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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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.