Is a $600 CPU 10x MORE POWERFUL than a $60 one?
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
1,227 words · ~6 min read
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when i first saw the pentium g4560
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at 64. earlier this year i thought
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gee the core i7 6850 is almost exactly 10
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times the price we should see if it's at all worth it
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but we kind of missed the boat on that one
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because the core i9 is here now so i mean
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who would even care about this comparison anymore anyway
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wait we'll just use its replacement the core i9 7820x
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and we'll just agree to disagree about how many times 64 goes into 600
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let's get this out of the way right now we are not expecting the pentium g4560
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to go toe-to-toe with the core i9 7820x
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that's stupid i mean for one the core i9 has turbo
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boost to say nothing of the six
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extra cores that it's packing under the hood
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well okay Linus then what is the point of this video
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i'm glad you asked first since one is roughly
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ten times the cost of the other we thought this would give us a good feel
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for how pricing scales with performance
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within Intel's product stack because
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i think obviously we're not going to be getting 10 times the performance with the core
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i9 right or will be
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no we've been through that that's stupid
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reason number two is that this will give us some interesting insight into
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bottlenecks and where they show up within the system for example will the
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rebalanced cache and avx-512 support of the core i9 help it
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will it hinder it will it depend on the workload
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how much will the extra cores help with real world tasks does it even really
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matter now i know i know
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raw performance isn't the whole story the core i9 has more than double the pci
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express lanes quad channel memory support blah blah blah
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and those features don't come cheap so it makes sense that you'd be paying a
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premium for both the CPU and the accompanying motherboard and because the
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core i9 demands a better cooling solution
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surprise you get to buy one of those too they even require more thermal compound
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thanks to their larger physical size i mean
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the pentium comes with a cooler and compound that's more than adequate for
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it right out of the box so then with all these differences how
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can we possibly compare the two easy we'll just dump a bunch of
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benchmarks into excel like we always do and wait really
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is that all i'm paying these guys for oh no there's more here actually oh cool
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okay so while we'll be running the two chips on otherwise identical hardware we
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are also going to run a second set of
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tests on the 7820x with it configured
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with only two cores enabled and clocked like a g4560
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so in the past this method of cutting down higher-end chips has generated
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pretty accurate simulations of lower-end ones but today the new cache setup and
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support for avx-512 might make things a little more interesting
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our gaming results well okay these ones aren't going to shock anybody our
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simulated 4560 does slightly better than
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the real thing and the stock 7820x blows
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the doors off of both in every test
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but while that difference is measurable our
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arch nemesis doctor point of diminishing returns
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makes a bold appearance here interestingly our simulated chip
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actually fell slightly but measurably
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short of the real one at 4k in cs go and
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in 3dmark which makes us wonder where else we might see Intel's new caching
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mechanism perform worse bottom line here if you thought that
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spending 10 times was gonna net you 10 times the performance in gaming
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uh i believe as the gamers say get wrecked
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productivity though was really interesting in applications like y
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cruncher that support avx 512 we saw a
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massive difference with the simulated g4560
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while in more traditional tasks like cinebench CPU mark and real bench the
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cash related performance boost is less exciting with real benches and coding
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tests revealing another situation where it may actually cause a slight
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performance regression it's not over for the simulated chip
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though because our real world blender test also sees a huge performance boost
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over the real 4560. in productivity applications the lack of
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avx and course hurts our value chip big
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time the 7820x still doesn't give you 10
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times the performance for its price
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but given that many of these workloads are
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business oriented ones time is money and even a 2x performance
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improvement or a more modest one could allow it to pay for itself over time so
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your mileage may vary power consumption is probably not going
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to surprise anybody so we'll skim through that but what might is the
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performance scaling using some simple math helpfully
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provided by alex we crunched the numbers and calculated a very theoretical
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ballpark for how pricing would look if it scaled linearly with performance
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so in that world from the perspective of the core i9 7820x
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the performance averaged price of the pentium would actually be roughly five
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times as expensive as it is today
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then looking at it the other way around the price of the core i9 7820x
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would work out to about a quarter of its current msrp of
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600. so what did we learn today well first
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and foremost that CPU pricing at least for team blue is more complicated than
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just how does it benchmark on a test bench
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and uh then uh you know what price tag should we slap on it and more
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importantly perhaps we've also confirmed that skylake x's new cache
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generally helps more than it hinders though it can hinder situationally
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there are a hundred reasons for wanting multiple computers at your desk maybe
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you're a mac person primarily but you need a non-virtualized Windows
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