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Intel Announces 9th Gen Core CPUs: Core i9-9900K (8-Core), i7-9700K, & i5-9600K
Among many of Intel's announcements today, a key one for a lot of users will be the launch of Intel's 9th Generation Core desktop processors, offering up to 8-cores on Intel's mainstream consumer platform. These processors are drop-in compatible with current Coffee Lake and Z370 platforms, but are accompanied by a new Z390 chipset and associated motherboards as well. The highlights from this launch is the 8-core Core i9 parts, which include a 5.0 GHz turbo Core i9-9900K, rated at a 95W TDP.
[...] Leading from the top of the stack is the Core i9-9900K, Intel's new flagship mainstream processor. This part is eight full cores with hyperthreading, with a base frequency of 3.6 GHz at 95W TDP, and a turbo up to 5.0 GHz on two cores. Memory support is up to dual channel DDR4-2666. The Core i9-9900K builds upon the Core i7-8086K from the 8th Generation product line by adding two more cores, and increasing that 5.0 GHz turbo from one core to two cores. The all-core turbo is 4.7 GHz, so it will be interesting to see what the power consumption is when the processor is fully loaded. The Core i9 family will have the full 2MB of L3 cache per core.
[...] Also featuring 8-cores is the Core i7-9700K, but without the hyperthreading. This part will have a base frequency of 3.6 GHz as well for a given 95W TDP, but can turbo up to 4.9 GHz only on a single core. The i7-9700K is meant to be the direct upgrade over the Core i7-8700K, and although both chips have the same underlying Coffee Lake microarchitecture, the 9700K has two more cores and slightly better turbo performance, but less L3 cache per core at only 1.5MB per.
Intel also announced refreshed 8 to 18 core high-end desktop CPUs, and a new 28-core Xeon aimed at extreme workstation users.
Related:
Intel Teases 28 Core Chip, AMD Announces Threadripper 2 With Up to 32 Cores
AMD Threadripper 2 Available Starting on August 13
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Tuesday October 09 2018, @07:46AM (13 children)
There cannot be such a thing as a "mainstream" 8-core CPU. Look at your average user - they have some application open that might make serious use of 1, or at most 2 cores. Toss in another one to handle background work by the OS, and you're done. Even then, those 2-3 cores will spend most of their time idle.
As a technical user - yesterday I had half-a-dozen background tasks running, in addition to working normally - I was maybe making half-decent use of 4 cores. Realistically, though, my background tasks were limited by disk and/or network throughput, so the CPU was definitely not the limiting factor.
tl;dr: WTF are all those cores supposed to do outside of a server? In the new Intel line-up, anything over the lowest two options will be completely wasted in any end-user device.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Tuesday October 09 2018, @07:48AM
Damn, knew i should have kept the scare quotes.
Actually, you know what? I will write "mainstream 16-core" without scare quotes next year when AMD debuts it.
And here's your mainstream use case... uh... streaming your video game in 4K while using
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(Score: 4, Funny) by Arik on Tuesday October 09 2018, @07:51AM
The extra 6.5 CPUs are for the nice chaps at MI5.
You don't want the commies to win, do you?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by choose another one on Tuesday October 09 2018, @09:06AM (3 children)
> Look at your average user - they have some application open that might make serious use of 1, or at most 2 cores.
And one of those applications will be a web browser, with multiple tabs open, almost guaranteed. And because today's ad-polluted web takes so fricken long to load a page (I swear pages loaded quicker when I had a 14.4k modem), many of them will still be loading pages while the user looks at another tab and then switches back when the page has, probably, loaded.
Source - watching the kids, the wife, and jsut looking in front of me. Biggest CPU hog - chrome, biggest memory hog - chrome, tabs open - double figures, most of the damned time. God forbid chrome crashes, because reloading everything makes the machine unusable for several cups of coffee.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 09 2018, @12:47PM
Thanks to the whole webapps mentality, web browsers have become virtual machines.
Never mind that CPUs are rarely utilized to capacity unless the dataset can fit inside cache.
This because reading anything from ram, never mind HDD/SSD, will have the CPU sit idle for "ages".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 10 2018, @12:01AM
Sounds like you really need an SSD. Trust me, once you upgrade from an HDD, you can't go back. NAND flash is even almost reasonably priced by now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 14 2018, @06:01AM
Step 1. Install Firefox
Step 2. Install umatrix addon
Step 3. Enjoy faster web experience
(Score: 3, Interesting) by richtopia on Tuesday October 09 2018, @01:14PM (3 children)
Then why are mobile processors cranking up the number of cores? It feels like all phones are octacore now, and while some of it may be bloat I can't imagine the budget phones shipping with any more than required.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bob_super on Tuesday October 09 2018, @04:19PM (2 children)
There is a battery benefit to staying in deep sleep as long as possible, then firing up the CPU to do everything that's waiting as fast as you can before going back to sleep.
Which is totally irrelevant to the fact that "my phone has more core than yours, and higher benchmarks in games you don't play because you only check FB/twit/inst/porn, so it's better" is the actual driving force for more cores.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday October 09 2018, @09:01PM (1 child)
Most phones have different cores for different purposes. For example, 4 performance cores and 4 lower power cores. Or 2 performance cores, 2-4 regular cores, and 4 lower power cores.
DynamIQ is the successor to big.LITTLE [wikipedia.org] and can allow weirder configurations [anandtech.com]:
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(Score: 3, Informative) by bob_super on Tuesday October 09 2018, @09:17PM
A good read:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/08/p-is-for-power-how-google-tests-tracks-and-improves-android-battery-life/ [arstechnica.com]
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Wednesday October 10 2018, @02:49AM
By "mainstream" that means it fits into Intel's standard desktop socket, and not their stupidly expensive "charge more just because we can" workstation socket. On the other hand, that also means you lose features such as ECC. Though if you want ECC, I'm sure there's a Xeon somewhere in the lineup that's almost exactly the same but costs about three times as much.
(Score: 2) by exaeta on Wednesday October 10 2018, @05:04AM (1 child)
Yeah no. Stay in the dark ages if you like, but programmers *should* write multithreaded code. The reason we haven't is laziness and lack of multicore systems. As core count rises, the benefits of multithreading will increase, which will result in multithreading becoming more common. The way forward is multithreading. Since we are hitting the shrinking limit, I also announce a new law: The number of cores on a "mainstream CPU" will double approximately every 2 years.
In
The Government is a Bird
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 14 2018, @06:04AM
but powershell multithread support is quite basic at the moment so why bother just hammer it in one