Monday, October 7th 2019
Intel Cuts Prices of iGPU-devoid 9th Gen Core F and KF SKUs by up to 20 Percent
Intel Monday revised prices of select 9th generation Core "Coffee Lake Refresh" desktop processor models. These price cuts target the "F" and "KF" brand extensions, which denote a lack of integrated graphics. The price cuts range from 5 percent to 20 percent, and cover key fast-moving SKUs popular with the DIY gaming PC crowd that likes to pair these chips with discrete graphics cards. The entry-level Core i3-9100F gets the biggest cut of the lot. The 4-core/4-thread chip is now selling for USD $97, a 20 percent cut from its $122 MSRP.
Other noteworthy cuts include the popular Core i5-9400F 6-core/6-thread processor, which is now going for $157, compared to its $182 original price. This chip has seen sub-$160 pricing in promotional sales on popular e-tailers such as Newegg. The Core i7-9700F and i7-9700KF are the other popular SKUs among the premium gaming PC build crowd. The two 8-core/8-thread chips are now priced at $298 and $349, respectively. Leading the pack is the Core i9-9900KF, which is going for $463, a small 5% saving over the i9-9900K which you can spend elsewhere, such as slightly faster RAM.
Source:
Tom's Hardware
Other noteworthy cuts include the popular Core i5-9400F 6-core/6-thread processor, which is now going for $157, compared to its $182 original price. This chip has seen sub-$160 pricing in promotional sales on popular e-tailers such as Newegg. The Core i7-9700F and i7-9700KF are the other popular SKUs among the premium gaming PC build crowd. The two 8-core/8-thread chips are now priced at $298 and $349, respectively. Leading the pack is the Core i9-9900KF, which is going for $463, a small 5% saving over the i9-9900K which you can spend elsewhere, such as slightly faster RAM.
29 Comments on Intel Cuts Prices of iGPU-devoid 9th Gen Core F and KF SKUs by up to 20 Percent
I can't find the thread any more, but there was a guy on OCN who ran some (iirc cinebench) benchmark on a larger thread count than the CPU had (some haswell system back in 2015 or so) and resulted in significant (10%+) performance degradation past of the order of 64 threads per (SMT2) core. This was back when the big topic of discussion was whether the G3258 was at all useful or not... The windows scheduler, particularly on the consumer versions, is known to be much worse than the Linux ones in this regard, those numbers should give you a hint as to how much worse...
One context switch might not lead to a noticeable difference between the two, but when you have hundreds of threads combined with regular interrupts from user inputs you end up with a lot of context switches being necessary. If your scheduler then decides it wants to switch away from some thread only to have to go back to it again like windoze seems to do, those microseconds really add up a lot.
Looking at my own system, a heavily utilized machine for software dev, I only have around 300 processes. Context switching among them should still take only microseconds, and keep in mind that the OS will not switch context on all 300 processes at the same time, if at all. Saying the context switching causes Intel CPU to have stuttering is FUD, I am afraid.