Among many of Intel’s announcements today, a key one for a lot of users will be the launch of Intel’s 9th Generation Core desktop processors, offering up to 8-cores on Intel’s mainstream consumer platform. These processors are drop-in compatible with current Coffee Lake and Z370 platforms, but are accompanied by a new Z390 chipset and associated motherboards as well. The highlights from this launch is the 8-core Core i9 parts, which include a 5.0 GHz turbo Core i9-9900K, rated at a 95W TDP.
Biggest news for me is that Intel unveiled that these new processors will switch from a cheap paste as thermal interface material between the die and the IHS to a layer of solder. This should greatly aid in cooling.
The new Core i7-9700K might have eight cores, but it doesn’t have hyper-threading (8 threads, instead of 16); isn’t the whole point of the i7 to have hyper-threading over the i5? — that’s the entire reason I bought a 4th-gen i7 over the i5 counterpart, I need the extra threads for rendering & compressing tasks.
Also, *still* no ECC.
This is a bullcrap move to position the i9 as the only “true” Intel processor, and therefore increase costs for anybody trying to do any serious work. I’m not even going to bother to look at Intel come my next PC, it’s Ryzen/ThreadRipper or bust.
Edited 2018-10-08 20:28 UTC
No the whole point is to make money… period.
Not saying AMD isn’t out to make money also … but they seem to care a little more as they are the underdog, so that’s where my money is at.
Also wendel at Level1Techs just did a test of ECC on ThreadRipper 2 apparently you can get it working and he tested up to 128GB.
And yes lack of hyperthreading in i5-i7 parts is a complete joke.
Edited 2018-10-08 20:51 UTC
The underdog that started to offer x86 alternatives running at 40 MHz when Intel was stuck at 33 Mhz. Just to say…
May AMD have it’s downsides, they are rather competent and can deliver very good shoot for your money.
Plus they have bought ATI and offering very decent APUs. Hence that’s also where my money goes.
The point of i3/i5/i7/i9 is to offer different performance price points, preferably in a way that lines up well with how they can bin the chips coming off the production lines.
On the desktop line, for a long time one of the big the difference between i5 and i7 was hyperthreading (cache size being another). On laptops, the difference was just clockspeeds and cache sizes, as both models had hyperthreading.
Compare 9th gen i7 to 7th gen i7 and you’re getting 8 real cores instead of 4 real cores and 4 extra threads. That’s a huge win for every workload. Compare to 8th gen and you’re getting 8 real cores instead of 6 cores and 6 threads, and you’re getting a clockspeed boost. 9th gen is probably going to be an improvement for most workloads.
Now you’ve got i9 as a viable mainstream option too. It no look requires server motherboards.
As someone that stresses an i7-8700K pretty hard for work, the i9-9900K is *really* tempting, as it’s a drop in replacement. Not rushing to buy one, but probably will down the line when the prices drop.
The value proposition for the i9 is very iffy, compared to the AMD alternative.
ECC is only on Xeons and that’ll always be the case. If you want ECC so badly, get a Xeon.
Also, look into recent history, Hyperthreading is crap at security. HT is not the full equivalent of having separate CPU cores anyhow, unfortunately a lot of people utilize them as such and it’s not the right way to do it.
Not to say that your particular use of the threads is the wrong way to go about it, but a lot of people brag about having 16 cores, when they only have 8.
They make some models of laptops and desktops that have Xeons in them, so if you need lots of threads and absolutely need Intel and ECC, just get a Xeon.
Or, get Ryzen. Or any AMD processor, really.
What I truly hate about the whole iSomething naming standard is its total lack of convention. You can’t really know what you are buying without looking at some spec sheet. So, no, the point of the i7 isn’t to have hyperthreading. It’s to make things confusing.
We geeks get a quick laugh at the apparent random tiering of silicon between “i3”, “i5”, “i7” and “i9” levels, but Intel is making a killing thanks to it, because it allows them to sell any piece of silicon they want (with whatever features they want fused-off) as premium hardware. This is especially true for laptops which are bought by non-technical people. And BTW AMD is barred from playing with most OEM laptops because of shady backroom deals.
Edited 2018-10-09 17:09 UTC
“shady backroom deals”
It can’t be.
Article didnt mention avx512. Does it have it?
It should, it’s basically the same microarchitecture than the 8th gen with some minor tweaks.