Intel Core I9-13900K and I5-13600K Review: Raptor Lake Brings More Bite
anandtech.com
anandtech.com
Also consider that there's 10+ billion transistors for those 200 A to go around.
As far as power density goes, the i9-13900K seems to be 335W / (257 mm^2 die area * ~1mm water thickness) ≈ 1.3e9 W/m^3. The power density of the sun in comparison is around 2.8e2 W/m^3, roughly what you'd find at the center of a large pile of compost (although the temperature at the sun's core may be just a wee bit higher).
The sun's output is 3.8 x 10^26 watts and the volume is 1.4 x 10^27 cubic meters
Surface of the sun is 6.09×10^12 km^2, which comes out to 62.4 watts per square mm. The AM5 socket is 40x40mm, so that would be 100,000 watts of the sun's surface.
For this processor to continue dissipating 335W without overheating, it needs to dissipate that 335W of heat energy into hundreds of cubic feet of air every minute. Six fans push and pull the air through hundreds of tiny fins, which are conducting heat out of liquid coolant continuously pumped through tubes soldered to those fins and through a giant copper waterblock millimeters from the point where this heat is produced. And even with all that, it probably can't actually run at 335W continuously.
You don't have a $200 cooling solution on every foot of your battery cables, they're wrapped in PVC or silicone, buried in conduit, in plastic wire wrapping, or through insulation in a wall cavity.
As an EE, those rules are painfully applied to microprocessors, such that a ton of PCB design energy, mechanical constraints on packaging, and other costs are spent removing that heat. You have the convenience of just buying the recommended AWG4 cables and it just works, regardless of the severely sub-optimal thermal design you might employ when running that cable.
In theory your batteries could pass 255A through a single strand of bare copper from an Ethernet cable for a few tens of milliseconds before it went into thermal runaway and liquefied/evaporated. Remove that heat fast enough (liquid nitrogen?) and you could run tiny cables to your battery storage.
Sadly waiting on cache (l1, l2, and l3), main memory (4 32 bit channels approximately 100ns away), missed branch predictions, etc is fairly common. So delivered performance is much less than you'd think form a 6 way issue @ 6 GHz * 8 to 16 cores. Sadly we are still stuck at 128 bit wide memory, as a result even the most parallel of codes like cinebench go up by 50% when you double the number of cores.
Dynamic power being proportional to voltagr squared will hurt perf/watt significantly also.
There are times when I will certainly sacrifice cost for speed, but most of the time I want my CPU to churn out pretty good performance while being frugal on the power budget.
Both 7950X and 13900k don't lose much performance from limiting power to "reasonable" wattage.
Notice at 185W, the Ryzen 9 7950X is churning out about 36% higher performance than the Core i9 13900K. The Intel CPU, however, is then able to continue drawing up to 335W!
At their respective peak scores, the i9 is using over 70% more power.
[0] https://www.techspot.com/review/2552-intel-core-i9-13900k/
[1] https://static.techspot.com/articles-info/2552/bench/Power_S...
I use high performance only for seconds when compiling.
From https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/10195/amd-ryzen-5-7600x-ze...
"Power consumption is measured directly from the dual eight-pin connections. At peak, the 7600X pulls an impressive 130W, and during idle, it was down to 18w."
Sounds pretty good, especially considering its at the "dual eight-pin" power supply connection. Not laptop class, but pretty good for a high performance desktop.
Not sure what exactly is included in the 18 watts via the power supply connector. Wasn't sure if it was all CPU, or CPU+Dimms, or maybe the entire motherboard.
AMD is killing it with efficiency there.
Apparently Intel's trying really hard on an old process to get the performance crown, forcing AMD to clock higher than they'd like to compete. It's ridiculous that they double the power for 10% performance. But the nice thing is you can half the power and take the 10% hit.
Also note that the 7900/7900X are dual chiplet design that has a significant power impact. The 7700x and below have a single chiplet and saves power, and also increases single thread perf. If you look at the gaming benchmarks the 7700x is often better than the 7900x, not to mention all the Intel chips except the top of the line i9.
So if you buy the 7700x and underclock just a bit you should have a very efficient desktop.
This is a minor terminology mix-up. The term you want here is "CCX". Each CCX holds multiple chiplets.
See https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-ccx-definition-cpu-... for more details.
EDIT: It does look like my own information on this was rusty.
A "chiplet" is not an individual core, but a trimmed down die that does not have a memory controller. A "CCX" contains cores (within a chiplet) and L3 cache.
https://www.hardwaretimes.com/amd-ccd-and-ccx-in-ryzen-proce...
> The basic unit of a Ryzen processor is a CCX or Core Complex, a quad-core/octa-core CPU chiplet with a shared L3 cache.
From that link, your statement does not appear accurate. Multiple CCX's appear on a given Core Chiplet Die. There are indeed two vs one core chiplets on different Ryzen designs (plus the IOD).
The popular tech press understanding of how closed-loop control systems work is just REALLY annoying.
So I am actually surprised at how well AMD Zen 4 is doing. It used to be if you want MT you go with AMD, at the expense of ST. Now this is no longer the case.
If you care about energy efficiency, just buy AMD Zen 4.
Not sure if it gets closer to the testing approach you're looking for?
My work PC with a 4th gen i5 has been unusable even for basic tasks for a few years, despite the 16 GB of RAM and SSD drive. Even moving windows around and stuff is sluggish.
Yes and no. AMD just released the 5800X3D which is just a teensy bit slower than Intel's top-dog...but it uses a bit more than one third the power the I9-12900KS and 13900K do.
Right now you can get a blisteringly-fast (for gaming and other certain specific workloads) AMD CPU with power consumption a skooch over 100W. It yields a nearly 25% increase in framerate on some games, which is huge, and does it at less power usage than the non-stacked-cache variant: https://youtu.be/hBFNoKUHjcg?t=515
You're right about the next generation of Ryzen processors using more power, but nobody knows how much, partly because AMD using some silly nonsense to calculate "TDP", and review units aren't out yet: https://youtu.be/hVnJbiYOCq4?t=363
In 1080p gaming (useful for exaggerating the CPU bottleneck), the 13900K outperforms the 5800X3D by about 11%[1].
Review units of "next generation of Ryzen processors" have been out since late September when they became available to buy, so you can read reviews and find out their actual power usage[2]. The Ryzen 9 7950X is shown to push system power consumption up to 355W while running Blender.
(TechSpot reviews linked simply because they include power consumption in their reviews.)
[0] https://www.techspot.com/review/2449-amd-ryzen-5800x3D/
[1] https://www.techspot.com/review/2552-intel-core-i9-13900k/
At idle, where the cpu spends most of it's time, the Intel chips are winning significantly.
Well, by 3W for an entire system. Which isn't worth worrying about in my opinion.
So personally, I'd be looking at other specs to help me decide between them.
https://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/intel_core_i9_13900k_r...
For day to day use (including non-gaming work) my old Intel CPU consumes less power overall because the idle power was so much lower.
Peak TDP isn’t everything.
How often do you run your CPU at 100% load across all cores? For me, idle power draw dominates my overall power consumption. The difference between a 100W peak CPU and a 300W peak CPU basically doesn’t matter across the course of my day, because even compiling large codebases doesn’t last very long.
I say this because I bought into the AMD efficiency hype a few years ago, ditching my Intel workstation for an AMD workstation. Yet according to my home energy monitor, my office circuit consumption actually went up, not down.
Further investigation revealed that my AMD desktop had significantly higher idle power than the old Intel one. Given that most of my day is spent typing, not pegging the CPU at full load, this nets out to higher overall power consumption.
So I’m back to not caring about peak power consumption. If the Intel CPU wants to pull 300W for the 60 seconds that my compile takes, go for it. What I’ll really be looking at is the idle power usage.
For my desktop, I only care if it's possible to make it quiet overall.
For a laptop, I care about performance given the more restrictive cooling restraints of the form factor, and battery life (but that's secondary since I can usually use it plugged in anyway.)
So efficiency matters (including under load), but it can't be your only deciding factor in deciding what to buy and use.
And then having a processor drawing this kind of power has impact on you PDU, cooling system, case...
mATX for instance makes nearly no sense with that kind of power use. But who wants a huge tower on their desk anymore?
It seems to me like people only care about peak power consumption when AMD and Apple win those benchmarks.
Intel is seeming likely to have the pricing advantage this time due to their compatibility with DDR4, IIRC slightly lower prices and support for existing motherboards.
They're already here - the 5800X3D or whatever it's called - and there's a significant performance jump in a bunch of games.
It is being released for the same cost as the non-stacked version of the chip, which has since come down in price. There are some downsides, like not being overclockable, so for workloads that don't benefit from the extra cache (which are many), it's not advantageous.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBFNoKUHjcg
Edit: I apologize for not being more specific in a casual internet forum discussion, so as to make clear that I was simply pointing out that there are also some 3d cache chips already in the market.
I mistakenly thought this was intuitively obvious to casual observers. Praise be that neogodless was available to prevent HN readers from being led astray.
In the future, I will be more careful and exacting in my wording.
I have been appropriately chided, and will not transgress again.
Thank you for correcting me, good sir.
AMD: Total $615
B650 motherboard $230
Ryzen 5 7600X (6C) $300
DDR5-4800 $85
Intel: Total $439
B660M motherboard (DDR4 only) $90
Core i5 13600k (6P + 8E) $300
DDR4-3200 $49
The motherboards are really killing it. DDR5 isn't such a problem. Yes it's more expensive, but higher performing. But their entry level motherboards need to come way down in price!
I think Apple is probably too conservative with their power limits on their Mac Studio (maybe that's something they're saving for the Mac Pro) but I'd prefer that to this nonsense being the default.
My CPU runs most of the day at around 5-20% usage
And it reaches top usage when I run some relatively new game for like a hour a week at best
Thus, the point is: why power usage at highest usage is that important?
I'd say power usage for the most common CPU usage is most important for majority of the people (for data center it'd be different)
I can spend several hours on a weekend night gaming, and my GPU and CPU, depending on the game, are going half to full tilt. Typically ~350W, and that doesn't include my two monitors. When it's not in active use, it's asleep - I rarely leave it idling for more than ~30min before I put it in sleep mode. I'd say it probably spends 25% of its life under load.
This and the prior generation I9s use 2-3x the wattage of current generation AMD CPUs...couple that with NVIDIA 4000 series cards hitting 600W and you could have an intel 13900k w/4090 gaming rig using around 1000W, not including PSU efficiency losses or monitor(s). We're talking "you might need a dedicated circuit if you're on 100-120VAC and want anything else on that circuit" territory; it wouldn't surprise me if people start hiring electricians to switch circuits over to 208v.
You can use PC for 4 hours/week, so 3h gaming per week = 75%
That's what I believe s/he meant
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/xp5yj5/eco_mode_is_ver...
I'd rather have the product ship near the top of it's v/f curve than risk my warranty getting it there myself.
Tuning power profiles down to something reasonable is much harder than putting together a computer. You overestimate the competency of DIYers. System integrators aren't going to go out of their way to reduce the performance of their systems.
Enthusiasts should carry the burden of tuning their systems to eke out its maximum performance to the point of massive diminishing returns. That should not be the default profile.
but that's kinda missing the larger point. if you care more about power consumption than performance, you aren't the target audience for K-suffix parts anyway. these parts are specifically marketed to enthusiasts.
Example: I currently have my 12th-gen Core configured in a peculiar way that caps the all-core turbo clock rate to 4100MHz, but this leads to shorter project build times because it leaves thermal overhead sufficient for the single-threaded link to hit 5200MHz earlier and longer.
Hopefully the new Mac Pro is better
However it's also very useful to just know when a particular failure causes issues. So you know that the 3rd of 4 dimms died, instead of tracking down frequent crashed that might be power supply, motherboard, cpu, any dimm, etc.
Linus Torvalds recently lost time thinking he had an unreliable kernel when a 2+ year old dimm just went bad.
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/230496/...
Power limit 90W: https://youtu.be/H4Bm0Wr6OEQ?t=280
A power limit scaling graph in 20W steps with Cinebench R20: https://youtu.be/H4Bm0Wr6OEQ?t=910
The default settings on both AMD and intel are such a shame when you can offer 5-10% less performance for a major decrease in power consumption.
Pretty weird that roles changes and now Intel is dominating low end and AMD is trying hard to dominate high end.
Also value overclocking is back - cheap boards like MSI MAG B660M Mortar Max Wifi DDR4 and AsRock B660M PG Riptide can overclock non-K Intel CPUs. Combined with say an i5 12400f overclocked to 5.1GHz they are providing amazing performance per dollar.
How do you come to that conclusion? Here's a Chromium Compile Benchmark in which the 7950x beats the 13900k. https://youtu.be/P40gp_DJk5E?t=593
'In our testing, power consumption topped out at a absurd 335 Watts, over 100W more than the Ryzen 9 7950X'
And Intel is on at least 1/1.5 node behind right now so still impressive for me especially 12600k that totally destroys 7000 series right now.
I've seen a lot of comments, but no solid links/reviews.
I did find this YouTube video which compares Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 9 5950X at idle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvv1hlUny7c
The overall "CPU Package Power" is around 38-42W for these two.
Does anyone have the same number for a Raptor Lake system?
To put it another way, i9 exists for those who either need the bestest performance or want bragging rights. i7 exists for those who need/want the best performance.
Intel's 24-core chip matches AMD's 16-core chip in performance for $100 less, but uses up to 150W more.