Sunday, August 9th 2020
Intel's Apple-exclusive Core i9-10910 Geekbenched
Intel designed an Apple-exclusive Core i9-10910 10-core processor for its new-generation iMac, with an interesting set of specs. The chip has a base frequency of 3.60 GHz - much higher than the 2.90 GHz of the i9-10900 - but a lower max boost frequency of 5.00 GHz (against 5.20 GHz TVB max of the i9-10900). The TDP of the new chip is rumored to be higher, at 95 W, giving its boosting algorithm more breathing room. Leakbench, a twitter handle that tracks interesting submissions to the Geekbench online database, fished out one of the first Geekbench 5 submissions of the i9-10910.
The i9-10910 serves up 6.9% higher single-threaded performance than the i9-10900. It however, falls behind the i9-10900 in multi-threaded performance by 9.6%. These results as surprising. Normally, we'd expect the i9-10910 to have a lower single-threaded performance and higher multi-threaded performance. As its max boost frequency is lower, and the i9-10900 is able to run single-threaded workloads on its favored cores at frequencies of up to 5.20 GHz (as opposed to 5.00 GHz on the i9-10910). On the other hand, with a higher TDP (higher PL1), the i9-10910 has more power budget for its cores to sustain higher boost states, which should give it a slight edge over the i9-10900 in multi-threaded performance. The raison d'être of the i9-10910 appears to be in giving Apple a variation of the 10-core "Comet Lake" die that macOS can make the most of, as it probably lacks optimization for Turbo Boost Max 3.0 and Thermal Velocity Boost.
Source:
Leakbench
The i9-10910 serves up 6.9% higher single-threaded performance than the i9-10900. It however, falls behind the i9-10900 in multi-threaded performance by 9.6%. These results as surprising. Normally, we'd expect the i9-10910 to have a lower single-threaded performance and higher multi-threaded performance. As its max boost frequency is lower, and the i9-10900 is able to run single-threaded workloads on its favored cores at frequencies of up to 5.20 GHz (as opposed to 5.00 GHz on the i9-10910). On the other hand, with a higher TDP (higher PL1), the i9-10910 has more power budget for its cores to sustain higher boost states, which should give it a slight edge over the i9-10900 in multi-threaded performance. The raison d'être of the i9-10910 appears to be in giving Apple a variation of the 10-core "Comet Lake" die that macOS can make the most of, as it probably lacks optimization for Turbo Boost Max 3.0 and Thermal Velocity Boost.
11 Comments on Intel's Apple-exclusive Core i9-10910 Geekbenched
However... they do dial back. For every other mortal this means you gotta read between the lines, and those lines are that Intel CPUs right now are bursty, hot headed pieces of crap with yesterday's tech.
Meanwhile the 65W 3700X Ryzen CPU has around 91W power consumption under load and the same applies to many other Ryzen 3000/4000 CPUs/APUs.
If only there were a website that has reviews of these.....
Surprised hyper threading isn't disabled.