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Intel Hardware

Intel's 9th-Gen Mobile Core Chips Aim For the High End, Rocking 8 Cores at Up To 5GHz Speeds (pcworld.com) 84

Posted by msmash from the moving-forward dept.
Intel debuted six new 9th-gen mobile H-series Core chips on Tuesday -- with its fastest, the Core i9-9980HK, soaring to a new high-water mark: 8 cores, 16 threads, and a whopping 5GHz clock speed, after boost. From a report: After launching its 9th-generation Core chips for desktop PCs last October, Intel has now brought that same capability to notebooks. Intel executives said systems based upon the 9th-gen chips are expected to debut shortly. All the chips are based on the "Coffee Lake Refresh" (Coffee Lake-R) architecture, and all are fabricated on a 14nm process. Last year's 8th-gen mobile Core chips topped out at 4.8GHz, and offered only 6 cores.

Though theoretically anyone can benefit from the increased performance, Intel is aiming at two particular segments: professional content creators and gamers. Intel said it expects its 9th-gen Core i9-9980HK (8 cores/16 threads, 2.4GHz/5GHz turbo) to deliver up to 18 percent higher frames per second in games and 28 percent faster 4K video editing than the 8th-gen Core i9-8950HK (6 cores/12 threads, 2.9GHz/4.8GHz turbo). When performing general office tasks and web browsing, the chips can run in a low-power mode, with an "aspirational goal" of ten hours of battery life, or just an hour while gaming, executives said. Price, performance, and power are the old battlefronts, though. Further reading: All the Desktop and Mobile 45W CPUs Announced (AnandTech).
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Intel's 9th-Gen Mobile Core Chips Aim For the High End, Rocking 8 Cores at Up To 5GHz Speeds More

Intel's 9th-Gen Mobile Core Chips Aim For the High End, Rocking 8 Cores at Up To 5GHz Speeds

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  • So what is the performance like of these chips going to be after the next round of Intel design mistakes?

  • The video card makes the biggest difference. A high clock speed but lower core count Core i3 will get similar performance in just about any game.
    Save on the CPU and invest in a better GPU.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by godrik ( 1287354 )

      That's true for the rendering part. But games with complex mechanics can take a while to resolve. The AI in civilization 5 (haven't played 6 yet) can take painfully long to decide what to do an enact the changes. I doubt the civilization game engine is CUDA accelerated...

      • TFS explicitly talks about frame rate. Slow AI doesn't (or at least shouldn't) affect frame rate.

        Anyways is this AI heavily multi threaded to take advantage of 8 cores instead of 4? If not, again, you are probably not going to notice a big improvement over a Core i3.

        • Not really sure what to say about that. The current best i3 on the market doesn't come anywhere close to touching *current* 5ghz chips in single-threaded benchmarks. Or do you consider +23% unnoticeable?

          • i9-9900 has a clock speed of 3.6 GHz. 5 GHz turbo for $488
            i3-9350 has a clock speed of 4 GHz. 4.6 GHz turbo for $173
            Pentium G5620 has a clock speed of 4 GHz but no turbo for $86

            I don't know where you +23% comes from. Even if you consider turbo, the i9 only has less than 9% clock speed advantage over i3. It will hardly make any difference on the frame rate compared to investing that money on a better video card.
            Even the Pentium should perform good enough in games maxing only 1-2 cores.

            • I don't know where you +23% comes from.

              Will explain below.

              en if you consider turbo

              Of course I was considering turbo. Unsure why one wouldn't in the context of single-threaded performance.

              the i9 only has less than 9% clock speed advantage over i3.

              And a 100% cache-size advantage at every level, as a well as a RAM speed advantage.

              The 23% was derived from single-threaded performance of the current highest single-core performing i3 (for sale, that can actually be benchmarked), paired against an i7 of that generation, scaling that differential up against the current i9 against the known clock rate of the i3-9350 (since it isn't fo

              • Turbo is never guaranteed from what I understand. So when you need it the most, the CPU can decide it is running too hot so won't use turbo as much as you'd like it.
                When gaming, what matters is usually the minimum frame rate. Nobody cares you get 300 FPS instead of 200 at some point. However, if the frame rate drops to 15 FPS instead of 20 FPS at some point, you can notice it.
                One would hope the turbo speed is always maxed when using a single thread however. Still, base clock frequency can't be ignored (and

                • Turbo is never guaranteed from what I understand. So when you need it the most, the CPU can decide it is running too hot so won't use turbo as much as you'd like it.

                  This is a very real problem on laptops and computers that are trying to be "quiet" or otherwise have skimped on their cooling capacity. It isn't a problem on a "normal" desktop build with a K processor. There are tools you can download to see if you are being throttled due to a heat problem. My i7-8700K doesn't, ever.

                  There is no 100% cache advantage at every level. There is a cache advantage because you have more cores and every core includes cache.

                  Well, more complicated than that. L2 and L3 are shared among groups of cores, but the increase in cache is critically important. Is the amount of cache double because double the cores? Yes. But

                  • Sorry, replace average with minimum, and maximum with average.

                  • I don't think you would notice the difference between 136 and 140 FPS anyways. But now, compare what would be the difference between a $150 and a $250 video card. The difference would be huge.

                  • the desktop shouldn't throttle because of temperature, but still, Intel makes sure the CPU never exceed its TDP, so the CPU is not guaranteed to stay at 5 GHz.

                    Unlike what you said, with Intel's design I don't think a single threaded application can benefit from more L2 cache on an i3 vs an i9. L3 is shared however.

                  • Also, the i5-8600K has turbo while the i3-8350K doesn't. It's probably what explains the speed advantage here (4.3 vs 3.7 GHz).

                    The new i3 (the one we were talking about) has turbo (4.6 GHz), just like the new i9 (5 GHz), so the clock speed difference is less important.

            • It will hardly make any difference on the frame rate

              CPUs definitely affect framerate. [techspot.com]

              compared to investing that money on a better video card.

              That's a different argument than was being had.
              Above link addresses it as well (They like to test CPUs against insane GPUs that wouldn't be realistically paired with that CPU)

              Even the Pentium should perform good enough in games maxing only 1-2 cores.

              Now you've changed it from "not going to notice improvement" to "a GPU is a better investment of money" to "Even a Pentium should be Good Enough (TM)"

              • Of course CPU affect frame rate. Just not significantly compared to the GPU. And the higher the resolution, the less the CPU makes a difference.

                Now you've changed it from "not going to notice improvement" to "a GPU is a better investment of money" to "Even a Pentium should be Good Enough (TM)"

                I've been saying the same thing since the beginning. And I still stand by these 3 statements which aren't contradictory.

    • That's changing thanks to the consoles (Score:5, Interesting)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @10:13AM (#58477430)
      In the PS3/X360 era there was an over abundance of single threaded CPU performance on the consoles and that carried over to PC games. Multi-core aware games are finally a thing because console programmers had to get used to it in order to get the comparatively weak PS4/XBO hardware to perform well enough to feel "next gen".

      This is why AMD's Zen processors are suddenly competitive. They caught up to an i3 in single core performance and the $160 Ryzen 2600 processor hangs with a $250 i7 in multi-threaded performance. So the Zen has enough single core IPC to run the older single-thread only games just fine and newer games use all those lovely cores.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kjella ( 173770 )

        Well the PS3/X360 generation weren't single core either, but they had other weird CPU/GPU architectures so the port often took the easy way out. The PS4/XBO generation is essentially a fixed spec 8-core PC, no wonder porting got better (apart from controller issues). The main reason Zen is competitive though is Zen itself, it was a huge leap over Bulldozer in every way.

        • when compared to the GPUs that they might as well be. There wasn't much need for multi core programming on those consoles because the CPUs could keep the GPUs fed with one core. The other cores were usually used for streaming/decompressing audio and other mundane tasks.

          Don't get me wrong, zen is a big leap, but even the high end Zens (2600x) still barely hang with my two year old i5-7500 in single thread. But that doesn't matter, because my 2 year old i5 can keep a GTX 1080 fed in single core heavy game

      • You are a few consoles out of date.

        This trend of multi threading started with Sega's Saturn's 7 different CPUs, continued with the PS2's seven CPUs, made "worse" with the PS3, and driven home with the abysmally slow clock speeds on the PS4 & XBox One.

        All the AAA game devs shipping games on the PS3 and Xbox360 were shipping multithreaded games.

        * PS3 has 6 SPUs available
        * Xbox 360 Xeon was dual core

        i.e.

        * Uncharted Tech Retrospective [youtu.be]
        * Deferred rendering in Killzone 2 [guerrilla-games.com]

        It is only the lazy / "amateur" game dev

        • to code a Saturn? It would make an Atari 2600 programmer weak at the knees :).

          The PS2 was more like stream processors. You feed them data and they spit out effects. If you ever want to see something really crazy use an emulator to play Burnout 3 without those effects, it looks like a first gen PS1 game :). Turn those same effects on and it looks like a late gen Xbox1 game.

          I mentioned this elsewhere but the single thread performance of the PS3 and X360 CPUs far outstripped their GPUs. Meaning a prog

        • The Sega Saturn was not multithreaded in the modern sense. It has multiple processors (not cpus) but they were dedicated to specific tasks which wasn't all that unique or special in that era. Back then you didn't have enough realestate in your silicon to integrate multiple functions into one chip so it was very common to have dedicated ASICs for specific tasks. This was very common in home computers in the 80's like the Amiga and Atari's. That wasn't the only issue though, you also lacked the raw compute po

          • > The PS2 did not have 7 CPUs, it had two

            If you are going to be pedantic it had two CPUs, and 7 *other* processors / units:

            * EE main CPU
            * FPU Coprocessor
            * VU0 Coprocessor
            * VU1 Coprocessor
            * GS
            * IOP - The R3000A from the PS1
            * SPU1
            * SPU2 - The SPU from the PS1
            * IPU

            Each of these xPUs were programmed *independently.*

            You obviously haven't shipped any games on it because you know how much of a PITA it was to synchronize data across all of the processors. (Mis)Labeling them as CPUs doesn't change that fact.

            The p

        • This trend of multi threading started with Sega's Saturn's 7 different CPUs, continued with the PS2's seven CPUs, made "worse" with the PS3

          A great list of consoles that shared nothing in common with PCs and did not affect PC game design in any way.

        • * PS3 has 6 SPUs available

          Non-symmetrical multiprocessing is not multithreading.

    • What about games with more complicated calculations going on beyond the hood? What about games that insist on having multiple anticheat processes running at one, and/or people who run games AND run other things (streaming software AND chatbots, or try doing video rendering and kill time gaming? I think that current games not utilizing that many cores alone is not the best reason to dismiss this in of itself, but also that it depends on use case ...

      • 4 CPU cores is more than enough for all current games. The speed advantage of getting 4 more cores is generally minimal, if any. And this is despite what you said.

        But sure, if you want to encode video (or do some other non real-time, highly threaded, CPU-limited task) while gaming, a 8 core CPU will help getting your non real-time task completed faster.
        Given that a typical gaming PC is probably off or idle over 80% of the time, is it worth it?

  • So, what you are saying is that I can look forward to getting these babies in my $3000 MacBook Pro in 2021? Who wants state of the art in premium machines!!!!

  • Goodbye Battery run time! Those things running that hot are going to get like 30minutes of battery.

  • Given that PS4's have K's of cores ... is it worth noting 8 cores here?
  • YAAWWWNNN! Sure it's great for multimedia content creators and gamers, but it's really boring for everyday folks who just do basic stuff on their PC. The Intel CPU reached good enough performance for everyday tasks years and years ago. The ATOM/Pentium line has plenty of performance, but luckily for Intel, customers keep wanting to shell out more money for the i5.

  • And it doesn't matter (Score:3)

    by thereddaikon ( 5795246 ) on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @01:46PM (#58478562)

    Because the biggest performance limitation for laptops is the thermal envelope. OEMs are obsessed with making these things as thin as possible and the thermals suffer. No high end laptop has real world performance anywhere close to where it should be because they are forced to throttle so quickly. I can understand it to a degree with ultrabooks, their goal is to be light and long lasting. But even my T480s with its U class cpu has thermal constraints that gimp it. And don't get me started on the "workstation" models. They might as well be spitting fire out the exhaust it gets so hot. These designs are so compromised that if they didn't throttle so aggressively they would likely damage themselves.

    You want faster laptops? How about we ease off the thinness so much and let them breathe? You get the secondary benefit of being able to fit a bigger battery at the same time.

  • But (Score:1)

    by dimko ( 1166489 )
    Can it run Crysis?

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