The Intel Core i9-9980XE CPU Review: Refresh Until it Hertz
by Ian Cutress on November 13, 2018 9:00 AM ESTHEDT Performance: SYSMark 2018
You either love it or hate it. BAPCo’s SYSMark suite of tests is both an interesting combination of benchmarks but also clouded in a substantial amount of ire. The altruistic original goal was to develop an industry standard suite of real-world tests. AMD (and NVIDIA) left BAPCo several years ago citing that workloads were being chosen on purpose that favoured Intel processors, and didn’t include enough several emerging computing paradigms for the industry. Intel disagrees with that statement, and here we are today.
We run this disclaimer on our SYSMark testing primarily to emphasise that this benchmark suite, while some consider it more than relevant and encompassing a lot of modern professional software, others feel is engineered with specific goals in mind.
We haven’t run SYSMark on every processor, as it requires a fresh OS image compared to our automated suite, and requires refreshing that image every seven days. As a result we are trying to do sets of processors at a time where it makes sense and when time is available.
It’s clear from the Intel comparisons that the i9-9980XE takes a lead here, with a nice bump over the 7980XE of around 7% in the overall test. Given that the 7900X is the best of the Skylake-X processors, it will be interesting to see what the 9900X scores here.
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nexuspie - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
Marketing doesn't work in tech. Tech buyers aren't dumb. People want performance, and today that's Intel by far. On a per-core basis it creams the competitor.Arbie - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
Ironically stated in pure marketing-speak.Tech buyers know that shouting "performance" is meaningless out of context - and that includes a lot more than clock speed. For example price, power, cooling, cores, threading, features, platform, socket life... the list goes on. All conveniently ignored in a slogan like yours, which could have come from an Intel ad.
Spunjji - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
He's dropping classic lines from the "I am an empowered, smart individual and marketing doesn't work on me" playbook. I find it's usually a line trotted out by people on whom marketing works absolute miracles.Kilnk - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
I've been reading your comments and I love your style.Arbie - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
"there’s no point advertising a magical 28-core 5 GHz CPU ... if only one in a million hits that value."Sure there is: to confuse the market and draw attention away from the competition. As at Computex in June.
twtech - Thursday, November 15, 2018 - link
How about 4.5 GHz?eva02langley - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
So many refreshes, and so little supply on the shelves.jospoortvliet - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
Takes only 9 weeks to be delivered I suppose? And that is just the promise - delays likely.Cooe - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
Rofl, and the second you look at the price tags, anyone with half a piece of common sense would realize that buying an i9-9980XE over a TR-2950X is absolutely freaking ridiculous! (Unless you simply NEED AVX-512 that is). Intel's flailing with Skylake.... again..., while AMD's near finished changing the game entirely with 7nm Zen 2, and it's all honestly pretty damn hilarious. Karma's a b**ch and all that lol.benedict - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
Agreed, the 2950X offers the best value in the HEDT segment.