Silicon Lottery has listed prices for Core i9-9900K and i7-9700K.

You might be able to tweak your PCIe bus clock in an attempt to get more stability. You could also try increasing your chipset voltage.

 

Run Cinebench R15 with and w/o HT. Both ST and MT part. So, you can make nice table with 4 values. I made quite interesting conclusion long time ago on Ryzen.

 

I'm not really sure how that relates to what I said, especially seeing as Ryzen's approach to SMT is quite different from Intel's HT.

 

They're based on the same fundamental principle but they're different enough that the end result isn't the same, which is why Windows has (even to this day) so many scheduler issues with Ryzen. Actually, Windows even had major scheduler issues with HT, both during the P4 days and when Intel re-introduced it in the Core i series, but for the most part all of those problems have been ironed out.
Regardless, my point is that real physical cores is better than SMT/HT and if you compare the 9700K to the 7700K, you're going to see a significant performance improvement for a minimal price increase.

 

But if you compare the 9700K to the 8700K you'll hardly see any benefit. Speaking as someone who uses a lot of threads for computing apps, I don't see the 9700K as attractive at all.

 

Very true, but they also cost about the same.
As I've mentioned before, I personally am not interested in or would recommend others to get the 9700K, but just because I feel that way, that doesn't make it a bad value when compared to predecessors.

In other words, HT for the sake of HT is not a feature worth paying for. What's important is the overall performance, and this CPU should be comparable to the 8700K. It'll be better in some tests and worse in others. But since the clock-per-clock performance will likely be very similar, I see that as a good thing - people who want to shop Intel will have 2 CPU choices for the same price, the same single-threaded performance, and same overall tech, but they have a choice as to which one best suits their multi-threaded needs. That may not be what you and I prefer, but I do see the potential appeal.

 

How is that any different from what they've been doing for the past decade? (offering similarly performing products year after year) I mean, do you really think people would be satisfied with a product that could perform worse than its predecessor? The 8700K was lauded because it was a genuine improvement, superior to the 7700K in virtually every way. The 9700K is not.

 

For the most part, you're totally right - this isn't any different. So what's the problem here? Intel still sees a profit regardless of that. And what makes you so sure the 9700K will perform worse than the 8700K? Why would Intel be dumb enough to do such a thing? Again - HT isn't that good. In many typical situations, it takes roughly 3 [Intel] HT threads to maybe outperform 1 physical core. The 8700K has 6 total HT threads; the 9700K has none, but 2 additional physical cores. Do the math and you'll find, on average, both CPUs will perform roughly the same. Intel will see a profit of roughly equal value no matter which model people buy, and that's all that they and their shareholders care about.

I think it's worth pointing out that I am in a lot more agreement with you than you think I am. If Intel really wanted to screw with AMD, they'd ditch the 9900K and make the 9700K have HT, because as I stated before, it's obviously disabled artificially. I'm well aware the 9700K isn't a major improvement over the 8700K, but you have to remember too that Intel can't afford to piss off their own fanbase. It's much better for them to take small incremental improvements year after year than to leap ahead of AMD. Imagine buying a 7700K in late 2017 only to find 2 years later you could've got something that was literally twice as fast for the same price from the same brand on the same fabrication node with overall the same core architecture (those last 2 points matter, because the CPU isn't faster or a better value due to any architectural changes). Intel fans would feel truly ripped off in such a scenario. And let's not forget Xeon owners. So what can Intel do? They don't have enough clock headroom to release yet another 6c/12t CPU with higher boost clocks.

Intel is in a tricky situation. They've been price-gouging people for so long and being so slow to progress performance that AMD's very good performance-per-<currency> has truly screwed with Intel's product lineup. If they continue the trends they've been doing all these years then people will think Intel isn't capable of competing, which in their eyes would be a major failure. If they try to match AMD's level of features and performance by price, then their existing customers will feel gypped and people will be very questionable of their honesty and true value. Intel has to be very careful about the way they release their high-end products, and unless Intel sold a weird 7c/14t i7, what else could they do?

 

For applications which are extremely thread-heavy, the 8700K may have an advantage. The 9700K will win in some areas and lose in others (as you said yourself). Also, having alternatives is not a bad thing but the 9700K is supposed to be the successor to the 8700K (the numbers make this clear). Having a successor which could potentially be slower than its predecessor in certain workloads is not a good look.

Sorry, but I disagree. Intel offering mediocre upgrades year after year is precisely the thing that pissed me off - a previously loyal Intel customer. I don't know about you, but I don't know a single Intel customer who is satisfied with the glacial process of the past decade. Whether it's CPUs or GPUs, we want rapid progress - given a choice of 5% improvement or 50% improvement, virtually everyone would take the latter.

Remember that Intel used to charge $1700 for the 10-core 6950X. Today, you can get a 16-core 7960X for about the same price (both 14nm), and yet I don't see anybody complaining. If anything, people are thrilled with this progress. Intel has no compunction about lower the price when needed, sometimes drastically (the 10-core 7900X is $999 vs $1700 for the 6950X, and the 8-core 7820X is $599 vs $1050 for the 6900K).

 

I totally agree, but again, I think you are over-estimating the value and performance of HT.

What exactly are you disagreeing with? Because I feel the same way (except, I've never been a loyal Intel customer). I'm not stating what I as the consumer want of Intel, I'm stating the dichotomy that Intel is in and why they can't give us what we want.
Intel put themselves in this crappy situation.

That's different. AMD didn't have anything to compete with a 10-core CPU at the time. Intel could charge whatever they wanted because they knew that anybody who wanted that performance was willing to pay for it. But today, AMD is able to compete with Intel's entire lineup. That makes things difficult, because that means Intel has to either adjust the prices for every single CPU they have (which will scare investors) or they have to shift around every performance tier (which will piss off customers who paid the same price for a dramatic performance loss). The i7s and Xeons are the trickiest for Intel to figure out; everything else can easily be adjusted without causing much of an uproar.

Also, nobody complained about the price of the 7980X (isn't that the 16-core? The XE was 18 cores) because it was just a comically poor value compared to Threadripper. Why complain about something when you can take an alternate route without many sacrifices?

 

I'm disagreeing with your assessment that Intel customers don't want rapid progress. You seem to be suggesting that Intel customers would prefer mediocre improvements so that they can justify their current CPU purchase, and I don't think that's true. That'd be like 1800X/2700X owners hoping that the 3700X bombs so that they feel happy about the money they paid for their current CPU - does any AMD customer think like this?

The 7960X is 16-core, and I used it in my example because it's priced similarly to the 6950X (the 7980XE is more expensive - $1999). The 7960X vastly outperforms the 6950X which is sold at the same price, and yet nobody is complaining about it. I think you're making this out to be a bigger issue than it is.

 

That´s true of course but we have to acknowledge that we are reaching a wall regarding performance increases. Intel milked customers as hard as possible but the only things that could have done better was to lower prices, stop the artificial segmentation of features and increases cores, like they are doing know. All of this would provide a nice performance jump, nothing more because Intel can´t increase IPC or clock speeds in a significant way like in the past. So prepare yourself because the future is going to be made of 5% improvements... And to make things worse it looks like GPUs are going to follow the same path...

 

I didn't suggest Intel customers don't want rapid progress; of course they do. I'm saying Intel, at this point, must do mediocre improvements or else they will anger customers who have already paid too much. Again - if they make products too good too quickly, their existing customers will become bitter. 6950X you brought up earlier is an old product. A lot has changed since then, so it isn't easy to compare to.

It's also 2 years older at a time when there was no competition, so it isn't an apples to apples comparison.
I'm not making this an issue at all; I frankly don't care what Intel does, I just know that the design of the 9700K was very deliberate and strategic. They've been screwing customers over with overpriced mediocrity for about 5 years now and karma has finally caught up with them.

What he said.

 

And again, I disagree with this assessment. Intel customers will not be angry about their past purchases just because Intel releases a much faster product (I have no idea where you get this idea). Just look at how popular the 8700K was - 50% more multi-core performance for a slight increase in price, and it sold like hot cakes.

I think you misunderstood my post. I'm not saying that Intel is going to offer 50% improvement, just that given the hypothetical choice between a very mediocre improvement and a very good improvement most customers would choose the latter.

 

So you're telling me that if you bought a 7700K in October 2017 that you'd be perfectly fine with an 8c/16t i7 (which would be beyond a 100% performance improvement) of the same price being released? You wouldn't feel bitter about that at all? And what about the Xeon users?

I'm not misunderstanding you at all; I agree.

 

The only time when I can see existing customers being pissed off is when there is a large price drop soon after release. If you bought something for $300 but the company drops the price to $200 a week later then people would be angry. Otherwise, I see no issues.

Note that there is always information about upcoming products. Much like the leaks about the 9000 series, there is typically some info about an impending release so people have time to prepare. It's why people on the forums here were asking if they should wait for the 20/11 series before Nvidia announced Turing. If someone buys a product just before a much better product comes out then they would only have themselves to blame. Typically, in such scenarios people say that they should have waited (they usually don't blame the company for moving things forward).

 

No, I'm not joking. My current rig was 5500 € when I bought it. And 5 GHz turbo clock out of the box for the 9900k is very nice.

 

Intel simply did a thing and named their old i7 to i9 and i5 to i7 how I see this launch. 8700K is actually superior to 9700K from enthusiast stand point most likely.