The Intel Kaby Lake-X i7 7740X and i5 7640X Review: The New Single-Threaded Champion, OC to 5GHz
by Ian Cutress on July 24, 2017 8:30 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Kaby Lake
- X299
- Basin Falls
- Kaby Lake-X
- i7-7740X
- i5-7640X
Benchmarking Performance: CPU Office Tests
The office programs we use for benchmarking aren't specific programs per-se, but industry standard tests that hold weight with professionals. The goal of these tests is to use an array of software and techniques that a typical office user might encounter, such as video conferencing, document editing, architectural modeling, and so on and so forth.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
Chromium Compile (v56)
Our new compilation test uses Windows 10 Pro, VS Community 2015.3 with the Win10 SDK to compile a nightly build of Chromium. We've fixed the test for a build in late March 2017, and we run a fresh full compile in our test. Compilation is the typical example given of a variable threaded workload - some of the compile and linking is linear, whereas other parts are multithreaded.
Our Chrome Compile test is a mix of load, but also loves L3 cache. We've seen before that the L3 victim cache on AMD can be a defecit here, but even then the Core i5 cannot overcome the 3:1 thread deficit to the Ryzen 5 CPUs. The Core i7-7740X hits the nail on the head for threads and single thread performance, although users that play in this space would look straight to the Core i7-7800X, and likely decide that +16.5% better performance is worth the +18.2% extra cost.
PCMark8: link
Despite originally coming out in 2008/2009, Futuremark has maintained PCMark8 to remain relevant in 2017. On the scale of complicated tasks, PCMark focuses more on the low-to-mid range of professional workloads, making it a good indicator for what people consider 'office' work. We run the benchmark from the commandline in 'conventional' mode, meaning C++ over OpenCL, to remove the graphics card from the equation and focus purely on the CPU. PCMark8 offers Home, Work and Creative workloads, with some software tests shared and others unique to each benchmark set.
SYSmark 2014 SE: link
SYSmark is developed by Bapco, a consortium of industry CPU companies. The goal of SYSmark is to take stripped down versions of popular software, such as Photoshop and Onenote, and measure how long it takes to process certain tasks within that software. The end result is a score for each of the three segments (Office, Media, Data) as well as an overall score. Here a reference system (Core i3-6100, 4GB DDR3, 256GB SSD, Integrated HD 530 graphics) is used to provide a baseline score of 1000 in each test.
A note on context for these numbers. AMD left Bapco in the last two years, due to differences of opinion on how the benchmarking suites were chosen and AMD believed the tests are angled towards Intel processors and had optimizations to show bigger differences than what AMD felt was present. The following benchmarks are provided as data, but the conflict of opinion between the two companies on the validity of the benchmark is provided as context for the following numbers.
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Spoelie - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
On the first page, I assume the green highlight in the processor charts signifies an advantage for that side. Why are the cores/threads rows in the Ryzen side not highlighted? Or is 8/16 not better than 4/8?Ian Cutress - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
Derp. Fixed.Gothmoth - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
intel must really push money into anandtech. :) so many interesting things to report about and they spend time on a niche product.....Ian Cutress - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
This has been in the works for a while because our CPU failed. I work on the CPU stuff - other editors work on other things ;) If you've got an idea, reach out to us. I can never guarantee anything (I've got 10+ ideas that I don't have time to do) but if it's interesting we'll see what we can do. Plus it helps us direct what other content we should be doing.halcyon - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
This is an amazing amount of benchmarking with many options. thank you. Must have been a lot of work :-)The obvious idea is this:
Gaming (modern CPU limited and most played games) & Productive work (rendering, encoding, 4K video work, R/statistics/Matlab)
Test those under 4c/8t and 8c/16t CPUs both from AMD and Intel - all at most common non-esoteric overlock levels (+/-10%).
This is what many of your readers want:
How much does c. 5Ghz 4c/8t do vs 4.x Ghz 8c/16t when taken to it's everyday stable extreme, in modern games / productivity.
The web is already full of benchmarks at stock speed. Or overclocked Ryzen R 7 against stock Intel, or OC intel against overclocked Ryzen - and the game/app selections are not very varied.
The result is a simple graph that plots the (assumed) linear trend in performance/price and shows any deviations below/above the linear trend.
Of course, if you already have the Coffee lake 6c/12t sample, just skip the 4c/8t and go with 6c/12t vs 8c/16 comparision.
Thanks for all the hard work throughout all these years!
Ryan Smith - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
"so many interesting things to report about and they spend time on a niche product....."What can we say? CPUs have been our favorite subject for the last 20 years.=)
user_5447 - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
"For 2017, Intel is steering the ship in a slightly different direction, and launching the latest microarchitecture on the HEDT platform."Skylake-S, Kaby Lake-S and Kaby Lake-X share the same microarchitecture, right?
Then Skylake-X is newer microarchitecture than Kaby Lake-X (changes to L2 and L3 caches, AVX-512).
Ian Cutress - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
Correct me if I'm wrong: SKL-SP cores are derived from SKL-S, and 14nm. KBL-S/X are 14+, and shares most of its design with SKL-S, and the main changes are power related. Underneath there's no real performance (except Speed Shift v2), but Intel classifies Kaby Lake as its latest non-AVX512 IPC microarchitecture.user_5447 - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
Kaby Lake-S has some errata fixes compared to Skylake-S. AFAIK, this is the only change to the CPU core (besides the Speed Shift v2, if it even involved hardware changes).David Kanter says Skylake-X/EP is 14+ nm http://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=16889...
extide - Wednesday, July 26, 2017 - link
I have a buddy who works in the fabs -- SKL-X is still on plain 14nm