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Intel Hardware Technology

Intel Core i9-9990XE: Up To 5.0 GHz, Auction Only (anandtech.com) 146

Posted by msmash from the up-next dept.
Ian Cutress, reporting for AnandTech: AnandTech has seen documents and supporting information from multiple sources that show that Intel is planning to release a new high-end desktop processor, the Core i9-9990XE. These documents show that the processors will not be sold at retail; rather they will only be sold to system integrators, and then only through a closed online auction. This new processor will be the highest numbered processor in Intel's high-end desktop line. The current top processor is the i9-9980XE, an 18 core part with a base frequency of 3.5 GHz and a turbo frequency of 4.0 GHz. The i9-9990XE, on the other hand, is not simply the 9980XE with an increase in frequency. The Core i9-9990XE will be a 14 core processor, but with a base frequency of 4.0 GHz and a turbo frequency of 5.0 GHz. This makes it a super-binned 9940X.
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Intel Core i9-9990XE: Up To 5.0 GHz, Auction Only More

Intel Core i9-9990XE: Up To 5.0 GHz, Auction Only

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  • ~o~ Intel Core i9-9990XE L@@K RARE!!! ~o~ (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    nt

  • Finally! (Score:4, Funny)

    by fattmatt ( 1042156 ) on Friday January 18, 2019 @11:39AM (#57981734)

    Now I can play Crysis.

  • Better have a heavy water cooling loop (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Otherwise you'll have Chernobyl in your bedroom.

    • Why? 255W TDP is nothing exciting. You can handle that easily with a large air cooler or a standard 240mm AIO. I have a 360mm radiator in my system happily handling the 430W TDP of my combined CPU + GPU with ease. I've only managed an 11C temperature rise in the water under synthetic stressing of the GPU or CPU, not even individual benchmarks were able to get the temperature to rise that much.

      • I was thinking of hooking a water cooling loop to my central heating radiators.

        • That may be surprisingly ineffective at actual cooling. The radiators in a house are designed to create natural draft and in order to do that you need a very high temperature differential between the water loop and the ambient air. That is what you get when you have a vertical fins running lengthwise through a radiator. Additionally most depend on convection and radiate poorly thanks to the default colour choice of off-white and the thick layer of lacquer covering the metal.

          Mind you it will still work. The

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by q_e_t ( 5104099 )
            It was a joke.

            • It was a joke.

              It shouldn't be. Enthusiasts are an inquisitive and experimental crowd. You may have made a joke but your joke has been a very serious question asked over and over again on online forums.

              People do all sorts of wonderful things such as using full sized car radiators: https://www.reddit.com/r/shitt... [reddit.com]

              I wish I still had the link to it but in the mid 2000s I remember seeing someone who laid copper tubing in a giant S bend under the foundation slab of his new build garage and cycled that through his CPU. Dirt an

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by q_e_t ( 5104099 )
                I'm aware of people using domestic radiator systems in an experimental way, especially when they have their own personal server farms at home as that was the root of the joke.

  • Followed by the 9999XE++++ (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Which only works under liquid nitrogen.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *
      Liquid helium, baby, liquid helium... On the bright side you can share the cooling system with an MRI.

  • This type of CPU seems like something that is more sizzle than steak. If it is so expensive and exclusive, what makes it better than say, a Xeon Platinum or even a Xeon D?

    There is so much overlap that one might as well jump to a Xeon if an i7 just isn't up to the task anyway, unless this is a laptop or mobile machine.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Normal humans don't want their massive filesystems to be corruption-free. :rolleyes:

        Thanks, AMD, btw. BIOS vendors, get your shit together.

        • Normal humans don't want their massive filesystems to be corruption-free. :rolleyes:

          Normal humans practically never experience corruption on their filesystem. If you want to get people to care about something they first need to be affected by it.

          • How do you know? That last "everything went batshit" reboot might have been caused by DRAM corruption. It might have been caused by buggy software, or even cosmic rays. Who knows how many "mystery" crashes might have been averted by use of ECC memory and bus structure. No one knows, that's part of the problem, n00b end-lusers are blamed, system gets re-imaged, and all is right with the world for another quarter. Rinse and repeat.

            • That last "everything went batshit" reboot might have been caused by DRAM corruption.

              Interestingly not only did you just move the goalposts you made them as wide as the entire frigging field. I never said DRAM doesn't get corrupted, I said "filesystem". Your memory is chock full of data so in the incredibly remote chance that you actually suffer from an error that ECC detects you have an additionally incredibly remote chance that you happen to corrupt data in flight on the way to being written on the disk. The vast majority of these already incredibly rare events will as you say cause a "ba

              • Geez. I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition!

                No One Expects The Spanish Inquisition!

                Our Chief Weapons are Surprise, Fear, Etc., Etc. ...

                No goalpost movement here, bud. Relax!

                Seriously, user "DigiShaman" started talking about ECC.

                Then, user "bill_mcgonigle" conflated lack of ECC memory with filesystem corruption. I thought that's where we were at. I just went with it.

                Interesting anecdote about your experience with ECC memory, though. No doubt, ECC there to handle the one-in-a-billion case of a more tha

                • No goalpost movement here, bud. Relax!

                  Sure there was. You came in and wanted to play a different sport than others were playing. I was replying about file system corruption and specifically talking about file system corruption and you went and changed the scenario to one which not only has many orders of magnitude different likelihood but also orders of magnitude different consequences.

                  But back on point, even DigiSharman's original assertion contradicts itself. If you want "high-performance" then you don't want ECC RAM. The entire topic of ECC

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 )
      You mean besides the 2x+ price premium and slower per-core clock speeds for the Xeons?

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by lgw ( 121541 )

        Intel prices this stuff carefully. You do hit a point where it's cheaper to build a 2-socket server system for the needed performance. I did all the math very carefully before ending up with a 28-core 2-socket Xeon system for video transcoding.

        I rather suspect that if this CPU were priced normally, it would mess up the very careful price curve for Xeon, and end up cheaper for some loads that force you to Xeon today. Can't have that.

        BTW, the lower per-core clock is all about thermal management, which is f

        • You do hit a point where it's cheaper to build a 2-socket server system for the needed performance

          What needed performance? Show us a Xeon with the single core performance of this chip.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Greyfox ( 87712 )
      Xeons tend to be more cores and slower, although the I9 is kind of blurring those distinctions. When I was shopping around for my gaming rig, I think the most cores I could find in an I7 were 6. You can get more cores on a xeon, but at a lower clock speed. As the clock speed and cores go up, the price also does, on what appears to be an exponential curve. So when I was speccing out my video processing machine at work, I ended up going with a dual-10-core-processor model with a clock speed kind of in the mid

      • I prefer more cores as well, just because more tasks can run unimpeded. Especially with desktop virtualization, so the web browser VM can run without affecting anything else on the system.

        AMD is looking quite attractive these days for the desktop. More cores, less cash.

  • Errrr SIs only? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Friday January 18, 2019 @12:06PM (#57981904)

    This is quite the curious move from Intel. Sure SIs have budget to buy in bulk and to auction, but the super enthusiasts who would be the likely target market for this chip aren't usually the type to go out to an SI and say "I want something off the shelf, please build for me".

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 )
      I did. My 7980xe system (7980xe, 64GB RAM, 1TB nvme, 2x1080ti) came from Alienware. Of course this was mainly because I saved over $2,000 thanks to cryptomining screwing up GPU prices, but still, it does happen. And plenty of people buy high end systems from SI's like iBuyPower, Cyberpower, Maingear, etc.

      • but still, it does happen

        Of course it happens, the question is does it happen in a big enough market. I'm willing to bet the majority of 7980xes were not bought by SIs. But you even said it yourself there were mitigating factors that pushed you towards that decision. In the normal case it's not cost effective to go to an SI vs building yourself and typically the type of people who are into these kinds of specs are more than capable of plugging a few things together.

    • Isn't that pretty much the Alienware market? Some dope will pay double for this tiny performance boost.

      • Isn't that pretty much the Alienware market? Some dope will pay double for this tiny performance boost.

        Not really. The Alienware market is wide and varied and the "best of the best" make up a very very small portion of their sales. Yeah they do move some units, but compared to enthusiasts who don't want to pay double on an already insanely expensive piece of kit... you said it yourself.

  • Obligatory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozcEel1rNKM

  • I guess that when you make a lot of processors, one of them has to be overclock-able. With a 255-watt power draw, you know it's overvolted and overclocked.

    • With a 255-watt power draw, you know it's overvolted and overclocked.

      Overvolted and overclocked imply you're pushing something beyond it's vendor spec. This is the vendor spec so by definition not "overclocked". In case you don't know basically every processor on the market is binned so by your standard every processor on the market except for the slowest model in every line is "overclocked".

  • That sure is a lot of 9s. Looking at the CPU lists though, they haven't really used 9 very much in their model names. Is 2019 the year of the Number Justice Warriors?

  • Like many people, I want my PC to keep up with the newest games, but none of these are CPU constrained. With dual graphics cards, even a cheapish CPU will not degrade performance. If people do a lot of rendering video or working in Photoshop, they can use Ouadro or FirePro rendering accelerators, and even a $170 cpu [ebay.com] will not be the limiting factor.

    I think it's time for tech journalists to do the equivalent of a "taste test" to see if even power users can really tell whether they're running one of these s

    • I would probably assert that moving to a NVMe SSD might more important than going to a new CPU barring specific tasks like Photoshop or other rendering. For almost all interactive use, disk I/O is what causes slowdowns.

      In my experience, it is usually disk I/O -> RAM -> GPU -> CPU, in that order for performance items, for most things.

    • There's only so much you can offload on the GPU. If you have a 6 year old GPU and throw a Quadro at it you're going to have a pretty bad day, even in Photoshop or Premier. I'm currently running an encode offloaded on hardware. My hardware video encoder is only sitting at around 60% many thanks to one of my CPU cores being pegged.

      You're quite right about the law of diminishing returns for gaming though. The difference between a 9700K and an 8700K is only a few FPS. But hey if that matters to you then more po

  • At 255W, systems integrators are required (Score:4, Informative)

    by guruevi ( 827432 ) on Friday January 18, 2019 @02:34PM (#57982832)

    I understand they don't want to give this one to the masses. 255W from an area the size of an oversized postal stamp will require some very good cooling and having it destroyed due to just poor installation of your water cooler, they'll probably won't be allowed returns at all.

    I know Intel wants to give AMD the finger but this is 1/4 kW in the processor alone. Give it a good GPU and you're looking at a 2kW space heater. This moves makes it obvious they are desperate to increase both profitability and get to a smaller scale.

    • I understand they don't want to give this one to the masses.

      What "masses" spend in excess of $2000 on a CPU and don't understand or look into the cooling solution?

      While we're at it, what 1990s era CPU is capable of being damaged due to poor cooling? Thermal throttling is a thing that occurs on a millisecond basis and failure for a CPU to protect itself these days would be grounds for returning it as being defective and not fit for purpose.

      I know Intel wants to give AMD the finger but this is 1/4 kW in the processor alone.

      Multiple Threadrippers have a 250W TDP, as do many Xeon chips. This isn't anything new. It's also nothing difficult to cool. Ther

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Jahoda ( 2715225 )
      The RTX 2080 TI is a 250 watt TDP chip (as it the 1080 TI). There's nothing remotely challenging to cool these systems. I don't really think you understand how TDP works. In any case, as several have corrected you, chips self-manage their thermals and have for about 15-20 years now.

      • The RTX 2080 TI is a 250 watt TDP chip

        So are the Threadrippers and many Xeon chips.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by guruevi ( 827432 )

        Not for 15-20 years. Athlons famously caught fire without a sink as did other P4-era chips, Intel started requiring temp diodes on the motherboard around that time but the BIOS had to regulate it. Nowadays, temp sensors are integrated but they only throttle to 25% and they produce enough heat before throttling that you can easily, with the help of a tiny water-cooler heatsink destroy or warp the motherboard and surrounding components, eventually destroying the chip.

        And yes, people will install the chip the

        • And yes, people will install the chip the wrong way, overtighten the cooling, not applying or too much cooling paste (resulting in uneven heat dissipation) or somehow destroy the chip and simply return it to the store and ask for their money back.

          And? That applies to the cooler on a Celeron as well and has nothing to do with high TDP.

          The GPU is a lot larger

          No it's not. The GPU is firstly direct die and is smaller than a heatspreadder. On top of that the cooler is required to connect to multiple parts of the card. If you're worried about enthusiasts destroying any component while installing a heatsink, then the GPU is orders of magnitude more likely to be ruined.

          They also have the heatsink already assembled in most cases and removing it voids the warranty.

          You do realise that installing the heatsink on e.g. a modern 250W TDP TR4 chip or an LGA 3647 chip is no differe

  • I know I'm a bit behind the times but when I was in school in the aughts, my TA was doing research on how to overcome the large amount of clock skew [wikipedia.org] you'd have on such fast chips. It seems like a 5 GHz chip would have problems with that.

    • 5GHz is not even close to the record extreme overclocks have stably achieved on CoffeeLake. 7.3GHz is getting close to the limit where no amount of magic can make it run stably anymore.

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