The Intel Skylake-X Review: Core i9 7900X, i7 7820X and i7 7800X Tested
by Ian Cutress on June 19, 2017 9:01 AM ESTBenchmarking Performance: CPU Rendering Tests
Rendering tests are a long-time favorite of reviewers and benchmarkers, as the code used by rendering packages is usually highly optimized to squeeze every little bit of performance out. Sometimes rendering programs end up being heavily memory dependent as well - when you have that many threads flying about with a ton of data, having low latency memory can be key to everything. Here we take a few of the usual rendering packages under Windows 10, as well as a few new interesting benchmarks.
Corona 1.3
Corona is a standalone package designed to assist software like 3ds Max and Maya with photorealism via ray tracing. It's simple - shoot rays, get pixels. OK, it's more complicated than that, but the benchmark renders a fixed scene six times and offers results in terms of time and rays per second. The official benchmark tables list user submitted results in terms of time, however I feel rays per second is a better metric (in general, scores where higher is better seem to be easier to explain anyway). Corona likes to pile on the threads, so the results end up being very staggered based on thread count.
Blender 2.78
For a render that has been around for what seems like ages, Blender is still a highly popular tool. We managed to wrap up a standard workload into the February 5 nightly build of Blender and measure the time it takes to render the first frame of the scene. Being one of the bigger open source tools out there, it means both AMD and Intel work actively to help improve the codebase, for better or for worse on their own/each other's microarchitecture.
LuxMark
As a synthetic, LuxMark might come across as somewhat arbitrary as a renderer, given that it's mainly used to test GPUs, but it does offer both an OpenCL and a standard C++ mode. In this instance, aside from seeing the comparison in each coding mode for cores and IPC, we also get to see the difference in performance moving from a C++ based code-stack to an OpenCL one with a CPU as the main host.
POV-Ray 3.7b3
Another regular benchmark in most suites, POV-Ray is another ray-tracer but has been around for many years. It just so happens that during the run up to AMD's Ryzen launch, the code base started to get active again with developers making changes to the code and pushing out updates. Our version and benchmarking started just before that was happening, but given time we will see where the POV-Ray code ends up and adjust in due course.
Cinebench R15
The latest version of CineBench has also become one of those 'used everywhere' benchmarks, particularly as an indicator of single thread performance. High IPC and high frequency gives performance in ST, whereas having good scaling and many cores is where the MT test wins out.
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FreckledTrout - Monday, June 19, 2017 - link
Missing the 7820x on the power draw graph.Ian Cutress - Tuesday, June 20, 2017 - link
The 7820X power numbers didn't look right when we tested it. I'm now on the road for two weeks, so we'll update the numbers when I get back.chrysrobyn - Monday, June 19, 2017 - link
In my head I'm still doing the math on every benchmark and dividing by watts and seeing Zen looking very different.Old_Fogie_Late_Bloomer - Monday, June 19, 2017 - link
I'm sure I'm wrong about this, but it makes more sense to me that the i9-7900X would be a (significantly) cut down HCC die instead of a perfect LCC. i9 vs i7, 44 vs 28 lanes, two AVX units instead of one?And yet the one source I've found so far says it's the smaller die. It's definitely the LCC die, then?
Ian Cutress - Tuesday, June 20, 2017 - link
HCC isn't ready, basically. LCC is. Plus, having a 10C LCC die and not posting a top SKU would be wasteful of the smallest die of the set.Also, delidding a 10C SKU.
Old_Fogie_Late_Bloomer - Tuesday, June 20, 2017 - link
Well, it wouldn't be a waste if Intel's yields weren't good enough to get fully functional dies. The fact that Intel is not just releasing fully functional LCC chips but announced that they would be the first ones available suggests that they have no trouble reliably producing them, which is pretty impressive (though they have had plenty of practice on this process by now).Thanks for the response; I thoroughly enjoyed the review and look forward to further coverage. Exciting times!
Despoiler - Monday, June 19, 2017 - link
Considering Ryzen is in the desktop category and these Intel chips are HEDT, we need to wait to see what Threadripper brings. AMD won't have the clock advantage, but for multithreaded workloads I suspect they will have more cores at a cheaper price than Intel.FreckledTrout - Monday, June 19, 2017 - link
I wouldn't say AMD wont have a clock advantage once you get to the 14 and 16 core chips. They might not but you saw the power numbers and thermals, Intel very well may have to pull back the frequency as they scale up the cores more than AMD will.FMinus - Thursday, June 22, 2017 - link
Actually I think it's the other way around. AMD might have clock advantage on higher core models thanks to not going with the monolithic approach. Easier to to cool those beasts but power is still an issue.If you imagine four 1800x on one interposer, you can see them reaching 4GHz on all of those dies, that said the power consumption would be massive, but easier cooler as the intel 16 core variant.
Lolimaster - Tuesday, June 20, 2017 - link
The 1995X will have a stock 3.6Ghz for the 16cores, same as the 7900X with just 10.