Intel 9900K released

Update 22 Oct: Please check update here as well.

Yesterday Intel released “new” generation of CPU’s and I would like to talk about top CPU in this “new” generation.

But firstly, I would like to mention that it is actually not new. It is pretty much same as 8000 series with minor tuning. They just finally able to increase core count.

You can watch review here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_I--zROoRws

To be honest to me it made strange impression.

9900K costs $580 while top AMD cost $304. Intel has no cooling and it is quite hot. From watching different reviews looks like Intel needs high end cooling and many reviewers recommend around $100 cooling solutions. AMD on other end have quite adequate cooler in the box and unless you want to overclock it a lot it will work just fine. So, it looks like $680 vs $304. You can clearly see that Intel solution cost about 2 times more than AMD.

If we compare performance, it is mixed feeling as well.

Gaming.

In 1080p resolutions it is clear that Intel is much faster. But also, clear that nobody will buy $680 CPU and play in 1080p. I would say at least 1440p or 4K. In 1440p difference between AMD and Intel is much smaller and in 4K there is pretty much no difference. Of source there are games like Civilization that have heavy AI computation and Intel is faster there and any resolution.

And while we are talking about gaming. if someone have unlimited money sure Intel is best choice but 99.9% people have budget. So, what is better nVidia 1060 6G and Intel 9900K (about $950) or nVidia 1080 and AMD 2700X (about $900)? Clearly for gamer second choice is much better for gaming and about $50 cheaper and can be used to buy faster memory or disk.

Work-related activities

Again, most of the time Intel is faster as well. But what will you get for your money? For example, you are doing professional rendering. So, question is how much one frame will cost you? Clearly AMD is winner here. But let’s say you need to finish rendering ASAP and willing to pay for it. In this case Threadripper is good choice. It will cost about the same but much faster than Intel CPU in almost all work-related activities. It even consumes less energy than Intel CPU.

But is there anything where Intel CPU is good? Yes. It provides very good single thread performance. If you have critical application that uses only one thread, Intel will be much better choice. But again, are you willing to pay 100% more for 20% improvement?

As result from my point of view it looks like best workload for new Intel CPU is mix of gaming (mostly) and occasions work-related activities. Also streaming will work quite well (AMD provide good performance as well but just slower).

Also, I would like to mention that soon Intel will release new CPU that will use smaller tech process and new CPUs will be faster or cooler. And most likely you will need new motherboard for new CPUs. So new Intel CPUs will likely have short shelf time

Note: I would like to mention that in general everything is optimized for Intel but there are more and more AMD CPUs there and more and more cases where software developers optimize code for AMD CPUs as well because they are more and more common these days (https://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-intel-core-cpu-market-share-price-report-september-2018/). So perhaps soon we will see better software performance for AMD CPUs.