Speculation: AMD's response to Intel's 8-core i9-9900K

[DigDog]

If Ferrari puts out a ferrari that costs half as much as the previous ferrari and goes faster, people are gonna think "thats a great deal on a ferrari". It doesnt matter that you can own a Honda with the same specs for half that.

If you look at the 8700k versus the 2700x you still have a margin in most common uses to the 8700k, at the same price point. The 9900k is primarily bought for ePeen by people who do not need the extra cores OR the extra speed - but that extra speed is the marketing ploy that has people buying the 9900k.
If i was to go for a cpu today for a brand new build, i would probably consider the 9900k, because it does well in just about everything. (Honestly id rather have a cheaper 6/12 5ghz but intel decided not to refresh the 8700k)

We STILL have the idea that "one Intel core is vorth 1 1/2 AMD cores" due to the past 8 years of tri-core bs that we had to live through and Bulldozer is still alive in the minds of people buying components.
AMD needs to SMASH the performace of Intel to breach through the imagination of people, if they want to be taken seriously - never mind the stats.

Releasing 12- and 16- cores with a lower clock wasnt seen as a winning move outside of AT, it just makes people think that AMD have relegated themselves to the "cheaper workhorse" segment while Intel is the luxury brand.

Ferrari ... Honda.

 

[maddie]

If Ferrari puts out a ferrari that costs half as much as the previous ferrari and goes faster, people are gonna think "thats a great deal on a ferrari". It doesnt matter that you can own a Honda with the same specs for half that.

If you look at the 8700k versus the 2700x you still have a margin in most common uses to the 8700k, at the same price point. The 9900k is primarily bought for ePeen by people who do not need the extra cores OR the extra speed - but that extra speed is the marketing ploy that has people buying the 9900k.
If i was to go for a cpu today for a brand new build, i would probably consider the 9900k, because it does well in just about everything. (Honestly id rather have a cheaper 6/12 5ghz but intel decided not to refresh the 8700k)

We STILL have the idea that "one Intel core is vorth 1 1/2 AMD cores" due to the past 8 years of tri-core bs that we had to live through and Bulldozer is still alive in the minds of people buying components.
AMD needs to SMASH the performace of Intel to breach through the imagination of people, if they want to be taken seriously - never mind the stats.

Releasing 12- and 16- cores with a lower clock wasnt seen as a winning move outside of AT, it just makes people think that AMD have relegated themselves to the "cheaper workhorse" segment while Intel is the luxury brand.

Ferrari ... Honda.

An over 30-1 ratio in annual revenue between the two. I prefer the Honda model.

 

[PotatoWithEarsOnSide]

If you put both in the hands of Mrs Webster down the road, Mrs Webster couldn't tell the difference in performance. Then again, Mrs Webster's son would choose the one with the go faster stripes, insisting he can tell the difference of 0.1s quicker 0-60 (that go faster stripes generate).
Car analogies are stupid.

 

[epsilon84]

$500? Very little money? For one thing nobody is selling it for und $550. Plus it has no cooler. So in reality it is nearly $600 where you can get a 2700X for just over $289 here in the USA.

Depends what you compare it to. $500 isn't a lot if you compare it to HEDT CPUs - the closest competition being the 1920X ($430) and 2920X ($650). The 9900K has comparable MT performance to the 1920X but better ST performance, so an extra $70 is probably justified in this instance.

It is actually $500 (with a discount coupon) at Amazon and has been that price for a little while, so stock levels seem to be improving. Still, its quite a niche that would need a 9900K as I previously mentioned. Most people would probably opt for the 2700/2700X because they are much cheaper.

 

[chrisjames61]

Depends what you compare it to. $500 isn't a lot if you compare it to HEDT CPUs - the closest competition being the 1920X ($430) and 2920X ($650). The 9900K has comparable MT performance to the 1920X but better ST performance, so an extra $70 is probably justified in this instance.

It is actually $500 (with a discount coupon) at Amazon and has been that price for a little while, so stock levels seem to be improving. Still, its quite a niche that would need a 9900K as I previously mentioned. Most people would probably opt for the 2700/2700X because they are much cheaper.

If I was interested in productivity the 9900K wouldn't even be on my radar. Threadripper all the way.

 

[TheELF]

Selective reading? My use cases for 8-16 core are completely professional and work related only.
I work in the industry so know quite a lot about it. I assume you do as well? Were talking about desktop CPUs btw and the 9900k is a CPU tuned for gaming not professional workloads. Professional workloads are about multi-core performance not single threaded performance where there 9900k shines. Where do you see 5Ghz :
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/processors/xeon/scalable/platinum-processors.html
Nowhere because that's not the primary focus of professional workloads. Moar cores is because the software is written carefully and with pure scalability in mind.

- snip rant-

As I consumer I see : price/performance value and roadmaps. Intel is unequivocally dead to me via this analysis. 30% more 8 core performance for triple or quadruple the price = DEAD... I can buy a 16 core from the competitor for intel's flagship 8 core price and did w/ confidence knowing there was nothing coming from Intel.. Wont be for years. I haven't even highlighted the fundamental security flaws in their processors.

Getting 30% more work done in the same amount of time is priceless to a professional,so no you are not a professional and you can claim otherwise all you want.

Number crunching = export to GPU
Video decoding/encoding = GPU
Offline Ray tracing = Now accelerated by GPUs
Video gaming = leisure hobby of wasting time (No need to go crazy)
Zipping/unzipping files = blink of an eye even on a 4 core and rarely done

Computing is going towards HSA not CPU centricity. CPU centricity was yester year's paradigm.

Then let's all get celerons and athlonsXP and be happy, if what you say here has any truth to it then why are you trying to make ryzen sound better than it is?

GPUs are capable of accelerating anything that is straight forward dumb but exhausting computation.
As such, CPUs are generally sufficiently clocked and performant as long as you have enough cores to handle a heavily diverse range of process execution simultaneously.

Yes that is the one thing GPUs and multicore CPUs are good for.
Any arch that has the same or more number of execution units as the app needs will have pretty much the same performance.
What intel has on top of that is that they are just as good in not straight forward and branchy but IPC light computation.
That's what games are,representations of very IPC light branchy software same as 3dpm which actually shows you how badly written code ,so about 99% of software out there that is not of the straight forward dumb but exhausting computation variety will run,as you can see it's the same result as games have and it's the same result as any software any industry will run that they made themselves.
AMD is done and finished,their best try after so many years is still so far behind of intel that intel has to respin the same old design again and again to not completely kill off AMD...
Yes the only market AMD is good for is the straight forward dumb but exhausting computation market that is being flooded by arc gpus and anybody that can make chips.Intel will always have a market in the IPC light branchy software because still today nobody is close to them.

https://imgur.com/xVXKs8a

 

[epsilon84]

If I was interested in productivity the 9900K wouldn't even be on my radar. Threadripper all the way.

Maybe you missed the point of my post. I'm not saying that the 9900K is better for productivity, though it is no slouch in this department. What it offers is higher ST / gaming performance as a point of difference compared to the similarly priced TR chips. It's $500 pricepoint sits right in between the 1920X and 2920X. Sure you can get the 1950X as well if you need the cores, but the 9900K has its place amongst these chips. Keep in mind not all 'productivity' apps can scale with increased core count.

 

[PotatoWithEarsOnSide]

Lol what?
AMD is done and finished?
Someone please tell that to their accountant.
AMD is anything but done and finished. In 2019 they'll be the dominant performer in server and HEDT markets, and they'll be either extremely close or ahead on desktop. The only thing keeping them from a whitewash is OEM reluctance over laptop parts. Even that could change drastically by the start of 2020.
Meanwhile, Intel have been stuck trying to figure out how to get a square object into a round hole. Fortunately for them, they had a large enough lead for their recent incompetence to have been barely relevant.

 

[chrisjames61]

Lol what?
AMD is done and finished?
Someone please tell that to their accountant.
AMD is anything but done and finished. In 2019 they'll be the dominant performer in server and HEDT markets, and they'll be either extremely close or ahead on desktop. The only thing keeping them from a whitewash is OEM reluctance over laptop parts. Even that could change drastically by the start of 2020.
Meanwhile, Intel have been stuck trying to figure out how to get a square object into a round hole. Fortunately for them, they had a large enough lead for their recent incompetence to have been barely relevant.

I hope the guy was being sarcastic.

 

[scannall]

Maybe you missed the point of my post. I'm not saying that the 9900K is better for productivity, though it is no slouch in this department. What it offers is higher ST / gaming performance as a point of difference compared to the similarly priced TR chips. It's $500 pricepoint sits right in between the 1920X and 2920X. Sure you can get the 1950X as well if you need the cores, but the 9900K has its place amongst these chips. Keep in mind not all 'productivity' apps can scale with increased core count.

For me anyway, while the 9900K is a great gaming chip, it's pretty dead in the water for productivity. No ECC memory, and a lack of PCIe lanes are deal breakers. For productivity. For gaming? Go for it. It's pricey, and the 8700K is as good for pure gaming but if you have money to burn then why not?

 

[rainy]

I hope the guy was being sarcastic.

No, he wasn't.

I think, he should modify his nickname a bit using name of creature known from Scandinavian folklore./s

 

[IEC]

AMD doesn't need to do anything special to reply to the 9900K. They just need to get the Ryzen 3000 series out on schedule and if it at least meets their conservative estimates of IPC, frequency, and power efficiency improvements they will sell every one they can make. Being first to volume 7nm desktop CPUs is going to be huge.

Meanwhile, despite knowing 7nm is just around the corner I purchased a lot of 1000-series Threadripper hardware at fire sale prices because it's the cheapest way to add CPU power to my fleet. Bonus: There's a path for future CPU upgrades. With my multi-GPU setups for distributed computing (especially Folding@Home), I want every PCIe lane I can get, which the X399/Threadripper platform delivers in spades.

If I were building a new gaming rig on a budget today I would use a 2600/X or 2700/X and the best GPU I could afford. Or a 8700K or 9700K if I had to pick Intel for whatever reason.

If I want the absolute best gaming rig, budget is not a concern, then obviously a 9900K with OC to 5GHz+ and a GTX 2080 Ti overclocked would be the ticket. But we're talking about the 1% of the 1% at that point, because of the marginal returns for the doubling and tripling of price.

 

[Markfw]

No, he wasn't.

I think, he should modify his nickname a bit using name of creature known from Scandinavian folklore./s

I think he is not living in reality. AMD currently (in user acceptance) has the best hardware for servers out there, and is king in HEDT, and does pretty well in gaming, and is also king in mid-to-low end CPU'
s (like the 2600). All they need is what most likely is in Zen 2, to equal or beat Intel in gaming/ST performance. They pretty much have the rest wrapped up. All of this is except AVX512, which Intel is best at. But what % of software uses that ?

 

[ozzy702]

Intel is having a hard time selling their 9900K. For one thing they go in and out of stock often. The second thing is their is no doubt that the 2700 and 2700X trounce it in number of units sold. You don't think Intel has fallen behind in their manufacturing process? You don't think that this is going to hurt them going forward? Who is to say that the gap doesn't widen even more instead of narrow? You don't think they have dropped prices yet? Nor will they have to do it drastically come 7nm Ryzen? What about them having to up their core counts? This hurts their bottom line. What about all the negative public relations hits they are constantly being battered with? Right now Intel looks desperate and their only answers are vaporware.

Going out of stock means they are selling very well in relation to supply. Supply is what Intel is struggling with on the 9900k because it's an extremely high binned SKU. Intel's bottom line hasn't been hurt one iota yet, in fact they are posting record profits.

Again, outside of enthusiast circles like this nobody is looking at Intel as being up against the ropes. Yes, Intel will for one of the few times in it's history, be at a disadvantage when it comes to process and design in 2019. Yes the delays with 10nm will potentially hurt them in 2019/2020 but we'll see how that plays out. So far I haven't seen any price drops from Intel, the opposite actually.

When you talk of vaporware, are you discussing CPUs like the 9900k that Zen2 may not even match performance in a year after the 9900k was released? Just curious here, it's hard to understand all of your emotional ranting.

I hope AMD does release top tier CPUs and GPUs that I can feel good about purchasing for myself. I'd love to not have to make compromises and pickup moar cores, the best available single core performance, high clocks, tons of cache and all at a reasonable price. I'd love to have high end GPU options from AMD like the 7970, praise be it's name, but I have a feeling I'll have to wait until 2020-2021 to see these developments materialize.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Releasing 12- and 16- cores with a lower clock wasnt seen as a winning move outside of AT, it just makes people think that AMD have relegated themselves to the "cheaper workhorse" segment while Intel is the luxury brand.

What are you going on about?

Threadripper was huge, even outside of this forum. It shook Intel's entire HEDT lineup to its core after AMD already caused problems by releasing 8c/16t chips on a desktop socket in March 2017. Following up with the 2990WX just made things less comfortable for Intel (and provoked the chilled water 28c demo at 5 GHz). Once Threadripper makes the leap to 7nm, it's going to get real. 64c Threadripper anyone?

So how does anyone see the 2990WX and conclude that AMD is in the "cheaper workhorse" segment? There is nothing cheap about that!

 

[DigDog]

Because they are commercial products and as such they are bought in larger volume by consumers rather than professionals or enthusiasts. It's easier for marketing to promote a 5ghz part .. lol it's easier to promote a 5ghz instead than a 4.9ghz that outperforms it, you dont need me to explain this. People are dumb, the internet is full of bad information, and people who buy a 8400 think that the performance crown "trickles down" from a 9900k to their 8400.
Now, Intel knows that threadripper is a threat (specially to their "enthusiast" platform, the 2011, 2066, 3647) but the kid that buys his parts from Scan.co.uk doesn't - since he only reads the reviews on toms or yahoo answers. Maybe just youtube.
Gaming is THE market for pc parts, at least when it comes to selling at retail; supplying to the prebuilt industry (or to datacenters) is a different thing that also takes into consideraton non-performance factors. I do not know of a time since 2006 when AMD had the recommended-for-gaming cpu, and we should not confuse "finally a AMD cpu that doesnt suck" for praise.
Im not desputing that ryzen as a whole and TR specifically are good, but with releasing a 12 core, 3.5ghz cpu AMD has signalled that rather than trying to fight Intel for the gaming crown, they were INSTEAD trying to sell ON PRICE to those who Intel can't sell to - the home professional who can't afford Xeon prices; i can't think of a more blatant "we admit defeat" than that.

 

[Kenmitch]

Tbh i think that $500 for a 9900 is very little money. That's the kind of cpu that a few years ago was on the enthusiast platform, and if you look at the 3ghz 6990k it costs twice the money of the 9900. We simply never thought a consumer grade cpu would come with 8c/16t.

I hope you at least realize that in the long run this isn't a good thing for Intel. Being forced to sell more for less will hurt their bottom line. It might not have much effect in the short term, but the long run will be a whole different ballgame.

 

[moinmoin]

Because they are commercial products and as such they are bought in larger volume by consumers rather than professionals or enthusiasts. It's easier for marketing to promote a 5ghz part .. lol it's easier to promote a 5ghz instead than a 4.9ghz that outperforms it, you dont need me to explain this. People are dumb, the internet is full of bad information, and people who buy a 8400 think that the performance crown "trickles down" from a 9900k to their 8400.
Now, Intel knows that threadripper is a threat (specially to their "enthusiast" platform, the 2011, 2066, 3647) but the kid that buys his parts from Scan.co.uk doesn't - since he only reads the reviews on toms or yahoo answers. Maybe just youtube.
Gaming is THE market for pc parts, at least when it comes to selling at retail; supplying to the prebuilt industry (or to datacenters) is a different thing that also takes into consideraton non-performance factors. I do not know of a time since 2006 when AMD had the recommended-for-gaming cpu, and we should not confuse "finally a AMD cpu that doesnt suck" for praise.
Im not desputing that ryzen as a whole and TR specifically are good, but with releasing a 12 core, 3.5ghz cpu AMD has signalled that rather than trying to fight Intel for the gaming crown, they were INSTEAD trying to sell ON PRICE to those who Intel can't sell to - the home professional who can't afford Xeon prices; i can't think of a more blatant "we admit defeat" than that.

That's some cute reverse psychology you are applying there. People were asking for competition. AMD finally delivered that with their first take on Zen by turning up the core count (an area Intel did nothing about for near 10 years) that restricted Intel's remaining advantage in consumer space to ST and gaming. Turning that into i can't think of a more blatant "we admit defeat" than that is laughable.

 

[Topweasel]

I hope you at least realize that in the long run this isn't a good thing for Intel. Being forced to sell more for less will hurt their bottom line. It might not have much effect in the short term, but the long run will be a whole different ballgame.

As far as investors are concerned Cascade Lake is going to bankrupt them, they aren't going to be selling those 48c chips for 20k. They have wiggle room to massage prices up. But even on the enterprise where money is no object there is a point where performance deficits overcome price differences. If AMD sticks to 4k maybe even 6k for top Epyc chips with Zen 2. The extra 33% more cores, higher clock speeds, and price will make Epyc a very compelling option even if persocket performance is lower overall, if Intel tries to make up for the fact that they have to double up on Dies. So in the end Intel can up it 12k maybe 14k. But that is still selling a CPU with double the production costs, double the yield cost (meaning more wafers to sell the same amount of CPU's), and at most only a 40% increase in prices. But this goes farther. The 9900k isn't priced at $500 because it's so much bigger that Intel has to price it like that. It's to make up for lost margins elsewhere. It's a larger CPU on a production strapped process that is basically going to cut it's enterprise production in half next year.

Intel can ride this out but it's pretty devastating for a company that could rarely do wrong by money men standards. It hasn't even happened yet and already a CEO lost their job over it.

 

[DigDog]

AMD finally delivered that with their first take on Zen by turning up the core count (an area Intel did nothing about for near 10 years) that restricted Intel's remaining advantage in consumer space to ST and gaming.

Uh .. what ?? WHAT ? Intel didnt do anything for core count??

Ok. Ok.
1. C2D +C2Q
2. for YEARS there was no core scalability outside of very few professional applications, with the market developing these *because* of the C2D. Before that nobody coded for multicore because nobody owned one; if you had a Pentium D or Athlon X2, your second core was busy tunning winamp.
AMD came out with a 3-core ht and tried to sell it as a 6-core, let's not forget that.
3. Sure TR is cool but realistically 4 cores is still ideal for ST if you are a typical consumer, and ht takes care of your occasional video render.

When Intel is selling a 6/12 4.7ghz for $400 ON A MAINSTREAM PLATFORM i dont think they are denying the gaming market those extra cores they so much need ... have you forgotten what HEAT means?
If you are a photoshop professional, go buy a Xeon.

You need to accept that the people who "demand" from AMD just want their Skyrim to run at 60 frames - they are not industry suppliers or render farm owners. Those who are do not care about the stats of the cpus they buy.

I worked for IBM. I read the internal info and the paperwork on their Blade servers. You know who makes the best servers? Sun does. And who sells the most servers? IBM does.

WAIT YOU TELLIN ME AN INFERIOR PRODUCT SELLS MORE ??

For that market it's not the quality of the cpu that matter but the support that can be attached to that product; this *is* changing now that IT people can actually do IT, but for the easily-swayed consumer public, what matters is being N1 in what is most publicized: ST clockspeeds and "perfect" corecount.

It doesnt matter that the 9900k is a pre-overclocked ripoff, because it hits all the marketing requirements to be considered the BEST.CPU.EVER.

 

[DigDog]

I hope you at least realize that in the long run this isn't a good thing for Intel. Being forced to sell more for less will hurt their bottom line. It might not have much effect in the short term, but the long run will be a whole different ballgame.

I .. dont care? I am in no way pro-Intel. They are an old, slow, bulky company that wants to play it safe and often rumored to sit on new tech. I hope AMD manages to hit every ryzen 3 target so Intel are forced back to valuing innovation more than their ++++++ node refresh.

I hope i made it clear with the post above that i think the 9900k is a well-marketed cpu; 8/16 to appeal to anyone who fancies himself a "content creator", but without the clockspeed hit that comes with REAL cpus for professionals. Because of these factors, it is the ideal G4m3rz cpu. And, you know, *i* fall into that group. I occasionally render a video, but im more interested in the clockspeed, and dont really care for more than, say, 8 threads, but given how marketing-impressive the 9900k is, down to the cool 99 name, id rather buy that for $500 than a 8700k for $400 because i know i can resell the 9900k for more.

People's stupidity is something that affects us all .. just ask Trump.

 

[chrisjames61]

AMD came out with a 3-core ht and tried to sell it as a 6-core, let's not forget that.

What was that? AMD never had cpu's with Hyper Threading that I can recollect. I hope you aren't bring up the old discredited ditty that the AMD cpu's with the modules such as the 8350, 6300 were actually only three and four core cpu's.

 

[DigDog]

What was that? AMD never had cpu's with Hyper Threading that I can recollect. I hope you aren't bring up the old discredited ditty that the AMD cpu's with the modules such as the 8350, 6300 were actually only three and four core cpu's.

Yup.

 

[Markfw]

Yup.

No, they did not have HT, they really had that many cores. A pair of cores did share something though ,like cache or something, help me out guys,

Edit: I found some reference that each "module" have 2 cores with independent integer cores , but they share the floating point processor

 

[tamz_msc]

Yes that is the one thing GPUs and multicore CPUs are good for.
Any arch that has the same or more number of execution units as the app needs will have pretty much the same performance.
What intel has on top of that is that they are just as good in not straight forward and branchy but IPC light computation.
That's what games are,representations of very IPC light branchy software same as 3dpm which actually shows you how badly written code ,so about 99% of software out there that is not of the straight forward dumb but exhausting computation variety will run,as you can see it's the same result as games have and it's the same result as any software any industry will run that they made themselves.
AMD is done and finished,their best try after so many years is still so far behind of intel that intel has to respin the same old design again and again to not completely kill off AMD...
Yes the only market AMD is good for is the straight forward dumb but exhausting computation market that is being flooded by arc gpus and anybody that can make chips.Intel will always have a market in the IPC light branchy software because still today nobody is close to them.

Haha what rubbish. Equating branchy code with slowdowns due to false sharing and claiming that Intel wins? Are you so absolutely sure of yourself that you're certain that there doesn't exist pathological scenarios where Intel is so far behind AMD that Skylake looks like Bulldozer in comparison with Zen?

https://imgur.com/VC48HEm