Intel's HT isn't as good as AMD's SMT implementation.
Gets offtopic but I wonder why is that. Have you seen any good articles about why that is the case?
Threading and frontend should not be that much different. Intel does appear to have more load/store but actual compute is the key to SMT. My bet would be on AMD's much cleaner execution stage setup. They have more execution units that are far more specific in what they do. Intel has a couple powerful ones but the management to get the stuff efficiently into these must be pretty crazy.
- Zen2 has 4 INT ALUs (with slightly varying capabilities) and 4 FP ALUs (2 FMA/FMUL and 2 FADD) plus some AGU/Load/Store stuff.
- Coffee Lake has 4 execution pipes with strange range of capabilities. One that can do everything (INT, FP, both INT/FP Vector etc), second can do a little less and remaining two are largely INT stuff.
What AMD said and went for with Bulldozer with regards to execution units sounds true here - FP is less critical than INT. The moment FP is used and used heavily, Intel's scheduler will need to make hard choices. This is simplified but while Zen can do 4 INT and 2 FP instructions (or 4 in case of 2 FMA and 2 FADD) at once, Coffee Lake has to choose whether it does 4 INT, 3 INT+1 FP or 2 INT + 2 FP.
No, you just think it wrong. If there are extra hardware security fixes in 10900K that are not in 9900K, then 10900K should show some difference compared to 9900K. No one says that hardware security fixes will improve performance, only that software security fixes on the 9900K have a negative impact on performance. If 10900K had hardware security fixes in place of software security fixes, the difference in performance should have been obvious, even without IPC improvements.
If you look at the link, 9900K R0 stepping has everything but TAA and V3a already fixed in hardware. P0 stepping lacks MDS fixes.
I was going to see whether or not anyone picked up on the 2 extra cores etc but I'm not sure why Intel would say we have a massive performance increase.... I mean how dumb??!
Sure they did. John_ even pointed out exactly that.
25% performance increase is the baseline expectation (10 cores is 125% of 8 cores). Some of the tests rely on single/fewer cores resulting in no real performance increase.
a more modern platform and also a platform that will have at least one more upgrade option, Ryzen 4000.
This is probably the first time the longer-term platform argument is not true with Ryzens. AM4 is expected to get Ryzen 4000 but AMD has not even given hints about what happens after that. They have said AM4 will last to 2020. Intel's sockets have been very predictible - 2 CPU generations per socket. Which in a weird way puts whatever socket 10-series will come out for, on par with AM4 at this point in its life cycle.