What We Know About Intel 9000-Series CPUs So Far

[Guest]

We give you the lowdown on Intel's upcoming 9000-series processors that are slated to launch in October.

What We Know About Intel 9000-Series CPUs So Far : Read more

 

[Quaddro]

we have to glad, because due to competition, all of us get a better computing horse power these day..
Not stuck for quad core consumer class processor anymore for high end gaming machine.

 

[JamesSneed]

we have to glad, because due to competition, all of us get a better computing horse power these day..
Not stuck for quad core consumer class processor anymore for high end gaming machine.

To some degree for the 6 cores but for the 8 core it's going to have a huge premium which if you think about it isn't much of a change at all as we already had that for many years with the HEDT platform. We won't see any proper competition until Ryzen Zen2 on 7nm is for sale.

 

[pyro411]

Now the major question is will the i9-9900k require the newer chipset or would it work without suffering too much of a performance or feature hit and would it be a worthwhile upgrade from the i7-8700k.

 

[salgado18]

Suddenly HT is a premium feature: only the i9 has it.

Why disable HT on every CPU, now that they have 4/6/8 core parts? Shouldn't all of them have it?

Does it make sense that it is disabled to allow for faster clocks?

 

[hendrickhere]

I'm pleasantly surprised that I'll be able to upgrade from the 8th gen to the 9th gen with just a BIOS update! I though Intel stopped ding that a while back. This is great news for the longevity of the system I build this past winter! I guess I should be thanking AMD for upping their game so much.

 

[jeremyj_83]

The biggest question is will the i7 9 series be any faster than the 8 series....While it does gain 2 full cores, it loses 4 threads. This might be a time when the old is actually faster than the new.

 

[Matt_550]

How many PCI lanes can they support? 16-20 isn't enough with today's storage game.

 

[1_rick]

The removal of HT is probably to mitigate Meltdown/L1TF/TLBleed/Foreshadow/etc.

 

[1_rick]

The i3-9100 and i3-9000 both show a top speed of 3.7GHz, same L3 cache & TDP. IIRC I've seen that before. Surely they're not both the same?

 

[jdlawrence]

JUST BUY IT!

 

[TEAMSWITCHER]

With only ONE (1) hyper threading variant .. I can't see ANY value in the bulk of this line up. Why does Intel do this? Is it to drive shoppers to the most expensive chip?

 

[hackermom]

95 watt, yeah right. At 3.6GHz it might but at 4.7GHz all core turbo... More like 170-200 watt.

 

[stdragon]

The removal of HT is probably to mitigate Meltdown/L1TF/TLBleed/Foreshadow/etc.

^This!

Yes, agreed 100%. They probably sacrificed portions of the die responsible for speculative execution (needed for HT) and instead carved out the space for another core or two. Purely a guess.

Given the endless Spectre variants being discovered and patched, HT being disabled outright was a fait accompli. In fact, it's already disabled in newer builds of OpenBSD. Might as well axe it from silicon.

 

[walter.eckalbar]

As core count increases, doesn't the utility of hyper threading decrease? For many tasks I work on, performance actually gets worse if I leave hyper threading on. When a $120 i3 has 4 cores running in the upper 3s, or a $200-250 i5 has 6 at ~3-4Ghz , I just don't really see the use cases for HT being all that material. Intel has its issues, but I don't see this as one of them.

 

[Rexer]

I'm pleasantly surprised that I'll be able to upgrade from the 8th gen to the 9th gen with just a BIOS update! I though Intel stopped ding that a while back. This is great news for the longevity of the system I build this past winter! I guess I should be thanking AMD for upping their game so much.

Yeah. I'm pleasantly surprised, too. Adds a little value to the model. Through the years, I've gotten into a habit of keeping a spare board around. It makes me want to entertain the idea of building another machine.

 

[KD_Gaming]

HT has been shown to cause worse performance in most games.

@matt, 20 to 24 pci-e lanes is plenty dude. Figure 8 to gpu, leaving you with 16 lanes for a consumer level computer.... that's over 8GB/s of possible transfer speed using that as just storage... no consumer level network can handle that much on a single line. And you sure as hell don't have enough internet bandwidth to need that.

 

[TerryLaze]

As core count increases, doesn't the utility of hyper threading decrease? For many tasks I work on, performance actually gets worse if I leave hyper threading on. When a $120 i3 has 4 cores running in the upper 3s, or a $200-250 i5 has 6 at ~3-4Ghz , I just don't really see the use cases for HT being all that material. Intel has its issues, but I don't see this as one of them.

No, if your software scales to any amount of cores you get ~30% more speed with HTT,if it doesn't scale and only uses the real cores you can still use HT to keep using your system normally without impacting the performance of your program.

 

[Olle P]

Strange... the title is "What we know about..."
So: "The Intel 9000-series... is the last wave of processors... with the chipmaker's aging 14nm process node."
Do we really know this for a fact? Even if it takes a couple of years before a 7/10/12 nm process become available?

As core count increases, doesn't the utility of hyper threading decrease? For many tasks I work on, performance actually gets worse if I leave hyper threading on. ...

Depends a bit on the task. The type of work you do obviously don't benefit from HT, and possibly not at all from having even more cores available?
For more common tasks that benefit from having many threads available the assigning of tasks to a core is more time consuming than the actual computing of said task in the core. Then HT/SMT is beneficial.

 

[Matt_550]

HT has been shown to cause worse performance in most games.

@matt, 20 to 24 pci-e lanes is plenty dude. Figure 8 to gpu, leaving you with 16 lanes for a consumer level computer.... that's over 8GB/s of possible transfer speed using that as just storage... no consumer level network can handle that much on a single line. And you sure as hell don't have enough internet bandwidth to need that.

Maybe for consumer level. I don't want to deal with bottle-necking my GPU by cutting it from 16 lanes to 8 because I added a SSD. That is a terrible trade off.

 

[computerguy72]

Isn't it kinda sad that Intel is now down to iterating 8xxx to 9xxx without even upgrading the architecture. I know the upgrades between architectures was very minor but now they don't even bother with that. Basically all the 9xxx really should be labeled 8xxx as they are ***still Coffee Lake. How the mighty have fallen.

 

[rderubeis]

Will the 8700k be better than the 9700k. Im debating on getting the 8700k but not sure if i should wait for the 9700k i wont be able to afford the i9 nor do i think i need to spend that much

 

[Rexer]

Isn't it kinda sad that Intel is now down to iterating 8xxx to 9xxx without even upgrading the architecture. I know the upgrades between architectures was very minor but now they don't even bother with that. Basically all the 9xxx really should be labeled 8xxx as they are ***still Coffee Lake. How the mighty have fallen.

Yeah, it's really hard to say what they'll do. They may surprise us and put out a 8000/9000 siamese cpu with 10x the cache and double light speed. Who knows? In that sense, they may be as secretive as Nvidia is. AMD kept making a year of full of announcements with Vega and HBM2 and Nvidia kept countering.