Intel Debuts 9th-Gen Core Chips, Including Core i9 and X-Series Parts, With a Few Twists (pcworld.com) 160
Intel unveiled its 9th-generation Core desktop chips, with the notable omission of a key feature: Hyper-Threading, at least on all but the most exclusive Core i9-9900K for mainstream PCs. Hyper-Threading has also been reserved for a new iteration of Intel's X-series processors, which includes up to 18 cores and 36 threads. From a report: In a livestream Monday morning from its Fall Launch Event in New York, the company announced just a single Core i9 chip, the $488 Core i9-9900K. Later, the company privately revealed two others in the Core i7 and Core i5 families. Intel also announced a new series of X-class chips, ranging from 8 cores and 16 threads through 18 cores and 36 threads. Prices will range from $589 to $1,979.
It's certainly fair to say that Intel surprised us all with the unexpected shift of its upcoming 28-core chip to the Xeon family, as well as the announcement of the X-series chips, too. And what's the deal with hyperthreading? Intel's announcement certainly adds some new topics to talk about in the months ahead. Part of the confusion was due to what Intel was expected to announce: a family of new 9th-gen chips, from Core i3s up through the Core i9, and how it did so. On the publicly available livestream, the company revealed only the presence of the Core i9-9900K, as well as the presence of the new X-series parts. Later, after the livestream had concluded, Intel fleshed out the remaining members of the K-series parts, and disclosed the price and performance of the X-series parts.
However, Intel didn't even mention what many enthusiasts wanted to know: why only the i9-9900K, out of all of Intel's mainstream parts, boasts the Hyper-Threading feature. Further reading: Intel claims best gaming processor with 9th Gen Core unveiling.
It's certainly fair to say that Intel surprised us all with the unexpected shift of its upcoming 28-core chip to the Xeon family, as well as the announcement of the X-series chips, too. And what's the deal with hyperthreading? Intel's announcement certainly adds some new topics to talk about in the months ahead. Part of the confusion was due to what Intel was expected to announce: a family of new 9th-gen chips, from Core i3s up through the Core i9, and how it did so. On the publicly available livestream, the company revealed only the presence of the Core i9-9900K, as well as the presence of the new X-series parts. Later, after the livestream had concluded, Intel fleshed out the remaining members of the K-series parts, and disclosed the price and performance of the X-series parts.
However, Intel didn't even mention what many enthusiasts wanted to know: why only the i9-9900K, out of all of Intel's mainstream parts, boasts the Hyper-Threading feature. Further reading: Intel claims best gaming processor with 9th Gen Core unveiling.
IIRC... (Score:4, Informative)
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Hyperthreading is at least partly to blame for the serious security flaws in nearly every processor produced over the last two decades. The 9900K still has it because some people value speed over security.
https://www.itnews.com.au/news... [itnews.com.au]
no that was speculative execution where it would guess what the code was going to do do it then throw it away if it was wrong but want actually trowing away and would reach into restricted parts of memory. hyper threading is more like task switching.
Re:IIRC... (Score:4, Informative)
Read and learn:
We’ve seen over the past few months that the Meltdown and Spectre flaws were not a one-time vulnerability that we could patch once and then forget about. Multiple Spectre-like speculative execution flaws have been found since Meltdown and Spectre was revealed earlier this year, and chances are we’ll continue to see more of them until the entire class of speculative execution bugs are fixed at the CPU architecture level.
de Raadt also believes that Hyper-Threading itself will exacerbate most of the speculative execution bugs in the future, which is why now is the best time to disable it. He also recommended updating your BIOS firmware if you can.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/disable-intel-hyper-threading-security,37690.html
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Hyper threading requires speculative execution.
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but the idea is that if you have an integer unit and a floating point unit, hyper-threading lets you treat them as two cores.
No, that is not the idea.
How would that work?
The floating point "core" suddenly is able to interpret integer instructions? A magical process is translating integer instructions to floating point instructions, so the FPU can execute them? Another magic knows that 100.0 +1.0 is not 100.99999 and transforms it magically back into an int with the value of 100?
Hyperthreading works by havin
Re:IIRC... (Score:4, Informative)
It sounds like you only heard about Meltdown but not the issues related to Foreshadow a.k.a the L1 Terminal Fault (L1TF) [youtube.com]
For some attacks: disabling Hyperthreading is necessary to completely mitigate.
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Too much time spent on mitigation, too little on education.
Well, there you have it, exactly.... the patches are mitigations, but none has been a complete fix, and there's still a problem,
and L1TF was exploitable by what could be a malicious actor in some virtualization scenarios, even with all the patches, and
blocking hyperthreading turns out to be required to fully close the vuln: at least until new CPUs come out.
My suspicion is i9-9900K comes as a Desktop-Only Processor with this known caveat. The
Re:IIRC... (Score:5, Insightful)
The 9900K still has it because some people value speed over security.
Lots of people value speed over security. This is why some people buy motorcycles over Volvos. Or keycards over keys. It is often a valid choice. It is also why the Specter and meltdown mitigations are switchable in Linux. I have turned them off on some internal servers where security is less important. That can also save heat waste and power. Absolutes are often a bad thing...
Re:IIRC... (Score:5, Funny)
Absolutes are never a bad thing.
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This! hyper threading can be disabled on every chip that ships with it. I'd prefer the option to be available, ... knowing full well I won't exercise it on any of my machines due to the nature of the security flaw and it's difficulty to exploit without direct access.
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The attack vector is extremely limited anyway.
To exploit Specter and Meltdown an attacker needs physical or remote access to the machine to install a "malware" to exploit it. And needs a way to run that malware, as in remote access.
A typical server would have no access from the internet besides HTTP or what ever protocol you expose.
My Mac is a little bit vulnerable because in theory one could have a Javascript exploiting one of the two, but that is so hypothetical, I doubt anyone will ever be able to actual
A tech news story? On slashdot? (Score:5, Funny)
I come here for global warming and trump articles, not tech news.
Best gaming CPU = best single threaded performance (Score:3)
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More to the point, which current offering is the i7 2600K of years past (not too expensive and overclocks like crazy?)
Amusingly enough, it's probably the 2nd-gen Ryzen5 2600X.
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It kind of overclocks itself in fact (not much worth messing with it yourself). It's not too different with the Intels that run at some 4.x GHz already, like the 4790K and i7 7700K. and now the 8700K, 9700K, 9900K. You can mess with settings to gain some +5% performance or something but not something like +30%. Or use faster memory which is attained by.. buying faster memory.
If you really want to mess about you'll need to get the Ryzen 2600 not 2600X but then you'll about match a 2600X.
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Re: Best gaming CPU = best single threaded perform (Score:5, Insightful)
Your gut is wrong and no doubt influenced by marketing and shilling from Intel.
You can buy a Meltdown invulnerable CPU from AMD *today*. These new CPUs from Intel are still vulnerable and it will be years before they sell one that isn't.
Go AMD.
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he's building a gaming pc.. he's not running banking transactions on it. What matters is raw performance.
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he's building a gaming pc.. he's not running banking transactions on it
Is he ok with sharing all his passwords with any random driveby hacker? Because his Intel gaming PC is wide open to exploit even by Javascript on a web page. Or in case that isn't clear:, you own Intel, you surf, you lose.
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reg add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management"
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and no doubt influenced by marketing and shilling from Intel.
My gut also says to avoid AMD. Not because of anything Intel has said, but because of years of being burned by ATI.
Don't get me wrong, I know it is not a rational hatred at this point. But it will take a lot to ever get me to consider AMD again. And no, these vulnerabilities from Intel are not enough, because it seems to me that if you aren't running random code that you found somewhere online, then there is nothing to be worried about from them.
Re: Best gaming CPU = best single threaded perform (Score:4, Interesting)
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Anyone making emotional decisions when buying computer hardware will probably wind up being disappointed. Explaining to people today why they should chose AMD when they reference "being burned by ATI" is probably a wasted effort. Since you know, ATI hasn't existed in about a decade as an independent company.
AMD is a proven viable option on at least the CPU front (and really not that bad on the dGPU front, if you can find a decent deal on RX Vega 64). Anyone who doesn't know that today has their head in t
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A current model CPU games better than a 5 year old competitor. Well that's a glowing endorsement...
Re: Best gaming CPU = best single threaded perfor (Score:1)
Re: Best gaming CPU = best single threaded perfor (Score:2)
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Go AMD.
Meltdown and Spectre are completely irrelevant to 99.9% of computer users out there in scope and risk they present to users.
Go AMD anyway because of awesome price performance ratio.
Re: Best gaming CPU = best single threaded perfor (Score:2)
Reply to undo accidental moderation. Was attempting to mod up when the bus hit a bump.
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LOL :-)
There's some vids on Youtube (Score:3)
Now, if price isn't an object then you just go with Intel's $1000 or $2000 part and get the b
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Re: Best gaming CPU = best single threaded perform (Score:2)
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Intel is still the single thread champ.
Before Meltdown, maybe. Today, Intel owners need to decide whether to lag behind AMD also in single core performance, or leave the machine wide open to attack.
10th Gen (Score:1)
Theyâ(TM)ll add hyperthreading back for the 10th Gen, which will be the 5th variant of Skylake.
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What exactly makes you type a curly quote apostrophe when you post on Slashdot (which for some reason still cannot into Unicode)? I"m not picking on you, it's just that none of my browsers automatically substitute these characters and this makes me curious.
Unicode is not broken at all. Slashdot is. (Score:1)
I'm not hearing about all those Unicode hacks that you suggest should be happening everywhere.
Unicode is extremely simple to deal with. The UTF-8 encoding system is beautifully simple and elegant.
And if it's decoded into 32-bit Integers, then all you have to do, is say which ranges you allow. Since it's separated into planes and then into blocks, and on top, all code points are associated to certain character classes, it’s just a matter of allowing all the classes and blocks you deem OK. Usually, it
What do you mean, “substitute”? (Score:1)
Your “curly apostrophe” is the correct apostrophe, and the “ ' ” is merely a substitute character for the limited abilities of keyboard layouts of the ’90s. The 1890s, to be exact
Thankfully, there are vastly better keyboard layouts [neo-layout.org] nowadays.
I would say, “The ’90s called”, but that meme was already outdated in the ‘90s. :)
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The other two AC replies you got didn't answer your question at all :-(
I'm not the original poster, but I strongly suspect it was a post from IOS (ex. an iPhone). On IOS, Settings -> General -> Keyboards -> Smart Punctuation, causes some punctuation (ex. quotes) to be automatically replaced by more typographically appropriate alternatives (like curly quotes). See here for info on that: https://www.jordanmerrick.com/posts/ios-11-smart-punctuation
He may be using something else, but some feature like
Spectre, Meltdown, Backdoors required (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm not buying unless it's overpriced, has both Spectre and Meltdown flaws, and the built-in Intel Management Engine backdoor.
These are the features I demand as an Intel fanboy who pays more for less so I can merit putting the Intel Inside sticker on my desktop case for all to see.
Re:Spectre, Meltdown, Backdoors required (Score:4, Informative)
I got news for you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I've got logic for you: (Score:1)
That doesn't make him wrong.
Let's agree on:
1. They ALL suck.
2. Some suck more than others.
3. Intel have been consistently evil bastards in the last decades.
4. Evil bastards suck more than plain old assholes.
QED
Deletion of hyperthreading known in July (Score:3)
9 & X (Score:1)
Not intererested in new processors for a while now (Score:2)
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Happily until you try to do one of the major feature upgrades... Then there's not enough space to apply update and you have to install from scratch.
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I don't know about "lots". Low-end laptops still ship with 5400RPM hard drives. As you move up eventually you start seeing the models with 256 GB SSDs. The big exception for this seems to be Apple (lol), where most of their models start with a meager 128 GB, and yes you pay dearly for this. The other exception are some of the tablets-with-keyboards, probably because they don't want to cram a hard drive in there but still want to keep the cost down.
Re: Not intererested in new processors for a while (Score:1)
All my Win7 VMs run nicely in 20GB. The trick is getting rid of the WinSxs folder garbage.
Re:Not intererested in new processors for a while (Score:5, Informative)
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No computers come with only 32gb of storage. Windows wouldn't even fit.
Windows 10 has a minimum storage requirement of 16GB. Bonus points if you use that machine there's not enough free space to download windows updates.
Plenty of devices out there come with 32GB of storage.
Considering this is the same 14nm process... (Score:3)
...what kind of housefires are these things gonna be? They almost certainly went back to solder because toothpaste wasn't going to cut it for these chips to even work. The last AMD processor I bought was an X2 4200+ something like 10 years ago, but I think they're going to get my business back because I'm not paying a premium for a hotplate running the zillionth tweaked version of an architecture we've had for the better part of a decade.*
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Platform TDPs that have to be targeted have been fixed for like 15 years. No one could sell a hotter SKU without defining a new platform to use it.
Thermal Profile and Hyperthreading (Score:1)
The peak power generation is reduced but the mode remains the same when you turn off the hyperthreading. It all improves further if you remove the hyperthreading logic altogether. This helps improve margins for silicon lifetime. Your Apple ][ might work well after 35 years, but running a current gen 14nm at full load is warranteed for 10 years. Reducing the peak load extends the worst case, full load lifetime.
This is not simple engineering. There are many factors that go into identifying the distribution of
I love Intel performance per/clock, but... (Score:5, Informative)
. The fact is that at this moment, the single thread performance of Intel's chips, and their performance per-core is unmatched. If you're doing anything with multimedia, such as x265 encoding, video editing, whatever, Intel is still the best.
But the fact is that AMD is coming with more cores, and higher clocks, and lower cost. And they are rapidly reaching the tipping point where 24 of their cores for $500 bucks make a lot more sense than 6 of Intel's for $500 bucks.
All I am seeing from Intel's 9th generation is an upward-rebrand of all their parts, eliminating the Celeron. And, a continued artificial scarcity of cores and PCI bandwidth to push customers up into the Xeon lines...
, this coming from a company that apparently can't get to 10nm until next year, and is facing major supply issues....
Well, all these things do not bode well for Intel.
Re: I love Intel performance per/clock, but... (Score:1)
And you don't even mention Meltdown, to which AMD CPUs are invulnerable.
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Big fucking deal. My ATtiny85 isn't vulnerable to Meltdown either, nor is my ATmega328P.
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And you don't even mention Meltdown, to which AMD CPUs are invulnerable.
Probably because meltdown is completely irrelevant to nearly all users.
Re:I love Intel performance per/clock, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Single-threaded benchmarks put Zen and *Lake at the same IPC. AMD wins some benchmarks, Intel wins some. That's why Intel had to shit out these high-clock parts - while first-gen Ryzen had a pretty low clock ceiling, second-gen Ryzen matched the contemporary eighth-gen Core series. These chips here are only faster than Ryzen in single-threaded performance because they're clocked to the absolute limit.
And across the entire spectrum, AMD is matching or winning on core count, and treats SMT as a near-standard feature (only excluded on the bottom-end R3s) instead of a top-end halo feature (now present only on i9s).
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Not really? Like, older games, sure, single-threaded all the way, although they obviously don't push modern hardware much. But the current console generation runs eight wimpy cores - you just can't make a demanding single-threaded game and have a console release. And PCs have been multicore for even longer, so even PC-only games are multithreaded if they're at all pushing the hardware (lots of indie games just aren't pushing enough to *need* multithreading, but they also don't demand top-notch performance a
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The single-threaded performance mattered a lot on dual-core and some on quad-core. But on an six/eight-core chip it's like yeah you're going full throttle on 12-16% of the processor, it's basically a huge waste unless it absolutely has to be done in one thread. I switched to Ryzen and I've not had any reason to regret it. Playing at 4K you're usually GPU limited anyway, while the few times I really do push my CPU encoding or something like that all the threads start firing up.
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If you're doing anything with multimedia, such as x265 encoding, video editing, whatever, Intel is still the best.
Still the best for certain single-threaded tasks, sure. Those things you mentioned, however... are highly parallelizable... and also depend greatly on compiler optimizations (Zen being a new architecture and all that).
The long and the short of it... is you're talking out your ass.
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They left off the security checks. Of course they're quicker.
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If you're doing anything with multimedia, such as x265 encoding, video editing, whatever, Intel is still the best.
That's a nice absolute, but suffers the same problem with all absolutes, it's wrong. Especially in video editing there's plenty of use of multi-threading, and my processor happily pegs the 100% mark on all cores when exporting video in H.265 in Premier.
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How big of a deal is 5% better single core performance though, especially when you are being hit with Spectre/Meltdown mitigation and really need to disable hyperthreading too?
Very few tasks are going to benefit from that slightly higher single core performance, because anything that would will get parallelized as soon as possible. It's really just some older games that will run great anyway.
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And they are rapidly reaching the tipping point where 24 of their cores for $500 bucks make a lot more sense than 6 of Intel's for $500 bucks.
Only if your work is heavily parallel. If the process you're running can only make use of 4 or 6 cores anyway, the other 18 aren't going to do much good. There is no need to reply just to say that your workload can in fact make use of 24 cores. That's fine. I'm just saying that adding a whole bunch of cores is not equivalent to making the cores faster in the general case. I'd rather have four really fast cores than 24 slower ones. Of course, I'd also rather not pay 500 bucks for a processor, but that'
No thanks (Score:3)
No ECC /w only 16 lanes = No sale
Call me dense but (Score:1)