Intel's flagship 10th-gen desktop CPU has 10 cores, reaches 5.3GHz
engadget.com
engadget.com
> The 10900K has a 125-watt TDP, for example, while AMD's Ryzen 9 3900X's is just 105-watts.
My understanding from other articles (like [1]) is however that Intel had to _massively_ increase the amount of power the CPU consumes when turboing under load:
> Not only that, despite the 125 W TDP listed on the box, Intel states that the turbo power recommendation is 250 W – the motherboard manufacturers we’ve spoken to have prepared for 320-350 W from their own testing, in order to maintain that top turbo for as long as possible.
Somehow it feels like back in the Pentium 4 days again.
[1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15758/intels-10th-gen-comet-l...
Jim Keller might be doing just that with Intel right now. I only hope whatever they come up with, AMD is ready and able to keep up. Otherwise we're going to see a rerun of the following period too: Intel tweaking the same architecture for years at a time, and squeezing low single digit performance improvements that come with questionable security sacrifices and deeply unpleasant sticker prices.
This time around though Intel isn't in the same position at all to dictate to major market players for a variety of reasons. The current big lucky break catapulting AMD way into the lead is certainly temporary, but it does seem like they'll be able to gain some real marketshare and attention. That will hopefully serve to make this time around end up in a much more stable back and forth.
So AMD (or rather, their RTG division specifically) would be remiss not to align their price/perf with Nvidia to maximize profit.
A reason why they'll probably stay 'cheaper' to some extent for some time (perhaps long) is that they don't compete against CUDA, Nvidia's silver bullet. And don't just think “muh fancy library”, think hordes of engineers that Nvidia has the financial muscle to deploy in the field, 'lending' them to customers who need ad hoc driver work, custom implementations, general help, and what-have-you.
CUDA is a war machine, because that's how Nvidia operates its strategy.
It's how they owned the video game market back then, and I'm pretty sure they do the same with CUDA / ML / compute (why wouldn't they).
I thought that OpenCL would eventually be to CUDA what Vulkan is becoming to DirectX (btw: thank you, Linux); but it seems to me that OpenCL is going the way of the dodo? (still very little support in all ML/compute software I encounter, anecdotally).
AMD can sell a ton of GPU at good price, and they should, but they're lagging behind because optimized software libraries support (CUDA, the whole commercial hammer it represents) is where it's at.
Fortunately or not for them, Intel's graphics efforts seem to be... hype, more than a truly organized effort (insiders leaks speak of a terrible, terrible political / manegerial / organization situation at Intel's). It's fortunate for AMD's graphics market share, but it's unfortunate in that Intel would be a major support for OpenCL (last I checked, at least) and Intel's rise on that market could have taken AMD's hardware along with it in a tsunami of competition for CUDA.
But that's not happening soon, apparently.
And maybe an even larger demand from coin miners.
The desktop customer might not matter that much for GPU makers.
It would be nice to see more companies releasing GPUs like it was in the '90s.
Jim Keller has said he is technically the manager for thousands of people now and that they are working on even more IPC with even bigger out of order buffers. Even so I don't see the same leap being made in power and single threaded performance.
Then again apple has an incredible amount of performance per watt in their cpus, so I don't know where the limits really are.
So basically Jim Keller is competing with himself.
After working at Intel we might see him again at AMD.
I run it at a 5.2ghz all-core overlock and it pulls nearly 200W under load. (yes, beefy watercooling). From memory it was around 150W @ 5ghz but I haven't played around with the OC settings for a while after I got it tuned right.
Another issue is that VRM needs cooling too, and custom loops can come VRM cooling (monoblocks). AIOs would need forced airflow (fan).
This will vary by radiator size/thickness, the fans and the case airflow and any obstructions.
Personally, O11 dynamic, with a 360 aio at the top/exhaust and 3x side, 3x bottom intake... It's really quite pretty much all the time... If I stick my head close, I can hear a little hum, but that my well be the video card for all I can tell. The 4-bay nas on the shelf nearby is more noticeable.
Gamers Nexus has some standardized measurements for “time to max”: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h10MU3Jebx0&t=751
However, cooling on any radiator is a function of the temperature difference between air and metal. The heat from the CPU will slowly heat up the water and radiator, which has actually a large heat capacity. That takes times, so the temperatures go up slower. When the heater stops, it will take the radiator also comparatively long to get that heat out of the water again.
A normal air cooler has much smaller heat capacity, so will react much faster, in both directions. These faster cycles are certainly less good for the CPU than the slower cycles of a water loop.
It is for intuitively explaining how heat capacity is what causes the delay.
Ideally, you want to set your fan and pump speed based off coolant temperature, which is inexpensive with a simple screw-in temperature sensor.
This is irrelevant entirely, as long as it stays in the desired/designed range.
More importantly the higher thermal capacity allows for easier short turbo boosts which most of the load is. For sustained load, it matters only the hottest part (cores) of the cpu and water cooling is a lot better to transfer heat away.
(pump and radiator, longer term, will get tied to a 280w 3970x at some point this summer. Was not expecting the socket update they added with the sTR4x and 39xx series threadrippers)
I can maintain turbo under load, but it decays from a full 4.5GHz to 3.9GHz-4.1GHz under a sustained prime95 load. My primary workloads are more bursty, so this is not a big problem for me. I just don't like leaving performance on the table. Also, I cannot turn on PBO on air. It runs up to 95C and then bounces around from 90C-95C, and I'm just not comfortable bumping up against the thermal limit like that long term.
On the other hand the custom loop I now have which has a 420 (triple 140) and a 280 (double 140) rad and includes the CPU and GPU is whisper quiet unless you're running a load that taxes both the CPU and GPU. It's actually eerie when you have it running because I was always used to that fan hum with previous builds.
A large air cooler will be as effective, possibly more effective, than an AIO water cooler. What matters is radiator surface air x airflow. AOIs tend to have small surface area radiators and quiet fans because that is their target market. Water cooling does have some advanteages, but for coninuous heavy loads all that really matters is radiator capacity. The large air-cooled radiator is going to have more veins with more surface area covered by a more powerful fan than the typical AOI radiator.
What target market? I know there are some that just have one square 120mm radiator, but I guess I naively assumed that given the fact that they offer 1x, 2x, and 3x length radiators that the average size of a water cooler was somewhere in the middle. I've always understood that the basic advantage of a water cooler is that it lets you move the air-heat interface to a remote object instead of requiring it to be suspended horizontally from the motherboard. Given you get to shove it on the top or front of your case, why wouldn't people choose as big a radiator as possible? What do you think the average water cooler size is?
(The H60 isn't that much cooler than a Noctua UH-12, either.)
My perspective from participating in PC building communities and consuming content from the big hardware sites and channels is that most people who use an AIO go for either a 240mm or 280mm radiator. I can't remember the last time I saw a 120mm or 140mm radiator recommended for a non small form factor build, as they usually perform equal to or worse than much cheaper air coolers.
AIOs confer no particularly special advantage in either. The fact that the working fluid is water means nothing, heatpipes actually use water internally too. The difference is that heatpipes are actually evaporating the water so they can actually more more heat energy (due to enthalpy of evaporation) than AIOs.
AIOs actually tend to be louder for a given amount of cooling due to cheaper, louder fans and crappy noisy pumps. Custom loops don't really suffer that but they also cost 10x as much. They mitigate a lot of the downsides like pump noise by throwing expensive, high quality components at it. That's fine as far as it goes, but AIOs themselves are not an automatic win.
A large air cooler (eg Noctua NH-D15) is going to perform very similarly to a 240/280mm with identical fans (Noctua) at the same RPMs/noise levels. The difference is that most AIOs ship with very cheap fans that are just designed to spin fast and be loud, but that cools quite effectively. You can punch up the fans on a big air cooler and push a lot more heat through them. They just are optimized for silent performance out of the box.
Furthermore, most situations are currently limited by the IHS. AMD once pushed 500W through a 120mm radiator on their 295x2 card (OC'd), and temps would stay under 60C while doing it. The radiator size is not as big an impact as most people expect, moving heat out of the loop is not the bottleneck, it's how fast you can move heat into the loop that matters. GPUs do that very efficiently (bare die, dual chip on the 295x2). 5 GHz 14nm chips push an incredible amount of wattage, 7nm chips are so tiny that they result in very high thermal density, making both of them fairly prone to IHS thermal limitations. Colloquially: the heat just can't move out of the die into the IHS fast enough. The surface of the IHS is actually fairly cool, the liquid inside an AIO is barely above room temperature, but the heat just is not moving into the loop very well.
There is a resulting thing where people splurge on high-end gear, say a 280mm, and see high temps and tell themselves "wow, good thing I bought a 280mm, a 120mm would have been way hotter!". And no, not really, the amount of radiator fins isn't the limitation, it's how fast you can move heat into the loop. If you put a probe inside the reservoir to actually see the temperature of the fluid, it would barely be different between a 120mm and a 280mm.
And in fact the temperatures would probably be barely different than if you bought a NH-D15, or a Scythe Fuma, or other large multi-tower cooler. At the end of the day the working fluid doesn't matter, it's all fins and airflow.
You could move like 5W and you might have to dissipate 50W of heat total. Peltiers can't realistically move 100W and you don't want to cool 1000W.
Helpfully, Linus Tech Tips has walked through this particular experiment for you already ;)
Really, it’s all to do with how fast the heat can be permanently ejected from the system, almost always as heated air.
Analogised to a storage array, metal heat sinks and water reservoirs are a high performance write cache. Brilliant for bursty loads but once the cache is filled they don’t improve sustained performance.
In that scenario, the water isn’t a write cache, it’s just sending the heat directly to /dev/null
What you really want is a closed-loop heat exchanger, where the components only touch distilled water, and it gets pumped to a bathtub somewhere with a heat exchanger that pushes the heat out.
Nitpick: "working fluid" here implies that cooling has to involve a liquid. But there are solid-state (e.g. peltier) CPU coolers, which of course have no "working fluid." They suck, but they exist!
(I think the suckiness of the existing peltier CPU coolers might be due to their small size, though. If you gave one of them as much solid-state thermal mass to work with as a water-cooling setup has fluid thermal mass, it might be rather efficient, for the same reason a chest freezer is efficient.)
Some people seem to think air can be better because at idle, heat pipes can end up a few degrees cooler. Ultimately what you want though is heat dissapation, ideally without super powerful fans and water cooling is far better.
The closest thing I have found to filling the void when Kyle had the gall to shut down HardOCP :/
When you overclock, no wonder you get more power draw than the official spec says.
The complaint was that when being restricted to TDP power draw processor won't run above about 4.5GHz. Having overclocking mentioned after that as drawing more power made me think, that by overclocking they meant going beyond Turbo Boost, as 4.5GHz is approximately the all-core Turbo Boost frequency for the processor.
If that is correct, then there is no surprise, that going beyond max boost requires drawing power beyond declared TDP.
Power increases linearly with frequency and squarely with voltage. Higher freq. needs higher voltage. This applies to pretty much any CPU/GPU. Also AVX loads are significantly more power hungry.
230W would be a low estimate for a fully clocked one.
Going by the common use of "squarely," the power usage might also be interpreted as being linearly with voltage. Rather, I understood you meant that power increases proportional to the voltage squared.
(For the lurkers: Friction increases proportional to velocity squared, as does kinetic energy. These are all quite useful things to know, and should be part of the takeaways from your basic science education.)
Clearly we don't turn all the mosfets on every cycle but it's the rough idea.
About turning on/off all fets, it doesn't matter as long as the same ones turn on in specific cycles. They just turn on/off more frequently.
AMD CPUs OTOH run significantly higher power than their spec'd TDP right out-of-the box. For example, that "105 W" 3900X actually ships with a power limit of 142 W and it is quite capable of sustaining that under an all-core load.
AMD's turbo numbers are also pure fantasy. If AMD rated turbo frequencies the same way Intel did that 3900X would have a max turbo of 4.2 or 4.3 GHz instead of 4.6 GHz. When Intel says their CPU can hit a given turbo frequency they mean it will actually hit that and stay there so long as power/temperature remains within limits. Meanwhile AMD CPUs may-or-may not ever hit their max turbo frequency, and if they do it's only for a fraction of a second while off full load.
The outrage over Intel CPU's power consumption is pretty silly when you realize that the only reason AMD CPUs don't draw just as much is because their chips would explode if you tried to pump that much power into them. If you care about power consumption just set your power limits as desired and Intel CPUs will deliver perfectly reasonable power efficiency and performance.
I'm pretty sure you've got that exactly reversed, AMD's power draw tends to stay closer to the rated TDP than Intel's.
>>The outrage over Intel CPU's power consumption is pretty silly when you realize that the only reason AMD CPUs don't draw just as much is because their chips would explode if you tried to pump that much power into them. If you care about power consumption just set your power limits as desired and Intel CPUs will deliver perfectly reasonable power efficiency and performance.
I'm not even sure what this means. AMD CPUs are on a more advanced and physically smaller process, with smaller wires, and a different voltage-frequency-response curve. Of course they would "explode" if you try to pump them with voltages that the process isn't designed to operate with, that the Intel CPU with it's larger process can handle. But the power draw isn't really the "point" of the CPU -- performance is.
Imagine thinking that the Pentium 4 or Bulldozer was better than their contemporaries because they were capable of drawing incredible amounts of power.
I was talking about the CPUs in their factory default configuration. Intel CPUs default to limiting their sustained power draw to exactly their TDP, AMD CPUs meanwhile run significantly higher.
Where Intel CPUs will draw more is when you disable the power limits, but that power buys you extra frequency over what AMD is capable of.
> That's like complaining that speaker wire is deficient because you can't use it to charge an electric car. It's a CPU, not a space heater -- how much power it can draw isn't the point, performance is.
Yes, and Intel CPUs achieve significantly higher frequency, and thus per-thread performance, in exchange for that higher power.
With Intel you have the option of running high power/high frequency or lower power/high efficiency. With AMD you don't get the former option due to limitations of the fabrication process used. Somehow this has come to be considered a win for AMD.
No, no they don't. That's a motherboard setting not a CPU one, and basically no desktop motherboard at least follows Intel's "recommendation" out of the box.
Yes, they do. The power limits are set in MSRs within the CPU and the CPU has default values for those MSRs.
> basically no desktop motherboard at least follows Intel's "recommendation" out of the box.
Wrong again. Motherboards using chipsets other than the Z series typically do not change the power limits unless the user explicitly sets them. These days even Z series boards do not change the power limits unless the user enables at least one overclocking feature, e.g. XMP. This is how the motherboard manufacturers technically follow Intel's specs while actually running out-of-spec with the settings most enthusiast users use.
I'm pretty certain that I remember watching videos from GN, LTT, or Bitwit (can't recall which) where they noted that AMD chips were turboing up to a few hundred MHz above the specced numbers.
The AMD bios's were updated and do get better boosts now, but really in short bursts. That said, they do incredibly well for most circumstances and depending on your use, a much better option at all price points, except for some gaming at the ~$500 mark.
I'd still take an R9 3900X over an i9 *900K series. Using a 3950X now, no plans to upgrade for 3-5 years.
Have you actually tried to do that? When Intel says their CPU can hit a Turbo frequency, it's usually pure fantasy because they can't actually do it within the power/temp constraints.
Yes, they'll get to 5-whatever GHz on maybe half the cores if you're lucky, but full all-core load at the top stated Turbo? No chip will stay there, it will throttle down, likely by a lot.
And AVX loads will bring it to, or close to, maximum non-turbo clocks, that's how hot they run.
It could maybe be done with extremely good cooling and undervolting, and completely removing power limits (in which case it will probably consume close to 500W if it doesn't fry something first :D).
This looks like they're turning every nob to 11 on the current architecture to try to get something that they can sell until they can come up with whatever will succeed the Core line.
AMD just has a good architecture and are using good fabbing facilities.
Intel can have the best architecture in the world but that won't matter much if they are stuck with their fabbing at the current 14 nm process.
What we've got here is actually the mysterious, long-overdued Pentium 5 (which was known for its greater-than 5 GHz clock speed and never released due to the huge heat dissipation issue). History repeats, but this time, it actually got released.
Than maybe they'll come up with a core design again.
This is an incredibly poor showing and if I were an investor I would be seriously questioning the future of Intel as a company.
- Consulting can be interesting to feed that. You can expose yourself to a wider variety of projects and you can eventually have a lot of say in what work you choose to take on. You will also have the opportunity to limit the duration of projects you take on to an extent, so you won't be stuck on any given thing for longer than you can tolerate. Difficult to get started, to gain momentum.
- A first line suggestion from HN would typically be side projects. This can help restrain your desire to bounce around, dulling that like a pain killer. You do what you want on your own time, and change it up anytime you see fit, while staying at a job and trying to progress up the ranks. I don't know what your skillset is of course (eg programmer), it's somehwat dependent on that as to whether side projects is an interesting angle.
- If you think you're not experienced enough, focus on trying to leap yourself forward on something you are good at, to open up more opportunities to jump. Push one of your skills well above the market average. If you have some strong center pivot skill, you can bounce more often. You don't have to be Jim Keller to do this, people that are in the top 1/3 in tech at something often bounce around because they can, it's not unusual. As the other person commented, Jim has a core strength and it's why he can jump around. The bottom 1/3 is in a beggar position, they are always in a position of having to take what they can get by necessity (which rarely changes, unless their skill level changes or the labor market is extremely tight); so you have to focus on pushing a skill as high as you can, and you don't need to reach elite levels as an outcome.
- Much like physical exercise (high intensity training), there are paths to gain intense experience in shorter amounts of time with a high payoff in the experience you acquire. These opportunities are rare, although that doesn't mean they don't exist. The work is usually very difficult, the hours are more likely to be long. There is always that trade-off in there. To get what you want in the bounce around aspect, you might have to dial up the intensity for a time until you get the experience you need (after which you can dial it back).
Get a role at a >decent consulting firm in the field you like. Move aggressively into a role where you get to take lead on projects. Find conferences in your area of interest. Speak at those. Build relationships with any vendors that are common to your customers and area of interest. Speak more. Get to know organizers at conferences and seek keynote and panel discussion opportunities. Engage with everyone you can to identify problems. Evolve your content to focus on the intersection of interesting and common problems. Somewhere in here you can shift to a top-tier consulting firm in your field, or to independent consulting, or jump to a vendor, or take on a senior role at an org that would otherwise be a customer of your consulting firm.
At this point you should have strong experience and a reputation for the same. Leverage this to filter opportunities to those you want.
All of this is predicated on you actually being quite good at what you're interested in. You don't have to be world class to start, but you do need to continuously improve. You'll probably end up in the top 10% of your field. Again, predicated on ability.
Intel does not know how to compete from a marketing, sales, and business standpoint, for a few decades they only really competed with their own product line, now that they have actual competition in the market they are unable to react to it properly even if they had the tech stack to do so
If the rumors are true there _never_ will be a 10nm desktop chip, the process is broken. It seems 7nm will be "it", late next year.
And everytime we're expecting that new chips will be finally 10nm, but you know "maybe next year".
Now AMD comes out of nowhere and make 7nm chips.
That's why "too late"...
I'll take one AMD Ryzen 9 3900X, thanks MicroCenter!
The 10900KF will do 4.8 GHz all-core at $472, the 3900X will do it at around 4-4.1 GHz[0]. AMD has a slight IPC advantage in productivity, Intel has a slight IPC advantage in gaming[1].
The market for the 10900K/KF is basically someone who wants the fastest gaming rig, but then as a secondary priority wants more cores for productivity. Kind of an overlap with the 3900X, sure, but the 10900K/KF will still outperform it in gaming, where the 3900X tilts a little more towards productivity.
There are of course exceptions, CS:GO loves Zen2's cache and Zen2's latency makes DAWs run like trash, so your specific task may vary.
I'd personally point at the 10700F as being the winner from the specs, 4.6 GHz all-core 8C16T with slightly higher IPC in gaming than AMD, for under $300. That's competitive with the 3700X: little higher cost, and more heat, but more gaming performance too. The 10900 series and 10600 series are a little too expensive for what they offer, the lower chips are too slow to really have an advantage.
But really it's not a good time to buy these anyway. Rocket Lake and Zen3 will probably launch within the next 6 months, if you can stretch another 6 months there will be discounts on Zen2 and more options for higher performance if you want to pay.
[0] https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/ryzen-9-3900x-overclock
[1] https://www.techspot.com/article/1876-4ghz-ryzen-3rd-gen-vs-...
People seem to have a deep hatred for Intel, exactly the way they had deep hatred for AMD (pre-Conroe days, when Intel released Conroe in 2005/06, people were rooting so hard for Intel, it was hard to find any positive comments about AMD). I don't get it. Both are multi-billion dollar companies and innovating like crazy. We can't just sit back, and feel the utter awe of what it takes to make computer chips whether it is Intel or AMD. You know, its engineers like anyone else - they have good intentions and work hard to make all of this possible, the fans have this egregious entitlement that is so infuriating and dismissive.
[1] https://www.blackhat.com/docs/eu-16/materials/eu-16-Lipp-ARM...
[2] https://duo.com/decipher/new-side-channel-attack-extracts-pr...
People shit on Intel like it's their particular mistake, but POWER, ARM, and basically everyone's out-of-order cores except Ryzen were affected by Meltdown. It's some oddity of Ryzen's cache predictor that make it immune, basically everybody else was affected by it.
Note: I haven't followed the "saga" closely so maybe there is more to it that I'm not aware of.
Modern CPUs are at the very edge of what humans can design and build. Hundreds of verification engineers try to make sure they work. Not one of them will have a whole picture of the entire machine in their head, or really understand all of its requirements. The very best, hardest working, most diligent and dedicated teams will still ship a CPU with bugs. Perfection is simply not possible in this domain.
Second to this, is competition is important and having competitive products tends to bring pricing down to what is probably closer to optimale.
Aside: I've thought for a long time, that if medications had a dual-sourcing requirement it would help a lot.
I was only stating part of why someone might favor for AMD strongly, without going into the irrational, which you seem to be focusing on here.
Right now, AMD is largely better at every price bracket and in general has done better in terms of security and long-term support (don't have to by a new motherboard every year if you want to upgrade).
what do you mean by this? I researched intel vs. amd gaming performance pretty extensively last summer, and I paid particular attention to csgo benchmarks. AFAIK, 9700k/9900k are a little faster than the 3900X in csgo at stock speeds, and a good bit faster on a typical overclock.
LTT (not OC'd): https://i.redd.it/fnw15b6dxv831.png
The doubled cache really made an enormous difference in performance. Zen2 averaged about a 15% IPC improvement on average, in games the average was more like 30%, and in CS:GO it was about 42% improvement. It went from being pounded in this title to tying or beating the 9900K.
And that's against a 2700X, the 1800X was significantly worse than that. Compared to the 1800X, CS:GO is more like 50-60% improved.
The slightly higher clocks don't hurt, but Zen2 really made huge progress in handling the "unhappy cases" for their architecture. I tend to point the finger at cache for this specific case, cause I don't think of source engine titles when I think clean, well-optimized, highly threaded code.
Reading this makes me feel like I need to build a new PC now lol. Any idea what percentage of desktop PCs are still on Sandy Bridge?
It's relevant for the TDP number.
> I'd personally point at the 10700F as being the winner from the specs, 4.6 GHz all-core 8C16T with slightly higher IPC in gaming than AMD, for under $300
I think the 10700F would only be the winner if you have a motherboard that either isn't following Intel's recommendations for turbo or lets you ignore them.
Otherwise the 10700F's 4.6ghz all-core isn't going to happen with a 65W limit after unknown seconds. That TDP limit is going to really cripple that chip. Whether or not you can ignore that limit will I guess decide whether or not the i7-10700KF is worth the extra $50.
But the 9700 appears to be almost nonexistent. I think the 10700 will end up in the same camp. The 10700K will likely be the only chip with any meaningful coverage/reviews in the i7 lineup.
e.g. it's possible for a Intel chip to sustained turbo at levels unsupported by the nominal TDP.
I wouldn't call the cost « little higher » if you factor in the motherboard (and possibly the cooler). Any AM4 board will run a 3700X whereas Intel's using yet another socket for their new chips.
You don't really want to be using the sub-$100 tier of motherboards for AMD either. People will talk up how cheap motherboards are but tell people you're going to put a 3900X (only 105W TDP) on a B450 and their eyes will roll at you.
-Do they still pack that PoS Intel management inside the CPU? And are these new CPU still vulnerable to Meltdown? Because if any of those questions are answered with "yes" then no amount of cores, GHz and performance % is going to change my mind from Ryzen
Why not AMD? Answer: iGPU. AMD's best iGPU offering seems to be the Ryzen 9 4900HS, which has fewer cores, and you can't just order it - it seems to be for OEMs only. So staying with Intel.
AMD has a "NUC-gap". At the high end, there's Epyc2 datacenter offerings, and going low there's the embedded line. And every device in between either assumes a discrete GPU (Ryzen 7) or is a wimp (G-series).
I built a beefy NUC-alike based on an Intel chip, because AMD has no offerings here. Google "Ryzen NUC" and the demand is evident.
Sadly AMD CPUs have something pretty similar too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Processo...
I am not praising AMD, don't get me wrong, I am merely choosing the lesser evil. In this case the lesser evil happens to be better and cheaper. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
https://www.reference.com/world-view/many-computers-world-e2...
Which sounds workable in theory, but is unworkable for many people due to limited Internet access speeds/volume.
And the real disadvantage then becomes obvious when the "super powerful cloud" only renders the game at console visual details levels with in-built control-lag.
Not just limited to gaming: Video-editing is becoming increasingly popular as a hobby and a field of work, which is another use-case for lots of local processing power.
So while in terms of market size desktops might be a niche, that niche still fulfills an important function thus I don't see that going away any time soon.
"Primary" means simple majority. >50% ARM market share for consumer PCs as defined below.
"Consumer CPU" refers to non-server application PCs. Workstations, desktops, laptops, and DIY. Personal and professional use (including enterprise purchases, so the full fleet of corporate laptops at any company are included). Some current examples would include things such as the Talos POWER workstations and ARM workstations.
For "PC", the definition gets a little rough, and I'd be willing to negotiate this. I'd say anything where the primary interaction mode is mouse and keyboard. With this definition I would exclude most tablets, but something such as the Microsoft Surface would be included. The test that includes the Surface and excludes most other tablets is that the Surface is sold with a keyboard and trackpad. If the keyboard and trackpad is not included or required, then it's not a PC. This rule would also exclude something like a NAS, where the hardware is basically that of a tower desktop, but the use is headless; this would be a server. Like I said, this can get a bit loose. Happy to negotiate a firmer definition.
As for "nowhere close", I'd say that we won't see ARM as the primary consumer CPU for the next decade easily. I'd be willing to bet $1,000 US on this.
If you wanted different timelines, I'd put $5,000 on 5 years, and $500 on 15 years.
Apple's market share won't push ARM past 50%. Enterprises move slowly and make up a lot of the PC market. If you assume a 3-year hardware replacement cycle, then ARM would have to come to dominance at least 3 years before the end of a betting period for it to have a chance of meeting the end of the betting period. Thus, for the 5 year timeline, ARM would have to be dominant by 2022. For the 10-year, by 2027.
Separately, in writing this response, I realize that you could easily make the argument that a "consumer CPU" includes cell phones and tablets. This is a very different conversation.
This is a totally arbitrary distinction. We can’t just ignore the fact that consumers are doing the bulk of their computing on smartphones nowadays.
Yes. Definitions often are.
> We can’t just ignore the fact that consumers are doing the bulk of their computing on smartphones nowadays.
> > Separately, in writing this response, I realize that you could easily make the argument that a "consumer CPU" includes cell phones and tablets. This is a very different conversation.
I think you can see that I didn't ignore this fact in my post.
I made a definition (as requested) to clarify my position and based on my interpretation of the original post in this thread. Based on this interpretation, it seemed like that poster was referring broadly to PCs. The definition was for the purposes of a prediction.
In defense of my interpretation, I would consider it unreasonable to assume that the OP meant to include smart phones in their consideration of "primary consumer CPU", due precisely to the fact that you and I have both mentioned, that many individuals use a smart phone for the bulk or even all of their computing.
And none of them have been well received or commercially successful. They seem to be more defensive bet hedging against Intel than anything intended to go anywhere.
The reviews look to all be middling at best, with a common refrain being "Get the Surface Pro 7 instead." Where are you seeing it be well received?
https://www.tomsguide.com/reviews/surface-pro-x: "The Microsoft Surface Pro X looks like the first ARM-powered laptop worth buying."
https://www.windowscentral.com/surface-pro-x: "Complicated but brilliant."
https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-surface-pro-x-review-i... "For me, it's the Surface Pro X. Personally, I think this is nearly a perfect PC, and Microsoft really nailed this one."
https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/5/20948092/microsoft-surfac...: "Better then expected is not enough."
At home, it's a high percentage and has been for many years.
In office environments at work, it's still near zero (emphasis on primary). A couple hundred million people across middile and upper development nations use desktops and laptops every day at work. They're not going to switch to ARM systems anytime soon for that work. Good desktop processors are a few hundred dollars; ARM has no great angle there (including on pricing). For businesses the cost of a decent Intel or AMD processor is a modest share of the overall system they're buying for the employee to work with.
In developing nations with primitive economies, certainly smartphones are much more common for primary work purposes. And that's a case where ARM pricing does bring a huge advantage that Intel and AMD struggle to compete with. Cost obviously matters in personal businesses where your income is $50-$200 per month. Numerically this category wins, primarily due to the intense poverty of three billion people in India, Africa and China. This market alignment based on incomes probably won't change much in the coming decade, as ARM's ability to push into higher value office work environments as a primary will be very limited.
My gf already uses her Samsung S8 as primary "computer". Only for a few things does she reach for her laptop, and that's mostly due to the screen and webpages not being mobile friendly.
Perhaps, I need to take that as an axiom, right? i7 5820K was non-typical for that matter then.
And yes, Xeon-W with 5.3GHz frequency? Tell me more :)
On the AMD side where they already have 4.0, few care for it (I do though - just ordered a mobo and processor that use it) - 4.0 nvmes aren't faster for common use cases, and it mostly matters when going multi-gpu which is only seen in some professional use (and even then you can use a threadripper and just have a lot of 3.0 lanes). Then next ~year ryzen 5000 which will require a new socket seems likely to already support 5.0. I'm guessing Intel will just altogether skip 4.0.
Supposedly the new socket is PCI-E 4.0 capable, which the next CPU "Rocket Lake" will supposedly enable.
But since it's still 16 lanes from the CPU only, that means you'll only get PCI-E 4.0 to likely a single slot. And likely not any of the M.2 drives, which typically are connected to the chipset instead.
You should go AMD if you want PCIe4 currently. Which is a bit funny as Intel sells certain peripherals that supports it.
One thing that bothers me a lot is the 2.5Gbps Ethernet that is supposed to come with those new Intel motherboard ( assuming MB vendors uses it ). Why not 5Gbps Ethernet? How much more expensive is it? It seems we still dont have a clear path on how to move forward from 1Gbps Ethernet. Personally I would have liked 10Gbps, but the price is still insanely expensive.
(House is a mix of Cat6a and optical/SFP+ 10G networking and it is tremendous.)
Personally I'm with the other guy, I think this is a dumb half-measure and we should just move straight to 10 Gbps. Right now the single biggest cost in your household multi-gig deployment will be switches, a switch with 4-8 10Gbase-T ports will run you around $500, and this figure is not really any cheaper with multi-gig. You are paying through the nose for something that is a watered-down version of the "real standard".
Say you have two switches, one is upstairs and one is downstairs, are you really going to drop $1000 on a half-baked deployment? People need to try it, figure out if their existing cable is stable enough for their needs (maybe that segment can run at 5gbit speeds and it can be 10 gbit on your machines and on the switch), and just pull cable where it's not.
The question is will they get cheaper faster than 10G? Perhaps. Despite being 14 years old 10G is just starting to get put into reasonably priced prosumer switches so it doesn't have that much of a head start practically.
Having 5Gbps End point gives you much more flexibility, instead we got 2.5Gbps. Unless the BOM cost made a lot of difference I dont understand this trade offs. Especially considering we have 802.11ax potentially offering 5Gbps+ and 802.11ay that runs faster then 10Gbps. We are coming in an age where a cheaper Wireless equipment is outrunning our wired counterpart.
> 802.11ax potentially offering 5Gbps+ and 802.11ay that runs faster then 10Gbps
Well, ax is at best about 1Gbps per antenna, and even with MIMO I'm pretty doubtful you'd ever beat 2.5 in practice.
ay is faster but it works inside a single room. It's for peripherals, not home networking.
(Will they go even higher in the future?)
Intel has been backed into a corner by AMD, so they’re pushing clockspeed over balancing against TDP and bus.
Also, the multi-year delays in the next process shrink gave them lots of time to improve yields and micro-optimize the fabrication generation these are running on.
Strangely, not all cpu reviews take this into consideration.
Core architecture brought it down to around 8 cycles to complete an op. Clock speeds dropped, but more shit got done at lower clock speeds.
> Circa P4, an instruction took around 40-50 cycles to complete
Different instructions can have wildly different latencies. Even then an instruction taking 50 cycles sounds like double precision division or an 80 bit floating point operation. Most operations on the P4 had a latency of 1 - 7 cycles, but the P4's high clocks made memory latency and branch mispredictions a bigger issue.
Some instruction latency might have been part of the overall pipeline shortening that made the core architecture fast, but this is an oversimplification, and the numbers here don't apply to the vast majority of common instructions. Caches, deep out of order buffers, prefetching and branch prediction all play a part.
All this time I thought everyone was going on about interprocess communication improvements :)
Eh? From anandtech's coverage: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15758/intels-10th-gen-comet-l...
"Users wanting the 10-core 5.3 GHz will need to purchase the new top Core i9-10900K processor, which has a unit price of $488, and keep it under 70 ºC to enable Intel’s new Thermal Velocity Boost. Not only that, despite the 125 W TDP listed on the box, Intel states that the turbo power recommendation is 250 W – the motherboard manufacturers we’ve spoken to have prepared for 320-350 W from their own testing, in order to maintain that top turbo for as long as possible."
Power is going up and by a lot to hit that 5.3Ghz. And requires a much lower temperature to do it.
That they've got the power consumption down is precisely what allows them to then increase clockspeed which then brings it back up.
[0] https://hanweiconsulting.com/cpu-frequency-world-record-hist...
Apple may drag the OSX ecosystem kicking and screaming, battered & bloody over to ARM so Apple can control more of the stack, but why would that have any impact whatsoever outside of Apple's corner of the market?
tldr: 6502 is very similar to 8086 and doing a binary translation is fairly straightforward. But, it turns out that many instructions that took multiple cycles on the 6502 now execute in a single cycle on x64 and pipeline deeply with other ops. So, the effective performance of a 4Ghz x64 resembles that of a 15Ghz 6052.
Single core performance is always preferable for CPUs.
The CPU manufacturers basically conned everyone into thinking multi-core was "good enough". Software people who knew what they were talking about back in the day called them out on it but nobody listened. Now here we are on Hacker News in 2020 and people still not understanding this.
We also all know that a single core with twice the performance and twice the cache space costs a lot more than two cores. It's a lot more expensive than even 3 cores.
I'd rather have 3 4Ghz cores than 1 8Ghz core (except for the novelty value).
I'm not sure that's actually true, even if you want performance (although it's dependent on whether your workload can use more than 1 thread, of course): A single core at a higher clock speed might be better if it can hold that clock speed. But the faster you run, the more power you use and the more heat you produce, and worse, the relationship isn't linear. So ex. 1 core at 4ghz won't stay at 4 ghz, where 2 cores at 2 ghz can hold that speed forever.
I'm a programmer, I don't care how much it costs the hardware manufacturer. I want a single core. Multi-threaded programming sucks. I don't care if that's implemented via multiple cores acting together and only presents itself as a single core. I just want a single core.
> I'd rather have 3 4Ghz cores than 1 8Ghz core (except for the novelty value).
I'd much rather avoid multi-threaded programming and get the 8GHz core. But your comment is missing the point, really, which is that single-core performance matters. If the 8GHz core existed then you'd still be able to get 3 8GHz cores. Still want the 3x4GHz?
I, on the other hand, care about the cost of my computers a bit more than that, not having infinite money. Which is why even if 8Ghz cores were commercially available I suspect I would still be buying 3 times as many 4Ghz ones.
Well no. Right now you can get ~5GHz cores and they draw close to 300 watts per core, which is why they can't run all cores at 5GHz on threaded programs. For the same amount of power as one core at 5GHz you can get 64 cores at almost 3GHz, e.g. ThreadRipper 3990X.
An 8GHz core would presumably draw 500+ watts per core and maybe even a lot more than that. To get the same performance as the 3990X, you would either need a single 185GHz core (basically impossible) or >23 8GHz cores (expected power draw >11kW). That would cost thousands a year in electricity, but a normal 20 amp household circuit breaker would trip before you hit 2.5kW anyway.
More than that, by the time you write code that can scale to 16+ threads, 64 isn't that much harder, and 256 isn't much harder than that. So get used to it, because in a few years there are going to be 256-core mobile devices and 1024+ core desktops and servers.
a. these hypothetical ultra high clocked single core CPUs actually exist, and
b. they have unlimited spending money and don't care at all about power usage or cooling.
You wouldn't have true parallelism then, would you? So if you have something, for whatever reason, blocking further processing, the entire computer would lock up. Why is this a better scenario again?
That doesn't occur because the OS scheduler will eventually pre-empt your thread and swap to another task. You don't really have control over that. All modern OSs use pre-emptive multitasking and there's not a ton you can do to prevent it.
(read: anything in the last 30 years, last cooperative multitasking I remember was MacOS Classic (probably like OS7 or so.)
Single-core processors were the norm up until 15 years ago, and people routinely ran more than one process on them. Yes, we ran Discord (we called it Roger Wilco or Teamspeak back then) and played music in the background too, without 4 dedicated cores for the background tasks.
Yes, in the abstract it would be preferable to have a 64 GHz processor instead of 16 4 GHz processors, because then you can have all that speed devoted to a single task. Context switching is not that expensive (particularly if you have hyperthreads/SMT to soak up the wasted cycles). The physics of transistors make that impossible, but we absolutely would not do any of this multithreading crap if we didn't have to. Single-threaded code is easier to write and usually faster (in terms of less total cycles - multithreaded programs waste extra cycles on synchronization, overhead, spinning for locks, etc that single-threaded programs don't have to).
I remember reading about that a while ago. Wasn't everything up to and including Mac OS 9 cooperatively multitasked?
> With the release of System 7, the MultiFinder extension was integrated with the operating system, and it remains so in Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9. However, the integration into the OS does nothing to fix MultiFinder's inherent idiosyncrasies and disadvantages.[11] These problems were not overcome in the mainstream Macintosh operating system until the MultiFinder model was abandoned with the move to a modern preemptive multitasking Unix-based OS in Mac OS X.
https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...
Sure, if you forget all the additional cache evictions, memory reads and writes and TLB flushes caused by all the competing threads on a single core. Not to mention that one shitty bit of code in one thread can poison the cache enough to re-read the data from memory every context switch.
I sort of doubt this is true, if only for the reason that most people don't buy a new CPU, GPU, and monitor at the same time. monitor and pc are probably going to be on different upgrade cycles, unless the monitor came with the pc (in which case, probably not "top end"). for DIYers, the GPU and CPU+RAM+mobo are likely also on different upgrade cycles.
I bought my current 4K monitor about four years ago, but I ran most games at 1080p until I had enough spare cash to buy a 1080 ti. I finally upgraded my CPU, RAM, and motherboard this year, mainly because I was tired of having 8GB of DDR3.
in any case, it's usually not a rational use of funds to buy the fastest CPU and GPU for a 4K monitor unless your budget is unlimited. with a constrained budget, it's usually better to drop a tier or two on the CPU if it gets you the next higher tier GPU.
The high clocks result in less pipeline stalls meaning your high frame rates are more achievable as well as significantly reducing the dips (0.1% lows is what every reviewer hates).
This isnt about "average", this is about having the best experience possible, which Intel provides in this very specific scenario.
Intel has three things going for it(in the consumer space), which matter a lot or not at all to different folks:
- better idle/low usage power consumption than AMD (low load laptop battery life)
- Intel's QuickSync is fantastic for media encode/decode (NVENC is typically better, AMD is basically non-existent)
- Intel has the highest clock rates.
I don't think this point is true anymore for the latest laptop processors.
Where Intel still rules (in x86 land) is that all day battery life. They're simply better, for now. I think mobile Ryzen 5000 may take over even that niche, but it remains to be seen.
EDIT: Celeron -> Centrino
https://www.techspot.com/article/1171-ddr4-4000-mhz-performa...
I've seen some people on Reddit running modded Skyrim (can probably throw Fallout 3/4/etc into that bucket as well) who are really mad about the performance of their Zen2 processors. ARMA3 probably runs poorly. That kind of thing.
Also, DAW performance is not very good on Zen.
That said, even in games that use more threads, there is often noticeable performance scaling from having faster per-thread ("single core") performance because there is one thread that is bottlenecking everything else. No real-world game ever has the magical 0% serial code necessary to scale perfectly according to Amdahl's law. It is just a question of whether that scaling starts dropping off at 6 cores, or 8 cores, or maybe 10 cores. Very few games can saturate a 3900X or 3950X yet, maybe Ashes of the Singularity but I doubt much else.
Why is this? It's something I've heard a lot but I don't understand why. Is it something fundamental about audio, or is it simply the case that The Application With the Mindshare isn't architectured in a way that multithreading works well?
Personally, my day job is working on a program that could support 4-16-64 threads just fine, but since a lot of the core architecture is from the 90s and there's a giant ball of globals, component object model/single threaded apartment spaghetti deep under the hood, multithreading even trivially parallelizable tasks is fraught with peril. Fortunately for my employer, we are an entrenched 800 pound gorilla, and we can skate on momentum while these issues get fixed. So I totally understand if it's the same in a specialized space like DAW.
re: Skyrim. That engine is a fork of a fork of an engine that was written in 1997. Skyrim ran like garbage when it was released in 2011. It has nothing to do with open world or so forth, it's just run of the mill legacy architecture problems. ARMA3 (released 2013) is in a similar boat- it's a very old game engine written by a very small (they're not indie, but they're close) development studio. Both of these studios have the same problem my employer has- they have a bunch of legacy cruft that's difficult to migrate away from.
There's a tipping point somewhere. With two physical cores, you don't gain that much from farming stuff out to the different cores. A lot of multithreaded stuff from that era had a sequential-concurrent model. Your one large task was broken down in a sequential series of subtasks. (usually it was gather input, do AI, do physics, do drawing) Sometimes those subtasks would break out into N threads, which do a small amount of stuff in parallel, then there's a "join the world" event, you move on to the next subtask. Think links of sausages; sometimes it's wide, sometimes it's narrow, but you never have two sausages at the same time. This model is very sensitive to single threaded performance, because all of the join the world events are single threaded, and at the end there's a giant pile of single threaded calls to OpenGL which is a single threaded API.
We're steadily moving away from that. First of all, the game loop went from having a giant mutable ball of state, to having a generational immutable world state. One pile of threads would compute world state generation N+1, and a second giant pile of threads would draw world state generation N. Both would depend on generation N, but since generation N was immutable, that was fine. This can be broken down further- it's fine to generate new AI priorities for gen N+1 using the physics state from gen N, and use the AI priorities defined in gen N to do physics to generate gen N+1. So AI and physics can happen on independent threads. This can be broken down further- chop the world up into zones, and give responsibility for each zone to individual jobs. We're also switching from OpenGL (with its internal state machine, single threaded API) to Vulkan, which has completely blown open the drawing steps. I think Valve did some benchmarking where where the single threaded chunk of OpenGL took 5ms, (which is an eternity) but the single threaded chunk of Vulkan was ~1 microsecond. The 4.999ms of CPU time still exists under Vulkan, it didn't just go away- but now it can happen in parallel on multiple threads. Instead of having 3-20 join the world events each frame, there's only one, and the only thing that happens there is a pointer swap.
The industry is moving away from single threaded engines like ARMA3's and Bethesda's in house engines. For the most part, AAA games since ~5 years ago properly utilize multiple cores. ARMA3 and Skyrim are dinosaurs, and they've aged about as well.
The value proposition of these chips is pretty bad, as well. Enormous power and cooling requirements, short-lived motherboard sockets, and sheer price/performance ratio are all not great in comparison.
For my computer graphics and processing work, multithreaded tasks scale amazingly well with the number of cores so single core performance doesn't matter all that much. A single thread isn't even be able to process all the data that's streamed from an SSD. I need three threads just to process/prepare the data in the background, in addition to the main thread that keeps rendering.
I suspect it's only a matter of time until multithreading is a must for games. The additional programming effort may not have paid off if players only have 2 or 4 core CPUs, but now that 8 cores with 16 threads are increasingly common, it's going to make a difference.
Anyway, traditional graphics APIs like OpenGL are practically single-threaded. Modern APIs like DX12 and Vulkan have been designed with multithreading in mind and support scaling with number of cores much better (with added overhead of having to do manual synchronization).
Unity has been introducing a lot of features (Job System, ECS) that make excellent use of parallelism. Additionally, a lot of the engine internals are being rewritten with that as a base (and some of the old features get patched with APIs that allow access from multithreaded jobs). It's a lot of fun when the code you write by default runs on all of the cores, with (almost) none of the usual parallel programming headaches.
Pretty soon you should start seeing all kinds of indie titles making use of those features.
If all your threads are sitting at 40-60% you're using more than 4 threads worth of execution... (if all 12 threads were at 50% that would be 6 threads worth).
So, by the numbers you are giving, yes.
see this dev blog for more info: https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-215
You might mean memory latency bound from serial simulations that need to calculate one piece to move on to the next, like an emulator or scripting language.
If you can point to anything to support your NUMA claim that'd be highly interesting, but all the block charts & teardowns I can find show it's clearly UMA.
For example, at 3 GHz and 30 FPS, there are 100 million cycles per frame. If the game requires 250 million cycles per frame spread between a few threads, it will never need more than two cores and a half in aggregate, plus waiting; and with 10 cores used 10% there's more time to wait without dropping frames than with 3 cores over 80% load.
They said "require" as shorthand for that because they (apparently wrongly) expected people to follow the "strongest plausible interpretation" rule.
You're talking past everyone because you're arguing hypotheticals, and assuming everyone else is also talking about hypotheticals, but they're not.
Look at the other replies. People who don't understand the difference between concurrency and parallelism. These people actually think multiple cores are a good thing.
What you don't seem to understand is that CPU manufacturers could have scaled up performance while still delivering a single core. They went the multi core route because it's much easier for them.
Their marketing departments have won, though.
If you want to max out gaming benchmarks right now, this is your CPU. And there are a decent number of people who do, so heavily tuning existing dies (I mean, let's be honest, this a rebinned and overclocked 10900X) makes sense.
Intel's per-core performance is decently higher in gaming, between their lower latency giving them slightly higher IPC in gaming tasks[1] (as these are latency sensitive) and the much higher all-core clocks they are pushing (at least 10% higher than AMD at present). That still gives them an edge in gaming, although certainly much less of an edge against Zen2 than it was against Zen1 (which was much worse than people were willing to admit at the time, people at the time were benching it with a GTX 1080 (the fastest card available at the time) at 1440p and 4K and claiming there was "no noticeable difference", but faster GPUs showed the weakness).
I think the 10700F looks good, 4.6 GHz all-core 8C16T part for under $300 looks compelling for gaming customers if you can keep it cool. The 10900K fills the "I want the top gaming performance first and foremost, with as many cores as I can get, and I'm not super concerned about budget" but is definitely on the expensive side. Other than that, nothing terribly impressive here IMO, the other chips fall into a range between "not fast enough" and "not cheap enough".
[1] https://www.techspot.com/article/1876-4ghz-ryzen-3rd-gen-vs-...
A very bad proxy then, since performance-per-core with multiple cores in use will almost certainly be limited by constraints on (1) memory bandwidth and (2) power/thermals. "Single-core performance" only applies when you're literally pegging one core at 100% cpu.
Pure single-core turbo is usually a bit higher than all-core turbo, but as a proxy it's surprisingly close. A 9400F (so, no hyperthreading, we are removing that variable) scores 2380 in CB R20 (AVX2 aware). As a 6C, that means its per-core performance is 397. Since single-core is 4.1 and all-core is 3.9, if we adjust the per-core by that amount, we come up with a per-core equivalent of 417. The actual single-core score is 430, so using single-core as a proxy introduces less than 3% expected error to true "per-core" performance. That is the impact of thermals, more cache available to that thread, etc - all of that adds up to less than 3% difference, in a full AVX2 heavy task.
AMD boost clocks are not as neatly defined as Intel but the 3500X has let's say 4.1 single-thread boost (the advertised single-thread boosts tend to be "ephemeral" at best under actual loads) and 3.9 all-core. It scores 2650 all-core, that's 441 per-core, adjusted for speed that's a per-core equivalent of 464. The actual single-core score is 467, so basically dead-nuts on.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-ryzen-5-3500x-review-e...
AMD people just don't like "single-core" because it's not a metric they currently win in. In practice it correlates pretty damn closely to expected per-core performance, and that is a critical metric that has a world of performance impact on a variety of tasks (Amdahl's law says many real-world tasks are dominated by one bottlenecked thread, the faster you run that one single thread, the faster the whole thing runs).
Once we see AMD move into the open lead in various workloads (which is very possible with Zen3), overnight we're going to see a lot of people suddenly rediscover the merits of empirical testing under non-bottlenecked conditions. The arguments about "well you would need a RTX 3070 running at 1080p" are going to fade away, just like the whining about the irrelevance of "single-core".
----
Generally speaking most home tasks are not memory-bandwidth bound. It depends, but generally they're not. As far as power/thermals, it depends on the board, if you're running a really crappy board with a weak VRM then all bets are off, but in practice it is not a problem with normal workloads. Gaming is not at all intense and can clock high even on some pretty mediocre boards if you've got some airflow. Something like video encoding (lots of AVX2) is the next step more intense, if you are going to sit there all day crushing video and you won't have airflow then yeah, you do need to buy at least something in the $170-200 tier.
Prime95 is not a realistic real world workload and will definitely overheat anything.
Web browsing is no longer a "light" thing to do. You need solid integer single core computing performance to have a snappy browsing experience.
AFAIK, there is not yet a web browser core that can parallelize tasks in a meaningful way.
Firefox is getting there. The CSS style engine is parallelized already, and graphical compositing+rendering will follow shortly (already enabled experimentally in some configurations). Other parts of the browser will be next, including the DOM.
Overview: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum
CSS: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/08/inside-a-super-fast-css-en...
DOM: https://billmccloskey.wordpress.com/2016/10/27/mozillas-quan...
Rendering: https://www.masonchang.com/blog/2016/7/18/a-short-walkthroug...
None of this parallelization has found its way into mainstream Firefox afaik.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation#Rust_Components has a list of what Rust has shipped within Firefox, though most of it has been motivated by safety guarantees rather than parallelism.
Have a look at the web benchmarks though (starting at Mozilla Kraken 1.1):
Intel tend to give turbo performance which can only run for so long before heat becomes a problem.
Also, though you're statement is technically correct, it fails to account for the nuance that increasingly across all applications, not just gaming, multi-threaded processing performance is becoming the far more important benchmark to look at.
crushing adjective [usually before noun] used to emphasise how bad or severe something is
I had to check the dictionary just in case. And in this case neither was it technically correct, or downvoted because of the tone. I downvoted it because it was factually wrong.
Zen 2 actually has better IPC than Skylake in many cases, on a sustained single thread performance they are likely to be on a similar level despite having a slightly lower clock speed disadvantage on a much lower TDP.
Hardly crushing.