market, and then stagnate until AMD or someone else comes out with an architecture that's a category improvement on whatever Intel's offering.

This looks like they're turning every nob to 11 on the current architecture to try to get something that they can sell until they can come up with whatever will succeed the Core line.

DeathArrow5• 6 years ago

This time it isn't AMD which gives them trouble but TSMC. Intel doesn't lack a good architecture but a good fabbing process.

AMD just has a good architecture and are using good fabbing facilities.

Intel can have the best architecture in the world but that won't matter much if they are stuck with their fabbing at the current 14 nm process.

segfaultbuserr• 6 years ago

Somehow it feels like back in the Pentium 4 days again.

What we've got here is actually the mysterious, long-overdued Pentium 5 (which was known for its greater-than 5 GHz clock speed and never released due to the huge heat dissipation issue). History repeats, but this time, it actually got released.

DeathArrow5• 6 years ago

Somehow it feels like back in the Pentium 4 days again.

Than maybe they'll come up with a core design again.

henriquez• 6 years ago

I'm surprised they _still_ don't have a working 10nm desktop chip. They're 5 years behind schedule (and still counting) at this point! This is just a reskinned 9900k with 2 more cores and a much higher (> 25%) TDP at 125-watts, which is a generously low estimate of how much power it will actually suck. I briefly had their "140 watt" 7820x chip (returned for refund) that would gladly suck down more than 200 watts under sustained load. Intel plays such games with their single core turbo at this point that the 5.3ghz means very little, and it's the same tired architecture they've been rehashing since Sandy Bridge (2011).

This is an incredibly poor showing and if I were an investor I would be seriously questioning the future of Intel as a company.

superpermutat0r• 6 years ago

I believe Jim Keller is currently at Intel, maybe they'll have some surprises soon.

oAlbe• 6 years ago

I've always been puzzled by this whole Jim Keller situation. Is one man literally the only reason we have technological advancements in microprocessors?

syshum• 6 years ago

Intel's problems are not soley tech related, though their missteps here have not helped the situation

Intel does not know how to compete from a marketing, sales, and business standpoint, for a few decades they only really competed with their own product line, now that they have actual competition in the market they are unable to react to it properly even if they had the tech stack to do so

chx• 6 years ago

I'm surprised they _still_ don't have a working 10nm desktop chip.

If the rumors are true there _never_ will be a 10nm desktop chip, the process is broken. It seems 7nm will be "it", late next year.

mobilio2• 6 years ago

Too late!

nimbius• 6 years ago

is this 5.3GHz with, or without spectre, RIDL, meltdown, zombieload, fallout, MDS, TAA, and whatever other mitigations for vulnerabilities inherent in Intel chips?

vasco• 6 years ago

Clock speed is clock speed, you're thinking about operations per cycle.

saiya-jin• 6 years ago

You are of course correct, but it's a very important point - theoretical performance on paper is +-meaningless, only real, end performance after things are set safely is relevant to normal use cases. Which is basically all of us.

Strangely, not all cpu reviews take this into consideration.

greggyb7• 6 years ago

You are correct. Just a nit: it's usually referred to as "instructions per cycle" or IPC, rather than "operations per cycle."

riazrizvi3• 6 years ago

So about 400,000X faster than my first computer console, the 8bit 1Mhz Atari 2600, which cost $200 at that, time 40 years ago. Or 600X faster than the 64-bit 80 MHz Cray-1 which was $8mm at the same time.

sixothree2• 6 years ago

My first computer was a TRS-80 Color Computer with 4KB. The pace of doubling has been a part of my life since home pong. And now a generation provides <20% boost over the previous leaves me with an uneasy feeling.

riazrizvi3• 6 years ago

I get excited as much about economic and eco-political axes in technology, with this multidimensional perspective there is still so much room to grow. Look at how interesting OS's became when Richard Stallman started to open source them. Look at the price difference between the Atari and Cray in terms of $/speed, albeit a 70's example. Chips are still in patent-impregnable territory, they are proprietary and boring. In the next years, if these technologies open up, we could see some amazing stuff...

ahefner• 6 years ago

The Atari ST was 16-bit and ran around 7 or 8 MHz. Maybe you're thinking of the 8-bit line (400/800/XL/XE).

riazrizvi3• 6 years ago

was thinking 2600 and typing ST, fixed it

moonchild3• 6 years ago

Frequency is no longer a good proxy for speed, what with advancements in ipc. Also, note that the amount of memory in a cray-1 is similar (within 1-2 orders of magnitude) to the amount of cache in a modern cpu.

wahern• 6 years ago

Frequency is still very much a good proxy for speed, especially in the context of a chip which has the same deep pipelines and sophisticated scheduling that made "frequency is no longer a good proxy for speed" a popular retort. The benefits of improved IPC are dwarfed by the frequency gains as compared to those older chips.

Symmetry2• 6 years ago

And the CPU in your Atari might have to chew over an instruction for several clock cycles while a modern CPU will often be able to sustain multiple instruction per cycle in good stretches of code.

zaptheimpaler2• 6 years ago

It feels like we are moving towards ARM becoming the primary consumer CPU, and x86/x64 being used to power only niche use cases (dev, audio/video, gaming etc.) or servers only. Can anyone working in the space confirm/deny?

greggyb7• 6 years ago

Define "moving toward". We're nowhere close to that at this point.

Skunkleton2• 6 years ago

Define "nowhere close"? Apple's cpu's are competitive with x86 when looking at low power applications. Microsoft has multiple examples of windows running on arm. This seems pretty close in the grand scheme of things.

zaptheimpaler2• 6 years ago

I'm asking more about whether that is the future direction, not how far along we are.

gsnedders5• 6 years ago

Aren't we? How many people's primary computing devices are ARM-based devices at this point? I know plenty of people who rarely touch a laptop, yet alone a desktop. Expansion of the computing market is mostly happening in developing markets through predominantly ARM-based devices too.

magicalhippo• 6 years ago

My Raspberry Pi 4 could be an entirely usable desktop replacement for casual usage if the GPU was a bit better.

My gf already uses her Samsung S8 as primary "computer". Only for a few things does she reach for her laptop, and that's mostly due to the screen and webpages not being mobile friendly.

ken• 6 years ago

Smartphones have been out-selling PCs for 10 years now. Nearly all of them are ARM. The median consumer CPU is a smartphone CPU.

ashtonkem• 6 years ago

Isn’t the open rumor that Apple is gonna start switching over their Mac line next year? Apple switching from Intel to Arm across the board would drastically change the situation practically overnight.

vbezhenar3• 6 years ago

There are ARM Windows laptops. I don't think that they are successful. So I don't really see ARM becoming the primary consumer CPU for computers. It might change in the upcoming years, when Apple will release ARM computers.

fortran772• 6 years ago

Well, if you consider phones, sure. But for people who still need desktop/laptop computers for gaming, programming, video editing, photo editing, and heavy business use (spreadsheets, desktop publishing, etc), then Intel is still, by far, in the lead.

antongribok• 6 years ago

So, $488 for 10x 3.7 GHz Intel vs. $409 for 12x 3.8 GHz AMD?

I'll take one AMD Ryzen 9 3900X, thanks MicroCenter!

paulmd13• 6 years ago

Base clocks are irrelevant on desktop, it's not Sandy Bridge days anymore. No modern (desktop) processor runs at baseclock in practice.

The 10900KF will do 4.8 GHz all-core at $472, the 3900X will do it at around 4-4.1 GHz[0]. AMD has a slight IPC advantage in productivity, Intel has a slight IPC advantage in gaming[1].

The market for the 10900K/KF is basically someone who wants the fastest gaming rig, but then as a secondary priority wants more cores for productivity. Kind of an overlap with the 3900X, sure, but the 10900K/KF will still outperform it in gaming, where the 3900X tilts a little more towards productivity.

There are of course exceptions, CS:GO loves Zen2's cache and Zen2's latency makes DAWs run like trash, so your specific task may vary.

I'd personally point at the 10700F as being the winner from the specs, 4.6 GHz all-core 8C16T with slightly higher IPC in gaming than AMD, for under $300. That's competitive with the 3700X: little higher cost, and more heat, but more gaming performance too. The 10900 series and 10600 series are a little too expensive for what they offer, the lower chips are too slow to really have an advantage.

But really it's not a good time to buy these anyway. Rocket Lake and Zen3 will probably launch within the next 6 months, if you can stretch another 6 months there will be discounts on Zen2 and more options for higher performance if you want to pay.

[0] https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/ryzen-9-3900x-overclock

[1] https://www.techspot.com/article/1876-4ghz-ryzen-3rd-gen-vs-...

fermienrico2• 6 years ago

These days you can't say anything positive about Intel even if it is factually true. I am personally excited about the 10900K and the competition with AMD is bringing Intel prices down.

People seem to have a deep hatred for Intel, exactly the way they had deep hatred for AMD (pre-Conroe days, when Intel released Conroe in 2005/06, people were rooting so hard for Intel, it was hard to find any positive comments about AMD). I don't get it. Both are multi-billion dollar companies and innovating like crazy. We can't just sit back, and feel the utter awe of what it takes to make computer chips whether it is Intel or AMD. You know, its engineers like anyone else - they have good intentions and work hard to make all of this possible, the fans have this egregious entitlement that is so infuriating and dismissive.

leetcrew4• 6 years ago

CS:GO loves Zen2's cache

what do you mean by this? I researched intel vs. amd gaming performance pretty extensively last summer, and I paid particular attention to csgo benchmarks. AFAIK, 9700k/9900k are a little faster than the 3900X in csgo at stock speeds, and a good bit faster on a typical overclock.

lanius• 6 years ago

Base clocks are irrelevant on desktop, it's not Sandy Bridge days anymore

Reading this makes me feel like I need to build a new PC now lol. Any idea what percentage of desktop PCs are still on Sandy Bridge?

kllrnohj10• 6 years ago

Base clocks are irrelevant on desktop

It's relevant for the TDP number.

I'd personally point at the 10700F as being the winner from the specs, 4.6 GHz all-core 8C16T with slightly higher IPC in gaming than AMD, for under $300

I think the 10700F would only be the winner if you have a motherboard that either isn't following Intel's recommendations for turbo or lets you ignore them.

Otherwise the 10700F's 4.6ghz all-core isn't going to happen with a 65W limit after unknown seconds. That TDP limit is going to really cripple that chip. Whether or not you can ignore that limit will I guess decide whether or not the i7-10700KF is worth the extra $50.

But the 9700 appears to be almost nonexistent. I think the 10700 will end up in the same camp. The 10700K will likely be the only chip with any meaningful coverage/reviews in the i7 lineup.

Bayart• 6 years ago

That's competitive with the 3700X: little higher cost, and more heat, but more gaming performance too.

I wouldn't call the cost « little higher » if you factor in the motherboard (and possibly the cooler). Any AM4 board will run a 3700X whereas Intel's using yet another socket for their new chips.

vonmoltke• 6 years ago

It's not fair to compare Intel's sticker price to Microcenter's heavily-discounted price.

andy_ppp• 6 years ago

What’s the betting that when Apple move to ARM processors AMD and Intel both start developing their own ARM CPUs. I have a feeling it’s going to be extremely hard for x86 to compete once Apple show the way on this.

makomk• 6 years ago

AMD were developing their own ARM CPU for a while. They dropped it to focus on Zen 2, and after looking at the results it's easy to see why.

zozbot2344• 6 years ago

Intel sold their XScale ARM design to Marvell.

kllrnohj10• 6 years ago

Why would they? Instruction set is basically irrelevant. Almost nothing about the CPU design has anything to do with ARM or x86 or whatever.

Apple may drag the OSX ecosystem kicking and screaming, battered & bloody over to ARM so Apple can control more of the stack, but why would that have any impact whatsoever outside of Apple's corner of the market?

ksec5• 6 years ago

This may be just good enough to hold off AMD from further gaining market shares on Desktop. For certain group of user that doesn't need a GPU, the iGPU included is a good enough solution.

One thing that bothers me a lot is the 2.5Gbps Ethernet that is supposed to come with those new Intel motherboard ( assuming MB vendors uses it ). Why not 5Gbps Ethernet? How much more expensive is it? It seems we still dont have a clear path on how to move forward from 1Gbps Ethernet. Personally I would have liked 10Gbps, but the price is still insanely expensive.

tylerhou2• 6 years ago

2.5 Gbps will be an intermediary standard for consumer ethernet applications because existing CAT5(e) cabling can usually carry 2.5 Gbps (but not 5 Gbps or 10 Gbps).

eropple2• 6 years ago

Cat6/Cat6a can, however, and that's become a standard run--so the 2.5G "stepping stone" doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

(House is a mix of Cat6a and optical/SFP+ 10G networking and it is tremendous.)

Dylan168074• 6 years ago

For 100 meters. A typical consumer doesn't need that much length, and can use higher speeds even over bad cables. Especially if the cables aren't bundled for a significant distance.

paulmd13• 6 years ago

CAT5e is not in-spec for 10 Gbps but it will usually do it for short runs. Under ten meters, worth a try. The official spec is 100m and the transceivers are pretty solid at pulling a signal out of the noise.

Personally I'm with the other guy, I think this is a dumb half-measure and we should just move straight to 10 Gbps. Right now the single biggest cost in your household multi-gig deployment will be switches, a switch with 4-8 10Gbase-T ports will run you around $500, and this figure is not really any cheaper with multi-gig. You are paying through the nose for something that is a watered-down version of the "real standard".

Say you have two switches, one is upstairs and one is downstairs, are you really going to drop $1000 on a half-baked deployment? People need to try it, figure out if their existing cable is stable enough for their needs (maybe that segment can run at 5gbit speeds and it can be 10 gbit on your machines and on the switch), and just pull cable where it's not.

ksec5• 6 years ago

Well yes, but there are also a whole lots of CAT6x cables. CAT6 is now close to 20 years standard, and CAT6A or in earlier cases CAT6e is now 12 years +. As a matter of fact within consumer Home usage distance CAT5e may well be good enough for 5Gbps as well.

Having 5Gbps End point gives you much more flexibility, instead we got 2.5Gbps. Unless the BOM cost made a lot of difference I dont understand this trade offs. Especially considering we have 802.11ax potentially offering 5Gbps+ and 802.11ay that runs faster then 10Gbps. We are coming in an age where a cheaper Wireless equipment is outrunning our wired counterpart.

p1necone11• 6 years ago

How many people actually have internet faster than 1Gbps? Transferring large files around on LAN is not a particularly common use case either. The small number of people that actually need > 1gb ethernet can always add an expansion card.

martinald• 6 years ago

It's actually a bit of a chicken and egg problem. ISPs can't offer it as there is no real way to push it to the customers from the router to the end user devices. Virgin Media in the UK's 1gigabit package is actually 1.2gbit after docsis overheads (they always overprovision it slightly for various reasons), but the router only has 1gig ethernet.

ineedasername• 6 years ago

Are the gigahertz wars making a comeback?

sq_5• 6 years ago

Seems to me that all Intel can do at this point with their 14nm++++ is pump the Ghz and power consumption (when actually turboed to that high clock) up as far as they can.

gsnedders5• 6 years ago

The power consumption isn't going up quite as quickly as we'd expect; we're seeing a return to high frequencies partly because we're seeing high-end CPUs manufactured on a vastly more mature process than we typically have part.

freeflight2• 6 years ago

20 years ago me would probably be kinda underwhelmed how we ain't all running 10 Ghz chips in 2020.

[0] https://hanweiconsulting.com/cpu-frequency-world-record-hist...

MageSlayer2• 6 years ago

Too bad they have only 2 channel memory controllers and same 32/32 L1 cache. That means all that power is still wasted waiting for memory (Max Memory Bandwidth 45.8 GB/s, seriously?). Not sure why feeling so excited about those processors.

vbezhenar3• 6 years ago

For typical desktop workloads memory bandwidth is not that important. They likely will release Xeon-W counterparts later with similar frequencies but higher memory channels and PCI-E lanes for those who need it.

MageSlayer2• 6 years ago

For typical desktop workloads memory bandwidth is not that important.

Perhaps, I need to take that as an axiom, right? i7 5820K was non-typical for that matter then.

And yes, Xeon-W with 5.3GHz frequency? Tell me more :)

kllrnohj10• 6 years ago

They also still only have 16 PCI-E lanes from the CPU, which is disappointing. Ryzen's 20 isn't exactly lavish, but it's enough for the pair of x16 for the GPU + x4 for the primary NVME drive.

jobseeker990• 6 years ago

So how is this possible now and not 5 years ago? Are there new discoveries that let us bring up the clock speed again?

(Will they go even higher in the future?)

hedora• 6 years ago

They’re basically factory overclocked.

Intel has been backed into a corner by AMD, so they’re pushing clockspeed over balancing against TDP and bus.

Also, the multi-year delays in the next process shrink gave them lots of time to improve yields and micro-optimize the fabrication generation these are running on.

api• 6 years ago

This is still inferior to AMD's high-end offerings in terms of price/performance and performance/watt, but it does have one edge: single-threaded performance. There are certain applications where that matters a lot. Other than those, I'd pass.

greendave• 6 years ago

Somewhat surprised at the lack of PCIe 4.0. Is there really no demand for more PCI bandwidth on high-end desktops?

Tenoke• 6 years ago

PCIe 4.0 is likely to be short lived given that PCIe 5.0 seems to be around the corner.

On the AMD side where they already have 4.0, few care for it (I do though - just ordered a mobo and processor that use it) - 4.0 nvmes aren't faster for common use cases, and it mostly matters when going multi-gpu which is only seen in some professional use (and even then you can use a threadripper and just have a lot of 3.0 lanes). Then next ~year ryzen 5000 which will require a new socket seems likely to already support 5.0. I'm guessing Intel will just altogether skip 4.0.

kllrnohj10• 6 years ago

There is, but keep in mind this is yet another refresh of Skylake, not really a "new" CPU.

Supposedly the new socket is PCI-E 4.0 capable, which the next CPU "Rocket Lake" will supposedly enable.

But since it's still 16 lanes from the CPU only, that means you'll only get PCI-E 4.0 to likely a single slot. And likely not any of the M.2 drives, which typically are connected to the chipset instead.

yxhuvud2• 6 years ago

Odds are that is coupled to either CPU architecture or mobo standard, and they didnt touch either.

You should go AMD if you want PCIe4 currently. Which is a bit funny as Intel sells certain peripherals that supports it.

dchyrdvh• 6 years ago

Does anybody need those 5.3 GHz at 300 watts? I believe the next big thing is "massively parallel distributed processing": thousands or maybe even millions of tiny processing units with their own memory and reasonable set of instructions run in parallel and communicate with each other over some sort of high bandwidth bus. It's like a datacenter on a chip. A bit like GPU, but bigger. I think this will take ML and various number crunching fields to the next level.

motoboi• 6 years ago

Those are desktop processors. Most applications won’t even use 64 cores. But I agree this is this future, but today faster single core will speed up your day a lot.

fortran772• 6 years ago

I can't wait for the Xeon version of this to be released. There have been unofficial reports.

gok• 6 years ago

I'm kind of surprised at this point that Intel didn't just bite the bullet and go with TSMC or Samsung for fabrication for a year or two until they figured their in-house sub-14nm story out.

unnouinceput4• 6 years ago

As desktop user I don't care about power consumption, I care very little that it has x% more power then last year processors (at least when the x < 100) because current processors have enough power for anything you throw at them, but what I do really care is this:

-Do they still pack that PoS Intel management inside the CPU? And are these new CPU still vulnerable to Meltdown? Because if any of those questions are answered with "yes" then no amount of cores, GHz and performance % is going to change my mind from Ryzen

millstone3• 6 years ago

I have no horse in the CPU race but I do have a different perspective here. I have a SFF home server with <100W cooling. I am compute-bound, have no discrete GPU, and have no interest in Meltdown as I run only trusted code. My box sports a 6-core i7 8700, and I am tempted by the 10-core i9 10900.

Why not AMD? Answer: iGPU. AMD's best iGPU offering seems to be the Ryzen 9 4900HS, which has fewer cores, and you can't just order it - it seems to be for OEMs only. So staying with Intel.

streb-lo• 6 years ago

Why do you need an iGPU for a home server? Compute? Wouldn't a discrete GPU be worth it in that case?

sdflhasjd2• 6 years ago

Well, power consumption is still kinda important on a desktop. All that power has to go somewhere and you need a cooler that can keep up or you'll be losing more performance from thermal throttling.

unnouinceput4• 6 years ago

Water cooling. Desktops can afford that space generously.

p1necone11• 6 years ago

Do they still pack that PoS Intel management inside the CPU?

Sadly AMD CPUs have something pretty similar too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Processo...

unnouinceput4• 6 years ago

I agree, it's a sad one. But compared to Intel's flurry of independent security incidents in past years, it's but a bucket in a lake.

I am not praising AMD, don't get me wrong, I am merely choosing the lesser evil. In this case the lesser evil happens to be better and cheaper. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Intel's flagship 10th-gen desktop CPU has 10 cores, reaches 5.3GHz

Related Stories