Friday, June 16th 2017
Core i9-7900X Skylake-X Review Shows Up
An Intel Core i9-7900X has appeared for a full review at the site Hexus.net. Spoiler alert, it clocks to 4.7 GHz on all ten cores with relative ease (only taking 1.25 V, apparently, though it racked up nearly 100°C in Cinebench at that voltage).
The review praised Intel's overclocking headroom and general muscle in a mostly positive review. Still, not all is rosy in Intel land. They found performance per watt to not have improved much if at all, criticized the high price tag, and Hexus.net had the following to say about the overall experience:
"X299 motherboards don't appear to be quite ready, there are question marks surrounding the Skylake-X processors due later this year, and at the lower end of the Core X spectrum, Kaby Lake-X is nothing short of puzzling."
It would seem AMD is not the only major chip-maker who can have motherboards ill prepared at launch time, even the mighty Intel may have teething issues yet.
You can read the full review (which is mostly positive, by the way) in the source link below.
Oh, and a special shoutout to our own @the54thvoid for discovering this article.
Source:
hexus.net
The review praised Intel's overclocking headroom and general muscle in a mostly positive review. Still, not all is rosy in Intel land. They found performance per watt to not have improved much if at all, criticized the high price tag, and Hexus.net had the following to say about the overall experience:
"X299 motherboards don't appear to be quite ready, there are question marks surrounding the Skylake-X processors due later this year, and at the lower end of the Core X spectrum, Kaby Lake-X is nothing short of puzzling."
It would seem AMD is not the only major chip-maker who can have motherboards ill prepared at launch time, even the mighty Intel may have teething issues yet.
You can read the full review (which is mostly positive, by the way) in the source link below.
Oh, and a special shoutout to our own @the54thvoid for discovering this article.
247 Comments on Core i9-7900X Skylake-X Review Shows Up
Looks like RyZen put Intel back to the good old days of GHz race. When they loose in efficiency, the clock rate goes up.
Don't know how much more IPC improvement Intel can dig out of the X86. Unless they pull another story of Core2Duo of course.
OK wait a minute. If I am reading those charts correctly, the IPC of 7900X is actually worse comparing to 6950X? Can reduced L3 Cache size have such big impact on performance??
Man Intel is failing so hard after RyZen launch.
"Well power consumption doesn't matter on HEDT platforms" and "If you can afford it then better cooling isn't an issue"
So Intel is actually going backwards in IPC. Whoever made this decision in Intel needs to be fired 100 times.
"How are we gonna compete aganist RyZen"
"I dunno, maybe make our processors even worse?"
"Brilliant idea!"
Does Intel's ass control its brain these days?
Maybe Intel really is going all netburst on us again, sacrificing IPC for clocks. Dunno. They aren't there yet but they are certainly moving the wrong way IMO.
EDIT: And if clocks were the goal, WHY THE HECK DID THEY USE A TIM?!?!?!
As to TIM, going form 3.3 GHz on 6950X to 4.0 GHz on 7900X seems like a 700 MHz increase to me... and is well within the capabilities of that TIM. Enthusiasts that want better cooling and push the chip past the 297W limit can pop the top, and void the warranty, no big deal.
At the same time, I'd be deeply surprised if they cared. :laugh:
Max rated voltage of 2.15V, 1.35V for VCCIO and VCCSA, 1.4V for vDIMM.
To me, this is far from a proper review, because such info was missed. It's hard to make accurate judgements about anything when you don't have all the information. That TIM is actually doing a hell of a job, and these two reviewers that posted these reviews today missed it.
But of course, that's why you're here.
:lovetpu:
Also note the lack of disclosure about which board they have... You cannot make accurate assessments about this platform under these circumstances.
The grid approach is pretty standard in processors, ARM uses it all the time.
If you remember when sandybridge came out and intel jumped like 15-20% in IPC, That was when the ringbus was introduced. Now it topped out and limited them so they went back.
You know, like those performance dips; yeah, they could be cache, but they could also be a bit of throttle. Also, the high temps and voltage wall could be the TIM, or it could be the FIVR, or that they did not adjust its voltage properly. Obviously these sites needs hits or they'd not have posted such reviews. :p I am in shock about it all, to be honest.
I'll have samples of these chips and boards, as well as memory for the platform real soon. Not sure if W1zz has planned CPU review yet. If anything, this just makes me a bit more interested to see what's what.
The most important thing in this CPU is that it matches 7700K in single-thread performance.
Yes, more cores is the future, so this CPU is future-proof in the same way Ryzen 7 or Threadripper are future-proof. But this CPU doesn't have any penalty for the present while Zen does.
It will be near the leaders in games and in vast number of single-thread tasks. It'll be just as good in applications that only use 3 or 4 threads.The power consumption is significant (way to high for me for sure), but not something that we haven't seen before. It'll get better in time (improved node, optimizations).
Based on how Intel usually improves their architecture, it's very likely that in 1-2 years a successor of this CPU will match Ryzen 7 power consumption, while I wouldn't be so sure about Ryzen 7's successor matching 7900X performance...