The AnandTech Coffee Lake Review: Initial Numbers on the Core i7-8700K and Core i5-8400
by Ian Cutress on October 5, 2017 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Core i5
- Core i7
- Core i3
- 14nm
- Coffee Lake
- 14++
- Hex-Core
- Hyperthreading
Benchmarking 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.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
Corona 1.3: link
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.
With more threads on display, the Core i7-8700K gets ahead of the previous mainstream Core i7 parts. The frequency difference over the Skylake-X processor gives an extra +10% performance, but the 16-thread parts from AMD win out overall.
Blender 2.78: link
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.
Blender seems to separate very nicely into core counts, with six cores from Intel matching eight cores from AMD.
LuxMark v3.1: Link
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 3.7.1b4: link
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: link
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.
CineBench R15 in single thread mode can take the Core i7-8700K by the horns and drag it to be the best performing chip ever tested.
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mapesdhs - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
GN did a great video on this, it's certainly complicated.crimson117 - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
Will the included heatsink / cooler be viable on the i7-8700? Or would you still need to buy an aftermarket cooler?AndrewJacksonZA - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
Typo page 7 (Civ AI):"an asymptotic result wken you"
"wken"
jimjamjamie - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
RIP hyperthreading for anything under $300...Anonymous Blowhard - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
Buy AMD.mapesdhs - Tuesday, October 10, 2017 - link
Or a used Intel, sooo much value. I'd been looking for a 4930K upgrade for an X79 system (over a 3930K), so as to provide proper PCIe 3.0, etc., main focus is animation, rendering and video processing; gave up, bought a 10-core (20 thread) XEON E5-2680 v2 instead for 165 UKP (very easy to find). It scores 15.44 for CB 11.5, and 1381 for CB R15 (these tests force an all-core Turbo of 3.1GHz), compare these to the 8700K numbers, not bad at all for a board as old as X79, and the temps/power/heat/etc. are excellent.AndrewJacksonZA - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
Thank you very much for your efforts, ladies and gentlemen, this was a really informative review and I enjoyed reading it. :-)sonichedgehog360@yahoo.com - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
Here is a more accurate TDP test:https://img.purch.com/image001-png/w/711/aHR0cDovL...
bongey - Friday, October 6, 2017 - link
Quiet now, Anandtech only publishes what Intel tells them to publish.Ian Cutress - Saturday, October 7, 2017 - link
Last week I was being called an AMD shill. Before that, an Intel shill, Before that, an AMD shill. Swings, roundabouts, hedges.