Intel Launches $699 Core I9-13900KS, the First 6 GHz CPU: Available Now
tomshardware.com
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For example, let's contrast the 13700k to the ancient 7920X. The 13700K benchmarks to 47106, with a TDP of 250, a performance per watt of 188. Compare that to a 7920X, which benchmarks to half that at 23607, with a TDP of 140W, a performance per watt that's less than 170. The 13700K is clearly an improvement if we stopped there!
Except we don't, because the wasted watts matter a lot: the 13700K needs 75W just to power its cores, whereas the 7920X needs 50W. Adjusting our performance per watt to performance per watt per wasted watt, we get 2.5 for the 13700K, but 3.4 for the 7920X. That old CPU is a lot better at turning energy into work.
The 13700K is unquestionably a higher performing CPU than the 7920X, and I doubt anyone would object to calling it a much, much better CPU, but it's very hard to--with a straight face--call the newer CPUs an improvement in terms of energy consumption. CPUs have gotten quite a bit worse =)
If you take it to an extreme the flaw is apparent. Let's say "bogomips" is the name of a real world accurate benchmark.
If a CPU at full performance gives 100 bogomips at 2 watts and idles at 1 watt by your metric the score is 50.
On the other hand, if a CPU at full performance gives 200 bogomips at 2 watts and idles at a small fraction under 2 watts, your metric also gives a score of ~50.
It's obvious the 200 bogomips processor is way more efficient than the 100 bogomips processor. Something is missing.
I think both idle watts and TDP are somewhat irrelevant. Maybe it should be bogomips / actual watt draw (different from nominal TDP) at full speed. Assuming you can keep the processor busy. Not being able to keep the processor busy doesn't really reflect on processing efficiency. Except that it is better for the wasted watts to be as low as possible.
A true efficiency, like a true benchmark is elusive, because what is "normal use"? Somewhere between "no work, all waste" and "full use, maximum efficiency".
The 13900KS boosts to 6ghz at 320w.
The 13900K boosts to 5.8ghz at 253w.
That’s a 3.4% increase in clock speed at the cost of a 26.5% increase in power. The marginal power cost for the frequency increase is way out of line.
"but the extra 'S' in the name denotes that this is premium-binned silicon that hits 6 GHz on two cores — 200 MHz faster than the 12900K"These new Intels are desktop CPUs. They also have Performance and Efficiency cores. Ideally, they'd prioritize using E-cores, and only as many as needed to complete tasks within an acceptable period. In effect, though, they're not very smart, and you've got to get into overclocking and undervolting to get them into a state that resembles AMD's TDP-limited ECO Mode that provides 80% of the performance at 50% of the power.
For sure this is more fun to watch than another liquid cooling overclocking rig.
There is way too much gated on data movement at this point. Sure, CXL or other interconnect schemes may help but there are whole-system challenges for scheduling and dependency management and staging that drive these numbers.
Some of the engine work done for drag racing cars did make its way into consumer cars and it's not like grandma and grandpa are going to be ever running these high end CPUs either.
Power efficiency gains in recent generations have been pretty incredible - somewhere around 95% aggregate performance with half the aggregate power consumption of these processors is really crazy.
https://gerrymcgovern.com/data-centers-greenwashing-par-exce...
It really is pretty wasteful, but not much can be done I suppose.
Probably reduces life time
...said people about going to the moon.
...said people about organ transplants.
...said people about the horseless carriage.
...said people about computers.
So only 2 cores. They forgot to say for how many microseconds can the chip sustain this speed.
And 400 A ? Per nanosecond or what ? Thank god it will mainly wait for I/O and has enough time to cool itself. /s
Amps are already over time — 1 amp is 1 coulomb (6e18 electrons) per second.
They forgot to say for how many microseconds can the chip sustain this speed.
People have this weird view of modern chips. Yeah, they /can/ use a lot of power and produce a lot of heat.. Under terrible loads most people dont actually hit for any sustained period. even gaming, you arent going to be pegging all 24 cores.
EDIT: Just out of curiosity I looked up what voltage regulator slew rates for modern processors are, and it seems to be on the order of 100 A/µs, in case someone is interested.
A CPU that can hit 6ghz while pulling 400amps but can only do that for a few milliseconds before throttling itself is not particularly impressive.
They forgot to say for how many microseconds can the chip sustain this speed.
This is exactly what you are saying, they are asking how long can it run at 6 GHz before they have to throttle. Then they continue with the sentence I originally responded to.
And 400 A ? Per nanosecond or what ?
I see mainly two possibilities. The first one is that they made a typo and what they actually wanted to write is »And 400 A? For one nanosecond or what?« which would essentially be repeating the exact same question as in the sentence before, just in terms of current instead of clock frequency.
But this is not what they wrote, they wrote »And 400 A? Per nanosecond or what?« which leads to the second possibility and the one I consider more likely. They were confused about the unit, the equivalent of responding to »The average US citizen consumes 10 kW of power.« with the question »Per day? Per month? Per year? In its lifetime?« which obviously makes no sense. That would be an appropriate response to the statement »The average US citizen consumes 89 MWh of energy.«
Without the author telling us, we will never know for sure, but I find it more likely that they were confused about the unit than that they repeated the exact same questions twice and made a typo in the second one that just makes it look like they were confused about the unit.
There is another problem with watercooling, which is that once the water warms up (which it will under sustained loads) your CPU temperature will begin to climb.
Then it becomes a game of "do I have thermal mass enough to run my job before throttling", and often it can be the case that radiators are unable to effectively cool down the CPU; but the additional water becomes thermal capacity; sometimes giving the appearance of better cooling when in actuality your system will throttle after 10 minutes of work.
Your heatsink is one of the better ones, an NHD-15 might be better but only slightly, after which point: I don't think it can be expected to cool a CPU at a sustained load with any AIO system, even the triple fan ones.
I'm probably not communicating this terribly well, I went down this rabbit hole when I was watercooling my old GPU and CPU in a custom loop by EK, I ended up discovering that if I wanted to do sustained work (which I did) then a direct airflow system would have worked better, so I ripped out the loop and it did work better for sustained loads.
If it throttles after 10 minutes instead of after 20 seconds, that is in fact better cooling. The higher thermal mass is one of the major benefits of water cooling over air cooling for this reason.
I think the best setup would be ice cylinders. You put 3-4 packs of ice cylinders that hold good amount of ice in the fridge. Then you plug them into your watercooling loop to cool the water. Probably someone is working (or did work) on a setup like that.
The air did a better job because it was open. So you average initial temp was higher but could be sustained, because you always had cool air.
If you had a radiator with a fan it’s like the water solution would have still worked better.
2x 240mm rads
1x pump
1x 80mm reservoir
the gpu was a AMD firepro K2000 (not a epic GPU by any standards)
the cpu was a i7-4930k, which is pretty paltry by todays cooling standards.
What are people even doing on these newest CPUs? Video rendering? Servers? Because if they are playing games it is a huge waste of power.
All that said, DaVinci Resolve which is increasingly taking over from Premiere for many commercial editors, is more GPU than CPU bound. Lots of sales of the current fastest GPU Nvidia's RTX 4090 to this market.
A last-gen i5 mobile processor outperforms at 9600k with a 45W TDP.
People make a ton of noise about the efficiency of processors that are explicitly designed to be the hotrods of desktop computing: meanwhile we've also seen the bottom end get significantly faster over the years. Conversely, the floor for TDPs have barely risen.
The energy used for such activities is another question.
If I see 90%+ CPU load (being "efficient"), I need a bigger CPU.
If I hardly see any CPU load, I am being effective.
Ergo, the biggest CPU I can afford is the best choice.
I don't consider unused CPU power as waste, I see it as relief from worrying about capping out.
Let me put it a different way: If I'm playing a game and I'm barely using 20~40% CPU, I'm doing good. That 60~80% unused CPU processing headroom is my ability to be worryfree about capping out.
Which is to say: Yes, my 12700K is massive bloody overkill for my day to day activities, but it is 300% adequate for my needs and concerns and I love it. I'll probably upgrade it to a 13700K or 13900K(S) depending on the price a year or two down, since my mobo can accept it (thanks Intel!).
Edit: I accept your findings, and will pay closer attention to see if I can see the same.
These have been 7th gen and higher i5/i7 machines and newer J4xxx series celerons.
Haven’t had any AMD kit to compare though.
so... don't get a top end model or undervolt/underclock it if you care that much?
I don't get all the weird complaining about /halo products/ and /highest end models/ potentially using a lot of power and producing a lot of heat.
It's like, OK? and?
It isn't going to pull /320w/ all the time. It will periodically, under certain loads, briefly.
My i9-13900K happily slams into 6.4ghz across multiple cores when doing things. And power usage rarely actually hits ~230w doing that. I only ever see absurd power usage under really heavy work loads. Most of the time, itll hit its peaks on a couple of cores when I am doing something and thats that. I would rather slightly higher peak-y power usage for a more performance.
Beyond that, at scale, is it good to have high-consumption computers all over the world before we have widespread renewable energy? Probably not ideal.
As far as energy use we’re it’s such a tiny amount of energy compared to any given appliance.
I think others are concerned with a trend that extrapolates to something insane power consumption where power use grows exponentially to megawatts where clock speed is growing asompotically to say 10ghz
Back in the Amiga era, I inverted the PSU fan of a very loaded 2000 (lots of memory, SCSI, Video Toaster, etc) and piped in the output of an air-conditioner directly to it (with a little bit of epoxy sculpting). It stopped crashing and worked happy for a long time until being replaced by a boring Windows box running NT.
Tbh I like it in winter, warms my living room up nicely. In summer I just run my aircons more, but I also usually game less because the weather is nice.
I doubt too many computers based on these parts will be running that hot for any significant time. It's much more likely to experience bursty loads - compiling something big, crunching a massive amount of data - than sustained ones, such as a build server or something similar.
If the CPU is managing GPU-based number crunching, keeping it busy will require a lot of GPUs, which will make the CPU's thermal output a rounding error next to the rest of the data furnace.
I don't like noise.
On an energy basis the “performance” cores in an Intel CPU are more efficient than the “efficiency” cores.
My i9 desktop will start to spin the fans up with light web browsing.
To be precise, even at true zero load, an i9-10850k (what I've got) draws 25-30w. Any sort of load at all and it gets to 60+w. A gaming type load is well over 125w.
i9 is much hotter than i7, especially the high end ones. When I bought the cpu the only thing higher (without getting into server grade stuff) was the 10900k which was basically unobtanium.
The alternative is shipping a power constrained for…no gain? Letting the cpu boost this high is only a boon for people who want it and is an imagined negative.
But those i9 ks sku can achieve a couple hundred extra MHz. But have a much higher base clock speed.
This marketing "optimization" usually leads to cycle inefficiency and excessively deep pipelines, causing expensive pipeline stalls should a branch not be predicted correctly.
but seriously I heard arguments for a long time that bulldozer would probably be the highest-clocking LN2 CPU ever built, because of the combination of planar transistors and a frequency-optimized architecture. It seems like we stalled around 5 GHz forever with FinFET, and then 10ESF/Intel 7 just casually blows most of the way to 6 GHz in pretty much a single generation.
To be fair these chips will also be amazingly efficient at more modest clocks, because they're top-binned, but by default they're just pushing for max clocks above all else.
For some fun compare the 9900K to the 9900KS on SiliconLottery's historical statistics page... 95% of 9900KS will do 5 GHz all-core at 1.25v, vs only 30% of 9900K CPUs making 5 GHz at 1.3v, for example. Or top 5% of 9900K chips will do 5.1 GHz at 1.312v vs top 28% of 9900KS doing 5.1 GHz at 1.287v. Way way better silicon.
I don’t think there’s much in it between Apple, Intel, and AMD with regards to single threaded performance at the moment, so I’d probably make your decision based on other factors.
Processor Single-Core Score Multi-Core Score
Core i9-13900KS 2,319 26,774
Core i9-13900K 2,227 24,311
Ryzen 9 7950X 2,192 22,963
Core i9-12900KS 2,081 19,075
Core i9-12900K 1,988 17,324
$699 + estimated $350-400 motherboard + $200 cooling = 1249 or somewhere like that.
Is this what you're looking for?