18 Core CPUs!? - Intel Xeon E5 2699 v3 Processor Overclocking & Testing
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2016-05-06
·
2,507 words · ~12 min read
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Okay, so it's here. This might not look
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like much, but if you've ever gotten a review sample from Intel, then you'll
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know that there could be anything inside. Usually a CPU, but anyway, this,
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my friends, is one of our two Intel Xeon
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2699 V3 processors. Now, this was not easy to
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get because this is not your average run-of-the-mill consumer, you know, tops
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out at a,000 peasant dollars processor. No, this is a $4,500
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chip. It has 18 cores. It supports
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hyperthreading for a total of 36 threads. It has 45 megabytes of cache.
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It has more cash than my first computer
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had RAM. My first computer that I owned for myself had RAM. It has more cash
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than that. And my server board isn't
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here for it yet, but I figure what the hey, this is LGA 20113, right? Just like
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an X99 motherboard. The X99 motherboard listed as
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compatible. So, I figured why don't we take her for a spin even though we can't
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fire up both of them. and I'm gonna put it in ASUS X99 Deluxe and find out what
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this little puppy is capable of. So, come along for the ride.
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The Ring Video Doorbell lets you see who's at the door. And really, now
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you're going to open the door. Okay, well, whatever. I could have prevented
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him from doing that by locking my door and then going and seeing the video on
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my phone to see if I should let that guy in. All right, so the first step is to
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take that uh Wussy Core i75960X
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8 core processor out of my test bench.
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Now, the first thing that stands out to me immediately about these suckers is
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the fact that even though they go in the same socket, you can actually see that
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the Xeon chip Look, my hands are shaking. I'm super stoked on this. You
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can see that the Xeon chip is significantly wider and it will actually
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overhang the socket a little bit compared to what the Core i7 chip did.
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Now, this is for a very good reason because each of those physical cores uh
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in the die down there is the same size as the eight that go in here, but
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there's 18 of them. 18 cores. So,
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they're going to be spread out quite a bit more under the integrated heat
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spreader, the metal piece on top. Now, one of the cool things about these Xeons
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is that, you know, you might go 18 cores. Holy cow. Oh, we better put some
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new thermal compound on there. 18 cores, holy cow. How, you know, are they going
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to cool that sucker? Well, because they
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have so many lower powered cores running at a lower voltage and because the power
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density is so much lower, they're actually significantly easier to cool
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and they will it will in theory run cooler than our fewer high-powered
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cores. So, uh I am really stoked to see
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how our single 120 mm water cooler fares
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with this bad boy. Okay, now zeons aren't really meant to be used with
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gaming memory. So, we actually had Kingston for the the dual processor
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server that we're building with this thing, right? We had Kingston provide
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128 gigs. So, that's eight 8x6 gig
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sticks of ECC DDR42133.
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So, we're going to go ahead and we're going to pull our gaming memory out, but I'm not 100% sure if this board even
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supports ECC. So,
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okay. Moment of truth time.
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Let's see if she boots.
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Oh, does this powered on? Oh, boss.
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Oh, here we go. That took a really long time. There it
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is. New CPU installed. 64 gigs of RAM.
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E5 2699 V3 at 2.3 GHz. So, uh, yeah, I
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guess all that's left now is boot into Windows. Check that out. CPU core
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voltage 784 volts.
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Next to nothing.
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You're going to miss the moment. It's installing driver software. Oh, that's
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just USB devices. Okay, I guess the CPU works already fine then.
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I don't know. Maybe those. Holy crap.
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Have you ever seen 18 threads and or
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excuse me 18 cores and 18 hyperthreaded
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virtual cores in one place at one time?
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That is fantastic. There's our 45 megs
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of level three cache. There's our 18x
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256 kilobyte. Wow, this thing has multiple megabytes. So 4 and 1/2 megs of
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level two cache. Never mind the the level three cache.
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Memory is running in quad channel. Now, something I'm curious about is I
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obviously this chip is not designed for gaming strictly speaking, but I wonder
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will it support the regular unbuffered memory?
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Let's uh let's take a run at it, shall we? So, since we're playing around
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anyway, uh we're going to boot her up with our quad channel kit of Corsair
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Vengeance memory. And I'm just going to see if like XMP memory works because I
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can't imagine why it would, but I also
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can't necessarily think of a reason why not. I mean, would Intel turn a feature
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off on the $4,500 processor?
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It boots.
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And if we go to advanced mode, XMPP is an option. Oh, I don't think
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that's going to work, though. I don't know. Let's Let's see. Uh, yeah. You
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know what? Okay, I'm going to let it try.
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I don't think this is going to work, though. The way XMP works on the consumer grade
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chips is it'll actually run the CPU strap at 125 megahertz. Um, and then
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it's actually going to run the base clock slightly out of spec. And I really
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don't think the Xeon is going to like that. If this boots, I'll be floored. I
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don't think it is. It's in a loop right now.
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It's not happy. Time to clear Simos and restart.
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You know what? Let's do 26666 since that is a little bit of a of a safer
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number. Oh, not happy.
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Let's go for default settings. And that's it.
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Okay, so now that I'm booted up, I know the max turbo frequency for this chip is
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3.5 GHz in a single threaded workload, which means in theory you actually could
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game on the thing and there would be no disadvantage compared to running on a
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consumer chip. But what I don't know is
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that in spite of its 2.3 GHz base clock,
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what it will run at under a sustained
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all core load. So there's two things I
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want to know. I want to know what voltage it actually runs at when we're loading it. And I want to know what
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frequency it actually runs at. So you can see turbo boost and speedep jumping
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around changing frequencies here. So let's start our ID to 64 stability test.
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And then just for fun,
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100% usage of 18 cores and 36 threads.
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So it looks like we're going to get a
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multiplier of 24. Not bad. So that's a
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little bit higher. Not much higher. It manages to turbo boost another, you
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know, 100 MHz, but that's better than nothing. And the core voltage stays
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extremely low. So these are super low
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power cores. So, I'm going to go eat lunch and we'll come back and find out
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what these temps settling at. All right, so this is actually better than I
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expected. It's been sitting here running for 28 minutes and our highest core is
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51, 52°,
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something like that. That is ridiculous.
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So, let's overclock it.
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Now, I don't think we're going to be able to do much. Xeons straight up do
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not allow you to change the multiplier.
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They're not consumer chips. They're not intended for that. So, the only thing
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you can do on a Zeon is increase the base clock speed. Now, we already saw
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what happened when we tried to run a different strap. So, that's clearly not
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happening. We're not going to 125 base clock. So, all we can really do is maybe
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we can get, you know, 5 MHz
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more on the 100 MHz stock base clock.
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But remember guys, 5 MHz more is 5% to
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our to every clock speed we run at every boost level. So, that could result in a
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significant performance improvement, especially when you multiply it by 18
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cores. That's that's like adding almost another core to the to the chip.
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Look at that. 105 MHz. We are now seeing Well, I guess
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we should we should compare apples to apples. So, let's run our stress test.
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2.73 GHz.
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Rounding up a little bit. Come on. It's still impressive on our 18 core
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processor under full load. How very
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interesting. Now, obviously, something like this is going to need a longer
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stress test if you're going to deploy it in any kind of environment. Um, and 105
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megahertz from my understanding is actually pretty borderline. So, we're
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gonna use uh we're actually going to use ASUS's real bench in order to hit this
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bad boy and find out over a longer period of time
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if she's stable. So, Real Bench has two modes. One of
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them is a stress test mode and one is a benchmark mode. So, let's go ahead and
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give her up to 16 gigs of RAM and start.
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All right, so Real Bench, I thought it
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was still running for quite some time, but the system actually locked up after
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about 14 minutes. So, we're going to dial this puppy back.
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Let's say 103 MHz. Let's try this again
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and find out if we can get her stable. Okay, so now we're booted up at 103 MHz
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base clock. So let's do our eight hour
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stress test again and find out if this
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is stable. This will still give us a 3%
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improvement in frequency which will come
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back actually. Oh, this is not the same
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kind of a workload. So you guys can see that even in a fairly multi-threaded
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workload, we're actually sitting at
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2.88 GHz per core.
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Wow. So it's only in that synthetic IDA
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workload that the multiplier is only going to 24. That is really impressive.
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So, it looks like our 8h hour run
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actually did succeed, which means that
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we're stable for all intents and purposes at a 3% overclock on our Zeon.
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So, now all that's left is to run a couple benchmarks and kind of see how it
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goes from there. So, uh, those of you who are into Cinebench, why don't we go
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ahead and do a multi-threaded Cinebench R15
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bench.
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Wow,
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that is incredible.
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I've watched this run a lot of times. I
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have never watched it run like that.
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Holy crap. So I think is this your Xeon
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Ed 2.6 GHz 12 core 24 thread?
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Uh 2.7. Okay. So this thing
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is double the performance of an X5650.
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It is two and a half time like 2.3 times the performance of a 3930K
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in Cinebench. Something that scales reasonably well. Now, let's run the
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single core benchmark because I want to see how performance is actually scaling
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going from 1 to 18 cores. This one's going to take a while. I don't think
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we're going to film the whole thing. You see, this is this is more like what I'm
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used to seeing. So, we mentioned this before, but this
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is the Ring Video Doorbell. Basically, what it does is it allows you to preview
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using video. It's got a 720p camera on your iOS or Android device who is coming
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to your door. So, whoever it is that happens to be coming up the steps and
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knocking or in this case actually ringing the bell, which is of course his
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cue, but he totally missed it. What? Oh, hi. I have a package for you,
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Lionus. Get inside and get to work. I thought
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this was going to be my dual socket motherboard. Go, go. Jeez. Anyway, the
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point is it can be powered with your existing doorbell wiring or it can use
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its 5200 mAh internal battery and it
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works over Wi-Fi. It's got motion detection and is basically just a way of
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knowing who exactly it is without actually going outside or unlocking your
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door or whatever else the case may be. It's available for $1.99 and for $3 a
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month you can actually archive the footage off of it for six months. So,
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it's $30 a year if you buy a year at a time. So, head over to the link that
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I've got posted below me if you want to learn more about the Ring doorbell. All
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right. So, here we go. Obviously, performance is a little bit lower.
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Actually, less than 18 times the performance. So, you can see that what
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we lose in intercore communication and
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splitting up the project efficiency, we actually gain back and then a little bit
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with hyperthreading. So, performance
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looks very promising. This is an extremely fast machine. Um, but I think
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that's pretty much it for today. I'd love for you guys to leave a comment and
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let me know if you'd like to see any other completely, you know, different
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kinds of of stuff with this thing. I
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already have some ideas. I'd love to see how it actually does in in gaming
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workloads, for example. I'd love to see if we can if we can crack the top of
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some leaderboards based on that we're using processors that
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literally nobody has. So, uh, yeah, I
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guess that's pretty much it. Thanks for watching, guys. Like the video if you liked it, dislike it if you thought it
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sucked, and, uh, leave a comment if your feelings are more complicated than that,
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preferably in our forum, which is linked in the video description. also linked in
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the video description. You can buy a cool t-shirt like this one, give us a monthly contribution if you think what
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we're doing is awesome and we need more CPUs like this or even just change your
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Amazon bookmarked one with our affiliate code because if you bought a Zeon like
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that on Amazon with our affiliate code, that would help us a lot, like a lot.
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So, uh, thanks again for watching and as always, don't forget to subscribe.