Monday, August 27th 2018
9th Gen Core Processor Price Leak by Czech Retailers Drop Hints on Possible MSRP
A number of retailers across Europe are coming up with early pricing of Intel's 9th generation Core-K processors, codenamed "Whiskey Lake" or "Coffee Lake Refresh." One such set of pricing, compiled by Czech publication Alza.cz confirms that our suspicions that Intel will establish a new $500-ish price-point in its MSDT (mainstream desktop) segment. We are not counting the anomalous / limited-edition Core i7-8086K in our assertion. The current Core i5-8600K is a $250-ish product, while the current platform flagship Core i7-8700K remains around $350. The upcoming Core i5-9600K (6-core/6-thread) and Core i7-9700K (8-core/8-thread) will succeed the two at nearly identical price-points. We expect Core i9-9900K to have a premium price around the $500-mark.
Intel arrested the growing popularity of AMD's Ryzen 5 1600 earlier this year, with its 8th generation Core i5 processors. The 2nd generation Ryzen 5 series only trade blows with Intel's competing offerings, with the Ryzen 5 2600X at best edging past the i5-8600K with a wafer-thin margin, in price-performance and absolute-performance. The Ryzen 7 2700X has more merits over the 6-core/12-thread i7-8700K, besides a slightly lower price, creating a competitive uncertainty that works to AMD's advantage; and which Intel hopes to plug with the 8-core/8-thread i7-9700K. The 8-core/16-thread i9-9900K could be double-digit percentage faster owing to HyperThreading and larger cache, and Intel could look to monetize that with a premium price.
Source:
Alza.cz
Intel arrested the growing popularity of AMD's Ryzen 5 1600 earlier this year, with its 8th generation Core i5 processors. The 2nd generation Ryzen 5 series only trade blows with Intel's competing offerings, with the Ryzen 5 2600X at best edging past the i5-8600K with a wafer-thin margin, in price-performance and absolute-performance. The Ryzen 7 2700X has more merits over the 6-core/12-thread i7-8700K, besides a slightly lower price, creating a competitive uncertainty that works to AMD's advantage; and which Intel hopes to plug with the 8-core/8-thread i7-9700K. The 8-core/16-thread i9-9900K could be double-digit percentage faster owing to HyperThreading and larger cache, and Intel could look to monetize that with a premium price.
59 Comments on 9th Gen Core Processor Price Leak by Czech Retailers Drop Hints on Possible MSRP
Curious to see the x390 motherboards too.
6 cores is really quite sufficient for gaming and these 9th gen CPUs are still Coffee Lake. So unless you really need those 8 cores, move along...
And I also got to read that x86 has been done so many times, it's possible we really got nearly all the IPC we can extract from it. If that's true, we'll all be screwed shortly (i.e. within 5 years).
Seriously, this is a gaming community. Why don't we stay with that theme and stop talking about the mystical "productivity"? Before Ryzen came along, hardly anyone here knew what SPEC is and how rendering works. :-D
You need as many cores as Zen offers if you do something truly massively parallelizable or, for some reason, you routinely run many things at once.
Yet, the above is not a bad thing per se. It's just that our single cores days, when the fastest core was the fastest CPU for everything are over. From now on, we will only have a best CPU for specific tasks. And we need to come to terms with that.
Personally, ever since Zen has been out, I started recommend friends to buy not based on the CPU, but based on the cost of the platform that supports their needs as a whole.
As far as the prices, I guess they can get away with it because they should conclusively beat the AMD offerings, core for core. They're still faster per core. Not by an extreme amount, but it's there. Vote with your wallets...
I could have spent half a day explaining the problems and potential for improvements, but here are some major improvements which can be done:
Front-end improvements:
- Instruction window: ~384+ (up from 224)
- Larger scheduler: >97 entries
- Larger µOP Cache
Execution units:
- ALUs: >=8 (up from 4-5)
- FPUs: >=5 (up from 3)
Cache improvements:
- 128b cache line size? (up from 64b)
- L2: More entries
Improvements such as these can yield at least 50% IPC boost, but I'm not talking over a single generation, but in a 10-12 year perspective.
Over the last year or so, increased core count have been the focus. Pushing both the mainstream and HEDT to more cores is necessary, but we will eventually hit a core count with diminishing returns. Increased core count only helps with workloads which can scale with multithreading, and many workloads simply can't. The long term solution to application performance is a balance of everything; multithreading, and single thread performance (through SIMD and superscalar).
When you take 1/4 of a decent server CPU, you don't automatically get a decent consumer CPU.
For me Ryzen is and will remain just a lost chance. We had few years of decent evolution of PC market towards mobile solutions. Without AMD and magic "competition is good" we got from 2kg notebooks that worked for 3h to 1kg ultrabooks that work for half a day. It was a perfect example of sustainable development.
Intel decided to play ball and raises core count before their semiconductor process matched the requirements. Result: we're now getting overheating notebooks and higher TDP in desktops. Fantastic. :-)Enthusiasts of building PCs and overclocking. As far as usage goes, it's 99% gaming.
And I don't see this as a problem. I come here to read about fps and keyboards. There are better places to discuss coding, simulations and IOPS.
But man... when I read another thread about how Ryzen is great for workstation because it rulez in 7-zip, I just start to melt.
At this point I'm expecting a thread about classical music, so that everyone could talk about Bieber playing the piano. :-)Just how do you imagine this?
Single-thread algorithms will remain single-thread. Interactive computing (including gaming) will remain interactive. This will NEVER change.
Not so long ago 4 threads seemed like a good compromise for a typical user. But now we're seeing 8 becoming a standard, maybe more. Just what will these threads do?
Yesterday you were a gamer. Now you must be a streamer, because gaming itself is not utilizing your awesome CPU.
It's such a pity AMD decided to ignore business segment - I'd love to see the marketing campaign they do for accountants.
Seriously, I had so much fun reading reviews with theories about thread utilization and how Ryzen has this huge potential, because games only push 16 threads to like 40-60% each.
But I really hoped the fun will be over in a year or so and we'll be back to serious stuff...
Still, anything beyond 6 cores have no real benefits for dedicated gaming PCs, in >90% of cases 4 cores is still plenty.
Only once, in the days if Bulldozer I have recommended someone an A10 chip. In all other cases, it has always been Intel.I often wonder if people really understand what mitigating these flaws actually means...
Different kinds of vulnerabilities are of course a different story.
Higher TDP happens all the time, when a manufacturer is losing ground in performance. AMD and Intel have done it, ATi did it, nVidia did it, RTG has done it. It happens when they need to push performance at the cost of efficiency. It happens when people overclock their computers. Whether by design from the factory, or some settings somebody changed in their CMOS, we run things out of their optimal, most efficient ranges to push performance. As a processor manufacturer, you don't want to be slower... but low power solutions have always been available. Even before Intel started shoving out higher performance (at higher heat levels and power draw) you could still stuff an Extreme edition processor in a laptop, which isn't always going to run cool while sipping power.7-zip may not be the best productivity benchmark... but there are plenty of others that Ryzen rulez at. It may not always beat Intel at everything, but it's usually not far behind, and does so while being cheaper, especially in the HEDT or server space.Not sure what you're going to do with 8 cores or more, as a gamer. At least, not yet. It's been a little bit of time since >4 cores became useful for gaming, so now usually a 6 core chip is recommended, because there are some gains to be seen. There's plenty of 6 core or less chips available if that's what you want. Not sure what this hangup is on needing a jillion cores for streaming is, though... these days both nVidia and AMD have GPU encoding options that can be used for streaming, and there's also quicksync, which comes with your Intel IGP. Give me an i5 8400 (it's not even that great of a chip, but popular/good enough for gaming) and I can stream with it using quicksync. I wouldn't use quicksync to do my own BDrips, but it's fine for streaming.
Not sure what you mean by ignoring the business segment? They've invaded the server space with EPYC, which is a pretty big deal. Spectre/Meltdown didn't help Intel there, nor did their high prices. EPYC appears more attractive to admins in the server space because it's cheaper and (so far) doesn't seem to be plagued as much with the issues Intel is dealing with, and now with Zen, it can finally keep up. If you mean typical office machines, then AMD needs to get in with OEMs, like Dell. If they can manage to do there what they did in the server space, they'd be in good shape. AMD systems are going to be cheaper than similar Intel systems, and that would be attractive to anybody calling the shots when it's time to upgrade 100 computers.
Even you're praising this idea, which find fairly disappointing...You missed what I'm trying to say. Apart from servers and workstations designed for particularly parallel tasks, nobody needs 16 cores for anything. Ever.
Computation is like cooking. It's about transforming what you have available into what you need - in the right order and quantity.
So how many pans do you have? And do you think owning 16 will make you a better or faster cook? :)
I kid you not: a well organized cook can make 16 omelettes at once on 16 pans.
But good scrambled eggs are single-panned and this will never change. If you need to prepare more eggs, you need a bigger pan, not more of them.
I just have this feeling that we're wasting time and potential on this pointless core war - betting that suddenly everyone will rewrite every mathematical recipe created in the last 300 years, because we're just too lame to make faster cores based on GaN or concentrate on quantum computing.So why is it used so much on gaming websites? Why not just scrap it and learn a better way to test workstations?No one cares about HEDT. Just forget about it.
As for servers: Zen is seriously rubbish for databases and so-so for virtualization. It is good for some computation tasks simply because of core count advantage.
On the other hand, it's still an exotic technology that hardly anyone buys. You may think it's cheaper, but that's true only when the effect of scale kicks in (datacenters and stuff). For small and medium companies - operating up to a few servers - it might turn out to be more expensive and they won't take that risk.LOL on "invaded". Ask around.Top3 already make desktops with AMD Ryzen CPUs. No one buys them.
Actually isn't Dell dropping these from the lineup??? I'm pretty sure they had more variants just few months ago...No, they won't. Seriously, not happening. :-D
Yeah... as much as it was entertaining, I think it's not getting anywhere.
If you can spare some time, I once again strongly suggest asking around about EPYC sales. :)