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Recently, Intel was rumored to be releasing 10 and 12 core "Core i9" CPUs to compete with AMD's 10-16 core "Threadripper" CPUs. Now, Intel has confirmed these as well as 14, 16, and 18 core Skylake-X CPUs. Every CPU with 6 or more cores appears to support quad-channel DDR4:
| Intel Core | Cores/Threads | Price | $/core |
|---|---|---|---|
| i9-7980XE | 18/36 | $1,999 | $111 |
| i9-7960X | 16/32 | $1,699 | $106 |
| i9-7940X | 14/28 | $1,399 | $100 |
| i9-7920X | 12/24 | $1,199 | $100 |
| i9-7900X | 10/20 | $999 | $100 |
| i7-7820X | 8/16 | $599 | $75 |
| i7-7800X | 6/12 | $389 | $65 |
| i7-7740X | 4/8 | $339 | $85 |
| i7-7640X | 4/4 | $242 | $61 (less threads) |
Last year at Computex, the flagship Broadwell-E enthusiast chip was launched: the 10-core i7-6950X at $1,723. Today at Computex, the 10-core i9-7900X costs $999, and the 16-core i9-7960X costs $1,699. Clearly, AMD's Ryzen CPUs have forced Intel to become competitive.
Although the pricing of AMD's 10-16 core Threadripper CPUs is not known yet, the 8-core Ryzen R7 launched at $500 (available now for about $460). The Intel i7-7820X has 8 cores for $599, and will likely have better single-threaded performance than the AMD equivalent. So while Intel's CPUs are still more expensive than AMD's, they may have similar price/performance.
For what it's worth, Intel also announced quad-core Kaby Lake-X processors.
Welcome to the post-quad-core era. Will you be getting any of these chips?
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Tuesday May 30 2017, @05:23PM (4 children)
Even assuming an MMO, where you're going to have a few more options that could be readily farmed off to a dedicated thread/core on top of the four examples of execution threads you gave (team comms, for instance), and maybe making some of the main threads (graphics and engine, perhaps?) multi-threaded in their own right, you might get up towards 8-10 threads, but 18? Even allowing for a few threads left over for background OS tasks, I'm not sure we're going to be seeing many games that can take full advantage of the 18 core monster - let alone its 36 threads - for quite some time, if at all.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday May 30 2017, @05:24PM
Basically only AAA games that explicitly have PC as a primary target, consoles tend to cap out at 4 cores.
Which is to say, not a lot.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday May 30 2017, @06:15PM
Like you pointed out, most people have other programs running at the same time. It's often overlooked in PC gaming benchmarks. VOIP being the big one. I often have a browser open too. So while most games only make good use of 3-4 threads that doesn't make an 8+ thread CPU useless for gaming. Zero random lurches or stutters from other processes is nice. Six core is pretty much the next step for gamers. Eight core is trying to future proof but probably not needed (yet).
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 30 2017, @07:02PM (1 child)
Why MMO? Most of the critical game logic, aside from display and control, is run on the server.
From my (admittedly genre-limited) experience, strategy games can make the most use of additional CPU resources. A modern strategy game AI can use as many cores as you can throw at it; here, the CPU (or sometimes the memory) is the bottleneck. Not to mention thousands or hundreds of thousands of individual units, each one requiring some low-level control routines.
In some strategy games I've played (Star Ruler 2...), late game on larger maps can become almost completely unplayable because the CPU just can't keep up. On the other hand, I've never had graphical stutter, even on combats with thousands of units shooting lasers and exploding all over the place (like on this screenshot [gog.com]).
TL;DR: AlphaGo is a computer controlled AI for a strategy game. Think about how many cores can it use.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday May 30 2017, @07:19PM
Agreed on the MMO. Single player first-person games can have "complex" AI to the point where you can't have dozens or hundreds of NPCs on a single map without causing slowdowns (compare that amount to your strategy games... like Cossacks: Back to War), and tend to break maps up with loading zones (for example, cities in Oblivion or Skyrim). Having more cores and RAM allows more AI and stuff to be loaded, which is beneficial for single-map stealth games with no loading zones that have all of the AI loaded and patrolling at the beginning.
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