Intel Core i9-9900KS

[GoldenX]

I can agree to that. But I insist, 14nm is not for 8 cores.

 

[trparky]

but 8 cores holding steady at 5GHz

Somewhere I read that it won't necessarily stay at 5 GHz and that it can and will clock down if the cooling isn't up to the task. It'll stay at 5 GHz under load as long as it can, usually until the heatsink is soaked, clocked down and then when the heatsink can take on more heat it'll clock back up to 5 GHz. So unless you have some damn good cooling, good luck with your 5 GHz under full load.

Oh wait... it wasn't something I read, it was a video I watched.

Gotta love how he put "5 GHz, Sort Of" in his video thumbnail.

 

[efikkan]

Somewhere I read that it won't necessarily stay at 5 GHz and that it can and will clock down if the cooling isn't up to the task. It'll stay at 5 GHz under load as long as it can, usually until the heatsink is soaked, clocked down and then when the heatsink can take on more heat it'll clock back up to 5 GHz. So unless you have some damn good cooling, good luck with your 5 GHz under full load.

Oh wait... it wasn't something I read, it was a video I watched.

Gotta love how he put "5 GHz, Sort Of" in his video thumbnail.

Yeah, after 28 seconds the power limit kicks in (unless it's disabled), and may limit the clock speed, down to ~4.7-4.8 GHz for the most intensive workloads.

The CPU will consume ~186W at burst speed and ~127W sustained, which itself isn't problematic on any decent air cooler. The challenge with i9-9900K(S) is energy density more than total energy consumption, and this is probably one of the few things Intel potentially can improve for Comet Lake which is still on 14nm++.

 

[Vayra86]

This may as well be 20 years old. Or it may be 320nm++++++. It's all just pointless numbers. It's not what computers are about.

You may buy a CPU because it's more modern or because it does better in reviews/benchmarks. But that's because you care about stuff other than actually using a PC. You care what's inside the case.
Some people on this forum openly admit that they're more interested in hardware than in software. I.e. they buy a PC as a collectors item or a DIY hobby - not as a tool (for the same reason many people here are against cloud in general).

Typical consumers are extremely pragmatic - simply because they don't know (and don't care) how a CPU is made or how it works. They only care what it does for them.
Most people don't even like PCs. A PC is something they're forced to use at work or at home.

Will someone like that consciously buy a 9900K(S)? Of course he won't. He doesn't even know what 9900K is.
But will he end up getting a 9900K(S) because he needs a PC to edit videos or do some scientific/engineering/financial computations? Likely yes.

Mate. Its hot, grossly overpriced and it has zero IPC improvements. If you think this product fills a niche you are quite right, the idiot niche is what that is. And I'm not even joking, its a real one with real people who really think what they're doing makes any sense. They buy products based on their price tag and place in the stack 'have to have top parts', and probably never even looked at a review proper. The vast majority doesn't even know if the CPU brings them any benefit in any of the games they play.

Main reason for this is that the product was also preceded by a 9900K that is the exact same product - if you really wanted top FPS, you'd have already gotten that one. This CPU exists for the headlines and for some extra margin for Intel off aforementioned idiot niche.

 

[altermere]

Mate. Its hot, grossly overpriced and it has zero IPC improvements. If you think this product fills a niche you are quite right, the idiot niche is what that is. And I'm not even joking, its a real one with real people who really think what they're doing makes any sense. They buy products based on their price tag and place in the stack 'have to have top parts', and probably never even looked at a review proper. The vast majority doesn't even know if the CPU brings them any benefit in any of the games they play.

Main reason for this is that the product was also preceded by a 9900K that is the exact same product - if you really wanted top FPS, you'd have already gotten that one. This CPU exists for the headlines and for some extra margin for Intel off aforementioned idiot niche.

Yep, it's a pure "golden toilet" product for the modern brainless "gamers" who buy $500 RGB mobos and $2k Kingpin GPUs thinking they're getting "teh best" to help them win in Overwatch. I'd call them "PC peasants".

 

[gamefoo21]

Sooo... my 7700K at 5.2 is just as fast single threaded...

LoL

 

[altermere]

Bad news for "gaming crown".
The Gaming Performance Impact From The Intel JCC Erratum Microcode Update

 

[notb]

Bad news for "gaming crown".
The Gaming Performance Impact From The Intel JCC Erratum Microcode Update

Have you actually seen the results?

 

[efikkan]

Bad news for "gaming crown".
The Gaming Performance Impact From The Intel JCC Erratum Microcode Update

That performance impact is pretty much negligible. And in many cases the performance impact decreases as the mitigations are improved.

Every Intel and AMD CPU from the last 15 years have a long errata. The biggest difference today is that some of these get much more attention in media than before. Hopefully this increased attention results in improved testing procedures to reduce the problem during development. While some timing issues may be hard to catch, most logical errors should be possible to find.

 

[altermere]

That performance impact is pretty much negligible. And in many cases the performance impact decreases as the mitigations are improved.

Every Intel and AMD CPU from the last 15 years have a long errata. The biggest difference today is that some of these get much more attention in media than before. Hopefully this increased attention results in improved testing procedures to reduce the problem during development. While some timing issues may be hard to catch, most logical errors should be possible to find.

So, losing performance over time is the new norm for Intel? And I feel this is not the last nerf, there will be many more to come because these kind of holes are impossible to truly fix without getting rid of flawed Core arch entirely. That's the point here, it's not a routine "errata fix" that apologists try to diminish it to.

 

[notb]

So, losing performance over time is the new norm for Intel?

CPUs are fixed all the time and many of these patches take away some performance. It has happened before most gamers learned about this in 2017.
Initial fix is always rushed and rough, so it often takes away more performance than necessary. Later revisions usually reduce the impact.

This is not new and not limited to Intel CPUs.

it's not a routine "errata fix" that apologists try to diminish it to.

It is.

And there's nothing extremely wrong with current Intel architecture as well.
But it's been around for a long time and has had over 90% server share. The amount of testing it has gone through is unprecedented in this industry.

 

[Shatun_Bear]

What a terrible release, last throw of the 14nm dice to fool Johnny Casual out of a bit more money. Terrible price, shocking power consumption, all for 2% more gaming performance? Get out of here.

It's just a flagship for the DIY market. It doesn't need to go any further.
But it's the fastest CPU available for software that uses 8 cores or less - a fact you should stop ignoring all the time...

Yes, it's not very efficient or posh in your world. But it gets the job done faster than anything else.

Is this how desperate it has become for Intel - that the defence has turned into 'this is the fastest CPU with this many cores' whilst ignoring every other factor? Let's ignore terrible power draw, price, longevity, multi-threaded performance, heat output, lack of heatsink, etc etc.

No thanks.

 

[efikkan]

So, losing performance over time is the new norm for Intel? And I feel this is not the last nerf, there will be many more to come because these kind of holes are impossible to truly fix without getting rid of flawed Core arch entirely. That's the point here, it's not a routine "errata fix" that apologists try to diminish it to.

Please be serious and stop pretending this is limited to Intel.
Your post is FUD.

 

[Animalpak]

Just waiting this CPU coming to swiss seller's and i will buy it right away.

Then my good old 4790k that served me for 6 years can retire for good and see you in 5 years as a minimum for an upgrade.

 

[E-curbi]

Sooo... my 7700K at 5.2 is just as fast single threaded...

LoL

Your 7700K might be faster at 5.2Ghz single thread than a 9900KS at 5.2Ghz, both using the same Intel Ring Bus yet your quad-core has less electronic distance to travel vs an 8-core. lol

Really, that's why you see quad core CPUs using fast ddr4 scoring so well (so low in nanoseconds) with the AIDA64 memory latency bench and other ST benchmarks.

Just run some ST benchies and find out.

PassMark CPU Benchmarks - Single Thread Performance

Benchmarks of the single thread performance of CPUs. This chart comparing CPUs single thread performance is made using thousands of PerformanceTest benchmark results and is updated daily.

www.cpubenchmark.net

Cinebench 15 Download

Here you can download Cinebench 15. CINEBENCH is a real-world cross platform test suite that evaluates your computer's performance capabilities. CINEBENCH is based on MAXON's animation software CIN...

www.guru3d.com

https://www.maxon.net/en-us/support/downloads/

CPU-Z | Softwares | CPUID

CPU-Z for Windows® x86/x64 is a freeware that gathers information on some of the main devices of your system : Processor name and number, codename, process, package, cache levels. Mainboard and chipset. Memory type, size, timings, and module specifications (SPD). Real time...

www.cpuid.com

CPUZ contains a "bench" tab that runs an MT and ST benchmark.

 

[Shatun_Bear]

Just waiting this CPU coming to swiss seller's and i will buy it right away.

Then my good old 4790k that served me for 6 years can retire for good and see you in 5 years as a minimum for an upgrade.

Bad time to buy this for that kind of longevity as it'll be blown out the water in less than 2 years when Intel finally releases their 10nm desktop CPUs.

 

[E-curbi]

Bad time to buy this for that kind of longevity as it'll be blown out the water in less than 2 years when Intel finally releases their 10nm desktop CPUs.

10nm or 7nm

Or maybe 14nm and 10nm within the same series, lower TDP processors using 10nm? Who knows what Intel is planning?

Two years can be a long time to wait vs having something functional "right now" in your PC working for you. lol

 

[GoldenX]

And there's nothing extremely wrong with current Intel architecture as well.
But it's been around for a long time and has had over 90% server share. The amount of testing it has gone through is unprecedented in this industry.

We can call that the "Windows XP effect", right?

 

[altermere]

But it's been around for a long time and has had over 90% server share. The amount of testing it has gone through is unprecedented in this industry.

Sure, but companies are still getting owned from time to time. No matter how "well patched" their Intel rigs are I would still like the bank and government systems that handle my data to use EPYC though. Even in casual stuff like game servers it would drastically help reduce the maintenance downtime, admins won't have to patch new speculative execution holes that surface every month.

 

[EarthDog]

Sure, but companies are still getting owned from time to time. No matter how "well patched" their Intel rigs are I would still like the bank and government systems that handle my data to use EPYC though. Even in casual stuff like game servers it would drastically help reduce the maintenance downtime, admins won't have to patch new speculative execution holes that surface every month.

This hardly effects downtime to the end user. That is what redundancy is for. I know with AWS, the amount of headroom and redundancy they have and the ability to simply ramp up servers (I worked there, note) means nothing. If patching takes you down, then you need better redundancy, period.

 

[efikkan]

10nm or 7nm
Or maybe 14nm and 10nm within the same series, lower TDP processors using 10nm? Who knows what Intel is planning?
Two years can be a long time to wait vs having something functional "right now" in your PC working for you. lol

7nm is coming late 2021 in low volumes, so don't hold your breath.
10nm Tiger Lake is scheduled for next year, I assume very late in the year, with parts up to 95W.

The choice between buying now and waiting is always a tough one. If value/price your criteria, I suggest using a price watching service and add notifications for relevant products and buy whenever it hits your sweetspot (e.g. during a Black Friday sale etc.). And while the next generation will be the first big step from Intel in over 4 years and much bigger than Haswell->Skylake, it depends if you need or benefit from that performance improvement or not. If this is only a gaming PC then a i7-9700K is already plenty fast, just get a decent Noctua cooler and be done with it. The improvements in Sunny Cove will mostly benefit non-gaming workloads and of course energy efficiency.

But if you need performance or features that don't exists in the market yet, then play the waiting game.

 

[Flanker]

Huh, the Visual Studio test shows it completed with about 10% less time compared to 9900K just from binning and higher clocks. I guess compilation is still very much dependent on single core performance. But the AMD stuff is performing really good :S Perhaps the high thread count helps with compiling the translation units in parallel and single core performance help with linking stage.

I thinking about grabbing this or a 9900K/9900KF if I can find one priced somewhat reasonably, because I can't be bothered replacing the motherboard. But then I would need a different case and cooler anyway. Ugh, nevermind, too lazy these days.

 

[efikkan]

Huh, the Visual Studio test shows it completed with about 10% less time compared to 9900K just from binning and higher clocks. I guess compilation is still very much dependent on single core performance. But the AMD stuff is performing really good :S Perhaps the high thread count helps with compiling the translation units in parallel and single core performance help with linking stage.

I thinking about grabbing this or a 9900K/9900KF if I can find one priced somewhat reasonably, because I can't be bothered replacing the motherboard. But then I would need a different case and cooler anyway. Ugh, nevermind, too lazy these days.

It's hard to tell how representative the workload really is. But in general, typical developers will be using a decent makefile or build system that only recompiles changes, and will be doing these very frequently during development. Small builds like these will scale better on faster cores rather than higher quantities of slower cores, probably even more-so than illustrated in this benchmark. While clean rebuilds of large code bases, e.g. the entire Linux kernel, is more relevant for a build server making releases, and these may sometimes scale better towards high core count.

Workstation workloads are always a bit tricky, since they are workload specific down to the individual user. If you have a particular workload in mind, you can at least get a good idea by watching your system monitor and see if it at least scales well on your current CPU, and if it appears to be bottlenecked by single core speed.

But in general, it seems like i9-9900K(S) is the best all-round developer CPU as of right now (until Sunny Cove arrives), providing you don't use it for also something that scales incredible well on many more cores, benefit from AVX-512 or similar. I do recommend that you add some kind of price watch notification and consider grabbing one on discount. I saw one deal at 16% off the other week, I would be incredible tempted if it wasn't already gone.

 

[erixx]

Yesterday early this cpu had 1 week delivery time. At midnight it jumped to 1-3 month!!! (Amazon spain)

 

[Poul-erik]

I wonder a little bit that when you give a thumbs down, why this processor then doesn't get a thumbs down to switch from 3 year warranty to 1 year. ??.

I have seen that in several places, it is not written that there is only 1 year warranty.

The 9900k has a 3-year warranty, so upgrade a 9900k to a 9900ks and lower the warranty by 2 years.

that does not sound good.