William Gaatjes
Lifer
- May 11, 2008
- 22,224
- 1,414
- 126
6700K is a higher clocked Quad Core, if Zen is at Broadwell E class, who's to say a Quad Core version wouldn't clock higher and make up this "gap"? Besides you are ignoring the lower clocks and bugs in the early silicon this benchmarked 20% gap you are going off of.
The problem with large core count SKUs are their shared package TDP, all those cores have to fit in the same package TDP, so clocking them all at a high base clock without having an insane TDP is very hard.
This is why Intel quad cores are kings at gaming, they have around half the cores of 8 and 10c SKUs and they have the same TDP so they clock much higher and with most games having issues utilizing more than 4 cores, it only increases this effect.
You can't compare an 8c/16t ENGINEERING sample to a Production Ready QUAD CORE 6700K. Wait for the 4c/8t Ryzen benchmarks to make any determination.
I wonder if it is possible for AMD to let an 8 core model power down 4 cores at software demand to let the 4 remaining running cores clock higher.
The cores that are powered down could then be spread in an even way to spread the dissipation hotspots over the die.
Let say the 8 cores are configured like this :
1256
3478
If cores 2,3,6,7 are powered down, there is some silicon that acts to absorb some heat :
1-5-
-4-8
I wonder if that is possible. I mean zen is hyped for all its sensors and on chip measurement, why not make practical use of it.