Comment by 013a | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 013a | Hacker News Reader

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The i9 isn't new. Its a rebranded Skylake-X/KabyLake-X chip. This has been on their roadmap for over a year [1]; they just changed the name to trick consumers into thinking its something new.

The hype between here and reddit about i9 is astounding to me. You've been able to get an i7 in a 10 core variant for a year now [2]. Need 6 cores? Take a time machine back to Q3'11 and pick up an i7 3930k [3]. And if you needed twelve cores, you could buy Xeon [4]! Heck, go crazy, get 22 [5]!

The only difference is likely price; hopefully the i9 is cheaper.

Fundamentally, why you should not be excited about these things: They'll use the enthusiast motherboard socket/chipset, not the consumer socket. And they'll have a 140W TDP, whereas Ryzen has 95W max. These two things are what makes Ryzen so amazing. If you ignore these two things, then you might as well by Xeon; Intel has lead in that category for years and continues to.

[1] http://wccftech.com/intel-skylake-x-kaby-lake-x-q2-2017-road...

[2] http://ark.intel.com/products/94456/Intel-Core-i7-6950X-Proc...

[3] http://ark.intel.com/products/63697/Intel-Core-i7-3930K-Proc...

[4] http://ark.intel.com/products/91767/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-...

[5] http://ark.intel.com/products/93805/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-...

The problem is of course the fact that 6+ i7 chips don't actually fit the consumer motherboards, but you need to go to the server segment where MBs are significantly more expensive and lack a whole slew of additional features nice for desktop machines.

>server segment where MBs are significantly more expensive

False-ish

Single socket server boards are on par with home motherboards. They only become expensive when you start wanting 2+ NIC's and A LOT of sockets. But then yes your feature thing is mostly true.

> and lack a whole slew of additional features nice for desktop machines.

False-ish

Intel's server socket (for non E7's) is 2011v3 which is also their enthusiast socket. I dropped a XEON E5v4 2030 into a 2011v3 ""ethusiast board"" and it worked without a problem.

Sure my enthusiast board doesn't support ECC RAM, and I can't over clock a XEON. But a 2011v3 board in and of itself is only ~50-60 more then an EXTREME low end <$100 stock standard home user motherboard.

You get what you pay for if you want a dirt cheap board to drop a server class CPU into you can find it.

Motherboard price is square to the number of sockets. (This is actually accurate, look it up; and for somewhat good reason).

Once you move into 2+ sockets you're already paying $5000+ for a CPU so what's an extra $4000 for a main board?

I got to my inexpensive build by buying trailing edge hardware, still much faster than what I had, buy cheaper than current generation hardware.

You don't need to go to a server board for ECC - a lot of the X99 boards actually do support it. Not all of them (EVGA doesn't, a lot of Gigabyte boards don't) but a lot do (Asrock usually does).

And you can find motherboards in pretty much any price range except the barest of dirt cheap. There are motherboards like the GA-X99-SLI that regularly hit $125 or lower. Cheapest thing on Newegg right now is a $150 Asrock board that supports ECC.

The only price range that you "can't get" for X99 is the under-$100 price range, i.e. the super-shitty low-end chipsets. And you actually can get it if you are willing to take an open-box item. I paid $60 after tax for my last X99 board.

Also realize that most of the people who are bitching up a storm about X99's $150 motherboards likely turned around and paid $250 for an X370 board when Ryzen launched. I mean, you gotta get one of the nice ones with the external clockgen so you can get your $300 Samsung B-die memory kit to run stable, right? (but that's totally different! /s)

Problem is that you cannot have both via current (from 2011+ on) Intel route: high clock speed on the CPU(achieved by OC) AND ECC.

You want ECC you have to get Xeons.

You want OC you have to get regular mainstream K chips or enthusiast -E chips without ECC support.

I think the last chipset which let you OC Xeons and still use ECC was X58 on 1366 socket.

Disclaimer: I am not counting tiny BCLK OC available on Xeons.

Definitely true.

Tangent: a lot of people wonder who would pay $1700 for a 6950X. The answer I always give is "people want to do intensive work and gaming on the same system". Otherwise the 4/6C chips are better choices for the money.

The great weakness of that system is - as you note - the lack of ECC.

I strongly, strongly recommend building two different systems for this situation. Depending on your needs it can almost be more economical to do it this way. i3s (and now Pentiums) support ECC and make good ZFS servers. The 4C Xeons aren't too bad either. You can also do some cheap E5 Xeon builds using engineering samples. Many-core Xeons are more than sufficient for the kind of stuff you need ECC for, even at relatively low clock rates. A 10C at 2.4 GHz is roughly comparable to 6C at 4.13 GHz (I use mine in Handbrake). And uses 2/3 of the power to boot.

And then you can focus on gaming performance in your gaming system. Like 3x as much for a given level of performance.

It's a lot like laptops. You're going to spend a lot more if you insist on only owning one system that can do everything.

The segmentation here does suck, I would rather see it supported even on consumer hardware, but practically speaking I don't think Intel is going to change this any time soon. Even if AMD does.

(and note: unless the manufacturer is willing to stand behind ECC, Ryzens's "unofficial" ECC support holds about as much weight as using Intel's engineering samples)

Because ECC and OC are targeted at different audiences. If you want both... you don't understand one or the other.

ECC is to guarantee system stability. Solving rare event that become regular once you have hundreds of boxes running.

OC INCREASES system instability. You put more power into a chip, increasing the probability of incorrect or malformed answers.

Now both these scenarios are rare, especially for single box home enthusiasts. Generally if you have a stable OC you won't hit garbled instruction results. Likewise you may almost never have an error that ECC would present.

---

Having OC and ECC basically says, "I want to solve one extremely rare error while opening myself up to another!" This is an idiotically unsound decision.

You can (and should!) decrease error ratios while OCing by providing proper cooling.

Having ECC memory in an OC setup will increase its stability further - and there are perfectly valid reasons for overclocking, for example if you want more computing power than even a 22-core Xeon does not provide.

ECC can help you ensure that your OC is still stable. And these chips are optimized for power use in servers. There is often a lot of room for stable overclocking.

You're also not guaranteed perfect operation inside the CPU without an overclock, so if it's idiotic to combine OC and ECC, it's idiotic to use ECC at all.

Intel have a high end desktop chipset related to the server boards which is used in such cases.

X79, X99, both are related to equivalent server chipsets in C602 and C612 respectively. Yes boards are more expensive but the HEDT platform has all the features you'd expect of a consumer/enthusiast board. also the high end i7s are all met with equivalent non overclockable Xeon E5-1* processors

The i9 is most definitely something new.

It is the first desktop CPU to bring AVX512. If the code is designed for it, that by itself doubles the perf compared to AVX2 CPUs.

I look forward to porting my algorithms to 16 wide SIMD.

Of course it is something new. The supposition is that Intel just rebranded something they already had in the pipeline; something which they release every 18 months or so.

AVX512 was already planned for Cannonlake.

Mostly agree, but AMD's TDP estimates are slightly optimistic and in reality Ryzen's power usage is much closer to its Intel counterparts.

Do you have a source for that?

https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/AMD-Ryzen-7-1800X-R...

https://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2017/04/06/amd-ryzen-7-170...

http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/8072/amd-ryzen-7-1800x-cpu-...

http://hothardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-7-1800x-1700x-1700-...

(bear in mind the 5820K/6800K/6850K are 6C, the 5960X/6900K are 8C, and the 6950X is 10C)

Essentially AMD is rating their TDP under a very light load - like a single thread at full boost clocks. Under an all-core load they are running roughly 30% over TDP. Intel's TDP rating is much more generous - they aren't quite rating at full, nonstop AVX load (eg Prime95) but typical full-load consumption is 15% under their TDPs which leaves some headroom for intermittent AVX usage.

Anecdotal evidence: my 10C20T Haswell-E Xeon pulls ~60% of its rated TDP during a Handbrake x264 encoding run. My 6C12T 5820K Haswell-E gaming chip (overclocked to 4.13 GHz all-core at stock voltages) pulls 75% of its rated TDP during a similar Handbrake x264 run. And supposedly x264 is smart enough to use AVX, so that should be a realistic-but-high figure. My OC'd 5820K pulls 90% of its rated TDP during a Prime95 SmallFFT run.

It's still a huge gain compared to Bulldozer - but not quite as rosy a picture as AMD is trying to paint. They are equal with Haswell-E/Broadwell-E in most respects, not 40% ahead like AMD is rating them.

AMD is playing the same game in the GPU market too. AMD's RX 480/580 are rated for "GPU only" TDP (which they define to exclude memory/etc) but NVIDIA rates the whole card. In practice, AMD is ~30% above their official TDPs while NVIDIA is pretty much spot on.

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/RX_580_Nitro_Pl...

(RX 580 is rated at 185W TDP, GTX 1060 is rated at 120W TDP)

Thanks!

TDP is and always was an expressly manufacturer- and product-specific number, though. It mainly exists for OEMs to match parts up with the correctly sized heatsink.

That argument stops holding water when the manufacturer starts marketing around the superior power efficiency of their processors based on that same number.

paulmd already put up a list, so I won't repeat it. Ars Technica sums it up:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/03/amd-ryzen-review/

> Indeed, Ryzen's 95W TDP looks impressive compared to the 140W TDP of Intel's 6900K, a similar 8C/16T processor based on the Broadwell-E architecture. But in practice, Ryzen pulls just as much wattage from the wall as the 6900K, in some cases slightly more. Considering just how power-hungry Bulldozer was, that remains a significant achievement, even if it means that overclocking headroom isn't as high as some might have hoped.

Unfortunately AMD and Intel don't use the same definition for TDP (look up AMD APC). AMD's values are more related to average power consumption during whatever they consider to be typical use. Intel's values on the other hand are more about the upper limit of power usage, "how high can it go" sort of thing. Both the average power and maximum power are useful bits of info, but it's obviously confusing and opaque for the end-user. The only reason that I can think of why AMD hasn't reverted back is because it would highlight how their processors are relatively power inefficient compared to their competitor's.

http://www.amd.com/Documents/43761A_ACP_WPv7.pdf

Didn't Intel try to do the same thing with SDP?

Same with Atom-based Celerons/Pentiums, and Core M-based Core i3's and i5's, and more recently the Skylake "Gold" And "Platinum":

https://semiaccurate.com/2017/05/05/intels-new-scalable-xeon...

It's looking like with Moore's Law dying, Intel has just given up, and is instead trying to "innovate" with how to trick its customers to pay more for the same or weaker stuff.

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