AMD Ryzen 9 5900X vs Intel Core i9-11900K: Rocket Lake and Ryzen 5000 CPU Face Off

Normally I would say it just isn't fair to compare 12C/24T vs 8C/16C CPU (outside gaming). However, they're at similar price level, so... yeah, people should know what they get for the money.
I'm not much a gamer, so my opinion is biased in this regard.. and that is: I'm pretty sure gamers won't buy 11900K simply because it's better than 5900X in few percents. Most of gaming performance depends on (expensive) GPU, so they will decide for more budget friendly CPU and save money for better GPU -at least I would do that.
Why is 11900K even there then? Or even further, why is 11-series there? Intel would stand in much better light if they would introduce improved 10-series CPU's. But yeah, way back, Intel promised 11th will be the "rocket".. and here we have it.
As usual, just sharing my thougts.
 

spongiemaster

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If the 5900x was actually available at $550 from major retailers, this would be a slaughterfest for AMD. However, taking into account that a 5900x is typically going for $700-800 on Ebay, neither of these CPU's is particularly appealing. If you're overclocking, and anyone buying an Intel K CPU should be, the 11700k is actually in stock and basically the same CPU as the 11900k for just over $400 ($405 at Newegg right now). That's a better value for money than either of these 2 selections.
 

dehjomz

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Intel’s mistake was calling the 11900k an i9. It just wasn’t a good marketing decision. Going from 10 cores back to 8 and calling it an i9 was already making people upset, and by calling it an i9, that meant reviewers and the press would compare it to the 5900x that has 12 cores and the 10900k. And both win in multicore performance.

If intel couldn’t deliver more Cypress cove cores on 14nm because of size and power constraints, then with alder coming soon, Intel could just have ceded the i9 market for 6 months. If the 11900k was instead an i7-11750k, then it would’ve been compared to the 5800x and the 10700k, and it is a pretty significant upgrade above the 10700k. Quite impressive.

What they’ve done by backporting and bringing a new core design to 14nm is impressive. But no one is talking about that because chose the wrong battlefield to play on. And they’re suffering for it. They had to have known the 5900x’s performance in non-gaming apps, so why charge the same price for much worse performance? Why force the industry to compare your part against the 5900x?? Who would want to buy it when they could get the 5900x?

Finally, intel seems to have used the same core design to bin the different skus. Meaning all the chips have space for the igpu and avx512. For the lower skus, they fused off cores, and for the f skus, they fused off the igpu. Rather than having just one core design, especially one with space for an igpu, why didn’t Intel have an additional cypress cove core design without the igpu so that it could have added more cores? Many enthusiasts don’t need a chip with an igpu as they have a dedicated gpu. Ryzen 5000 chips don’t have an igpu and yet the 5900x and 5950x destroy intel. Not sure why they didn’t put the space they had to better use.
 
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JayNor

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Intel includes the Xe GPU and the nice display support. I noticed one of the reviews ran GPU comparisons and posted 0 scores for the AMD chips ... seems fair.
 
But no one is talking about that because chose the wrong battlefield to play on. And they’re suffering for it. They had to have known the 5900x’s performance in non-gaming apps, so why charge the same price for much worse performance? Why force the industry to compare your part against the 5900x?? Who would want to buy it when they could get the 5900x?
How is the desktop marketplace the wrong battlefield for desktop performance/features?
AMD is the one that is targeting the hedt/workstation marketplace but selling them to the desktop marketplace.
"Who would want to buy it when they could get the 5900x? "
Answer, anybody that just needs a desktop PC and not a server.
Well, not the 11900k because that's just a stupid CPU, but 11th gen in general.
Many enthusiasts don’t need a chip with an igpu as they have a dedicated gpu. Ryzen 5000 chips don’t have an igpu and yet the 5900x and 5950x destroy intel. Not sure why they didn’t put the space they had to better use.
Again, you are only seeing things from your position of somebody that needs a lot of computing power, a hedt/server type system.
Most of the market wants the low power features of the iGPU, especially for mobile devices (that some of them do use desktop CPUs now) but even on desktop, being able to sync a movie to any device in super speed without even bothering the CPU and using extremely low power is more appealing to some people then being able to do 3d rendering faster...because nobody in the desktop market does 3D, nobody being the amount of people that buy 5900 and 5950, it's a small amount of people.
 

dehjomz

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How is the desktop marketplace the wrong battlefield for desktop performance/features?
AMD is the one that is targeting the hedt/workstation marketplace but selling them to the desktop marketplace.
"Who would want to buy it when they could get the 5900x? "
Answer, anybody that just needs a desktop PC and not a server.
Well, not the 11900k because that's just a stupid CPU, but 11th gen in general.

Again, you are only seeing things from your position of somebody that needs a lot of computing power, a hedt/server type system.
Most of the market wants the low power features of the iGPU, especially for mobile devices (that some of them do use desktop CPUs now) but even on desktop, being able to sync a movie to any device in super speed without even bothering the CPU and using extremely low power is more appealing to some people then being able to do 3d rendering faster...because nobody in the desktop market does 3D, nobody being the amount of people that buy 5900 and 5950, it's a small amount of people.

By wrong battle field I mean the 9-series sku battlefield; aka the Core i9 and Ryzen 9. The battlefield should have been constrained to the 7-series sku. Ryzen 7 and core i7. Against the 5800x, the 11900k/11700k are pretty good especially on the later microcode updates. Of course Ryzen wins on performance per watt. By competing on the 9-series battlefield, intel set itself up for failure as no one is mentioning that against the 8-core 10700k, Rocket lake is better in most instances (single and multicore). It is a success in that sense. But everyone is comparing the i9-11900k against the Ryzen 9 5900x, and there’s no comparison.

Regarding the igpu, it’s not only me who feels that the space used for the igpu could also have been used for more cores. I encourage you to look at the comments posed to intel on the recent 11th gen AMA on Reddit. Many commenters wanted to know why Intel didn’t design a core without an igpu. On this point, I’ll point out that Intel sells the F-series sku - aka the 11900KF and 11700KF and 10900KF and so forth with no igpu. People are interested in those skus, but the igpu is fused off and the space is wasted. So why not have a similar part with no igpu for those who don’t want one, and use the space for more cores?? People would buy it. A one size fits all approach (one core design) seems to limit flexibility. Intel could’ve had more than one core design. The 5600x,5800x,5900x have no igpu and yet people are buying them like hot cakes. Using the igpu space for more cores would’ve allowed for more multicore performance.
 
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just like the best cpu for gaming being 11600k (look at reviews from a wide source of reviewers and you see it loses is more games than it wins vs 5600x and in productivity it loses in 99% of productivity)...this one makes no sense in the OC part.

as ryzen 3 showed us intel's high frequency doesnt mean better.

frequency is 1 part of oc'ing.
 
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Regarding the igpu, it’s not only me who feels that the space used for the igpu could also have been used for more cores. I encourage you to look at the comments posed to intel on the recent 11th gen AMA on Reddit. Many commenters wanted to know why Intel didn’t design a core without an igpu.
How many percent of the CPU buying market took part in that AMA?
Also what was Intel's respond?
 

dehjomz

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How many percent of the CPU buying market took part in that AMA?
Also what was Intel's respond?

Their response is they have one core design and they bin it, and it was a business decision not to have another core.

But it seems that Intel is moving to a better design in the future with the tile-based architecture and packaging that they’ll be offering. Also, as they open their foundries to 3rd parties, it will be interesting to see what ideas folks come up with for core design, and how or if they use the igpu space on the core.
 

rluker5

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Honestly, you need to update the overclocking section. While Intel can hit higher frequencies, you can get a lot more performance by overclocking the Infinity Fabric, PBO, and RAM settings on AMD. Hell, you can do this on Intel too. Making a section strictly about frequency is extremely outdated.
Very true. Intel also has cache overclock benefits, and the memory speeds on the 11900k is comparable to running the Ryzen on DDR4 2400.
3200 is stock minimum for 11900k and is what it is run on, on default timings. 3200 is stock "up to" for 5900x, those aren't equivalent. With the oc 11900k the ram was upped to 3600, default timings. Right now you can pick up 16GB 4400 for $120 from Newegg. It isn't rare or exotic. Any 16 year old kid would choose the $120 4400 over some $90 3200 and just plug it in. It isn't even that close to top end of readily available ram for Intel.

And Ryzen can also run faster with more than just near max clocks and near max ram clocks with no apparent timing tightenings even though there are calculators for that. Overclocking should be stated as such and as long as the settings are comfortably stable, and methods are still plebian, they should be used.

Leaving obvious performance on the table in a comparison is just as shady as doing a cpu comparison with a gpu bottleneck.
Does ram speed no longer matter for Intel?
 
Their response is they have one core design and they bin it, and it was a business decision not to have another core.
There you go, it doesn't make economic sense to cater to the few people that are after multicore performance on desktop and nothing else.
Also, as they open their foundries to 3rd parties, it will be interesting to see what ideas folks come up with for core design, and how or if they use the igpu space on the core.
Providing foundry services does not mean that they are going to let people use their CPU designs, intel is only going to fab whatever other people come up with, it probably won't even be x86 since nobody else other than AMD has rights to make x86.
Which makes the most probable customer AMD to make ryzen chips as long as tsmc can't keep up.
 

Jim90

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The long history of this node gives us a unique opportunity for a future article: take, say the top line CPU from each desktop 14nm release iteration, and compare the price and performance each against the current 11900K. The results and many implications will be...interesting, to say the least, and amongst other findings, 14nm has clearly been very profitable for Intel and until Zen2, they faced little/no competition.
 

magbarn

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Intentionally choosing the 11900K over the 10900K would be a tough sell...

If AMD had enough 5800X and 5900X in stock at good price levels, they'd sell every single one.
5800x is mostly widely available now for MSRP. It's the other Zen3's that are hard to find at MSRP.
 

Specter0420

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I'm extremely disappointed to see flight simulators dropped from these CPU tests so quickly, specifically VR. Outside of VR flight sims, there isn't much in the gaming realm that requires peak overclocked CPU and RAM to provide barely acceptable frame rates.

It's cool that one CPU gives you 160 FPS in some game, while another gives you 160.5, but I'm not sure there is any value in that for anyone. Now those same CPUs in something CPU\RAM dependent, like VR DCS (especially with lots of AI), VR MSFS, or VR X-Plane 11 will likely show much more massive differences between platforms. Especially with ASW tech, the difference the two platforms provide could be up to 45FPS (or more) in VR flight sims where it may only be 0.5FPS in these games.

TLDR: The only type of gaming that REQUIRES bleeding-edge overclocked CPU\RAM is VR flight simulation. Put 3-4 VR flight simulators in these CPU reviews instead of half a dozen worthless games that are largely GPU bound even at 1080p.
 
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lazyabum

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Intel is confident that it can compete its 14nm to AMD's 7nm for a year or two more. Unless AMD can break Intel's record high earnings, sales and decades long record in all categories, Intel feels will be able to keep pace with AMD.
 

Lorien Silmaril

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https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/23/int...-to-build-two-new-chip-plants-in-arizona.html
Intel is spending $20 billion to build two new chip plants in Arizona
TSMC is spending $100 billion. :p

Intel is aware that ARM is the future, hence the IDM 2.0 strategy with foundry service on offer.

this article is a good read.