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 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 modelling, and so on and so forth.
Chromium Compile (v56)
Our new compilation test uses Windows 10 Pro, VS Community 2015.3 with the Win10 SDK to combile 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.
PCMark8
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
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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Tuna-Fish - Tuesday, June 20, 2017 - link
Just a tiny nitpick about the cache hierarchy table:TLBs are grouped with cache levels, that is, L1TLBs are with the L1 caches and the L2 TLB is with the L2 cache, as if the level of TLB is associated with the level of cache. This is not how they work -- any request only has to have it's address translated once, when it's loaded from the L1 cache. If there is a miss when accessing the L1 TLB, the L2 TLB is accessed before the L1 cache is.
PeterCordes - Monday, July 3, 2017 - link
This common mistake bugs me too! The transistors for the TLB's 2nd level are probably not even near the L2 cache. (And the L2 cache is physically indexed / physically tagged, so it doesn't care about translations or virtual addresses at all). The multi-level TLB is a separate hierarchy from the normal caches.I also commented earlier to point out several other errors in [the uarch details](http://www.anandtech.com/comments/11550/the-intel-... e.g. mixing up the register-file sizes with the scheduler size.
yeeeeman - Tuesday, June 20, 2017 - link
What this review shows just how good of a deal AMD Ryzen CPUs are. I mean, R7 1700 is like 300$ and it keeps up in many of the tests with the big boys from Intel.Carmen00 - Tuesday, June 20, 2017 - link
Small typo on the first page, Ian: "For $60 less than the price of the Core i7-7800X...". But the comparison shows $389 vs $299, which is a $90 difference. Otherwise a fantastic, in-depth review, thank you very much!Ian Cutress - Tuesday, June 20, 2017 - link
Official MSRPs haven't changed. What distributors do with their stock is a different story.Carmen00 - Wednesday, June 21, 2017 - link
I'm talking about the MSRPs. There's a table ("Comparison: Core i7-7800X vs. Ryzen 7 1700") on Page 1 with the MSRPs as $299 and $389, a $90 difference. The text just above this table says that there's a $60 difference, but 389-299=90, not 60. So either the text is incorrect, or the MSRPs in the table are incorrect.Tephereth - Tuesday, June 20, 2017 - link
Missing temps and in-game benchmarks... u're the only one in the whole web that has an 7800x to test, so please post those :(Gothmoth - Tuesday, June 20, 2017 - link
after reading a dozend reviews i say:great now we have the choice between two buggy platforms.... well done.
i am not going to be a bios betatester for AMD or Intel.
these two release are the worst in many years i would say.
i hope AMD has threadripper ironed out.
AntDX316 - Tuesday, June 20, 2017 - link
The new processors are in totally another level/league/class. It dominates in everything and more except a couple benches.AnandTechReader2017 - Tuesday, June 20, 2017 - link
Of course they are, Ryzen is mainstream, Thread Ripper is the competitor.Thread Ripper will be quite interesting, the scaling of the "infinity fabric" will come to the fore and show if AMD's new architecture is a worthy competitor.