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Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

What they are not mentioning is that the performance of the Intel Core i7-7700K is actually also identical to the Intel Core i7 4790K, which was launched in 2014 and is 3 generations old and is nothing more than an overclocked Intel Core i7 4770K which is from 2013. We basically haven't seen any improvements for this series of chips in years except for a bit of overclocking with 4970K and now 7770K.

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>... the Intel Core i7 4790K, which was launched in 2014 and is 3 generations old and is nothing more than an overclocked Intel Core i7 4770K which is from 2013

The 4770k didn't support VT-d, whereas the 4790k did. The 7700k has a much faster bus speed, and supports up to 64 GB of DDR4 memory.

I know these are small changes, but they make a difference. For instance, I have a 4790K because I wanted IOMMU (VT-d). I wanted an ITX build, but I went with micro-atx because I needed 4 dimms of ram to reach 32 GB. With a 7700k I could have an ITX build with IOMMU and 32 GB of ram.

Here's the ARK comparison: https://ark.intel.com/compare/75123,80807,97129

I don't know if the 7700k actually supports VT-d, but I would guess it does. I wouldn't actually buy one until I knew it supported VT-d though.

A question as I'm not that familiar with the Intel terminology: What does it mean that they dropped the "SmartCache"? Is the newer cache not smart anymore or did it just become standard? Or is Smart actually worse?

I don't think they actually dropped SmartCache. SmartCache is just a way of saying that all of the cores share the same cache space. (Generally, the cache is divided equally among each core for multi-core processors.) The Kaby Lake architecture is basically the same as the Devil's Canyon architecture with some minor tweaks, so there is basically no chance they changed how caching works, as that would be a really major change. Chances are the person in charge of adding information to ARK doesn't have the ability to release or verify all of the info yet.

it seems to be 10% faster and use 15% less power, so that's something.

source (german): https://www.computerbase.de/2017-01/intel-kaby-lake-test-cor...

It is only faster based on its higher clock speed. I overclock my 4790Ks to a base of 4.4GHz so I am already exceeding 7700K speeds based on 2013 technology. Yes at a higher power draw but it doesn't really add up to much cost.

Yes but the later models can be clocked even higher. That's one of the benefits of a smaller lithography node - faster transistor switching times.

Guess I will keep my 4770k for a while. This + management engine + nvidia demanding that you log in for parts of their drivers on windows, I am actually starting to miss a strong amd a bit.

Maybe it's time to jump ship again.

> the performance of the Intel Core i7-7700K is actually also identical to the Intel Core i7 4790K

false

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