The Intel Core i9-9900KS Review: The 5 GHz Consumer Special
by Dr. Ian Cutress on October 31, 2019 10:45 AM ESTCPU Performance: Web and Legacy Tests
While more the focus of low-end and small form factor systems, web-based benchmarks are notoriously difficult to standardize. Modern web browsers are frequently updated, with no recourse to disable those updates, and as such there is difficulty in keeping a common platform. The fast paced nature of browser development means that version numbers (and performance) can change from week to week. Despite this, web tests are often a good measure of user experience: a lot of what most office work is today revolves around web applications, particularly email and office apps, but also interfaces and development environments. Our web tests include some of the industry standard tests, as well as a few popular but older tests.
We have also included our legacy benchmarks in this section, representing a stack of older code for popular benchmarks.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
WebXPRT 3: Modern Real-World Web Tasks, including AI
The company behind the XPRT test suites, Principled Technologies, has recently released the latest web-test, and rather than attach a year to the name have just called it ‘3’. This latest test (as we started the suite) has built upon and developed the ethos of previous tests: user interaction, office compute, graph generation, list sorting, HTML5, image manipulation, and even goes as far as some AI testing.
For our benchmark, we run the standard test which goes through the benchmark list seven times and provides a final result. We run this standard test four times, and take an average.
Users can access the WebXPRT test at http://principledtechnologies.com/benchmarkxprt/webxprt/
WebXPRT 2015: HTML5 and Javascript Web UX Testing
The older version of WebXPRT is the 2015 edition, which focuses on a slightly different set of web technologies and frameworks that are in use today. This is still a relevant test, especially for users interacting with not-the-latest web applications in the market, of which there are a lot. Web framework development is often very quick but with high turnover, meaning that frameworks are quickly developed, built-upon, used, and then developers move on to the next, and adjusting an application to a new framework is a difficult arduous task, especially with rapid development cycles. This leaves a lot of applications as ‘fixed-in-time’, and relevant to user experience for many years.
Similar to WebXPRT3, the main benchmark is a sectional run repeated seven times, with a final score. We repeat the whole thing four times, and average those final scores.
Speedometer 2: JavaScript Frameworks
Our newest web test is Speedometer 2, which is a accrued test over a series of javascript frameworks to do three simple things: built a list, enable each item in the list, and remove the list. All the frameworks implement the same visual cues, but obviously apply them from different coding angles.
Our test goes through the list of frameworks, and produces a final score indicative of ‘rpm’, one of the benchmarks internal metrics. We report this final score.
Google Octane 2.0: Core Web Compute
A popular web test for several years, but now no longer being updated, is Octane, developed by Google. Version 2.0 of the test performs the best part of two-dozen compute related tasks, such as regular expressions, cryptography, ray tracing, emulation, and Navier-Stokes physics calculations.
The test gives each sub-test a score and produces a geometric mean of the set as a final result. We run the full benchmark four times, and average the final results.
Mozilla Kraken 1.1: Core Web Compute
Even older than Octane is Kraken, this time developed by Mozilla. This is an older test that does similar computational mechanics, such as audio processing or image filtering. Kraken seems to produce a highly variable result depending on the browser version, as it is a test that is keenly optimized for.
The main benchmark runs through each of the sub-tests ten times and produces an average time to completion for each loop, given in milliseconds. We run the full benchmark four times and take an average of the time taken.
3DPM v1: Naïve Code Variant of 3DPM v2.1
The first legacy test in the suite is the first version of our 3DPM benchmark. This is the ultimate naïve version of the code, as if it was written by scientist with no knowledge of how computer hardware, compilers, or optimization works (which in fact, it was at the start). This represents a large body of scientific simulation out in the wild, where getting the answer is more important than it being fast (getting a result in 4 days is acceptable if it’s correct, rather than sending someone away for a year to learn to code and getting the result in 5 minutes).
In this version, the only real optimization was in the compiler flags (-O2, -fp:fast), compiling it in release mode, and enabling OpenMP in the main compute loops. The loops were not configured for function size, and one of the key slowdowns is false sharing in the cache. It also has long dependency chains based on the random number generation, which leads to relatively poor performance on specific compute microarchitectures.
3DPM v1 can be downloaded with our 3DPM v2 code here: 3DPMv2.1.rar (13.0 MB)
x264 HD 3.0: Older Transcode Test
This transcoding test is super old, and was used by Anand back in the day of Pentium 4 and Athlon II processors. Here a standardized 720p video is transcoded with a two-pass conversion, with the benchmark showing the frames-per-second of each pass. This benchmark is single-threaded, and between some micro-architectures we seem to actually hit an instructions-per-clock wall.
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Korguz - Thursday, October 31, 2019 - link
one thing you should consoder.. NO cooling for this cpu at all.. so add at least $90 for that...AshlayW - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link
This too, the Intel CPU doesn't even include a cooler.liquid_c - Sunday, November 3, 2019 - link
AMD does, indeed, include a cooler. But stop acting like a frog and admit that you cannot (properly) use the CPU with that cooler. You'd still have to, eventually, get a AIO or a Noctua. So the fact that you'll have to pay an extra 90$ or so is moot, in this case.Korguz - Sunday, November 3, 2019 - link
moot ?? i dont think so, the cost of this cpu + $90 at least, just to be able to use it, ryzen 3000, no need for a cooler as it is included,if one wants better cooling, then it is an option, not a necessity, for the price, amd wins. for performance, for the most part, amd wins as well, specially in MT. and power usage, amd wins there again, you know, like how people were bashing amd for before zen cam out ?? WHY are people not bashing intel the SAME way now ??amnesia0287 - Friday, November 8, 2019 - link
3950x doesn’t include a cooler.Xyler94 - Thursday, October 31, 2019 - link
The cooling fan on X570 is if you're doing something as crazy as dual PCIe 4.0 NVMe RAID 0. Otherwise, they don't need to spin, as the passive heat dissipation is enough, and Gigabyte makes a board with no fan at all.It's great that Intel works better for you, but the use cases for it comes mostly down to super high refresh rates (240hz displays at 1080p) with medium settings. Otherwise, who cares if you lose maybe 5 frames if you're never gonna see those frames anyways, and if the 12 core Ryzen does almost everything better than the 8 core 9900KS in multi-threaded tasks, then I don't see the drawbacks in buying AMD.
Intel does lead AMD in the core speed and overclocking department however. If you're an enthusiast overclocker, then by all means, disregard AMD
AshlayW - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link
"Better Intel quality control and testing"Substantiated proof please? Otherwise, stop talking out of your backsie, many thanks.
Hey, look I can also be anecdotal: In 10 years of building PCs I've never had a CPU die, Intel or AMD, and only 3 motherboards, two of which was my fault.
Spunjji - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link
My anecdotes:I've had two AMD CPUs die. One was a Duron that I ran with the heatsink improperly mounted, causing it to go pop, and the other was a Barton core Athlon XP that had a corner of the die chip off from having a heavy CPU cooler dismounted and remounted too many times. Both my fault, albeit both consequences of design choices (no thermal regulation on the Duron, no protective heat spreader on the Barton)
I've had 3 Intel CPUs go faulty. All were Sandy Bridge, and every single one appeared to work correctly most of the time but would do weird things like suddenly stutter in games or crash without warning. None of them had been overclocked or otherwise "misused".
Off that basis I'd say AMD do better than Intel. *shrug*
Sivar - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link
AMD's random number generator instruction is crashing Linux and compromising security because it always reports that it can generate a legitimately random number, and it always generates the same one. This has made Sysd in Linux issue a patch that always assumes the generator is bad when it issues that value, a 0xffffffff, which means that when working instruction like Intel's generate that number legitimately, Linux will assume it is defective, too. If they had, say, tested the chip properly, the fact that many distributions of the world's most popular server operating have CPU-related crashes may have been found.AMD made the first chip I have ever used that could not run its stock speed stable, but could run underclocked (AthlonXP).
AMD owns the company formerly known as ATI. Somehow, the quality of their drivers is controversial, but after giving them 6 or 7 chances since the 90's, I will never use that hardware again due to the hilariously low-quality drivers and driver support software. The hardware is often fine, but has at many times been reputed to run too close to the line, requiring intense cooling with leaf blower-like fans, and allowing almost zero overclocking.
Really, the idea that AMD's QA is inferior to Intel's seems strange to even question. AMD, even with their successes here and there (AthlonXP, Athlon 64, Ryzen... and that's pretty much it) has always held a reputation for being the off-brand. Anecdotally, problems with AMD systems have long been considered more likely than with Intel.
I wish AMD the best, and I hope their next-gen Ryzen 4000 series shows a clear win over Intel other than in just core count, but for as excited as I was to get a 3800X or 3900X, when I looked at the numbers and at my own long history as an AMD advocate yet purveyor of fact, I had to conclude that AMD still doesn't quite measure up other than in specific corner cases.
Galid - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link
I owned multiple systems over the past here are some of the cpus: Intel 80286, intel pentium 133, intel pentium II 233 and 350, AMD Athlon 64 3200+, AMD Athlon x2 4200+, Intel Core 2 duo e5400 and q6600, AMD FX-8350, intel i5 2500k and then my brother got a ryzen 3700x that we just built lately. I won't go into all the video cards I've owned/purchased to build systems for my friends/family but here are some of them: ATI rage 128, Nvidia riva tnt2, geforce 2 mx, ATI Radeon 8500, ATI radeon 9700 non-pro, Nvidia 8800 gt, ATI radeon 4850 then upgraded to 4870 1gb and then I pretty much tried everything that came out after that for both team.Sincerely, the biggest problems I've had so far was my geforce 6800 gt's drivers totally incompatible with my Athlon 64 x2 3200+ and that was due to the chipset. Nvidia knew the problem was widespread. We could only fix this by using a very old driver(can't remember which) and sometimes underclock would work. They never fixed this.
My father still uses the FX-8350 and that cpu was not well received back in the days. He has no problems whatsoever.
Again, I'm not a linux user but I've got a friend who swears by linux and he uses AMD hardware. I could ask him why but I do not really care anyway. I remember when I bought my i5 2500k there was a major recall on motherboard including mine for b3 stepping because of the S-ATA controller risk of dying or something like that. 90% of the systems I named above are still running strong and of that 10% dead, it's mostly the motherboards or ram, which aren't built by AMD nor INTEL.
I'm no fanboy, I bought so many systems with always the same objective being the best performance for the dollar depending on the usage of the said system. I just had to comment because when I see someone commenting like that, I think they were simply unlucky and that it has nothing to do with what they beleive.