Discussion i7-11700K preliminary results

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John Carmack

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Sep 10, 2016
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Yea that's what I was seeing when I started reading the asus z590 manuals. So this must be a z590 specific design not an asus design choice?

I only have 1 nvme drive right now and plan on using it along with 3-4 other ssd's.

Z590 isn't a full PCIe 4.0 system so they have to pick and choose what gets the limited lanes.
 

JoeRambo

Golden Member
Jun 13, 2013
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320$ for 10850K is damn great deal, 20MB of L3 and 10C, 5Ghz all core easy OC is performance and value that is hard to beat*

What i hope is that once Alder Lake shows up, 11XXXKs would get same awesome deals. During this generation event those 11XXXF are getting great boosts due to memory tuning finally being available.

Good times to save money.
 

JoeRambo

Golden Member
Jun 13, 2013
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The chipset lanes are still 3.0.

I wonder if the following setup will be possible:

4.0 8x for video card

4.0 8x for dual M.2 PCIE card ( BIOS needs to allow bifurcation tho )

4.0 M.2 slot on mobo

And with 8x 3.0 width DMI, south bridge can surely handle SATA, sound, USB 3.2 biturbo 20, Wifi 6E and 2.5Gbit LAN ?

GPU could suffer several percent loss maybe, but this storage setup with 3x PCIE4 drives and bunch of SATA's would make beastly storage machine.
 

SAAA

Senior member
May 14, 2014
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I was going to get either a 11900k or a 11700k. With the price they are listing Im having a hard time finding a reason to get a Rocket Lake cpu over the 10850k @ Microcenter. Especially just for gaming and as a back up pc.
Honestly it's an upgrade over the 10850k mostly on the architecture and platform side. 10% faster here, 10% slower there don't matter much in the end, having PCIe4 or not on the other hand is a big deal, as is maybe the gen12 iGPU and features if you browse etc.
For generational gains it's the first time in 5 years you see anything new from Intel other than more cores (that's funny!) while AMD keeps dishing new toys.

If all you have to do is gaming on a secondary rig maybe a 5600X will be just as good as a 10850k or 11th gen, while I think we'll have something truly game changing on both sides with Meteor Lake (or Raptor jeez those names) and Zen 4.
 

LightningZ71

Golden Member
Mar 10, 2017
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PCIe 4.0 on a consumer platform really makes sense in two situations:

1) you have a workflow that really hits your storage system's sustained throughput very hard, to the point that you can realize a material benefit from sustaining a transfer rate that is much higher than PCIe 3.0 NVME drives can manage. There are precious few processors out there that can keep up with any sort of intense data processing at that throughput rate. And, even if it can, where's it going to put that data? Even with a max 128GB of RAM to act as an output buffer, you'd fill that in seconds. If you target a second NVME PCIe drive across the chipset, you have to deal with the congestion on the data link to the chipset. This is where you can see PCIe4 and the wider dmi link come in to play, but, there are still issues to deal with on consumer platforms.

2) you are playing a lot of games that were targeted at the Xbox X or PS5 and expect to have massive amounts of read bandwidth from the storage device or that are DirectX12 direct storage aware and can stream directly from the data system to the VRAM on the gpu. One consumer PCIe4 drive won't really match the console data throughput due to the compression factors, but, the often larger amount of RAM at play can likely offset that.

I'm still a firm believer that the answer for desktop producer platforms is to rethink how all this works. Instead of having just a 4 or 8 lane link to the chipset, use a 16 lane PCIe 4.0 connection. Hang the video card off of the chipset, as well as a bunch of x8 PCIe 4 slots. Leave the CPU with a pair of x4 PCIe4 connections to M.2 slots. We know very well that even the highest end video cards don't gain much if anything from PCIe 4 over 3 on x16 slots, so there would be plenty of left over bandwidth on the dmi link for other traffic.
 

moonbogg

Lifer
Jan 8, 2011
10,635
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320$ for 10850K is damn great deal, 20MB of L3 and 10C, 5Ghz all core easy OC is performance and value that is hard to beat*

What i hope is that once Alder Lake shows up, 11XXXKs would get same awesome deals. During this generation event those 11XXXF are getting great boosts due to memory tuning finally being available.

Good times to save money.

That is a crazy deal right there. I would go for that in a second.
 

coercitiv

Diamond Member
Jan 24, 2014
6,150
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People keep getting excited about Comet Lake deals while forgetting they're still buying an architecture from 2015. We don't call it grandpa' Skylake for nothing.

Alder Lake alone will ofer 40% more ST performance over Comet Lake. If you need a new system right now then discounted Skylake is a good deal, but don't expect it to age gracefully.
 

LightningZ71

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Mar 10, 2017
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I get that it's a six year old architecture, but, pray tell, what are we all expecting to change in the next three years that will suddenly obsolete it? Unless the computer industry suddenly dives into the deep end with the fragmented mess that is AVX-512, there's nothing that rocket lake can do that comet lake can't. Yes, there's a bit more single thread performance, but it's usually trivial for 99% of use cases. The MT performance is essentially a wash, save for things that are modestly threaded at eight threads or less. PCIe 4, as implemented on the rocket lake platform, doesn't make a massive amount of difference. Rocket lake doesn't bring ECC to the masses. It's no massive increase in PCIe lanes.

It's essentially just a bit faster in single thread, has a subset of AVX-512, and talks to the chipset a bit faster. That's not a sea change in capability. This isn't the change from Ivy Bridge through Haswell to Skylake that saw massive platform and instruction set changes. If you were arguing that people should wait for Alderlake for DDR5 and more platform advancements, I could buy that, but Rocket Lake just doesn't move the needle.
 

blckgrffn

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May 1, 2003
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www.teamjuchems.com
I think that was the point - but I feel like this is akin to scoring a great deal on those second Gen Core 2 Quads and then waiting for Sandybridge or Ivy Bridge. I was bummed to see that MC stopped carrying 9th Gen CPUs locally, I was really tempted to replace my sons 8500 i5 with a 9700k i7 but I guess he will somehow have to survive ;)

DDR5 is likely going to be expensive and picky at launch, so saying you are targeting Alder Lake or the next Zen CPU in late 2022 for maximum stability, value and compatibility makes buying a decent i9 right now not a crazy move.

I mean, availability on real next generation Intel and AMD desktop SKUs will likely be miserable for months after launch too. I don’t think there is much hope as all possible wafers will be dedicated to scalable server parts and desktop will be an afterthought after Mobile CPUs even.
 

Mopetar

Diamond Member
Jan 31, 2011
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People keep getting excited about Comet Lake deals while forgetting they're still buying an architecture from 2015. We don't call it grandpa' Skylake for nothing.

Does it really matter if the performance is good for the money? I think people forget that it was only recently that AMD achieved parity with and then ultimately surpassed that performance.

I think that in most cases a 5600X would be a better value, particularly with respect to the future, but those aren't always readily available and some people may want additional cores without having to pay an additional 50% for just two more.
 
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Kocicak

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Jan 17, 2019
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Does it really matter if the performance is good for the money?

The performance may be good for the money NOW. But a lot of people keep the same computer for years. After e.g. three years, they will run 8 years old technology. That is a prehistory in the computer world. If they waited for Alder lake, their computer will not be a historical artifact after 3 years.
 

Insert_Nickname

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May 6, 2012
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But a lot of people keep the same computer for years. After e.g. three years, they will run 8 years old technology. That is a prehistory in the computer world. If they waited for Alder lake, their computer will not be a historical artifact after 3 years.

This may surprise, but there are still people who use Pentium4s out there. Or C2D/Qs. I found a Pentium3(!) still in use last year.

Now, those are ancient history. SKL is practically state-of-the-art in comparison.
 

gdansk

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Feb 8, 2011
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I am impressed by Intel's ability to keep it relevant this long. I doubt any other company could do that. But then again other companies wouldn't be in this situation because they're fabless.

It may look pretty good compared to Rocket Lake but I think 2021 Skylake+++ purchases will age poorly. It wasn't meant to be a 2021 product. It does very poorly in web benchmarks compared to e.g. the M1. An increasing number of people basically only use web apps (especially via Electron). It is actually noticeable how much faster my M1 MBA is than my previous MBP16. And Skylake is only going to look worse from here on.
 
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coercitiv

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Jan 24, 2014
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I get that it's a six year old architecture, but, pray tell, what are we all expecting to change in the next three years that will suddenly obsolete it?
In the next three years Skylake ST performace will be equivalent to current Atom performance when compared to modern architectures. In just ~1 year from now we're expecting both x86 companies to have products that surpass Comet Lake by 40% in performance. In three years from now we can reasonably expect 50-60% performance delta between SKL and modern architectures.

We know modern consoles are currently implementing aggressive asset streaming from SSD to cut down on loading times. Sony is expecting to get ~8GB/s when compression gets factored in. Guess how we're gonna get this on PC when games will be built with these capabilities in mind... good old brute force. AFAIK Comet Lake does 3GB/s. Will 5-6GB/s available from current PCIe 4 SSDs make a difference? I guess we'll find out.
 

LightningZ71

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Mar 10, 2017
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If we are talking gaming, then, the vast majority of gaming development is going to be targeted at the most numerous available gaming platforms: the Xbox sX and the PS5. Both of those have Zen2 cores and a combined pool of 16GB ram. Comet lake gets there, rocket lake gets there, as well as all the Zen2 and 3 products. Gaming won't be a factor for another 4 years with respect to vote performance.

If we are referring to load times and the new consoles, then there's certainly a point to be made there, save for two factors: Comet Lake can support much more RAM than either console, and we know that caching is a thing. If you need more storage performance, it's possible to put an M.2 card in the second x16 slot in most decent motherboards and build a RAID array that can hit similar throughput numbers. It does get excessive, I admit, but it is possible.

In the end, it has ALWAYS been the case that single thread performance tends to improve each year. However, MT performance is still more tied to the number of cores and threads a socket can host, and the available thermal and power limits. A prime example is my current homeland server. I have a pair of Xeon V4 10 core processors with a bunch of ram. It's still got about the same throughput in most tasks as any of the 16 core thread rippers. If I wanted, I could replace them with a pair of 14 core models and keep up with the 24 core ones and not be too far behind the 32 core ones.

10 core comet lake won't be a major hamstring for many years.
 
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coercitiv

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Jan 24, 2014
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For instance, I don't care at all about CS:GO 360P performance. ;)
We may not even need to go bellow 1080p if Nvidia keeps their hardware & driver model for their 4000 series.

Again, I'm not trying to rain on anyone's parade here, these discounted CPUs are a fine purchase as long as they come with proper expectations. There is obviously a price where even I would bite the bullet and get an unlocked 10 core Skylake, but I wouldn't do so hoping to get relevant flagship performance 2 years from now.
 
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