Intel's benchmarking controversy: 9th gen Core i9, Principled Technologies

[Underseer]

After months of bad news from Intel about fabrication woes and the fact that their problems with manufacturing at a smaller process size will result in AMD slurping up a lot of market share, the folks at Intel were probably desperate for a bit of good news to help change the narrative. Hey, the ninth generation Core i9 is coming out, maybe we can publish some early benchmar[ent]hellip[/ent]

Whoops.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasone...roversial-intel-i9-9900k-benchmarks-responds/

The vendor that Intel hired to do the benchmarks (Principled Technologies) used a bad methodology (a special "gaming mode" was used on the Ryzen that disabled some cores) that made the 2700x look worse than it really is. In the tests, the 2700x looked around 50% the performance of the upcoming Core i9, but when we correct for the methodology, the difference is more like 12%.

I guess what I find really bizarre is that they gimped the 2700x in tests rather than the comparably-priced, comparably-positioned Threadripper CPUs. I get that the 2700x is probably a bigger seller, but the 2700 and 2700x are meant to compete with the Core i7 CPUs even if it has the same number of cores as the 9th gen i9.

Anyway, the things Intel and Principled Technologies did to try and downplay the flawed testing methodology has only served to make the story bigger.

 

[Deepak]

So it looks like the updated benchmarks have the numbers updated for AMD with and without game mode. Actually I had never heard of the Threadripper, so I decided to do a bit of investigation and, really I don't get the point (though honestly I never really got the point of i9s either). Apart from benchmarks or running Stockfish, most of those cores are going to be sitting idle for the majority of tasks. I would have said watching four HD movie streams while encoding a video at the same time, but the memory bandwidth would take a beatdown.

Hell, you could buy a pair of 2700x's and a pair of 980ti's for the cost of the 2990wx. In fact, I was going to check the comparison between the two, but a typo on my part actually got the results for my venerable i7-2700k and it doesn't match up too bad against the $1700 CPU at 4 or fewer cores https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-2700K-vs-AMD-Ryzen-TR-2990WX/1985vsm560423, and I bet you could find a new-old-stock for like $18 at a flea market. I'd figure at least half are bought by gamers with more money than sense.

 

[Underseer]

So it looks like the updated benchmarks have the numbers updated for AMD with and without game mode. Actually I had never heard of the Threadripper, so I decided to do a bit of investigation and, really I don't get the point (though honestly I never really got the point of i9s either). Apart from benchmarks or running Stockfish, most of those cores are going to be sitting idle for the majority of tasks. I would have said watching four HD movie streams while encoding a video at the same time, but the memory bandwidth would take a beatdown.

Most games are not aggressively multithreaded and don't benefit from a large number of cores. There are exceptions like Civilization where the more cores the better, but for the most part you're better off with a smaller number of cores running at a higher clock rate. That's what game mode is about: it shuts down cores so that they don't generate heat, which means the remaining cores can be cranked up more than normal.

What would you want all those cores for? Computation-heavy tasks other than gaming or virtual coin mining, such as video-editing or rendering CGI or running complex simulations.

Hell, you could buy a pair of 2700x's and a pair of 980ti's for the cost of the 2990wx. In fact, I was going to check the comparison between the two, but a typo on my part actually got the results for my venerable i7-2700k and it doesn't match up too bad against the $1700 CPU at 4 or fewer cores https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-2700K-vs-AMD-Ryzen-TR-2990WX/1985vsm560423, and I bet you could find a new-old-stock for like $18 at a flea market. I'd figure at least half are bought by gamers with more money than sense.

Threadripper and the Core i9 isn't really meant for regular users. If you did something that would benefit from CPUs like that, chances are you would already own one.