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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ddriver - Monday, September 25, 2017 - link
You are living in a world of mainstream TV functional BS.Quantum computing will never replace computers as we know and use them. QC is very good at a very few tasks, which classical computers are notoriously bad at. The same goes vice versa - QC suck for regular computing tasks.
Which is OK, because we already have enough single thread performance. And all the truly demanding tasks that require more performance due to their time staking nature scale very well, often perfectly, with the addition of cores, or even nodes in a cluster mode.
There might be some wiggle room in terms of process and material, but I am not overly optimistic seeing how we are already hitting the limits on silicon and there is no actual progress made on superior alternatives. Are they like gonna wait until they hit the wall to make something happen?
At any rate, in 30 years, we'd be far more concerned with surviving war, drought and starvation than with computing. A problem that "solves itself" ;)
SharpEars - Monday, September 25, 2017 - link
You are absolutely correct regarding quantum computing and it is photonic computing that we should be looking towards.Notmyusualid - Monday, September 25, 2017 - link
@ SharpEarsYes, as alluded to by IEEE. But I've not looked at it in a couple of years or so, and I think they were still struggling with an optical DRAM of sorts.
Gothmoth - Monday, September 25, 2017 - link
and what have they done for the past 6 years?i am glad that i get more cores instead of 5-10% performance per generation.
Krysto - Monday, September 25, 2017 - link
The would if they could. Improvements in IPC have been negligible since Ivy Bridge.kuruk - Monday, September 25, 2017 - link
Can you add Monero(Cryptonight) performance? Since Cryptonight requires at least 2MB of L3 cache per core for best performance, it would be nice to see how these compare to Threadripper.evilpaul666 - Monday, September 25, 2017 - link
I'd really like it if Enthusiast ECC RAM was a thing.I used to always run ECC on Athlons back in the Pentium III/4 days.Now with 32-128x more memory that's running 30x faster it doesn't seem like it would be a bad thing to have...
someonesomewherelse - Saturday, October 14, 2017 - link
It is. Buy AMD.IGTrading - Monday, September 25, 2017 - link
I think we're being to kind on Intel.Despite the article clearly mentioning it in a proper and professional way, the calm tone of the conclusion seem to legitimize and make it acceptable that Intel basically deceives its customers and ships a CPU that consumes almost 16% more power than its stated TDP.
THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE and UNPROFESSIONAL from Intel.
I'm not "shouting" this :) , but I'm trying to underline this fact by putting it in caps.
People could burn their systems if they design workstations and use cooling solutions for 165W TDP.
If AMD would have done anything remotely similar, we would have seen titles like "AMD's CPU can fry eggs / system killer / motherboard breaker" and so on ...
On the other hand, when Intel does this, it is silently, calmly and professionally deemed acceptable.
It is my view that such a thing is not acceptable and these products should be banned from the market UNTIL Intel corrects its documentation or the power consumption.
The i7960X fits perfectly in its TDP of 165W, how come i7980X is allowed to run wild and consume 16% more ?!
This is similar with the way people accepted every crapping design and driver fail from nVIDIA, even DEAD GPUs while complaining about AMD's "bad drivers" that never destroyed a video card like nVIDIA did. See link : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dE-YM_3YBm0
This is not cutting Intel "some slack" this is accepting shit, lies and mockery and paing 2000 USD for it.
For 2000$ I expect the CPU to run like a Bentley for life, not like modded Mustang which will blow up if you expect it to work as reliably as a stock model.
whatevs - Monday, September 25, 2017 - link
What a load of ignorance. Intel tdp is *average* power at *base* clocks, uses more power at all core turbo clocks here. Disable turbo if that's too much power for you.