The Intel Core i9-7980XE and Core i9-7960X CPU Review Part 1: Workstation
by Ian Cutress on September 25, 2017 3:01 AM ESTBenchmarking Performance: CPU Legacy Tests
Our legacy tests represent benchmarks that were once at the height of their time. Some of these are industry standard synthetics, and we have data going back over 10 years. All of the data here has been rerun on Windows 10, and we plan to go back several generations of components to see how performance has evolved.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
3D Particle Movement v1
3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz and IPC wins in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores. This is the original version, written in the style of a typical non-computer science student coding up an algorithm for their theoretical problem, and comes without any non-obvious optimizations not already performed by the compiler, such as false sharing.
CineBench 11.5 and 10
Cinebench is a widely known benchmarking tool for measuring performance relative to MAXON's animation software Cinema 4D. Cinebench has been optimized over a decade and focuses on purely CPU horsepower, meaning if there is a discrepancy in pure throughput characteristics, Cinebench is likely to show that discrepancy. Arguably other software doesn't make use of all the tools available, so the real world relevance might purely be academic, but given our large database of data for Cinebench it seems difficult to ignore a small five minute test. We run the modern version 15 in this test, as well as the older 11.5 and 10 due to our back data.
x264 HD 3.0
Similarly, the x264 HD 3.0 package we use here is also kept for historic regressional data. The latest version is 5.0.1, and encodes a 1080p video clip into a high quality x264 file. Version 3.0 only performs the same test on a 720p file, and in most circumstances the software performance hits its limit on high end processors, but still works well for mainstream and low-end. Also, this version only takes a few minutes, whereas the latest can take over 90 minutes to run.
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CrazyHawk - Tuesday, September 26, 2017 - link
"Intel also launched Xeon-W processors in the last couple of weeks."Just where can one purchase these mythical Xeon-W processors? There hasn't been a single peep about them since the "launch" week. I've only heard of two motherboards that will support them. They seem to be total vaporware. On Intel's own site, it says they were "Launched" in 3Q2017. Intel had better hurry up, 3Q will be up in 4 days!
samer1970 - Tuesday, September 26, 2017 - link
I dont understand why intel disables ECC on their i9 CPU , they are losing low budget workstation buyers who will 100% choose AMD threadripper over intel i9..Even if they are doing this to protect their xeons chips ,they can enable non buffered ECC and not allow Registered ECC on the i9 problem solved. unbuffered ECC has Size limitation and people who want more RAM will go for xeons.
Remember that their i3 has ECC support , but only the i3 ...
intel , you are stupid.
vladx - Wednesday, September 27, 2017 - link
Newsflash, these chips don't target "low budget workstation buyers". Golden rule is always: "If you can't afford it, you're not the target customer.".samer1970 - Wednesday, September 27, 2017 - link
Thats not a Golden Rule anymore with the Threadripper chips around . it is called "Stupid rule" ...They are allowing AMD to steal the low budget workstation buyers by not offering them an alternative to choose from.
vladx - Wednesday, September 27, 2017 - link
The "low budget workstation buyers" as you call them are a really insignificant percentage of an already really small piece of the huge pie of Intel customers.samer1970 - Wednesday, September 27, 2017 - link
who told you so ? Most engineering students at universities need one , and Art Students who render alot as well. all these people will buy threadripper CPU and avoid intel , for intel xeon are 50% more expensive .andI dont cae about the percentage in intel Pie ... hundreds of thousands student enter uiviersites around the world each year . Low percentage or not they are alot ...
how much do you think a low budget workstation costs ? they start from $3000 ... and with xeon Pricing , it will be very difficult to add alot of RAM and a good workstation card and fast SSD .
esi - Wednesday, September 27, 2017 - link
What's the explanation for some of the low scores of the 7980XE on the SPECwpc benchmarks? Particularly Poisson, where the 6950X is 3.5X higher.ZeDestructor - Wednesday, September 27, 2017 - link
Most likely cache-relatedesi - Wednesday, September 27, 2017 - link
Maybe. But one that really makes no sense is the Dolphin 5.0 render test. How can the 7980XE take nearly twice as long as the 7960X?esi - Wednesday, September 27, 2017 - link
So I ran the Poisson benchmark on by 6950X. It uses all 10 cores (20 h/w threads), but can be configured to run in different ways: you can set the number of s/w threads per process. It then creates enough processes to ensure there's one s/w thread per h/w thread. Changing the s/w threads per processes significantly effects the result:20 - 1.34
10 - 2.5
5 - 3.31
4 - 3.47
2 - 3.67
1 - 0.19
Each process only uses about 2.5MB of RAM. So the 1-thread per process probably has a low result as this will result in more RAM usage than L3 cache, whereas the others should all fit in.
Would be interesting to see what was used for the 7980/7960. Perhaps the unusual number of cores resulted in a less than optimal process/thread mapping.