10-core i9-10900F desktop CPU lags behind 8-core Ryzen 9 4900HS mobile APU

I don’t think this is about power efficiency, but thermal envelope.

I really wish they'd publish the range. Last year I built an AMD EPYC 3201 (embedded) with a 30W TDP (replacing a Xeon E3-1220v3[1]). Because it sits idle or under very low load most of the time, and though my power is effectively free (under my office lease I pay a fixed share of building utilities based on my square footage), I don't want to unnecessarily waste energy, generate a ton of heat (130-year-old building, A/C is adjusted by window height), or go deaf from the fans. Also, I prefer short depth rack mount cases which means everything is stuffed in there tight.[2]

It idles at about ~20W and maxes ~45W (+/- 5W, I forget) as measured at the outlet, but if a more powerful CPU idled at 30W and only peaked to 100-150W at full load, I'd prefer that (especially for a future replacement for my VM host), as the 1% of time I need the performance it's definitely worth it. But it's hard to find reliable numbers, if any numbers at all other than the marketing TDP, so I just err on the safe side.

[1] The older E3s were amazing, at least in the pre-Meltdown, pre-Spectre era. I built 2 E3-1220v2 boxes and 2 E3-1220v3 boxes, and at full load (all cores at max, with or without heavy memory transfer) both drew under their published TDPs at the outlet.

[2] Supermicro's EPYC embedded motherboard is a poor fit for the officially paired short depth case, especially the power connector. The case was originally designed for their Atom, Xeon E3, and Xeon D boards. With their EPYC embedded board the power connector needs an adapter, and the adapter and wires have to be stuffed forcefully in an awkward and worrisome manner, much more awkward than is typical for a poorly designed configuration. I think I spent a day confirming that I wasn't doing something wrong, and than another day looking in vein for an alternative adapter that wasn't so large. But I really wanted the EPYC to replace the E3, and didn't want to wait any longer. And it seems I'd still be waiting if I had. For all its flaws Supermicro's solution still seems the most practical for stuffing an AMD Zen CPU into a short depth rackmount case, whether EPYC or Ryzen.

Gamers Nexus has a video & article explaining how TDP is primarily a marketing term.

https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/3525-amd-ryzen-tdp-explai...

>There are processors that exist which can hit their performance numbers without needing any thermal solution, and as such would have an "honest" TDP of 0, despite having a >0 power draw from the wall.

Nitpick warning - I assume you mean that they are passively cooled in free air. They are still emitting heat into their environment. If you stuck such a processor into a perfectly insulated container, it would eventually overheat and throttle down. So it's really only fair to call them 0 TDP if you ignore the base "free" cooling. You could make the same assumption about power if you just stuck a solar panel on top (like a calculator processor) and then ignored that power input.

Some people have asked for failed speculative execution to be truly side-effect free. Like a transaction buffer that speculative execution can manipulate without evicting or impacting L1/L2 until the speculation is committed.

I don't really think this is a great use of transistors, and is why CPUs will probably never do it, but theoretically possible maybe.

If I should disable hyperthreading because of a hypothetical risk from an experimental proof of concept, shouldn't I also throw my PC into a dumpster because I don't know if the microcontroller controlling my LCD isn't also amplifying and Van Eck'ing my desktop to Chinese and Russian superspies waiting in a van outside?

After all, I'm not _SURE_ I know what it's doing.

Perhaps you don't particularly care about that risk, or you don't feel the risk is plausible enough to warrant the loss of one's computer, which is fair, but the risk is there nonetheless.

Why would a l33t haxxor waste their time on an esoteric and academic attack when they can just get their victim to click on something?

Are you aware of any spectre POC that in JavaScript you can break out of that sandbox and do anything worth while?

AFAIK hyperthreading issues are related to some narrow set of bugs (zombieload?), which are extremely difficult to exploit, at least not in a browser. Correct me if Iam wrong.

Yeah it does. 1TB will last a while but depending on what she’s working on she could easily have 100GB of source material per project.

Intel is reportedly going back to their old ways and incentivizing nuc vendors to either delay or cancel AMD versions.

https://twitter.com/IanCutress/status/1249819270537715719?s=...

Mini-ATX FF too big? If not, something like this: https://pcpartpicker.com/user/spety/saved/#view=QR7ZZL

(disclaimer, double check my research especially clearances for the cooler if you move forward :))

Slightly off topic, but with the G14, it was made clear that the RTX 2060 is the 60W max-Q version. Do you know if this Asus TUF RTX 2060 is the full 90W version? (Well, it sounds like you're getting the 1660 Ti, but the same question applies, since they also sell that in both 60W Max-Q and full 80W versions.)

ETA: This seems to hint it is the 90W version https://www.ultrabookreview.com/36108-asus-tuf-gaming-fa506i...

I'd love to see a comparison between this and a $3000 Macbook Pro.

Plus, look at all those ports that Apple will never give you!

Thanks for the link, this might be my new laptop.

I kept a bookmark just to come back to this thread later. Would you mind sharing your experience so far?

I think AMD will lose its x86 license then.

https://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/anton-shilo...

I wonder how feasible it would be to remove the internal instruction set translation, thus making it not an x86 CPU, and doing translation in software.

Thunderbolt can be added to anything. There are Thunderbolt 3 AMD motherboards currently even, just only on desktop where it's borderline pointless.

The main thing is Intel's CPUs integrate a chunk of the thunderbolt 3 responsibility (which Ice Lake takes even further: https://www.anandtech.com/show/14514/examining-intels-ice-la... ). So it's an easy add-on for OEMs, which makes it more common & widespread as a result.

Also relevant being this is AMD's first time being in a premium laptop position in a long, long time. Just having AMD in a premium offering is itself a new scenario for OEMs.

Yeah using AMD chips can instantly reduce the price and also offer more performance per dollar. Apple should try a single device at least

@downvotes: you know I'm right and your anger just shows how guilty you feel because of it.

It's not wrong in any way. People buy their devices by choice. Their products their prices

But what 100% workload? Is it 100% integer throughput? In which case it'll use a small fraction of the power of a blended integer & float workload. What about AVX-512? Is that considered 100% or beyond 100%? How much RAM is in play? Is it entirely an L1/L2 workload such that memory is never a bottleneck? Or is RAM used and then the CPU isn't really hitting maximum compute throughput? Or is it RAM reads & writes perfectly intermixed with integer & float computations that will always be L1/L2 cache hits, even though literally nothing will ever have that flawless of an execution in terms of power consumption?

With how much of a CPU is dynamically gated & power controlled there is a difference between "maximum theoretical draw" and "maximum a 'real world' 100% load" will hit.

So for that it's "Easier" because you check the VRM spec for the socket for server. That's the maximum draw the manufacturer expects any CPU for that socket to ever pull. Then generally most of the higher end parts will vary clock speed vs cores etc to stay on that line.

This works because server motherboard manufacturers only ever build to that spec and not one iota beyond it for cost reasons.

But yeah... average expected draw is going to be interesting and most manufacturers won't give a number to avoid getting sued.

If you’re selling server chips you’re likely selling to clients who are gonna do their own tests and trials under their use cases anyways. They aren’t even gonna look at numbers supplied by the manufacturer.

And if you advertise power consumption for those kind of workloads (100% usage) to regular consumers, who are probably gonna buy 1 computer every 3-5 years, you’re disincentivized from optimizing the kind of stuff that have seen real gains, such as designs that aggressively and cheaply turn on/off systems, or clever decisions to run the chip slower than its max output to improve power consumption, without making an impact noticeable by a human user.

Prolonged 100% all-core workloads, at what clock speed? With what cooling solution?

All of these factors are variable. You could produce a number that says "the maximum clock the part is capable of, with a perfect cooling solution", but that number would never be reached in anything short of a liquid nitrogen testbench, and thus would be pointless outside of an academic setting. Intel was literally demonized for trying something similar to this two years ago, when they benchmarked a 28 core 5Ghz chip without disclosing that it was overclocked, and hooked up to an industrial water cooler [1].

In reality, this number can be found, but it would be an irrelevant number.

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-28-core-cpu-5ghz,372...

Even that is specific to that chip/mobo/PSU/Case/CPU cooler setup. So unless you match what was used in the article your mileage will vary a lot.

I don't think reviewers measure it. It's essentially just an average power draw under real-world load at this point.

I apologize, did not link the graphs: power consumption: https://www.ixbt.com/img/x780/r30/00/02/26/21/31power_334783...

power effciency: https://www.ixbt.com/img/r30/00/02/26/21/33ee_794961.png

Here is the graph you are looking for: blue = low CPU load yellow = medium red = maximal load

They measure the whole system consumption, so you need to subtract roughly 25-30 watts, to get raw CPU consumption.

> most people/OEMs will couple a 9900k with a pretty beefy cooler and set the boost duration to be effectively infinite

They will, but that's technically no longer stock. Prebuilt systems from mainstream OEMs are unlikely to be configured like that, especially when we're not talking about the enthusiast line of motherboards.

If the motherboard is following Intel's actually spec for these (which does exist), then it will settle in to the TDP limit after PL2's duration is exceeded, which is supposed to be 8 seconds for Intel's 95W spec.

It is likely that the unnamed HP system with the i9-10900F is at least following Intel's recommended settings here. The 9900K system might very well not be, though, which would then make the power budget gap that much wider.

Ten-Nine Hundred is what I've seen on YouTube recently and I like it.

Ten Nine Hundred scans much better. I'd expect it to be what people settle on. Sort of like the Lockheed L Ten Eleven.

Tenty nine hundred duh

Does Intel ever even use those last two zeroes, or could we start leaving them off and calling this part the "one oh nine"?

On a related note, how do people pronounce the Intel 8088?

Eight oh eight eight? Eighty eighty eight?

I believe the K variant also has a higher base clock (3.7 vs. 3.2)

Small nit but the comparison here is against the 4900HS

    4900H:  4.4ghz boost, 3.3ghz base
    4900HS: 4.3ghz boost, 3.0ghz base

With the non-S variant being the more power hungry one with an up to 54W TDP vs. the S's 35W TDP.

AMD's 4000 APUs are monolithic and don't use separate chiplets and IO die. The chiplet + infinity fabric has higher latency than Intel, but that's not a problem for the APUs.

The 10900 uses a ring and IMO the mesh is superior to Infinity Fabric.

An APU is fine for those things, you don't need a dedicated GPU.

I generally avoid Ubuntu, but I'm not looking for an out-of-the-box perfect experience, and I like new hardware.

The unfortunate reality is that hardware vendors, not OS vendors, provide software support for their hardware. Additionally, Linux is a minuscule portion of the desktop/laptop market, and hardware vendors can't justify dropping as much money on Linux as they do for Windows.

Still, plenty of hobbyists are happy to develop for, test, reverse engineer, and support good hardware, but using Linux on a new platform generally means being on the bleeding edge, which is one of the reasons I like Arch. It also means participating in mailing list discussions, diving into various software projects, and testing and submitting patches.

So far, the experience has been mixed, but positive. Like I said, I've experienced a few random lockups, mostly at first. The fans have been working as expected on Linux 5.6.4. Even now, I'm compiling Chromium (for VA-API support), which usually takes an hour or two even on a Threadripper 1950X, and they only spin up occasionally.

The battery life at the moment is generally either 2-3 hours (~35W-40W power usage), or 7-10 hours (~7W-10W), depending on hardware usage. This is close to what I've seen from reviewers using Windows, though not quite as good. I expect that to get better as Nvidia improves their dynamic power management, and software support for Linux gets better.

Regardless, if you want to play with new hardware, use a rolling release distro, or figure out how to compile newer versions of the packages that come with your distro.

That's highly inconvenient. The best solution I've found is optimus-manager or prime-switcher.

That's what I meant, built-in Vega. Works fine OOTB on the latest kernel. I'm not aware of any dedicated Vega GPUs.