Top end 9th gen Intel Core Series processors outlined

[scaryjim]

It might be interesting if the Core i3 becomes 4C/8T though!

Can't see it, for the reasons I highlighted above (what's the segmentation between 6C/6T and 4C/8T?). Intel seems determined to keep HT out of the middle of their product stack.

Also, intrigued that a lot of people are assuming the i9 listed here is HEDT. If this leak is accurate it looks a lot more like they're feeding 8C/16T into the mainstream stack and branding it i9. I think it's also quite telling on what Intel thinks of its own HT implementation if they do make i7 an 8C/8T part to replace 6C/12T …. i.e. they think 8C without HT is at least comparable to 6C with HT....

[TheAnimus]

Are they trying to make room for AMD?

[Platinum]

Meh ill wait for the 16 core 32 thread Ryzen 3700 thanks

[Tunnah]

lol they're really gonna try put up at 8/8 part and try to tout it as the top-end i7 ? You gotta give it to em, that takes humongous balls

[Corky34]

HT is implemented by duplicating certain areas of the CPU but somehow AMD does it at no extra cost

At no extra cost? That doesn't sound right, why doesn't it, if i wasn't melting I'd actually bother finding out why that doesn't sound right.

[philehidiot]

I always thought hyperthreading was purely a firmware thing that was disabled on some chips but enabled on others. Is there a hardware element to it then and if there is, does that mean that Intel made all chips with HT and then disabled it on ones destined for certain price points?

[ohmaheid]

Is the $1000 cooling solution an optional extra - as per their recent 'demo' of 5ghz on all cores?

[DDY]

I'm not up to speed with SMT and HT, and stuff.

Say between an identically clocked 8C8T and 8C16T CPU with the same core.

For modern games, say coupled with a reasonably powerful graphics card, what sort of performance difference are we looking at?

[scaryjim]

lol they're really gonna try put up at 8/8 part and try to tout it as the top-end i7 ? You gotta give it to em, that takes humongous balls

No, the top end chip is clearly the i9. If the rumour is true it suggests they're fiddling the product stack. Now, whether the i9 will come in at a higher price point than the current i7, or if it will come in at i7 prices and everything else will shuffle down (i.e. the new i7 will actually cost nearer i5 money), only time will tell...

At no extra cost? That doesn't sound right ...

That's because it's not. Any form of SMT requires a certain amount of additional silicon to handle dispatching multiple threads to a single physical core, retrieving the right data out of caches etc. Intel's Core i hardware is all capable of HT, with some parts having it disabled to handle market segmentation, in the same way that AMD's Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 3 quad cores are all baked from the same silicon but the Ryzen 3 has SMT turned off.

AMD's implementation of SMT is more efficient than Intel's (i.e. they get a higher percentage increase in throughput by enabling SMT), but I have no idea what proportion of the silicon area is devoted to making SMT/HT work...

I'm not up to speed with SMT and HT, and stuff.

Say between an identically clocked 8C8T and 8C16T CPU with the same core.

For modern games, say coupled with a reasonably powerful graphics card, what sort of performance difference are we looking at?

Hate to hedge, but there's actually too many factors to give a definitive answer. SMT helps some games and actually reduces performance on others. And the extent to which it impacts them also depends on which processor you're looking at, so a game that benefits from HT on Intel might suffer under SMT on Ryzen, because of the differences in architecture.

That said, if you look at the dGPU results from most CPU reviews, you'll note that once you play at high resolutions and IQ settings there's minimal difference between CPUs anyway. If you want more detail look for some reviews comparing the i7 8700k to the i5 8600k - beyond a small clock speed difference they're the same CPU just with HT turned off on the i5....

[Iota]

Well, Intel are good at fragmenting their product stack at least. However, the problem with this approach is that AMD is pretty straightforward in their product stack, which makes it simpler for me to choose a product as they haven't fragmented it like Intel seems to want to do (and no doubt charge the earth for those little "extras").

Alongside the issue with which motherboard allows which features to work and multiple chipsets abound, I honestly think I'd choose AMD purely for simplicity, regardless of the small difference between them and Intel in terms of performance. How many people are Intel trying to confuse if this is accurate information?

[simonpreston]

I run a lot of virtual machines. Therefore I need cores/threads.

I'm willing to bet the i9 8/16 won't be anywhere near as VFM as a Ryzen 7 8/16. Built a Ryzen 7 /32GB machine, at the start of this year, and I'm very happy with it. Can run multiple VMs, simultaneously, without it getting bogged down.

[Lord Midas]

This does seem like a made up (fake) Chinese blog thing.

Genuine question: when you have 8 cores already does it actually matter if you don't have 16HT?
Isn't it true that at most some games could use 3 or 4 cores?

[Tabbykatze]

I always thought hyperthreading was purely a firmware thing that was disabled on some chips but enabled on others. Is there a hardware element to it then and if there is, does that mean that Intel made all chips with HT and then disabled it on ones destined for certain price points?

There is a hardware element but it is not talked about at great lengths or even has that much documentation about the hardware principles. From what I managed to find, each processor core has within it two "architectural cores" which share everything around them. The architectural cores are used to run the physical thread and the logical thread with shared cache etc.

That is why there is not HT across the whole line up. Take the 8700k for instance, if they produce a wafer with a 100 dies on and there is a 60% failure rate that one of the architectural cores has a flaw then those 60 dies have the architectural cores fused off (or left there and snipped) and the entire die is binned as an 8600k part.

That is verrrry high level, so if someone with more knowledge about how the hardware of HT works, please step in.

[ultrasbm]

F**k you intel!!!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

It looks like Intel will be using solder at least for the Core i9 CPUs:

https://videocardz.com/newz/golem-in...ll-be-soldered