Throughout 2019, we’ve had quite the reverse of performance when it comes to the competitiveness of the modern performance-oriented desktop processor. This year we’ve seen AMD introduce its Zen 2 processor designs, offering up to 16 cores for mainstream use cases, and matching if not beating Intel in raw clock-for-clock performance. In a similar vein, AMD’s Rome CPUs offer up to 64 cores per socket on the server side, where Intel can only offer 28 (or 56 in some configurations), while at the same time both consumer and server pushing PCIe 4.0 in preparation for upcoming GPUs and add-in accelerators. Intel has also launched a number of products, such as a couple of 5.0 GHz all-core CPUs, an unlocked 28-core CPU, Xeon 9200, and the next generation of server products.

If you’ve been away from the CPU space this year, here’s the Year in Review.

January 2019

In early January we attended the annual CES trade show in Las Vegas. It was the start of many keynotes for AMD’s CEO Dr. Lisa Su this year, which also included Computex, E3, Hot Chips, and various AMD partner events.

The AMD Keynote at CES 2019: Looking Ahead

Part of the keynote was that AMD was committed to delivering on its 7nm CPU platform later in the year, particuraly with its Zen 2 architecture, showing some very impressive benchmarks including an 8-core AMD vs 8-core Intel running a benchmark, scoring similarly, with the AMD at a quantifiably lower system power. We also got the first look at the 8-core Matisse package, along with predictions for a dual-die package offering up to 16-cores. At this point AMD was keeping quiet on core counts.

Intel’s keynote by contrast was the first since the new interim CEO, Bob Swan, had taken over. It wouldn’t be until later in the month that he would be confirmed as the full-time CEO, but unlike the previous CEO, he wasn’t on stage. Instead, SVP Greg Bryant was up to talk about how Intel had launched a CPU offering a 2-core 5.0 GHz turbo (the i9-9900K, in October 2018), but also spoke about how Intel was committed to delivering 10nm in 2019 through its mobile Ice Lake platform, new 3D stacked ‘Lakefield’ chip, and in 5G with its Snow Ridge design.

Intel’s Keynote at CES 2019: 10nm, Ice Lake, Lakefield, Snow Ridge, Cascade Lake

Most of this was based on Intel’s Architecture Day, which was only a few weeks prior in December 2018. At CES Intel also discussed its future for the server market with a brief coverage of Cascade Lake and also Intel’s AI options for that particular market.

Also at hand was Intel’s Project Athena, which Intel had launched last year, with the idea to create a level of requirements for mobile devices to guarantee performance, battery life, and other features that Intel believes its high-end customers need.

Also at CES, we learned of a new CPU that Intel didn’t want many people to know about. The Core i9-9990XE was meant to be a special processor kept under wraps. With 14 cores all rated at 5.0 GHz, this super binned chip (according to partners) would only be available to Intel’s key partners through an auction only process. Not only that, but these CPUs would be sold to the partners without any warranty. End-users who would want these parts include high-frequency traders who want the best of everything and can amortize the costs. We ended up reviewing the hardware later in the year.

Intel Core i9-9990XE : Up to 5.0 GHz, Auction Only

As for CPU launches in January, Intel was the main player here. In order to boost the launch of its 9^th Gen Core K-series processors from October 2018, the company launched its 9^th Gen F-series hardware. F-series parts lacked integrated graphics, so we expected them to be cheaper, but they were listed on Intel’s pricing at the same price as the K parts that did have integrated graphics (later in the year the price did eventually change). Along with the F parts were KF parts that offered both overclocking functionality but no integrated graphics.

What we also got to see in January 2019 was the Xeon W-3175X: Intel’s fully-unlocked 28-core beast of a processor. Intel shipped a number of press a full system to test this chip on, which included a rather beefy three-fan liquid cooler, an exhuberant $1500 motherboard, and a 1500W power supply. All in all, the test-kit for this CPU was $7000+, including the price of the processor, which was a cool $2999.

The Intel Xeon W-3175X Review: 28 Unlocked Cores, $2999

As perhaps was to be expected, it knocked the socks off of any of the other processors we’ve ever tested, even putting some dual-socket configurations to shame with its high core count, high frequency, and perhaps not surprisingly, high power draw. Only two motherboard vendors even dared to build boards for it, ASUS and GIGABYTE, with only ASUS ready for launch day. EVGA eventually built a board too, when the product stack filled out a bit, but ultimately we were told by these companies that they expected the W-3175X to be sold mostly through system integrators.

One of the final reviews to round off the month from us was our Cannon Lake review. Intel had ‘officially’ shipped its first 10nm CPU products in December 2017, but they were no-where to be seen. Despite repeated requests to find out where this mythical CPU had gone, we found a few in China, with Lenovo producing a product for the education market. We pulled a few strings and got this Cannon Lake laptop in, and gave it a good teardown as well as a full architecture analysis.

Intel's 10nm Cannon Lake and Core i3-8121U Deep Dive Review

Cannon Lake, Intel’s first generation 10nm product, shipped in a dual core design with a disabled GPU (because it didn’t work). It was more power hungry than the previous generation 15W laptop designs, and the parts that ended up in the market were undoubtedly salvaged to make it look like it was ready to go. Cannon Lake will forever remain a curio for CPU enthusiasts, and that’s where it should stay.

Right at the end of the month we had some good news. Intel had finally put the Itanic to bed. Intel’s Itanium product, initially launched in 2000, deployed the ‘Itanium’ architecture for high-scale enterprise servers. The last generation of products, called Kittson, were released in 2017 but even then were only a frequency bump over the 2012 Poulson products.

The only company still deploying Itanium was HP, and January 2019 marked the start of the End-of-Life cycle for this hardware. HP (and others) have until January 30^th 2020 to make the last orders of CPUs, which will be shipped by July 29^th 2021. But as it stands, with no roadmap and no more support, the Itanic has finally bubbled its last puff of air.

Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 Kittson Processors, the Last of the Itaniums

We also reviewed the AMD Athlon 200GE against the Intel Pentium G5400, in a battle of $60 hardware.

The $60 CPU Question: AMD Athlon 200GE or Intel Pentium Gold G5400? A Review

 

 

February 2019

No CPU launches to report from February, although discussions about Intel’s ability to provide enough consumer CPUs into the market were slowly rising. Having only launched 9^th Gen Core hardware for K/F/KF processors and not a full stack had people confused as to where Intel was going with the 9^th Gen Core family.

What we did at AnandTech was review a couple of special OEM-only parts from AMD. The Ryzen 5 2500X and Ryzen 3 2300X were technically announced in September, but due to their OEM-only status (and perhaps a bit of region-specificity going on), they could only be obtained in specific pre-built systems from HP, Lenovo, or other big vendors. We managed to get hold of the chips to compare their performance.

The AMD Ryzen 5 2500X and Ryzen 3 2300X CPU Review

It did strike us as odd as to why AMD doesn’t widely distribute them. Potential reasons include that these cut down parts are limited in number, or AMD wanted to drive up the average selling price of its processors on the market – a tactic used by a lot of companies. At this point it was unclear, and as we’ll read further, AMD did something a bit similar with the Ryzen 3000 family.

March 2019

March was also a relatively quiet month, with nothing happening on the consumer processor front. There were lots of predictions about AMD’s upcoming 7nm hardware, although nothing out of AMD itself.

What AMD did finally put into retail was a high-speed version of its then current-generation Naples server hardware based on its Zen microarchitecture. The AMD EPYC 7371 was a 16-core part that pulled an extra 30 W (200 W vs. 170 W) but enabled a much higher base frequency (3.1 GHz vs. 2.3 GHz) and turbo frequency (3.8 GHz vs. 2.9 GHz) than any other EPYC on the market. Beyond that, AMD stated it had a 3.6 GHz all-core turbo.

AMD Launches High-Frequency EPYC 7371 Processor

While the product was announced in November 2018, it actually was made available in February 2019. While we didn’t get to review the product directly, our friend Patrick Kennedy at ServeTheHome did do a review and said that it offered AMD’s most competitive EPYC server product to date, easily replacing dual 8-core systems from Intel (a common configuration) with a single chip.

 

April 2019

While the leaks and rumors are still flying for AMD’s Zen 2, April was all about Intel.

Intel’s big announcement for the month was the launch of its new enterprise processors. The second generation of the Xeon Scalable line is called Cascade Lake, and the key updates here are not only the first round of hardened security updates for Spectre/Meltdown, but Intel also adjusted the core counts at specific price points to offer 25% more cores for the same price. The new processors also support Intel’s Optane DCPMM, which allows for up to 4.5 TB of memory per socket with specific SKUs.

Intel’s Enterprise Extravaganza 2019: Launching Cascade Lake

The socketed Cascade Lake hardware matched the previous Skylake in terms of peak core counts (up to 28), and IPC was almost equal as well, with Intel leveraging increases in core counts and small frequency lifts to give overall frequency improvements.

We also saw the Xeon 9200 family being launched. This new line, sitting above the Cascade Lake Platinum 8200, essentially puts two 28-core silicon dies onto a single package. These chips aren’t socketed, and require to be soldered on board, but essentially act as a dual-socket processor in a single socket (albeit, at 1/3 of the link speed). Intel made these chips in order to offer high-density systems (224 cores in a 1U), but also to counter the upcoming the 64-core option from AMD.

Hands on with the 56-core Xeon Platinum 9200 CPU: Intel’s Biggest CPU Package Ever

Also on the books first was the Xeon D-1600 series, a network focused lower core count embedded chip for the edge market - a sort of baby brother to the D-2100 series.

Intel Launches the Xeon D-1600 Family: Upgrades to Xeon D-1500

For consumers, the release cycle meant that Intel started putting 45W TDP versions of the 9^th Gen Core family into the market, for both desktop and mobile. Finding them on desktop since the launch has been rather tricky (and seemingly location specific).

Intel 9th Gen Core Processors: All the Desktop and Mobile 45W CPUs Announced

 

May 2019

At the beginning of May, we started to bid farewell to one of Intel’s most ambitious projects. Originally derived from Intel’s attempt to make an x86 graphics chip called Larrabee, Xeon Phi had been on the run as a many-core design focused in high-performance computing, namely due to its 72 AVX-512 units. The last product announcement for Xeon Phi had the 10nm product going into the Aurora supercomputer, but Aurora is now getting Intel’s new XeHPC GPU instead, called Ponte Vecchio. For Xeon Phi, the last generation that was given life was Knights Mill, which was almost identical to Knights Landing except for an optimization to go to AI.

The Larrabee Chapter Closes: Intel's Final Xeon Phi Processors Now in EOL

Xeon Phi was an interesting product that slowly became obsolete as Intel introduced AVX-512 on its main Xeon Scalable family of processors with dedicated AI instructions. With Knights Mill now being ushered into its End-of-Life program, the chapter on Larrabee has finally closed, with the company now set to launch a range of GPUs up and down the stack with its new X^e architecture.

A side note on other Intel news: technically the company released its Xeon E-2200 family of CPUs in May as well. These are the Xeon analogues to the Core 9^th Gen hardware, except with enterprise features like ECC and vPro by default.

Intel Launches Xeon-E 2200 Series for Servers: 8 Cores, up to 5.0 GHz

 

The end of the May/beginning of June is our annual trip to Computex, and Dr. Lisa Su took to the stage for AMD’s keynote. AMD for the first time gave everyone details about the next generation of Ryzen: Ryzen 3000 built on 7nm chiplets using Zen 2 microarchitecture. In the disclosures, AMD covered its new 8-core products, as well as its new flagship Ryzen 9 3900X with 12 cores using two chiplets, as had been theorized by the previous CES disclosure.

Dr. Lisa Su at Computex 2019: AMD Keynote Live Blog

Of course, everyone was asking two things: (a) what’s new in Zen 2, and (b) where’s the 16-core ? More on that later in the year.

Intel also had its usual keynote for Computex, with Greg Bryant taking the stage. Last year the company had an upset where it showed a 28-core 5.0 GHz CPU without mentioning it was overclocked (and seemed very cagy about it at the time). This year there were no such hangups, and the company announced the Core i9-9900KS. This 8-core 5.0 GHz CPU actually does 5.0 GHz on all cores out of the box, without the need for exotic cooling.

Presented by Jon Carvill, now ex-Intel

Intel Announces 8 Core i9-9900KS: Every Core at 5.0 GHz, All The Time

Intel didn’t state a release date at the time (it ended up being October), nor a price, with the price expected to be high. It sounded like obvious competition for AMD’s 12-core and 16-core, so it did create quite a lot of traffic.

At Computex, Intel also mentioned that its next generation of X-series processors (Cascade Lake-X) would be coming to the high-end desktop market later that year, as would its 10nm Ice Lake laptop processors. This would coincide with the official release of the Project Athena 1.0 laptop specifications.

Computex 2019: Intel Keynote with Gregory Bryant

The full SKU list for Ice Lake was released, covering 9W, 15W, and 28W hardware. To date (as of Dec 2019), we still have only seen the 15W hardware come to market, so we are expecting to see 28W and 9W parts in Q1 2020. The big uplift for the high-powered parts is in the graphics, offering up to 64 EUs of the new Gen11 graphics. We got a chance to benchmark an early preview in August.

One other thing we found at Computex. We know from the previous year that AMD had done a deal to create a joint venture in China with a Chinese company called THATIC. This joint venture had a license to request changes to the Zen 1 architecture, which AMD would approve, and then they could be manufactured by the joint venture. These ‘Hygon’ processors were built under license specifically for the Chinese market, and even today at the end of 2019 it’s rare to even see one, let alone touch it or test it. At Computex, we found one to look at.

Spotted at Computex: Let Bygones be Bygons, with a Sugon Hygon

Interestingly enough, we got the bottom right of the CPU translated. A literal translation is 

'Using Cores to Calculate The Future'

However, the second character used in the slogan is a homonym, which could be translated as:

'Using Passion to Calculate The Future'

For a Chinese CPU, the synergistic phrasing is very poetic. Sugon, despite never having interacted with AnandTech before, asked us to take down our short article, and set us some odd documents that had nothing to do with AnandTech. The partner who had the CPU at the booth no longer speak to us. That’s how ‘sensitive’ a Hygon is. As part of our Computex coverage, we asked AMD about these parts, about what is different – we were told ‘if you test one and find something out, let us know and we might confirm it’. Perhaps this is a good time as any to mention that we have some Hygon for testing, and found some very distinct differences to Zen 1. Stay tuned in early 2020 for our review.

As part of our Computex coverage, we were also given the opportunity to participate in a roundtable with AMD's CEO, Dr. Lisa Su, and quiz her on the shows announcements. The questions in this interview are varied, due to the nature of a roundtable discussion rarely staying on the same topic, but Lisa offered some good gems of info.

All Ryzen: Q&A with AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su

 

June 2019

Technically Computex rolled into June, but also at the beginning of June is E3. Normally AnandTech doesn’t cover E3, however AMD decided to have a big 2-day NDA tech event just before the show started. This is usual before a big launch, and usually it’s a struggle for the company that does the tech event to keep everyone quiet in advance. Nonetheless, AMD took the time to go through the new Zen 2 microarchitecture in-depth, with key architects on hand to answer questions. So after the first full day of presentations, we only had 10 hours between the end of the presentations and embargo lift. I swore to some $deity that I was destined to have it written up in time. Here’s my 7000-word analysis of AMD’s Zen 2 microarchitecture.

AMD Zen 2 Microarchitecture Analysis: Ryzen 3000 and EPYC Rome

Aside from making the core wider, AMD had increased the micro-op cache size, introduced a new style of branch predictor, fully enabled dual AVX2 pipes, improved the load/store balancing, and a better efficiency by using 7nm for the cores but 14nm for the IO die. AMD claimed a direct +15% performance uplift from Zen1 to Zen2, which would put it directly in the firing line with Intel’s Skylake (now Coffee Lake) 14nm++ processors for raw clock-for-clock performance. Promising a release date of 7/7 (because 7nm), everything was heating up, to the point where people were now starting to ask about Threadripper.

During the E3 event, AMD also announced that alongside the 8-core and 12-core hardware, it would be launching a 16-core counterpart, the Ryzen 9 3950X. This didn’t really surprise anyone, except for its low TDP (only 105 W, 10 more than the 12-core), and the fact it was listed as having the highest single-thread frequency of any Ryzen 3000 chip. AMD listed it as ‘coming September’, but it ultimately came out at the end of November due to unprecedented demand of 7nm chiplets.

AMD 16-Core Ryzen 9 3950X: Up to 4.7 GHz, 105W, Coming September

To cap off the Computex/E3 announcements, Wendell from Level1Techs and I sat in our hotel in Los Angeles to talk about the announcements and our opinions of them, for his channel. Video is embedded below.

Fireside Chat with Ian and Wendell: Ryzen 3000, Zen 2, Navi, Xeon W

 

The rest of the month of June was all for Intel. The company finally launched the rest of its 9^th Gen Core processor stack, filled with non-K and non-F processors, as well as Pentiums and Celerons. There were no real surprises in frequencies or properties of these CPUs, almost mirroring what we saw on the 8^th Generation hardware with small frequency adjustments and identical pricing.

We also saw Intel launch the Xeon W-3200 series on the back of the new Mac Pro launch. The W-3200 family uses Intel’s LGA-3647 socket, and becomes a cheaper way to enable a 28-core workstation without going down the Xeon Scalable route. Intel also started to offer the Xeon W family with M versions for middle-tier memory support, allowing the maximum amount of memory to be supported go up from 1 TB to 2 TB (for an extra $3000).

Intel Cascade Lake Xeon W-3200 Launched: Server Socket, 64 PCIe 3.0 lanes

AnandTech Year In Review 2019: CPUs H2

July 2019

Enter July, and the key  question on everyone’s lips this month was regarding the new Ryzen 3000 chips. On July 7^th, the embargo was lifted on the 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X and the 8-core Ryzen 7 3700X. Gavin and Andrei stepped up to the plate for this review, easily our biggest of 2019, with a full deep-dive analysis of the new design.

The AMD 3rd Gen Ryzen Deep Dive Review: 3700X and 3900X Raising The Bar

Our underlying results showcased that Zen 2 does indeed have a ~15% uplift compared to Zen+, or around +23% over Zen 1. More importantly however, in terms of performance per clock against the Core i9-9900K, the new Ryzen 9 3900X on the industry standard SPEC2017 tests, was scoring higher for its frequency than Intel was. This was broadly interpreted as AMD taking the IPC crown from Intel on such a significant test, meaning that AMD doesn’t need to hit such a high frequency to get the same performance as Intel.

Ultimately, due to Intel’s high 5.0 GHz single-core frequencies and 4.7 GHz all-core frequency, it still took the crown in single threaded workloads compared to the 4.6 GHz of the 3900X. However, 12 cores against 8 was no contest, especially at a lower power consumption as well. To quote our review:

“[AMD has] never been this close to Intel in over a decade. This is no longer the story of the AMD that is trying to catch up to Intel; this is now the story of the AMD that is once more a formidable rival to Intel. And, if the company is able to continue to execute as well, we should be seeing even more exciting things in the future.  It’s remarkable that AMD has been able to achieve all of this while consuming significantly less power than Intel's best desktop chip.”

Hiding underneath the launch of the new Ryzen 3000 chips were the APUs based on Zen+. AMD’s cadence of having the APUs lag behind a generation from the latest CPU technology is perhaps understandable, but naming them Ryzen 3000 as well is sometimes a bit confusing.

AMD Ryzen 3000 APUs: Up to Vega 11, More MHz, Under $150, Coming July 7th

The Ryzen 5 3400G and Ryzen 3 3200G are still built on the older Zen+ architecture, offering enhanced frequencies over the Zen 1 APUs, but their goal is mainly in that $99 and $149 product price point.

August 2019

As we move into the second half of the year, one of our first articles was our Ice Lake benchmark preview. We were one of a few publications given early access to Intel’s Ice Lake reference design, and in an act of defiance to how long it would take, we ran an extensive array of microarchitecture analysis tests. This included a full run-down of the instruction set, runs of SPEC2006 and SPEC2017, and also looking into the cache and memory latency, plus a few of our regular tests bundled in.

The Ice Lake Benchmark Preview: Inside Intel's 10nm

We confirmed that Intel had increased the L1 latency from 4 cycles to 5 cycles, which would at a high level kill performance, however the increased size of the L1 cache (48 KB from 32 KB) and the L2 cache (512 KB from 256 KB) along with other functional updates actually improved performance across the board. Performance per clock, we measured a 19% uplift for Ice Lake over the previous generation Coffee Lake – slightly more than the +18% that Intel had been advertising. If Intel were to put Ice Lake in the desktop, it would again take the IPC crown in the desktop market.  One metric that Intel did vastly improve on with Ice Lake was the graphics. We saw a 2x or more improvement over the Whiskey Lake chip we compared it against.

However we did note that Intel’s 10nm CPU frequency is low compared to its latest 14nm hardware – Intel is trading off IPC for frequency, ultimately giving almost equal performance between the two chips (Whiskey Lake and Ice Lake). The proof in the pudding would be in the power measurements when we get OEM devices later in the year.

 

The other side of August was the launch of AMD’s cash cow: Rome, known as 2^nd Generation EPYC. Where Intel can offer 28 cores, AMD can now offer 64 cores, with >3x the PCIe lanes and 33% more memory channels. Intel’s previous CEO had stated that Intel’s job was to not let AMD capture 15-20% of the market share – Rome is the product that Intel has feared most.

One of the key differences in Rome, over the previous generation Naples, is the use of a central IO die. Each of the 8 chiplets in a Rome CPU connects to the IO die if it wants to access main memory or PCIe lanes, meaning that every core has equal latency to both. One of the main pain points of the previous generation was that this was not the case, and AMD would appear to have solved this issue, as well as provide each core with a nice hunk of L3 cache to help with bandwidth over the second generation infinity fabric.

AMD Rome Second Generation EPYC Review: 2x 64-core Benchmarked

The most expensive 64-core CPU, with support for up to 8 TB of memory, is the EPYC 7742. This chip has a base frequency of 2.25 GHz, a boost frequency of 3.4 GHz, an RRP of $6950.

In our review, we stated at the time:

“At the high end, AMD offers you up to 50 to 100% higher performance while offering a 40% lower price. Unless you go for the low end server CPUs, there is no contest: AMD offers much better performance for a much lower price than Intel, with more memory channels and over 2x the number of PCIe lanes. These are also PCIe 4.0 lanes. What if you want more than 2 TB of RAM in your dual socket server? The discount in favor of AMD just became 50%.”

I interviewed Forrest Norrod back at E3, and when asked about EPYC customers, he stated that they had a doubling of platforms in development for Rome compared to those available for EPYC. There was so much interest in fact that they had to turn away some platform requests just due to the sheer number that were coming through.

An Interview with AMD’s Forrest Norrod: Naples, Rome, Milan, & Genoa

 

Also in August, we had the annual Hot Chips conference (a favorite of mine). Dr. Lisa Su had the keynote for the first day of the show, where she covered AMD’s product portfolio as well as recent wins with the Zen 2 hardware on Ryzen and EPYC. As part of the Q&A session, I asked about AMD’s strategy in the workstation space, especially given the new Workstation section on the website. Our exchange went something like this:

That face a CEO makes when I start asking questions
Also present, Jon Masters (ex-Red Hat, now Nuvia)

IC: ‘Recently we have noticed that AMD has a new workstation-specific dedicated area on the website and have also advertised for workstation personnel. Can you speak about how your current strategy will develop in the workstation space, especially as it relates to product names that already exist in this space, such as Threadripper?’

LS: ‘I thought this wasn’t a product presentation! [laughs] No I’ll certainly answer that. We want computing to significantly advance, whether you’re talking about desktops, or whether you’re talking about servers, or you’re talking about workstations, on both the CPU and GPU side, and even in notebooks. What you’ll see from us is the same techniques that we brought in with Zen and next-gen graphics will flow through all of these product lines at some point in time. I know there’s a lot of interest around Threadripper, I see people are wondering when we’re going to launch Threadripper – I can say that the third generation Threadripper will be coming shortly. Does that help?’

IC: ‘No. [laughs]’

LS: ‘[laughs] How about less than a year? Does that help?’

IC: ‘…no? [laughs] If I keep saying no, maybe she’ll say a date!’

LS: ‘[laughs] Hah! You know I get that there’s so much excitement around Threadripper – we have just launched our desktop product but you’ll see Threadripper soon.’

IC: ‘2019?’

LS: ‘[laughs] How about this - you will definitely hear about Threadripper in 2019! How about that?’ [applause]

You can see the full exchange (and the keynote) here.

 

September 2019

If taking the overall performance crown wasn’t enough, AMD hit it home in September. The company announced a new EPYC 7H12 processor – a high frequency high core count product specifically built for high-performance customers. AMD pushed the TDP of its EPYC line up from 240 W to 280 W in order to do it, with an expected all-core turbo around 3.0 GHz. AMD stated that this chip is designed for liquid cooling, and any HPC partner that wants it can order it, but the company is not going to offer the chip on general release, and as a result there is no official price for it. We expect that if it had one, it might be anywhere from $7500-$10000.

AMD’s New 280W 64-Core Rome CPU: The EPYC 7H12

Noticeably absent in September was AMD’s 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X, the one that had been promised for September back at E3. AMD responded to these claims stating that demand for the 3950X was significantly higher than expected, and that it would be delaying the part until November. Because the 3950X requires two good performing 8-core chiplets, people speculated that all of AMD’s good silicon was going to the higher margin EPYC portfolio, as the company is still trying to drive revenue in the server space back up from zero, and this was causing the delay.

AMD also announced that its next generation Threadripper would also be coming in November, starting with a 24-core product. The official quote is:

‘We are focusing on meeting the strong demand for our 3rd generation AMD Ryzen processors in the market and now plan to launch both the AMD Ryzen 9 3950X and initial members of the 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen Threadripper processor family in volume this November. We are confident that when enthusiasts get their hands on the world’s first 16-core mainstream desktop processor and our next-generation of high-end desktop processors, the wait will be well worth it.’

At the tail end of September, AMD announced its Ryzen 3000 Pro line of processors for commercial pre-built units.

AMD Announces Ryzen Pro 3000 Series CPUs For Q4

 

October 2019

Within the first day of October, due to leaks, Intel moved up the embargo on the information of its new Cascade Lake-X processors. These Core i9-10000X class processors would offer 10-18 cores, with most noticeably a 16-core being absent (to prevent direct comparison with AMD, most people assumed). What marked this disclosure significant was that Intel was launching these processors at half the price of the previous generation. This would mean that at $979, users could get an 18-core Intel HEDT part. Not too long ago, that amount of money would only get you six Intel cores.

Intel's Cascade Lake-X CPU for High-End Desktops: 18 cores for Under $1000

As part of this disclosure, Intel was promoting the fact that this CPU has support for Thunderbolt 3, Wi-Fi 6, and Intel 2.5 gigabit Ethernet. The only issue is that those don’t come with the CPU or chipset – they require the motherboard vendor to put them on the board. In essence, any CPU can support these if the motherboard has them… At least it confirmed the presence of Intel’s 2.5 GbE i225 controllers.

Only a few days later, we saw one of the key announcements in the notebook market: Microsoft was updating its line of high-end notebooks. The key part of this announcement was the use of both Intel and AMD processors in the Surface Laptop – a high volume segment for all companies combined. This was seen as a design win for AMD, who has been gaining slow traction with its Ryzen Mobile APUs up to this point. With the 15-inch design, users could have a choice: Intel Ice Lake i5 or i7, or a semi-custom AMD Ryzen 7 or Ryzen 5 APU. The Ice Lake parts were similar to other Ice Lake designs, but AMD’s APUs were ‘semi-custom’ offering one more compute unit than the other Ryzen APUs on the market.

Microsoft Announces Surface Laptop 3 Family

Initially it was described to us that AMD would be the version for end-users/consumers, while the Intel model was built for companies (the ‘commercial’ market) to buy in bulk for their employees. Intel corrected that statement, saying that while the Microsoft website will direct end-users to buy AMD on the front page, there are links to where users can buy Intel models.

From a CPU perspective, it was hard not to look deeper into what the ‘semi-custom’ in the AMD Surface Edition APUs meant. We spoke with AMD who gave some details: ultimately ‘semi-custom’ in this context is more than just hardware, but also goes into software. Co-optimization of the design is included in this, something Intel surely did as well, however AMD also cited their work on security and the close links between Microsoft’s Xbox division and AMD’s semi-custom team on the software side as an angle to this collaboration. AMD also confirmed that they are working on at least one more semi-custom version for Microsoft in the future.

AMD’s Ryzen Microsoft Surface Edition and what Semi-Custom Means

 

A couple of weeks later, the embargo lifted on the first Microsoft Surface Laptop reviews. Our day one review coverage covered the Ryzen 3 version of the Surface Laptop 15-inch, which noted that the relationship between AMD and Microsoft was clearly solid through the use of a semi-custom design, however the CPU based on Zen+ still had a way to go to match the Intel CPUs. Despite work on the power profile the Ryzen Mobile APU, the high platform power is still an Achilles heel for AMD designs. Despite being in a premium design, which is a clear win for AMD, it still faces strong competition against Intel systems. As we tested Ryzen 5, which is the lower performance part, it only did more to strike this fact home.

The Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 (15-Inch) Review: AMD Ryzen Surface Edition

We did a more fair comparison between Intel and AMD APUs in the Surface Laptop in December, when we were able to source both Ice Lake Core i7-1065G7 and Ryzen 7 3780U units in a 15-inch form factor.

 

In the last week of October, we published our review on the Core i9-9990XE. This is Intel’s super-secret auction-only CPU, offering 14 cores all at 5.0 GHz all the time. By all respects, this processor is an absolute beast: it ripped through our benchmark suite like there was no tomorrow, smashing our compilation benchmark as the best processor we’ve ever tested, and for anything that relied on single threaded frequency or a variable threaded workload, the 9990XE performed really well.

The Intel Core i9-9990XE Review: All 14 Cores at 5.0 GHz

Unfortunately it didn’t perform as number one when it came to multi-threaded tests. Having 14 cores when the same vendor offers 18, or when the competition can offer 16-32, means that even with the super frequency there’s still a barrier a CPU like this can’t overcome. Our blender rendering test showed this all too well: 14-core 5.0 GHz took 162 seconds, but the Intel 18-core at a very competitive all-core frequency was faster at 140 seconds, and that’s before we get to the unlocked 28-core (102 seconds) or AMD’s 32-core TR2 (96 seconds), both of which are actually cheaper to buy. But for anything that was more constrained by single thread, then a 5.0 GHz Intel chip hits the spot, and there are plenty of high-frequency traders who want that performance. As long as they can deal with the power: we saw a +270W delta between idle and AVX2 load, which is well above the 255W TDP listed for this part.

With all that in mind, only a few days later the embargo lifted on Core i9-9900KS reviews. This is Intel’s 8-core all 5.0 GHz part which had been teased all year. Ultimately Intel wanted to put itself in the lead for all single-thread performance, as well as gaming, in advance of future launches of the year. We were unique in testing this as we’d only just reviewed the 14-core 5.0 GHz part, so for us perhaps the 8-core version didn’t feel all that special. The question that Intel were trying to solve with this part was:

‘Do you want the fastest ST consumer processor, or the best all-rounder? Why not both!’

The Intel Core i9-9900KS Review: The 5 GHz Consumer Special

Ultimately Intel made the best 8-core on the market. Compared to any other 8-core available, the 9900KS won pretty much every benchmark, and it made for a great gaming processor as well. For Intel to bin this chip to offer a full warranty at 5.0 GHz is an impressive feat, and then the $513 tray price is really sweet, as people were expecting it to be nearer $750. At that price it becomes a difficult choice between that and the Ryzen 9 3900X, which wins out on pure multi-threaded test due to 12 cores, and depends if you can find either of them at normal pricing.

 

November 2019

Due to the delays of various bits of hardware, November ended up being a big cluster. Neither AMD nor Intel decided to take into account that the annual Supercomputing conference was happening in the middle of the month, and decided to launch processors around it!

The AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review: 16 Cores on 7nm with PCIe 4.0

First up was one of the headline acts of the year: AMD’s Ryzen 9 3950X with 16-cores in an AM4 desktop package. With this launch it meant that the AM4 socket had stretched all the way from 4-cores in September 2016 through to 16 high-performance cores in late 2019. At $749, the 3950X also marked a new price high for any processor considered ‘mainstream’ – in fact there was a lot of debate that if this price indicated that it should be more of a desktop CPU, however my twitter poll showed because it was still on AM4, this CPU is still very much a desktop processor, albeit ‘enthusiast’ desktop.

With two full 8-core dies, we positioned our Ryzen 9 3950X review in the context that not everyone needs 16 cores, but some people do, and that this product isn’t aimed at everyone, just at those that do need it. Offering 16 cores for $749 is still a steal compared to the 6-cores at $979  we used to get several generations ago. For competition, users could either consider the 14-core Core i9-10940X at a similar price, or the 8-core Core i9-9900KS launched the previous month, for $513. Ultimately the AMD chip lost in single threaded performance against the 9900KS, but not by too much, and the AMD chip smashed the Intel one in multi-threaded tasks.

At the 30,000 ft holistic view, weighting benchmarks appropriately where a +20% lead on an ST benchmark is scored the same as a +20% lead on a multithreaded benchmark, the Ryzen 9 3950X became our best ever processor tested. High ST performance and desktop-leading MT performance does that. One criticism that could be rightly made is that for this price of CPU, a user should expect to be on the high-end desktop. I don’t disagree.

Before we get to the big stuff, in the middle of the launches was Supercomputing. At this conference we saw Raja Koduri take to the stage at HPC DevCon to give some details about Intel’s X^e GPU strategy, but from the CPU side of things, put on the table that the Aurora supercomputer will have Sapphire Rapids CPUs (the one after Ice Lake Xeon) when it is delivered in 2021.

We got a chance to interview Raja, in his first technical interview since he joined Intel almost two years ago. It’s mostly about GPU stuff, but this is the sort of exclusive I live for.

AnandTech Exclusive: An Interview with Intel’s Raja Koduri about Xe

Two weeks later, AMD and Intel decided to launch their new high-end desktop CPUs on the same day. Initially both companies set their embargoes for 9am Eastern on November 25^th, however a few days before then Intel emailed all the press to say they had moved their embargo earlier by six hours. This caused a lot of ridicule: moving the embargo to an earlier time meant that reviews that went live at that time would not be able to publish direct results from AMD, therefore ‘avoiding’ competition. This lead most of the press to believe that Intel wanted reviews where they weren’t compared to AMD, in order to mislead people who read the reviews between 3am and 9am. Some press went on the offensive, launching their review early with the AMD numbers doctored, but offered a long explanation as to why they thought Intel was being shady (see the LinusTechTips video, titled ‘Intel is PATHETIC’). Others, like us, bemoaned the fact that this was the case on social media, and ultimately decided to delay the review until the original start time. We weren’t prepared to play in these shenanigans, especially during a quiet time for traffic. Ultimately, as the numbers played out, everyone was more interested in AMD’s results.

But to cover what was actually launched: Intel launched Cascade Lake-X. In total, we saw four CPUs: the 18-core, the 14-core, the 12-core, and the 10-core. As stated previously, there is no 16-core such that there is no direct comparison with AMD’s 16-core hardware – Intel’s official line on this is that there isn’t a gap in their product portfolio to facilitate the entry of a 16-core.

It’s a Cascade of 14nm CPUs: AnandTech’s Intel Core i9-10980XE Review

At the end of the day, the Core i9-10980XE that we reviewed performed slightly better than the Core i9-9980XE that Intel launched the previous year, due to the increased frequency. The other feature of note, detectable, is the use of Cascade Lake, and the first round of hardware-based security updates that aren’t present in the 9980XE and Skylake-X family. For users that need Intel’s latest high-end desktop, it’s a definite plus to the product.

Another plus is the price – moving the 18-core part down to $979 is the price reduction that most of us suspected that Intel needed to make in order to stay competitive. Intel’s latest HEDT platform now spans from $590 to $979, while AMD’s new 3^rd Gen Threadripper HEDT platform starts at $1400. We’re now in bizarre world, where Intel’s best HEDT part doesn’t even touch the price of the entry level AMD HEDT processor.

And with that, we move on to AMD’s new third generation Threadripper product. The previous generation already had 24-core and 32-core hardware, but the chiplet/IO die paradigm solved the major issue with those parts – unequal DRAM access latency. Much like the Rome EPYC  CPUs on which the 3^rd Gen Threadripper are built, having a central IO die equalizes DRAM and PCIe latency across a single chip, making it a lot easier to write code for and making the chip a lot faster overall.

The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X Review: 24 and 32 Cores on 7nm

The difference is so striking that the 24-core Threadripper 3960X, one of the new CPUs, easily beats AMD’s old 32-core 2990WX in almost all of our benchmarks. Add in the increased frequency, the new microarchitecture, and the unified memory design, and AMD had a hit compared to its old hardware.

Obviously comparisons to Intel’s HEDT were made: for example, the Core i9-10980XE with 18 cores has a base frequency of 3.0 GHz but a turbo of 4.6 GHz, where AMD’s TR3 3960X with 24 cores has a base frequency of 3.8 GHz but a lower turbo of 4.5 GHz. Both chips are surprisingly competitive in single core performance, due to AMD’s performance-per-clock advantage with Zen 2 over the iterated ‘Skylake’ design, even if the frequencies were in favor of Intel by 100-200 MHz. When it comes to MT performance, in all but AVX-512 code, the AMD processor wins. The 32-core takes that win a lot further away, seemingly out of reach of Intel in the desktop space for a couple of years. The only way Intel could compete today is by bringing its 28-core to the desktop, which would absolutely eat into its workstation market.

Even Luxmark, built on Intel’s Embree engine, gets a good thrashing

That’s not to say that the 24-core and 32-core don’t have their faults. The processors are expensive ($1400 and $2000), the motherboards are expensive ($300+), and at 280W TDP, you best go for some good $150+ liquid cooling. But the performance is hard to ignore in the benchmarks that matter. For these CPUs, web benchmarks don’t matter, gaming benchmarks (at any resolution) don’t matter. Rendering and throughput benchmarks do matter. I’ve never used the word ‘bloodbath’ in a review before, but this time I did.

On the back of both of these launches, Wendell and I did another video about the products and the state of the CPU market.

December 2019

Here are in December, and thinks have gone quiet. Well, all quiet except for our Intel vs. AMD review of the Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 (15-inch) family. In this test, we put the best on each side against each other in a unique never-been-seen-before fist fight. The rumble has commenced.

The Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 Showdown: AMD's Ryzen Picasso vs. Intel's Ice Lake

Perhaps expectedly, Intel’s Ice Lake won the showdown. Ice Lake’s raw performance is a step above Whiskey Lake, which AMD was struggling to hold on with anyway. The high performance and low power consumption of Ice Lake is a hard combination to beat, especially if you’re on a custom AMD processor built with previous generation cores on a 12nm process. The one place where AMD was able to hold its own was in the gaming section, where the ‘custom’ part of the design, with an extra compute unit enabled, did help with extra performance in some tests. But elsewhere, Intel was the clear winner.

One could question if AMD moving to Zen 2 in mobile would have a big impact – perhaps AMD would fit in 8 cores where Intel has four, but then it becomes more of an efficiency battle between AMD using TSMC 7nm and Intel’s own 10++ manufacturing process. Unfortunately a Zen 2 based APU wasn’t ready in time for Microsoft, and we have to wait until the next generation of Surface hardware to perhaps see a fairer right. But kudos to Intel for this win, for sure.

 

A Blast From the Past

Interested to read what happened in 2018? Spectre, Meltdown, Visiting GlobalFoundries, 28 cores at 5.0 GHz, interviewing Jim Keller at Intel ?! Click here:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13746/anandtech-year-in-review-2018-cpus