Intel Killed their OWN Product Lineup - Core i9 vs Xeon
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
1,893 words · ~9 min read
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if we look back Intel's high-end desktop
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or hedt lineup has for the most part
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been pretty clearly segmented from their mainstream lineup it's enjoyed
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processors with higher core counts and larger caches and the motherboards have
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had more RAM slots taking advantage of the bandwidth and capacity benefits of
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hedt's beefier memory controllers
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and of course on each edt workstation users have been able to count on being
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able to install a greater number of high bandwidth pci express devices without
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running into bottlenecks but
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i would actually make the argument that in the current environment
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Intel has actually damaged if not mostly
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destroyed the value proposition of their
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own entire high-end product stack
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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
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able to stick with quad-core processors for consumers for 10
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years making the argument that well mainstream workloads like gaming ah they
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don't need more cores and anyone who does need more course they've probably
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got real work to do and they can justify ponying up for hedt
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but then AMD happened getting eight true cores
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with ryzen at the beginning of 2017 was
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a shock for the industry and i don't blame you if you've forgotten that eight
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core rising started at 329 us dollars with performance that
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compared favorably to Intel's hedt
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processors where eight cores at that time was going to cost you over a grand
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now Intel responded to that threat and they met AMD's high-end threadripper
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lineup head-on by dramatically increasing the core counts of its atdt
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lineup from 10 in the previous generation all the way to 18 with their
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7000 series core i9 cpus but that wasn't enough
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while mainstream core i7 was still the clear leader in single threaded
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workloads for anyone who did anything other than just gaming on their machine
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consumer ryzen had a huge price advantage thanks in part to its
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affordable motherboards so Intel finally had to bump their
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consumer chips as well first came the six core core i7 8700k at
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the end of 2017. now it didn't quite bridge the gap in budget workstation
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performance with ryzen but it did reduce
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AMD's lead somewhat and thanks to its superior single threaded performance it
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kept Intel on top for gaming and some other key workloads then fast forward
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another nine months and we got the core i9 9900k
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the first Intel branded a core consumer CPU and the first CPU ever on Intel's
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mainstream platform with core i9 branding along with the core i7 9700k
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also eight cores but without smt or hyper threading technology
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and then with those cpus we've got the real reason that Intel has been
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sandbagging consumer core accounts for so long
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because the hedt lineup has been traditionally based on Intel's
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workstation and or server platform
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where by the nature of these markets tech actually tends to move a little
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slower it has tended to lag behind their
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consumer processors architecturally sometimes as much as by two generations
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so compounding this performance disadvantage is the fact that hedt
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processors don't hit such high clock speeds due to power or thermal
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constraints and that they don't have an
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onboard graphics processor which over the last five years in particular has
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come to act as a co-processor for certain workloads on the consumer chips
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so we're at a very interesting crossroads right now
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think about it when we benchmark cpus
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for our reviews or whatever we tend to go out looking for workloads that help
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us demonstrate the potential difference in performance from one chip to another
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but in the real world how many workstation tasks like even workstation
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tasks do you actually perform in the course of a workday that require more
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than eight cores and of those how many of them can't be
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GPU accelerated in some way that is the ace up the sleeve of
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consumer chips and we'll be demonstrating that using the platforms
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you're looking at so with consumer chips you now have up to 16 threads enough to
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handle h.264 encoding without breaking a sweat and the same goes for light
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rendering for your 3d modeling and cad applications along with other
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traditionally CPU intensive tasks and this is especially true if you have a
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GPU that can be used to accelerate them
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so just look at how little our high-end
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desktop cpus affect spec view perfure
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it's basically just run to run variants in most scenarios in fact what's really
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interesting here is that our mainstream processors enjoy a significant advantage
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in applications like solidworks which is a traditionally workstation workload
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thanks to their much higher clock speeds
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this is again apparent in the case of adobe premiere where as we've tested
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before more cores does matter but only to a
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point so here we've reached that happy medium where the thread count the
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superior per core performance and the integrated graphics of the core i9 9900k
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put it in a league of its own way out ahead of Intel's own hddt chips
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even though some of them have more cores i mean
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this is amazing when you recall again
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that just two years ago we were stuck with four cores on Intel's consumer
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platform and had to pay a huge premium to get six or eight let alone the 10
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core 6950x that actually cost more by
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itself than the entire mainstream test
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bench that we are running here because remember the difference in CPU price is
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just part of the story the price difference between the platforms
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themselves can also be significant so
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all it'll take now is for AMD to continue to press the advantage of their
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modular CPU design and push core counts even higher with zen 2
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and then assuming that Intel follows suit and we
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know by now that they will have to the likely result we think is going to
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be the contraction and eventual disappearance of the traditional hedt
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lineup from Intel like think about it for light workstation use honestly apple
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hit the nail on the head with the imac photographers haven't really needed
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powerful workstations for a very long
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time now NVIDIA production hedt has offered
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clear performance improvements even as recently as two to three years ago and
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has also leveraged the increased pci express bandwidth with expansion cards
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like red rocket accelerators but GPU compute has eroded the market
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for devices like that very significantly i mean how many expansion cards do you
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have in your system so we're not saying that chips like
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Threadripper and Intel's own high core count cpus won't continue to have a
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place in desktop workstations there are
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workloads for them we're just saying that the use cases for
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those chips are not very mainstream anymore and that hedt is the wrong
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product for those kinds of customers and the reason is ecc memory support
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ryzen supports ecc from the ground floor
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all the way up to threadripper2 which makes it perfect for an entry-level
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workstation that has a need for ecc
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by contrast Intel has desperately clung
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to the paradigm of removing ecc from its
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consumer and hedt processors to force
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anyone doing more mission critical work to spend still more on a xeon
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that obviously isn't going to last so
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the bottom line is this we were wrong when we did our review of
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the xeon w we said xeon w had no reason to exist
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with only ecc to differentiate it from hedt because the performance was the
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same but actually hedt has no reason to
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exist if it doesn't support ecc because
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it's getting eaten away at from both the bottom and the top by Intel's own 9000
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series consumer chips and AMD's threadripper so here's our new proposed
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lineup you continue to expand the consumer
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chips with more cores when possible but don't compromise single threaded
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performance that's still your key advantage in certain workloads like
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gaming and solidworks then once that's done you replace the high core count
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lineup wholesale with xeon w so that's
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the lower end single socket only workstation z online and while you're at
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that you get your head out of your butt when it comes to the pricing of those
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chips they should end up in line with the core i9s that they will replace
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that way you cut out one entire platform to support which makes life easier on
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marketing teams and board partners and
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consumers now i suspect Intel won't take my advice they do like making money
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after all but there may come a time when it's absolutely necessary just like
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they're eventually going to have to bring coffee lake refresh to their lga
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1151 xeons threatening even xeon w
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but that's a conversation for another day for now the bottom line is this let's
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give credit where credit is due AMD brought more course to the table and
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Intel responded in kind so there has never been a better time to build a
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value-oriented desktop machine that can do serious workstation work and if this
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is what the death of hedt as we know looks like then i am super okay with
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