if we look back Intel's high-end desktop
or hedt lineup has for the most part
been pretty clearly segmented from their mainstream lineup it's enjoyed
processors with higher core counts and larger caches and the motherboards have
had more RAM slots taking advantage of the bandwidth and capacity benefits of
hedt's beefier memory controllers
and of course on each edt workstation users have been able to count on being
able to install a greater number of high bandwidth pci express devices without
running into bottlenecks but
i would actually make the argument that in the current environment
Intel has actually damaged if not mostly
destroyed the value proposition of their
own entire high-end product stack
so what happened exactly i will tell you
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Intel had a really good thing going in the absence of any competition they were
able to stick with quad-core processors for consumers for 10
years making the argument that well mainstream workloads like gaming ah they
don't need more cores and anyone who does need more course they've probably
got real work to do and they can justify ponying up for hedt
but then AMD happened getting eight true cores
with ryzen at the beginning of 2017 was
a shock for the industry and i don't blame you if you've forgotten that eight
core rising started at 329 us dollars with performance that
compared favorably to Intel's hedt
processors where eight cores at that time was going to cost you over a grand
now Intel responded to that threat and they met AMD's high-end threadripper
lineup head-on by dramatically increasing the core counts of its atdt
lineup from 10 in the previous generation all the way to 18 with their
7000 series core i9 cpus but that wasn't enough
while mainstream core i7 was still the clear leader in single threaded
workloads for anyone who did anything other than just gaming on their machine
consumer ryzen had a huge price advantage thanks in part to its
affordable motherboards so Intel finally had to bump their
consumer chips as well first came the six core core i7 8700k at
the end of 2017. now it didn't quite bridge the gap in budget workstation
performance with ryzen but it did reduce
AMD's lead somewhat and thanks to its superior single threaded performance it
kept Intel on top for gaming and some other key workloads then fast forward
another nine months and we got the core i9 9900k
the first Intel branded a core consumer CPU and the first CPU ever on Intel's
mainstream platform with core i9 branding along with the core i7 9700k
also eight cores but without smt or hyper threading technology
and then with those cpus we've got the real reason that Intel has been
sandbagging consumer core accounts for so long
because the hedt lineup has been traditionally based on Intel's
workstation and or server platform
where by the nature of these markets tech actually tends to move a little
slower it has tended to lag behind their
consumer processors architecturally sometimes as much as by two generations
so compounding this performance disadvantage is the fact that hedt
processors don't hit such high clock speeds due to power or thermal
constraints and that they don't have an
onboard graphics processor which over the last five years in particular has
come to act as a co-processor for certain workloads on the consumer chips
so we're at a very interesting crossroads right now
think about it when we benchmark cpus
for our reviews or whatever we tend to go out looking for workloads that help
us demonstrate the potential difference in performance from one chip to another
but in the real world how many workstation tasks like even workstation
tasks do you actually perform in the course of a workday that require more
than eight cores and of those how many of them can't be
GPU accelerated in some way that is the ace up the sleeve of
consumer chips and we'll be demonstrating that using the platforms
you're looking at so with consumer chips you now have up to 16 threads enough to
handle h.264 encoding without breaking a sweat and the same goes for light
rendering for your 3d modeling and cad applications along with other
traditionally CPU intensive tasks and this is especially true if you have a
GPU that can be used to accelerate them
so just look at how little our high-end
desktop cpus affect spec view perfure
it's basically just run to run variants in most scenarios in fact what's really
interesting here is that our mainstream processors enjoy a significant advantage
in applications like solidworks which is a traditionally workstation workload
thanks to their much higher clock speeds
this is again apparent in the case of adobe premiere where as we've tested
before more cores does matter but only to a
point so here we've reached that happy medium where the thread count the
superior per core performance and the integrated graphics of the core i9 9900k
put it in a league of its own way out ahead of Intel's own hddt chips
even though some of them have more cores i mean
this is amazing when you recall again
that just two years ago we were stuck with four cores on Intel's consumer
platform and had to pay a huge premium to get six or eight let alone the 10
core 6950x that actually cost more by
itself than the entire mainstream test
bench that we are running here because remember the difference in CPU price is
just part of the story the price difference between the platforms
themselves can also be significant so
all it'll take now is for AMD to continue to press the advantage of their
modular CPU design and push core counts even higher with zen 2
and then assuming that Intel follows suit and we
know by now that they will have to the likely result we think is going to
be the contraction and eventual disappearance of the traditional hedt
lineup from Intel like think about it for light workstation use honestly apple
hit the nail on the head with the imac photographers haven't really needed
powerful workstations for a very long
time now NVIDIA production hedt has offered
clear performance improvements even as recently as two to three years ago and
has also leveraged the increased pci express bandwidth with expansion cards
like red rocket accelerators but GPU compute has eroded the market
for devices like that very significantly i mean how many expansion cards do you
have in your system so we're not saying that chips like
Threadripper and Intel's own high core count cpus won't continue to have a
place in desktop workstations there are
workloads for them we're just saying that the use cases for
those chips are not very mainstream anymore and that hedt is the wrong
product for those kinds of customers and the reason is ecc memory support
ryzen supports ecc from the ground floor
all the way up to threadripper2 which makes it perfect for an entry-level
workstation that has a need for ecc
by contrast Intel has desperately clung
to the paradigm of removing ecc from its
consumer and hedt processors to force
anyone doing more mission critical work to spend still more on a xeon
that obviously isn't going to last so
the bottom line is this we were wrong when we did our review of
the xeon w we said xeon w had no reason to exist
with only ecc to differentiate it from hedt because the performance was the
same but actually hedt has no reason to
exist if it doesn't support ecc because
it's getting eaten away at from both the bottom and the top by Intel's own 9000
series consumer chips and AMD's threadripper so here's our new proposed
lineup you continue to expand the consumer
chips with more cores when possible but don't compromise single threaded
performance that's still your key advantage in certain workloads like
gaming and solidworks then once that's done you replace the high core count
lineup wholesale with xeon w so that's
the lower end single socket only workstation z online and while you're at
that you get your head out of your butt when it comes to the pricing of those
chips they should end up in line with the core i9s that they will replace
that way you cut out one entire platform to support which makes life easier on
marketing teams and board partners and
consumers now i suspect Intel won't take my advice they do like making money
after all but there may come a time when it's absolutely necessary just like
they're eventually going to have to bring coffee lake refresh to their lga
1151 xeons threatening even xeon w
but that's a conversation for another day for now the bottom line is this let's
give credit where credit is due AMD brought more course to the table and
Intel responded in kind so there has never been a better time to build a
value-oriented desktop machine that can do serious workstation work and if this
is what the death of hedt as we know looks like then i am super okay with
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