@dgianstefani
I remember back on some other thread you had mentioned that a well tuned Comet Lake beats a Ryzen 5900X in gaming?
Is that just the 5900X because it only has 6 core CCDs or does well tuned Comet Lake beat Zen 3 in general for gaming like 5800X or dual 5800X aka 5950X?
Comet Lake has much lower memory and core latency than any Zen chip, including Zen 3. The actual IPC is similar to Zen 3, little weaker, as its still just tweaked Skylake, but the frequency advantage of Comet Lake paired with faster memory support (peak DDR4, e.g. B die at 4133 MT) makes it better at latency sensitive gaming, e.g. Esports games, and competitive for casual gaming. The 5900X is also, along with the 5600 series, the worst of Zen 3 lineup for gaming, besides the quad cores and APU chips, which don't really count as they aren't normal chips.
5800X/5950X is slower than Comet Lake for gaming, even at stock, but the 5800X3D is faster stock vs stock, thing is, Comet Lake, just like ADL/RPL, can be tuned to get much better performance than stock, whereas Zen chips can't really do much besides RAM tuning, and that's frequency limited at around 4000 MT, but more likely 3800 MT, 6200 for Zen 4 unless you desync, which is slower, whereas RPL can do 8200 MT.
Now, there's probably someone ready to jump on me because in TPU testing 5950X and 5900X both test faster than 5800X, and all three are "faster" than 10900K, however that was tested with 3200 MT memory, which is on the slow side for Comet Lake, and also at stock timings.
Zen 3 can't really be tuned for better gaming performance, you can overclock it all core, but this will be slower in gaming vs stock with PBO, as I said, besides some RAM tuning. The best Zen 3 part for gaming, 5800X3D, barely benefits from RAM tuning at all, so...
Comet Lake however, can be overclocked to get better gaming performance than stock, and the memory support is much, much better than Zen 3. Comparing memory latency with Zen, it can be low 40 ns vs around 60 ns for Zen.
Remember that average FPS doesn't matter as much as FPS consistency, hence why the X3D chips or Intel CPUs paired with very fast, tuned memory give better gaming experiences than otherwise "faster" CPUs in a simple FPS chart.
I used to own both a 5700X and then a 5950X, and didn't really enjoy them for gaming, I thought the frequency advantage over the single CCD part would matter, but it didn't, and stutters were common for both those chips. 5800X3D was a whole other story.
The monolithic 10 core Intel architecture was really great for low latency, especially because you could lock all the cores at a high frequency, and pair the CPU with mature and tight timings DDR4, like high end B die, this reflects in how responsive and consistent competitive games feel with that series compared to Zen 3.
How is Comet Lake IPC compared to Skylake? Is it better or just Skylaje with more cores?
And how do those IPC compare with e cores of Raptor Lake assuming HT off and same clock speed and core count.
Comet Lake could still be very viable 10 core options if only it was not stuck on PCIe Gen 3 for RTX 4090 GPUs and beyond.
It's slightly better due to hardware security mitigations instead of software ones, and a better process, some minor core improvements, but it's still just tweaked Skylake. ADL and RPL have massively improved IPC and also much larger per core cache, both of which lead to much greater gaming performance.
PCIe generation, even Gen 3, is very minimal impact for 4090, about 2% slower using gen 3 vs 4.
When I say "just Skylake" it really is an excellent architecture, so that's not a downside, it's just to emphasise that the underlying architecture didn't change much for five generations (yet remained competitive).
E cores vs Skylake are roughly equal if clock normalised.
