Discussion i7-11700K preliminary results

[GunsMadeAmericaFree]

early benchmarks

more benchmarks

Just thought I would provide these so folks could draw their own conclusions. Evidently the processors have been getting sold for a few days now in Germany.

 

[zir_blazer]

The Prescott design sucked. Simple as that. Proof? Look at what Dothan achieved on the same process. Especially on desktop (f.x. using the CT479 adaptor). It's not even funny. 115W Prescott matched by a 37W mobile chip.

I never said that Prescott didn't sucked. What I said is how the tech industry justified Prescott power issues due to the high leakage of the 90nm process, then arguing about how it was going to become even worse in lower nodes (I don't recall all those issues materializing at all, it was business as usual). Dothan and Winchester showed that 90nm itself worked fine, leaving the previous high leakage statements as excuses to try to justify Prescott being horrible. Thus, what I said is that I don't really believe than a 32nm K10 has any reason to clock lower than a 45nm one, and that Llano is a bad example of that due to the compromises made to have the GPU on the same die.

 

[Hitman928]

I never said that Prescott didn't sucked. What I said is how the tech industry justified Prescott power issues due to the high leakage of the 90nm process, then arguing about how it was going to become even worse in lower nodes (I don't recall all those issues materializing at all, it was business as usual). Dothan and Winchester showed that 90nm itself worked fine, leaving the previous high leakage statements as excuses to try to justify Prescott being horrible. Thus, what I said is that I don't really believe than a 32nm K10 has any reason to clock lower than a 45nm one, and that Llano is a bad example of that due to the compromises made to have the GPU on the same die.

Leakage power was an increasing problem until we got to finfets. The 20 nm bulk nodes were pretty much ignored because the leakage at that node became too high. Moving to finfets by and large alleviated the leakage issue. Using FD-SOI also mitigates the leakage issue for planar processes (e.g. GF 22 nm FD-SOI). Obviously the P4 architecture had major issues outside of leakage, but the leakage issue was real and increased until the shift away from planar bulk processes at lower nodes.

 

[naukkis]

Far as I remember, it was the other way round. AMD apparently had trouble with the IGP being built on a CPU prioritizing process, and using SOI. But I can't remember where I read that, so I may be wrong.

Liano was build on same 32nm SOI-process as Bulldozer and Piledriver. Up to 5GHz dozers, barely above 3GHz K10.5. I have had both, A6-3670 Liano and Athlon 750K Trinity - and Trinity was nearly double as fast. Liano's L2 wasn't reason for low clocks - 45nm Athlon2-chips have same size L2 and clocked fine. Old design was just not suitable for newer process.

 

[Mopetar]

I think there was some agreement that there were issues with the 32 nm GF process. Even Bulldozer (which was pretty much Prescott 2.0) was banking on being able to achieve higher clocks.

The original Bulldozer CPUs capped out slightly above 4 GHz. Sandy Bridge could get close to 5 GHz despite not being designed to target such speeds. The 32nm Intel node was just that much better.

AMD eventually managed to beat Intel on clock speed once GF got a few of the kinks out, but the MHz wars were pretty much over by that point and AMD still couldn't get anywhere near the clock speed they would have needed to be competitive.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

I never said that Prescott didn't sucked. What I said is how the tech industry justified Prescott power issues due to the high leakage of the 90nm process, then arguing about how it was going to become even worse in lower nodes (I don't recall all those issues materializing at all, it was business as usual). Dothan and Winchester showed that 90nm itself worked fine, leaving the previous high leakage statements as excuses to try to justify Prescott being horrible.

Then I misread you. I think we're talking about the same thing after all.

Thus, what I said is that I don't really believe than a 32nm K10 has any reason to clock lower than a 45nm one, and that Llano is a bad example of that due to the compromises made to have the GPU on the same die.

Liano was build on same 32nm SOI-process as Bulldozer and Piledriver. Up to 5GHz dozers, barely above 3GHz K10.5. I have had both, A6-3670 Liano and Athlon 750K Trinity - and Trinity was nearly double as fast. Liano's L2 wasn't reason for low clocks - 45nm Athlon2-chips have same size L2 and clocked fine. Old design was just not suitable for newer process.

The 32nm K10.5 core used in Llano had double the L2 cache compared to 45nm K10 Thuban/Deneb (1024KB vs 512KB per core), and apparently it didn't scale very well past 3GHz.

BD could do 5GHz, but power consumption skyrocketed. I imagine something similar happening with K10.5, just at lower frequency if they pushed it that hard. Mind the 32nm SOI process itself was very good, my A12-6800K does 4.4GHz absolutely reliable to this day.

I do agree a 6C 32nm K10.5 Thuban successor with L3 cache would have been a decent performer for the time. Way better then 1st gen Bulldozer. Though that's a very low bar to get over. Problem was Intel hit it out of the park with Sandy, so AMD would only have been in a slightly better position then what actually happened. They'd have needed a Zen-like design eventually anyway.

 

[naukkis]

The 32nm K10.5 core used in Llano had double the L2 cache compared to 45nm K10 Thuban/Deneb (1024KB vs 512KB per core), and apparently it didn't scale very well past 3GHz.

45nm 2-core Athlon2 has also 1MB L2 per core, and clock as good as 512KB versions.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

45nm 2-core Athlon2 has also 1MB L2 per core, and clock as good as 512KB versions.

Good point. Forgot about Regor.

 

[zir_blazer]

Oh my. From AnandTech today review:

Platform Stability: Not Complete
It is worth noting that in our testing we had some issues with platform stability with our Core i9 processor. Personally, across two boards and several BIOS revisions, I would experience BSODs in high memory use cases. Gavin, our motherboard editor, was seeing lockups during game tests with his Core i9 on one motherboard, but it worked perfectly with a second. We’ve heard about issues of other press seeing lockups, with one person going through three motherboards to find stability. Conversations with an OEM showcased they had a number of instability issues running at default settings with their Core i9 processors.

The exact nature of these issues is unknown. One of my systems refused to post with 4x32 GB of memory, only with 2x32 GB of memory. Some of our peers that we’ve spoken to have had zero problems with any of their systems. For us, our Core i7 and Core i5 were absolutely fine. I have a second Core i9 processor here which is going through stability tests as this review goes live, and it seems to be working so far, which might point that it is a silicon/BIOS issue, not a memory issue.

Edit: As I was writing this, the second Core i9 crashed and restarted to desktop.

We spoke to Intel about the problem, and they acknowledged our information, stating:

We are aware of these reports and actively trying to reproduce these issues for further debugging.

Some motherboard vendors are only today putting out updated BIOSes for Intel’s new turbo technology, indicating that (as with most launches) there’s a variety of capability out there. Seeing some of the comments from other press in their reviews today, we’re sure this isn’t an isolated incident; however we do expect this issue to be solved.

There goes the only market advantage that Intel usually has, launching on Day One with platforms that are usually more mature than AMD counterparts. Top bins Rocket Lake reminds me of the Pentium 3 Coppermine 1.13 GHz.

I actually expect than Intel could end up dialing back a bit the Turbo speeds and maybe actually capping power consumption since I don't trust long term stability of a piece of silicon that when doing AVX-512 sucks 300W and thermal throttles. It is living at the edge.

 

[Makaveli]

Oh my. From AnandTech today review:



There goes the only market advantage that Intel usually has, launching on Day One with platforms that are usually more mature than AMD counterparts. Top bins Rocket Lake reminds me of the Pentium 3 Coppermine 1.13 GHz.

I actually expect than Intel could end up dialing back a bit the Turbo speeds and maybe actually capping power consumption since I don't trust long term stability of a piece of silicon that when doing AVX-512 sucks 300W and thermal throttles. It is living at the edge.

Thats was because they have been launching the same thing since 2015 just refined. Now with RL being a new Arch they don't have that luxury anymore.

 

[zir_blazer]

Thats was because they have been launching the same thing since 2015 just refined. Now with RL being a new Arch they don't have that luxury anymore.

Is not a new architecture if you consider than Ice Lake was released on Mobile almost 2 years ago. Rocket Lake would be the second or third iteration of Ice Lake depending on whenever you count it as before or after Tiger Lake, and maybe fourth if you consider the cancelled Palm Cove.

 

[Makaveli]

Is not a new architecture if you consider than Ice Lake was released on Mobile almost 2 years ago. Rocket Lake would be the second or third iteration of Ice Lake depending on whenever you count it as before or after Tiger Lake, and maybe fourth if you consider the cancelled Palm Cove.

Technically you are correct but understand what I meant in my post.

 

[moinmoin]

It's the first iteration of it on 14nm. Which makes it the first new core design on 14nm since Skylake in 2015. May well be they don't have the staff anymore for debugging 14nm designs, 10nm and 7nm sure need them all in any case. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[dullard]

For the record Mindfactory started selling and shipping 11700Ks at 480 Euros - 60 Euros above the 5800X.

So yes, while it most definitely is pricing from a month before launch, at the same time, it was very clearly the price MF were planning on selling them at some point.

Seems like as soon as the chip is actually released, Mindfactory is selling it for 409 Euros.

Intel Core i7 11700K 5,0Ghz So.1200 BOX - Sockel 1200 | Mindfactory.de

INTEL Desktop von Intel | Intel Core i7 11700K 5,0Ghz So.1200 BOX :: Lagernd :: über 330 verkauft :: 24 Jahre Kompetenz | Hier bestellen

www.mindfactory.de

That is why I said to take their initial pre-launch prices with a grain of salt.

Discussion - i7-11700K preliminary results

early benchmarks more benchmarks Just thought I would provide these so folks could draw their own conclusions. Evidently the processors have been getting sold for a few days now in Germany.

forums.anandtech.com

 

[IntelUser2000]

Tiger Lake, and maybe fourth if you consider the cancelled Palm Cove.

Palm Cove is Cannonlake so that's not related to Icelake at all. Cannonlake is barely better than Skylake. Even regresses according to AT.

 

[itsmydamnation]

Palm Cove is Cannonlake so that's not related to Icelake at all. Cannonlake is barely better than Skylake. Even regresses according to AT.

Wasn't that just POS memory, in that laptop im pretty sure it was actually about 5-7% better, which is what i like to point out everytime someone thinks skylake to icelake was an amazing uplift .

 

[zir_blazer]

Palm Cove is Cannonlake so that's not related to Icelake at all. Cannonlake is barely better than Skylake. Even regresses according to AT.

You're right. Thought that due to the Cove designation it belonged to the Ice Lake series. I always called the 10nm Cannonlake... 10nm Cannonlake.

 

[jpiniero]

Spectre Mitigation Performance Impact For Intel's Rocket Lake - Phoronix

www.phoronix.com

Phoronix did some Linux comparisons with the Smeltdown mitigations off, and the difference was like 2-3% outside of context switching and browser tests using Firefox. That's mostly in line with the hit that he got when he tested Zen 3 back in December although it was different tests.