How many 8-core CPUs does Intel have?

[Mr. Koaliti]

I am new to Intel, but the only processor of their's that I can
that I can find that has 8 cores is the i7-5960X. Do they have any more
then this?

 

[coolcole01]

not really they have a xeon version but its basically the same thing what you trying to do with it.

 

[dgingeri]

The 5960X is the only mainstream one, so far. Broadwell-E should introduce a couple more.

There are many Xeons that are 8 core, though. Some can even be used in desktop boards. They will not overclock, though, at all.

http://ark.intel.com/products/64596/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-2690-20M-Cache-2_90-GHz-8_00-GTs-Intel-QPI
http://ark.intel.com/products/series/61422/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-2600-Product-Family#@Server

 

[why_wolf]

do you mean physical 8 core? If not then pretty much all of the i7 lineup is 8 core through the use of hyper-threading.

 

[DonkeyOatie]

The Xeon range goes up to 18 cores??? I think.

If you are coming from AMD, the two are not quite comparable.

AMD advertising talks about 8 core FX 8??? CPUs, but they really contain four modules with two Integer and one Floating point core and shared resources. The IPC is a lot less than a single Intel core at a similar clock speed, and even a four core i7 will spank a FX8??? in almost every application, and even more when overclocked.

 

[dgingeri]

The Xeon range goes up to 18 cores??? I think.

If you are coming from AMD, the two are not quite comparable.

AMD advertising talks about 8 core FX 8??? CPUs, but they really contain four modules with two Integer and one Floating point core and shared resources. The IPC is a lot less than a single Intel core at a similar clock speed, and even a four core i7 will spank a FX8??? in almost every application, and even more when overclocked.

Yes, they do go all the way to 18 now in the Xeon E5 v3 series.

http://ark.intel.com/products/family/78583/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-v3-Family#@All

However, the more cores they put in, the lower the clock rate has to be to keep the overall power consumption down. The highest clock rate on 18 core processors is 2.3GHz. There's a balance between the two to maintain, and that balance is different between each app. I don't know of a single game that uses more than 4 threads, and most of them are still down at 2. An 18 core CPU is good for database or web server duties, but would be horrible at gaming.

 

[DonkeyOatie]

The OP has yet to mention gaming. An i7 5690X is not really a gaming CPU, it's far too expensive and a bit slow, as well as having heavy power use and needing lots of cooling. It would be interesting to know why the OP asked their question.

 

[Karsten75]

It would be interesting to know why the OP asked their question.

My guess is that anybody saying "new to Intel" has an AMD background and swallowed AMD's octa-core propaganda.

 

[DonkeyOatie]

That was my guess too, and why I elaborated further, but there is also the purpose. Eight cores of any sort are not needed for almost any gaming otherwise all laptop users would be SOOL.

 

[Mr. Koaliti]

The reason I was asking is because I am doing research into different CPUs and comparing AMD to Intel. I have looked into both before buying and I knew that Intel had hyper threading but like dgingeri said: most games don't use all of the threads. So on top of the fact that Intel has slower cores and less cores, I went with AMD because I built my rig strictly for gaming. I didn't research into what Intel HAD but more what they did, and AMD seemed like a better choice to me.

On that note I am not being biased in my research and plan to present both sides as a whole. It has nothing to do with gaming but more what they can both do in general.

 

[DonkeyOatie]

Well, unfortunately, you turned out to have made a mistake then. For gaming four cores is plenty, and the IPC (Instructions Per Clock) for Intel is more than double what AMD can achieve, which is how a two core i3 can keep up with a FX8350 in many gaming titles. You can still build a decent gaming system with AMD, but you will be behind the curve quite a bit.

Is there any way to change?

 

[Mr. Koaliti]

The IPC (Instructions Per Clock) for Intel is more than double what AMD can achieve

From my understanding, this stat is due to hyper threading. You have double the IPC because you have twice the data going to a single core. but one thread can max out the core which would decrease your IPC, no? Having two threads does not increase your core speed; 3.0GHz does not double to 6.0GHz with a second thread.

 

[DonkeyOatie]

You are mistaken. Have a read of some work on IPC, clock speed and a comparison between AMD and Intel.

IPC is instructions per clock, Hyperthreading merely allows for threads to use idle and wait cycles.

Single core, single thread, Intel is very significantly better.

Quoted from elsewhere

AMD chips are built on an old CPU architecture, and therefore their chips suffer in the IPC department, with many of their chips having 50-60% less IPC than modern Intel chips. This means that if you have two single core chips (for simplicity's sake) and the Intel is clocked at 3 GHz, the AMD chip will have to run between 6 GHz and 6.5 GHz to compete with the Intel chip for performance.

Additionally, newer CPU's from both companies will have more IPC than chips in the previous generation. Skylake is about an 8%-10% improvement over Haswell in the IPC department, meaning that a Haswell chip clocked at 3.3GHz is about the same performance as a Skylake chip clocked at 3.0 GHz.

This problem is further compounded by AMD's preference for more cores, over faster individual cores. Coding programs to be multi-threaded (use multiple CPU cores at the same time) is difficult, time-consuming, and expensive for a game company. Therefore, it is often easier and more profitable to not code games to utilize more than 2-4 cores, especially since most CPU's only HAVE 2-4 cores. This further hurts AMD chips like the FX-8350, which has 8 cores.

A little math behind the 8350 vs 4690K. For simplicity's sake, let's say the FX 8350 has 50% the IPC of the 4690K. (I think its actually closer to 60, but the math is way easier with 50%) Clocked at 4GHz, with 8 cores, the total processing power of the chip is an arbitrary value 32 (this is a made up number, and means nothing to real world performance). However, it has 50% the IPC of the Intel chip, so that arbitrary number becomes 16. For the 4690K, each core is clocked at 3.5 GHz, meaning that the arbitray number for the 4690K is 14. However, the 8350 will ONLY outperform the Intel when all 8 of the 8350's cores are being utilized at 100%. Therefore, for a machine that exclusively uses heavily multi-threaded applications, the 8350 will come out on top.

However, most games only use 2-4 cores. Lets do the same comparison, except only letting the 8350 use 4 cores. 4GHz * 4 cores * 50% IPC = 8, while the 4690K still has the same score of 14.

https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/3zxj5z/discussion_amd_vs_intel_a_more_indepth_look_at/

 

[coolcole01]

The best comparison is the idea of loading two trucks the one loaded by amd the other by intel. Now there are 8 guys loading the amd truck which can carry one thing at a time(cycle). Now the intel team only has 4 guys but they can each carry 3 things at a time so for every cycle the amd truck only gets 8 things inside while the intel gets 12. When it comes to gaming this is even more prevelent because game code writers generally dfo a poor job with multi thread work loads so they really heavily on the first core which in the case of intel can carry 3 things and the case of amd can only carry one. This is a very basic explanation but trust me its very accurate to whats going on.