Intel Coffee Lake Core i7-8700K review
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
From the cons section (and this is in line with other reviews of the chip)
"Coffee Lake is the third "optimisation" of an existing architecture with no IPC improvement"
The performance gains exclusively come from the small bump in clock frequency which you could trivially get with a minor OC on the previous gen(s), and from 2 extra cores in multithreading tests (no real impact to games currently).
If you're already in the market for a new CPU and motherboard it should be on the short list. If you're not already in the market this won't make you want to upgrade.
It also means the 2- & 4- core Coffee Lake chips have no redeeming qualities over what came before, hardly a smashing success.
Side note it seems the author isn't even able to read their own charts? The author lists as a con "The 8700K runs very hot and pulls a lot of watts" but the 8700k was the lowest power consuming chip in the entire lineup that they compared it against. It has a similar power consumption to the 7700k and comes in at ~90w under load. That's peanuts for this category of CPUs.
If you're already in the market for a new CPU and
motherboard it should be on the short list. If you're not
already in the market this won't make you want to upgrade.
I feel all of the innovation effort in this space has been power consumption and trying to get solid MC perf (which is proving to be difficult when the cores get to double digits).
Unacceptable. It's now 5+ years since major improvements. And they released a new socket too, breaking upgrade paths.
Meanwhile, my Ryzen 1600 is overclocked at 4ghz and running smoothly with 6 cores/12 threads.
Intel better release something worthwhile soon. AMD is well into its comeback.
With Coffee Lake and Skylake-X the only real advantage AMD has is price there isn’t a single architectural advantage and if people expect another 50% jump in IPC from AMD with Ryzen 2 they will be sorely disappointed.
Unless AMD or Intel will drastically change their architecture the improvement will come from clock speed and corecount with some minor improvements with specific instructions from time to time.
If you look at the history of CPUs youll see a trend that started nearly 10 years ago where the additional transistor count doesn’t translates to actual general computing improvements in CPUs.
As far as upgrades go it’s irrelvant for the most part. While AM4 will be supported for 2 more years to get the most out of the new CPUs new chipsets and motherboards will be required.
With AM3 and FM3 we’ve seen this already where old motherboards could not run newer CPUs especially in the lower end of the spectrum and in some cases you would get issues like throttling due to lack of proper power delivery in the socket, memory compatibility issues and a plethora of other issues.
And while the 1600 is a great value 4.0ghz stable isn’t reachable on every chip 3.7-3.8 is a more realistic scenario, and in either case I wouldn’t compare it with the 8700K in pure performance I’m holding on 5.2 now and likely will push it to 5.4 when I’ll delied it, at those frequencies it’s faster than even the 1800/1700 at 4-4.1ghz.
It's disappointing that the curve doesn't go up-and-to-the-right more, but "unacceptable" reads a little harsh to me -- I doubt the lack of big IPC gains for single-core workloads was a voluntary choice. Intel (and ARM, and Apple, and AMD, and ...) are full of engineers trying to come up with clever tricks in the instruction scheduler, or branch predictor, or prefetcher, or cache replacement policy or whatever, that obtain fractions of a percent IPC improvement. It's really hard to improve on something that's been optimized to death for the past ~25 years (since the first CPUs with out-of-order execution), and they'll take whatever they can get.
I do agree that the competition with AMD will certainly be interesting to watch, certainly...
It seems to me like they voluntarily focused on power consumption over performance. It's a valid choice but it wasn't forced on them, and raw performance is more important for desktops.
Because people wanted thinner and lighter laptops. The Kabbylake-R "8th gen" mobile CPUs are absolutly amazing, 4 cores at over 3ghz with 15W TDP is absolutly bonkers: https://ark.intel.com/products/124967/Intel-Core-i5-8250U-Pr...
It's also important to state that it's not like AMD did anything better. Zen is a very attractive architecture but IPC wise it's slightly behind at about the same power envelope as Intel (both AMD and Intel measure TDP differently but the power consumption of the CPU per core is more or less identical for the same frequency (with intel slightly lower still) for non AVX loads).
Laptop sale outnumber desktop sales, and it's not like high end consumer and enthusiast CPUs for the desktop are that power conservative cooling 100-200W of TDP isn't easy even with water, I'm running a full custom loop on all my computers and cooling is still a problem when reaching high clocks at full stress.
So while Intel could've pushed Coffee Lake 1-2 years earlier with some sacrifice (especially in profit margins) as far as IPC improvements I really doubt they had any choice even if they would crank their CPUs a notch or two when power consumption goes the best the would've gotten is slightly higher clocks.
As far as the core count goes, yes Intel was lazy, but for AMD that was literally the only option a 4 core Ryzen wouldn't interest anyone since AMD can't get their process above 4.0ghz reliably even on low core count CPUs, on the IPC front it's behind, branch prediction is still quite behind Intel (one of the reasons why SMT give slightly higher relative advantage on AMD CPUs is all them stalls).
AMD has been operating at a near constant operational loss for the past 4-5 years, their only profitable quarters were when the console revenue cheque came in and in the past 4-5 years they maybe had 2, they had to pay MSFT back a truck of money because GloFo cocked up their 20nm process which caused Xbox One S to be delayed and had to cancel Skybridge and a few other projects. Intel has been rocking on at near 60% gross margins for years now, and while it's easy to paint them greedy if I was a corporation I wouldn't likely do anything differently.
The 8th gen is quite a big deal when it comes to Intel vs AMD more that some people would care to admit. Intel has a the fastest 6 core CPU out there with a built in GPU, it managed to squeeze 4 cores into a 15W part on the mobile side, this time around both mobile i5's and i7's will come with 4 cores no more 2 core CPUs for the mainstream and these are the U parts the ones that were traditionally dual core even for i7's, the HQ parts will likely bring 6 cores to mobile and with 9th gen CPUs launching for the ultra low voltage platform later this year AMD will have even more of an uphill battle where it counts laptops and other mobile devices. AMD needs to have a viable product for the mobile market, and with raven ridge coming for mobile this year they can only pull 4 cores with their APUs and how power efficient is it going to be no one still knows.
Do you by any chance run Linux or Linux dev tools on it and if so have you experienced hard crashing issues that I've been reading about?
?? being the week number and xyz 3 letters like PGT or SUS. If the week number > 25, you are fine.
It's hard to get official word though.
Otherwise why couldn't AMD issue a microcode update to fix the issue on older processors of the same stepping?
I guess I'm not understanding how it could be a silicon fix so quickly, or how any other manufacturing defect on the package would cause such an issue.
The title makes you believe that it has some serious gains over previous gens but nope. I wonder how much Intel paid for this review...
That being said, I'm sure if the average users CPU was substantially beefier developers would take advantage of it, but we have been in a nigh golden age of affordable PC gaming for the last 5 years - you could have anything dating back to Phenom 2 or Nehalem and still be running the latest titles very well as long as you have a beefy OC and a good GPU.
I don't think so. We've had multi-core CPUs for many years and developers haven't been taking advantage of those.
That's not remotely true. Does it scale linearly with core count? No, of course not. Similarly games are going to be perfectly playable with what most users have - which is dual & quad core, so scaling past that should expectedly be limited. A game isn't going to take advantage of something nobody has.
But games are absolutely multithreaded and do take advantage of it. There's a reason consoles have 8 cores, and it's not because Sony & Microsoft love to put in hardware that nobody will use.
If it was standard for gaming PCs to have 8 cores as well you'd see games utilizing that.
The problem is you generally need the results of step 1 before starting on step 2. Further, using more cores makes each of them slower due to heat and memory bandwidth issues etc.
Anyway it depends on the game, Factorio as an example tried multi core and going from 1 core to 4 gave a 30% speed boost at the cost a lot of additional complexity. In part because the game has basically zero AI load.
Eh? The title is "the best gaming CPU you can buy". It seems like the stats back up that assertion. The title is not "throw out your current gaming CPU because this new one is going to blow it away".
Give it a year or two for AMD to solidify Ryzen in the consumer market, and we should see the real playing field emerge.
Further, let's look at some of Mark Walton's other processor review titles:
1. Intel Core i9-7960X review: It beats Threadripper, but for a price
2. AMD Ryzen 3 1300X and 1200: True quad-core CPUs for just $130 and $110
3. Ryzen 5 review: AMD muscles in on Intel’s i5 sweet spot
4. AMD Threadripper 1950X review: Better than Intel in almost every way
5. Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti review: The fastest graphics card, again
If Mark Walton or the editorial staff are being paid by Intel, they're doing a bad job of drinking the kool-aid. I included a GPU review as well, to demonstrate another title that could be labeled as "technically accurate and practically misleading", but that I think is completely fine.
On another related topic, what does the word "best" mean? Some may think that it is the best on price, others may think performance, etc. I do think a more descriptive term could be used in the title, but that doesn't imply that I believe that Ars is a corporate shill working with Intel.
Does that mean the article is influenced by a PR effort on the part of Intel? Not necessarily. (Admittedly I should've clarified that.)
But as a journalist, it is your responsibility to put things into perspective for your audience. If a monopolistic market leader is moving at snail speed while holding the market back, it is your job to make that fact clear for your audience. Don't get them excited about a tiny improvement. Get them disappointed by it. Compare these tiny gains with what could've been if such and such experimental technology was industrialised.
I suppose the enthusiast segment of the market would be receptive to such information, and they'd be less happy with throwing money every year at incremental products and demand something more.
Want to add a PCIe x1 wifi card? Your GPU now runs at 8x. Want to add a second GPU? They're both running at 8x.
This is a pretty solid processor for the most common use case of single high end GPU + everything else built into the motherboard (including wifi) but that is far from the "best gaming CPU you can buy." I have friends who are going threadripper for the additional PCIe lanes, I know it belongs in a different price class but this is about the best CPU not the most cost efficient -- I suspect this processor would not land in the best bang for buck category either.
[0] https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/2488-pci-e-3-x8-vs-x16-pe...
https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_1080_...
This is the same reason why nvidia didn't bother with HBM for the 10 series. Those gpu's do not need that much memory bandwidth and in most cases GDDR5 provides plenty of bandwidth as it is.
Does that mean my GTX 980 is crippled? If so, wow.
Thanks a bunch! Much appreciated.
Back in, say, 2008 the diminishing returns threshold was much higher. But builders have never adapted to how good cheap parts are - games are being designed for the average hardware, and nowadays that is extremely old relative to how it would have been ten years ago.
The real winners of Coffee Lake and Ryzen for me are the 8100 and 1200. Quad cores with, respectively, high frequencies or an unlocked multiplayer on almost all motherboards that come in under $120. These chips beat the pants off an i5 2500k and until this year that kind of performance was barely trickling down when suddenly it just windfalled as soon as AMD was competitive again.
Same way the winners in the GPU market are either the 1060 or 580. At least before the mining boom, they were both available under $200 and delivered performance comparable to $500+ cards three years ago.
The real advent of recent years has not been pushing the envelope in terms of tech - even the most ludicrous builds still cannot handle 4k and VR is still in its infancy - it has been in driving the cost of admission to great looking 3d games at 1080p down to a fraction what it was five years ago.
I'm not sure what it will take to break that 4k barrier. Maybe once we are near a mature 5nm node we will be able to stuff enough transistors onto a die to push that many pixels. But until then we should appreciate how affordable PC gaming is becoming for anyone just getting into it. At least when GPU prices come back down to Earth...
It's not especially mainstream in PC gaming culture, but if you search for "console killer" it's pretty easy to find people talking about such builds.
http://archagon.net/blog/2016/12/31/cheap-and-painless-egpu-...
https://pcpartpicker.com/list/F87BCy (NOTE: The GPU price isn't added into the total as they don't seem to have a value for it right now.)
Not sure if it helps, but that price is under $1k for reasonably similar performance. RAM could be faster though, I guess.
Edit: I just noticed this but the build I linked is also water cooled, while yours looks to be air-cooled?
I think it just takes some looking around to find good bang-for-your-buck.
Looking back I probably should have just bought a 1060 6GB, though then I would have been paying for G-Sync instead of FreeSync.
To add to my GPU choice -- I have been bitten before by AMD software that supports their cards. Not going that route again, ever. Had to run an open source graphics card driver a few years back instead of using the proprietary drivers from AMD because the proprietary drivers kept shutting the card off. This was easily 6 years ago so it may not be so bad now.
$110 CPU + $80 mobo + $60 for 8GB ram (you really don't need 16GB to play PC games - just add some swap space if you are really paranoid, and RAM is still overpriced) + $200 for a 580 at MSRP (whenever it gets back there) + $30 PSU (entry level 450-550w bronze units often go on sales that low nowadays) + $30 case (I know at least the Coolermaster N200 sometimes hits $20-30 and is solid). You can get a budget 22" 1080p monitor for about $85-90 nowadays, and a 5 button mouse + media keyboard are usually only about $20. And there are regularly ~250GB ssds for $80 as well, so the total is just under $700 with peripherals.
I'd definitely say your mistakes were the monitor and ram. I was recently shopping for all manner of monitors and generally the following price chart applies:
22" 1080p TN for ~$90
24" 1080p TN for ~$110
22" 1080p IPS for ~$120
27" 1080p for $150
24" 1080p 144hz for $180
27" 144p 144hz for $250 (from Monoprice)
Anything beyond that is way overkill for gaming, especially 4k, which also starts around $250. The monoprice monitor I mention goes on sale for $250 often and is an unbeatable deal, but the panel quality is lackluster so it might take an RMA or two of that model to get one without a substantial number of dead pixels. If you want to avoid that hassle more reliable monitors with those specs start around $350 though.
For ram, that market is a mess too right now, but just like how i7s and 1080s are overvalued in builds, so is 16GB of ram. Especially with an ssd, especially with an nvme drive, having 8GB of swap is not going to do anything to performance. Same with memory frequency - it really does not matter for gaming, especially not enough to consider spending more money for higher frequency kits.
The rest is just waiting for a good sale rather than buying everything at once, and its not like you would wait months, just watch /r/buildapcsales for a few weeks and you can pick up a whole build on the cheap.
In your build, it is just nickle and dime differences per part that add up. $20 more on each individual piece comes out to several hundred dollars total.
I think you mean 1440p...
https://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/damien-cox/intels-cof...
Not as catchy.
But that weirdness aside, nice to see the additional cores, that Intel stayed at 4 cores for the desktop for so long has been unfortunate.
That's why my next cpu will be AMD: Intel needs competition to stay sharp.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_4#Prescott
Intel claimed that NetBurst would allow clock speeds of up to 10 GHz in future chips; however, severe problems with heat dissipation (especially with the Prescott Pentium 4) limited CPU clock speeds to a much lower 3.8 GHzI hope the next step on Zen really closes the gap. It's only then we're going to be set for some real innovation from intel.
Though for gaming it is most likely a dream.
From what I've seen AMD's new Ryzen CPUs do better in maintaining a constant framerate than Intel's CPUs, possibly because AMD's SMT implementation and the switching between threads is better than Intel's.
Also this Intel CPU seems to run hot, which means this is a compromise Intel made to be able to "win" these benchmarks. I wonder what sort of problems that will create in the day to day use of it, or in the long term (dying more quickly?)
Finally, like someone else said, this won't be available for purchase for most people until early 2018. By then AMD's updated Ryzen CPUs should be out. Strange that Intel would give out its chips almost half a year earlier for review...
Shamed be he who thinks evil of it. Intel would never, never I tell you, make upgrading your mainboard a necessity, but there are just these stringent technical requirements to replace PCIe-I/O-Expander and sell some extra electronics garbage with every iteration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CPU_power_dissipation_...
i7 benchmarks higher than the Ryzen
That's the confusing thing to me.
It's basically just an ad.
However, my thesis statement would be, that's not that big a deal for 99% of people:
- CPU speeds aren't increasing quickly anymore. Last gen and current gen are often like 20% different.
- Most people (should?) care more about "Best performance I can get, for the price I can afford." You have $100/$200 in your budget, and you buy the best CPU you can when your old CPU can't run modern games. And AMD fits that quite nicely.
- Very few games "don't run" on an AMD. Heck, a last-gen AMD even. PUBG is notoriously under-optimized and my FX-8370 runs it just fine even though my "single-threaded" performance is complete crap compared to "the best of the best" Intel has to offer.
But a company would have to be insane or stupid, to design their games to only run on CPU's that cost >$400. The barrier-to-entry is too high.
- Furthermore, since I/we have to upgrade every couple years, I'd rather not buy a $600-800 CPU that's worth $25 in a few years. I'd rather pay $200 for a CPU that's worth $25 in a few years. You may think I'm exaggerating (and perhaps slightly) but I've literally had Xeon workstations and servers that were worth thousands and their CPU can be found... for $25 on eBay.
I think it's great that many people have much larger disposable incomes than I do. Geniunely, I'm happy for them. But spending >$600 on what will eventually be a glorified room heater / paper-weight seems very wasteful. I'm all about the best I can get, for a reasonable sum of money, and AMD (and Intel when they compete on similar models!) fits into that realm. These "enthusiest" grade CPUs are so expensive (and even worse the MOTHERBOARDS are >$300 for an i9 or Threadripper!) that they might as well be fictional. I'll never see one in real-life in the same way I'll never drive a Bughatti, so (in my opinion) they're not relevant in your usual collection of datapoints. You wouldn't compare a possible Toyota Camry to a Lambo and think "Well, the Lambo is so much faster, which is important for my calculations on a possible grocery getter car."
I currently play PUBG in 2560x1440 with my gens old, AMD FX-8370, and a GTX 1060. I could "almost" get 4K but it's only like 20-30 FPS. So if I've got eight-cores (4 of which I use to run a full Win10 VM with SQL server), using a one/two gen old CPU, and I can play the most modern games... what's the benefit? Higher FPS? Sure. But the problem is, the cost-to-benefit ratio (higher CPU $$ vs FPS) quickly goes to zero. You're not getting much more to be "ahead of the technology curve." As long as you're high enough in the curve to not be "unable to play modern games" you're set. If you spend bigger money you're not actually increasing your longevity of your workstation by much. The next gen will still make your "upper end" previous gen look like crap--especially when you consider the premium price you paid.
It would be much better to just be patient, and buy the current gen, when the next gen comes out. My current CPU dropped to HALF the price the second Ryzen came out, and is 2nd to the top in terms of performance-per-dollar:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_available.html
My CPU has a mark of ~9000 and costs $100 and the highest i7 is 20,000. (~2x) and costs... $1,600. 16 times the price for 2 times the performance and we can still play the same games.
I'm considering (and saving for) a Ryzen build... except I'm waiting till Ryzen 1.5 (<-actual thing) and 2.0 come out. I don't need to upgrade my machine to "be cool." My machine is a tool, and as long as it does what I want, it's fine. It compiles fast, it easily runs >180 chrome tabs, and can run a VM and a video game at the same time. What's more to want? If it's video encoding, the SSD's I have are 10x more important than the CPU.
But the "beefy PC" is actually a business SFF(ThinkCentre 715s) using the AMD A12-9800 APU, the final version of Bulldozer and a starter for the AM4 platform. The only thing superlative about it is the amount of external storage I added - a whole array of cheap USB flash, multiple HDDs, etc.
I actually splurged on that APU and could have gotten the A8-9600 for better value, but I liked the idea of "maxing out" the old architecture.
Now my upgrade cycle will probably be: wait a year and then get whatever is discounted then. By getting the APU now I already see a nice 2-4x improvement over my last laptop, and I defer a decision on getting a discrete GPU. And when I'm out the Chromebook gets me an all-day battery, local access to Android and Ubuntu apps, and 80% of the Windows experience(some network latency, and no remote audio) for productivity.