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Comment by perryh2 | Hacker News Reader

The i7-7700K has only 4 cores. The comparison with the 6900K is more fair.

6900K has 40 PCIE lanes and that's raison d'etre of this chip. So it is not really fair to compare the more expensive chip and then ignore exactly that thing, that makes it expensive.

Many more people care about core count than PCI-E lanes… Core count is the probably the most important thing about a CPU.

Not if you game, develop, or anything else where single thread is more important. If core count is the most important thing about a CPU then everyone would be buying bulldozer with its "8" cores.

Bulldozer is just old at this point.

Why is single thread more important in development? Large project builds typically spawn as many compiler processes as there are CPU cores.

If you want to keep these 8 cores busy, you need I/O to feed them.

Otherwise, your cores will be either waiting for something or just getting hot running synthetic benchmarks.

What I/O are you going to do with all these PCI-E lanes? 16 for a graphics card, 4 for an NVMe SSD if you have one (still 2x as expensive as a SATA SSD at the same capacity), a couple for a network card maybe… The only reason to have ~40 lanes is multi-GPU setups, which are absolutely not necessary to keep 8 cores busy.

Where I live, NVMe and SATA drives are at the same price and many boards come with two M.2 slots (plus of course you can put additional drive with adapter into plain old PCIE slot). Network card or two, maybe thunderbolt port or two...

All the other chips have 16 PCI-E lanes, which you max out just with the graphic card.

Intel's desktop (not X99) boards have some extra lanes on the chipset, Ryzen will be a similar setup. (Also graphics cards perform fine with 8 lanes, the performance difference from 16 is tiny)

Where I live, the price of a 256GB NVMe drive == 512GB SATA drive :(

> The comparison with the 6900K is more fair.

It's also pointless if consumers will be choosing between a 7700K and the closest equivalent Ryzen part.

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