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posted by martyb on Tuesday June 20 2017, @09:06AM   Printer-friendly
from the competition++ dept.

Intel's initial Skylake-X chips, including the 10-core i9-7900X, have been reviewed:

Core i9-7900X performs well in our productivity, workstation, and HPC tests. The mesh-imposed disparities aren't as pronounced in those benchmarks. But we also have re-run Ryzen 7 1800X benchmarks to think about. Pressure to size up has pushed AMD's flagship down to $460, less than half of what a Core i9-7900X would cost. While Intel may capture the top 1% of high-end enthusiasts with Skylake-X, everyone else has to consider whether Ryzen may be the smarter buy.

Moreover, AMD's upcoming Threadripper CPU has to have Intel worried. How do we know? The X299 motherboards we used needed firmware updates to address very serious performance issues right up until launch. Intel didn't seem nearly as ready for Skylake-X's introduction as we'd expect. A number of Core i9s with even more cores won't be ready until later this year. However, it looks like Intel couldn't get the four-, six-, eight-, and 10-core models out fast enough. They'll ship later this month.

Unfortunately, this story won't be ready to wrap up until we have Threadripper to compare against. Given Core i9-7900X's high price and performance caveats, enthusiasts should probably hold off on a purchase until we know more about the competition, even if Skylake-X looks like a bigger step forward than Intel's past HEDT designs.

VERDICT

Intel's Skylake-X-based Core i9-7900X weighs in with 10 Hyper-Threaded cores and architectural enhancements that benefit many workstation-class workloads, such as rendering and content creation. The processor struggles in some games compared to its predecessor, failing to match the [10-core] Core i7-6950X in several titles.

While the i9-7900X is generally an improvement over Intel's previous 10-core high end desktop (HEDT) chip, the i7-6950X, Skylake-X runs hotter and is significantly more expensive than its 8-core AMD Ryzen counterparts. Under full load, the i9-7900X used about 149 W, while the previous-gen i7-6950X uses just 111 W and AMD's Ryzen 1800 X is at 92 W. AMD's Threadripper chips will have more PCIe lanes than Intel's Skylake-X line. Ryzen also supports ECC RAM while Intel disables it to differentiate its HEDT chips from workstation/business Xeons. The TDPs of AMD's 10-16 core Threadripper and Intel's 12-18 core Skylake-X CPUs have not been confirmed.

For about a quarter of the price of the i9-7900X, you can get the Ryzen 5 1600X, which often holds its own against Intel's monster chip.


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  • (Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Tuesday June 20 2017, @10:52AM (5 children)

    by opinionated_science (4031) on Tuesday June 20 2017, @10:52AM (#528416)

    Competition would be nice, Intel is *so* expensive compared to AMD.

    Having said that , it would be *nice* if AMD could put AVX-512 on one of their new CPU's, as that seems to be the only thing keeping Intel an exclusive at the high-end.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Tuesday June 20 2017, @11:09AM (3 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday June 20 2017, @11:09AM (#528418) Journal

    Who uses AVX-512?

    Which flavors of AVX-512 [anandtech.com] do they use?

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    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday June 20 2017, @03:24PM (1 child)

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Tuesday June 20 2017, @03:24PM (#528496) Homepage
      And all of that's after AVX2, which was after AVX, which was after SSE4, which was after SSSE3. which was after SSE3, which was after SSE2, which was after SSE, which was after MMX, ....

      Why does anyone trust Intel to design a SIMD instruction set any more, they apparently can't get it right even after half a dozen rewrites.
      (Not that I trust them to design a general purpose CPU instruction set either.)
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      • (Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2017, @03:50PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2017, @03:50PM (#528522)
        You may want to look into ARM's SVE ISA (ARM SVE [arm.com]).

        One really big problem with Intel's SIMD ISAs is that the vector length (SIMD width) is a fixed constant for each ISA version. So, AVX2 is 256 bits wide, and AVX-512 is.. 512 bits wide. All software needs to be at least recompiled, perhaps even re-written.

        ARM took a much better approach with SVE, and made it scalable from 128-bit to 2048-bit in increments of 128-bits. So, code properly-written with the ISA will scale it's performance for new hardware that isn't even out yet. That's a very future-looking ISA, something Intel is historically _terrible_ at.
    • (Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Tuesday June 20 2017, @09:14PM

      by opinionated_science (4031) on Tuesday June 20 2017, @09:14PM (#528729)

      xeon phi - 3D FFT - electrostatic calculations...

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by rleigh on Tuesday June 20 2017, @05:26PM

    by rleigh (4887) on Tuesday June 20 2017, @05:26PM (#528601) Homepage

    Last I read, AVX512 uses so much power they have to throttle the CPU when it's used, which seems to negate its advantages when 256 doesn't cause the same effect.