The Intel Core i9-9990XE Review: All 14 Cores at 5.0 GHz
by Dr. Ian Cutress on October 28, 2019 10:00 AM ESTCPU Performance: Office Tests
The Office test suite is designed to focus around more industry standard tests that focus on office workflows, system meetings, some synthetics, but we also bundle compiler performance in with this section. For users that have to evaluate hardware in general, these are usually the benchmarks that most consider.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
3DMark Physics: In-Game Physics Compute
Alongside PCMark is 3DMark, Futuremark’s (UL’s) gaming test suite. Each gaming tests consists of one or two GPU heavy scenes, along with a physics test that is indicative of when the test was written and the platform it is aimed at. The main overriding tests, in order of complexity, are Ice Storm, Cloud Gate, Sky Diver, Fire Strike, and Time Spy.
Some of the subtests offer variants, such as Ice Storm Unlimited, which is aimed at mobile platforms with an off-screen rendering, or Fire Strike Ultra which is aimed at high-end 4K systems with lots of the added features turned on. Time Spy also currently has an AVX-512 mode (which we may be using in the future).
In simpler titles like Ice Storm, having that high frequency causes the 9990XE to be the best physics calculator for this test that we have.
GeekBench4: Synthetics
A common tool for cross-platform testing between mobile, PC, and Mac, GeekBench 4 is an ultimate exercise in synthetic testing across a range of algorithms looking for peak throughput. Tests include encryption, compression, fast Fourier transform, memory operations, n-body physics, matrix operations, histogram manipulation, and HTML parsing.
I’m including this test due to popular demand, although the results do come across as overly synthetic, and a lot of users often put a lot of weight behind the test due to the fact that it is compiled across different platforms (although with different compilers).
We record the main subtest scores (Crypto, Integer, Floating Point, Memory) in our benchmark database, but for the review we post the overall single and multi-threaded results.
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Supercell99 - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
The democrats have banned LN2 in New York as they have deemed it a climate pollutant.xrror - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
No they haven't you republican jackass, the Earth's atmosphere is 78% nitrogen.eek2121 - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
Because after a while, the system breaks down under LN2 cooling. There is such a thing as silicon being too cold, you know. Google intel cold bug, for example.ravyne - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
Have you seen LN2 cooling? It's not really practical for prolonged use -- you have to keep the LN2 flowing, you have to vent the gasses of the expended LN2, you have to resupply the LN2 somehow.But you're missing the most important constraint of all for high-frequency trading, which is the reason they're building this processor into just 1 rack unit -- these machines aren't running on some remote data center, they're running in a network closet or very small data center probably just a floor or two away from a major stock exchange, in the same building. There is only so much space to be had. The space that's available is generally auctioned and can run well into 5-figures per month for a single rack unit. That's why they're building the exotic 1U liquid cooling in the first place, it'd be much easier to cool in even 2 units (there's even off-the-shelf radiators, then).
edzieba - Thursday, October 31, 2019 - link
These machines are installed in exchange-owned and managed datacentres. "No LN2" as a rule would scupper that concept from the start, but even if it were allowed then you still have the problem of daily shipments of LN2 into a metropolitan centre, failover if a delivery is missed, dealing with large volumes of N2 gas generated in a city centre, etc. Just a logistical nightmare in general.eek2121 - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
It's impossible to cool a system 24/7 with LN2.DixonSoftwareSolutions - Tuesday, October 29, 2019 - link
I think you probably could do something like that. You would want to run it on a beta system in parallel with your production system for a long time to make sure you had the 99.999999% uptime required. You would have to get pretty down and dirty to make it a 24/7 system. Probably a closed loop LN2 system, and I don't even know what kind of machine is required to condense from gas to liquid. You would also probably want heaters on the other components of the motherboard so that only the die was kept at the target low temp, and other components at the correct operating temp. And you would probably have to submerge the entire thing in some dielectric fluid like mineral oil to prevent condensation from building up. It would be expensive no doubt, but if (m/b)illions are on the line, then why not? Also, before embarking on something like this, you would want to make certain that you had tweaked every last bit of your software, both third party software settings and internally authored code, to minimize latency.willis936 - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
Judging from your description I would argue that a traditional PC is a horrible choice for such a problem, given the money at stake. They should be spinning custom ASICs that have the network stack and logic all put together. Even going through a NIC across a PCIe bus and into main memory and back out again is burning thousands of nanoseconds.29a - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
I'm also wondering why they don't create custom silicon for this.gsvelto - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
They do, not all HFT trading houses use software running on COTS hardware. Depending on where you go you can find FPGAs and even ASICs. However, not all of them have the expertise to move to hardware solutions; many are tied to their internal sofware and as such they will invest in the fastest COTS hardware money can buy.