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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at8750 - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
Hi, Ian.Did Intel officially announce Skylake-X Refresh be manufactured on 14++ node?
But 9980XE Stepping is the same as 7980XE.
Stepping is 4, there is no change.
SanX - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
Sometimes the advantage of these processors with AVX512 versus usual desktop processors with AVX2 is crazy. The 3D particle tests fly like 500 mph cars. Which other tasks besides 3D particle movement also benefit from AVX512?How about linear algebra? Does Intel MKL which seems now support these extensions demonstrate similar speedups with AVX512 on solutions Ax=B, say, with the usual dense matrices?
TitovVN1974 - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
Pray look up linpack results.SonicAndSmoke - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
@Ian: What's with that paragraph about the Mesh clocks on page 1? Mesh clock is 2.4 GHz stock on SKX, and there is no mesh turbo at all. You can check for yourself with AIDA64 or HwInfo. So does SKX-R have the same 2.4 GHz clock, or higher?Tamerlin - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
Thorough review as always.I'd like to request that you consider adding some DaVinci Resolve tests to your suite, as it would be helpful for professional film post production professionals. There is a free license which has enough capability for professional work, and there is free raw footage available from Black Magic's web site and 8K raw footage available from Red's.
Thanks :)
askmedov - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
Intel is playing with fire by doing incremental upgrades over and over again. Look no further than Apple's new iPads - their chips are better than what Intel has to offer in terms of price-power-efficiency. Apple is going to ditch Intel's processors very soon for most of its Mac lineup.bji - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
Microsoft Windows is known to suck hard when it comes to performance on NUMA architectures and particularly the TR2 processors. See Phoronix for analysis.Why does Anandtech continue to post Windows-only benchmarks? They are fairly useless; they tell more about the limitations of Microsoft Windows than they do the processors themselves.
Of course, if you're a poor sap stuck running Windows for any task that requires these processors, I guess you care, but you really should be pushing your operating system vendor to use some of their billions of dollars to hire OS developers who know what they are doing.
I just bought a TR2 1950X for my software development workstation (Linux based) and I am fairly confident that for my work loads, it will kick the crap out of these Intel processors. I wouldn't know for sure though because I tend to read Anandtech fairly exclusively for hardware reports, dipping into sites like Phoronix only when necessary to get accurate details for edge cases like the TR2.
It sure would be nice if my site of choice (Anandtech) would start posting relevant results from operating systems designed to take advantage of these high power processors instead of more Windows garbage ... especially Windows gaming benchmarks, as if those are even remotely relevant to this CPU segment!
bji - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
Erp I meant 2950X, sorry typo there.Shaky156 - Wednesday, November 14, 2018 - link
I have to agree 110%, gaming benchmarks are more gpu/ipc related more than a multicore cpu benchmark.Somehow seems anandtech could be biased
eva02langley - Wednesday, November 14, 2018 - link
Totally agree, we have come to a time that benchmarks are not even accurately evaluating the product anymore. The big question is how can we depict an accurate picture? Especially if the reviewer is not choosing the right ones properly for real comparison.Well, seeing disparity from Phoronix is raising major concern to me.