
4-Core i3-9350KF 2% more perf than 18-Core i9-9980XE according to UserBenchmark - mschuetz
https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i9-9980XE-vs-Intel-Core-i3-9350KF/m652504vsm775825
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kup0
Not really all that surprising. i3 is Coffee Lake, i9 is Skylake. Even clock-
for-clock, the process possibly improved enough for a slight IPC advantage to
the i3.

The 2% here is heavily weighted on single-core performance and the results are
IMHO what one would expect from these two parts (the moment more than four
cores are in a test, the i9 wins by a mile).

Also, the Reddit link posted seems to be all about a whole different side of
the discussion (the calculation changes at userbenchmark, AMD/Intel favoring,
etc).

~~~
mschuetz
Yes, that new algorithm disproportionally disadvantages AMD CPUs which are
largely about multi-core performance. The new score weighting basically
ignores the main advantages of the Ryzen series.

~~~
kup0
I'm curious if they're just catering to their most common readers. If they
have a high percentage of people that use the site that use workloads where
single-core performance or low-count-multi-core performance is most important
(gaming, apps that take advantage of 4 cores but not 18, etc) then maybe they
thought that their algorithm originally favored Ryzen too much, and this is a
balancing correction, not a favoring of Intel?

Also, I don't understand the uproar over one small little overall percentage
number- the rest of the numbers are there for anyone to easily weigh one
against the other. Just a few lines down it's clear than the 18-core part
demolishes the 4-core part in multi-core workloads (as anyone would expect
without even visiting the website in the first place).

Being able to handle more programs at a time/etc really has no bearing on
"effective speed"\- if their workloads are not apps that take advantage of 18
cores (encoders, etc), it's possible a 4-core part could "feel" just as fast,
or faster, than an 18-core part if it does _their_ workload faster.

That said, the whole AMD/Intel war is less important to me because fanboyism
in any amount is toxic and worth avoiding. People biased heavily enough
towards one company will always see anything like this as some kind of
conspiracy or attack, regardless of whether or not it's true (something I
don't know in this case)

~~~
rowanG077
What do you most people use their computer for? Web browsing, word. Maybe some
foto or video editing. With the exception of word all of these things
MASSIVELY gain from having lots of cores. Not sure where the myth that most
people have single threaded workloads comes from because it's not true at all
at this time.

~~~
kup0
In what world would going from 4 cores to 18 cores even remotely matter for
web browsing? If you notice a difference in >4 cores for web browsing (and
maybe it IS noticeable and I just don't realize it)... then the web's even in
a sadder state than I thought. Anecdotally, I had about 20-30 tabs open
yesterday on a four-core machine, a couple of those I was actively using (one
playing a video), and CPU usage was maybe 25% or less.

Photo/video editing on the other hand will DEFINITELY see a benefit, something
I agree with- but I doubt nearly as many people do this as one would think-
and again, it's clear from userbenchmark's page of data that the 18-core part
in these workloads would demolish the 4-core part...so I don't see a problem.

I guess everyone just can't let go of what the "effective overall speed"
number/percentage means. _Maybe it 's better not to have an "overall number"
in the first place, since it can never always be true and is too dependent on
the user?_ I have a feeling the majority of people reading the site are going
to look at more detail than a single number anyway. They're certainly more
likely to be gamers and/or enthusiasts

~~~
llampx
Ever since users could open multiple tabs at once and web pages could be
active in the background, along with everything else that's running on the
machine in the first place.

If single-core is all that's important, why are AMD and Intel coming out with
multi-core chips at all and why are people buying them if they don't see any
improvement?

~~~
kup0
It's less about single-core vs. multi-core, and even then, it's really not
about quad-core vs more-cores.

My thought pattern through all of this (and maybe I'm completely off base) is
that, for instance, having a 4-core part with high single-core performance
might be preferable to a gamer/enthusiast (depending on common workloads) than
an 18-core part with less single-core performance, and that maybe this is all
a reason to consider why the weighting of UserBenchmark's "overall" score
changed instead of immediately attaching the change to some anti-AMD bias

Maybe my idea that the most common workloads of UserBenchmark users (I don't
claim to know their demographics, but I figured one could make assumptions
based on the types of individuals that would look up benchmarks in the first
place- very common among gamers) would see diminishing returns after, say 4
cores, is wrong- but that was how my thought process was going.

And a related point I'll concede (I admit my thinking maybe is just too old-
school, biased, too filtered through my own experience and needs updating) is
maybe there are more games and programs than I thought that actually take
advantage of more than four cores.

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ummm32
Can't somebody just invent a pluggable PC architecture, ala Kubernetes?

So you would connect several PCs, notebooks to a switch, or by wifi, then you
run a desktop, gnome or something, but there's a layer, heck it can be even a
wrapper before running the binary.

The layer or the wrapper would just check how's going your load, memory and
would the app from whatever machine has enough free resources available, the
it would show you a window with you app running there (in a PC/notebook
different from you "main" one), as fast as the network connection you're using
to cluster up your assembled PCs / notebooks.

I think Xwindow and some go code could do the trick? There's some experience
sharing clipboards/mouse/keyboard input (synergy).

What would be really necessary is a scheduler ala kubernetes (but a somewhat
clever bash script could the job as well), to be able to orderly tap the free
resources in several connected PCs/notebooks.

No need to rewrite thousands of apps, or design a new desktop environment
completely from scratch, and you could actually would be able to run Chrome in
its own hardware, just to use a hundred of tabs if you feel like to do it

~~~
myrandomcomment
They got close...look at Plan9.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs)

Everything on the network was just a mount, file system, sound, cpu, etc.

------
mschuetz
Wrote "more perf" than "higher effective speed" due to title length limits.

Also see discussion on reddit:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/chaofa/psa_userbe...](https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/chaofa/psa_userbenchmarkcom_have_updated_their_cpu/)

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brian_herman__
They changed their weighting of multicore performance recently....

~~~
mschuetz
To a weighting that virtually ignores multi core performance entirely.

Multi-Core weighting is now downgraded from 10% to 2%, single-core is at 40%
and quad-core at 58%: [https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Faq/What-is-the-
effective-CPU-...](https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Faq/What-is-the-effective-
CPU-speed-index/55)

Counting 58% for four cores yet only 2% for >4 cores in effective speed is
nothing short of an outright lie. And this change coming 2 weeks after
benchmark results that put Ryzen ahead in multi-core and value proposition.

~~~
la_barba
What is the "outright lie" here? Its their opinion on what they think is
important for the needs of their audience. Taking advantage of so many extra
cores by a single process is not all that easy or common. In a multi-process
scenario the extra cores are obviously very useful. A person intending to buy
a CPU for server loads would look at the appropriate benchmarks...

~~~
geezerjay
> Taking advantage of so many extra cores by a single process is not all that
> easy or common.

Browsers are both multiprocess and multithreaded. The ability to run a few
webapps without having your system drag to a halt is a feature that's
important to essentially everyone.

~~~
la_barba
>The ability to run a few webapps without having your system drag to a halt is
a feature that's important to essentially everyone.

Webapps such as? I have a 4 core CPU from 2014 (i7-4790K) and I can't recall
that ever happening to me. Primarily because any modern OS will throttle crazy
runaway threads to ensure UI responsiveness, so the system doesn't 'drag to a
halt' as you claim.

Also honestly.. how many people are looking at CPU benchmarks to run browsers
better? I'd wager a twenty that its mostly gaming nerds who are obsessed with
CPU benchmarks. Then.. its also a question of knowing your audience. I'm sure
they have a better idea of who their audience is than you or I.

~~~
xemdetia
Gmail is the #1 culprit for completely locking some of my lesser systems
(i5-7200U). I also have the fun thing sometimes where opening a large PDF or
Google Doc can take an unreasonable amount of resources from the rest of the
system for processing. I had Facebook do it constantly for a period where I
made the bad decision to use it for a while. I find a good bit of information
from benchmarks for non-desktop processors/whole system configurations,
especially when a new feature set/generation swings the difference between an
i3 and an i5 for instance.

"Primarily because any modern OS will throttle crazy runaway threads to ensure
UI responsiveness" seems like you have a particular OS in mind, and I would be
interested in hearing more. I do not observe that behaviour on Debian 9 (and
other Linux distros), Mac OS X, and Windows 7/8\. I regularly bring any of
those to UI stuttering/freeze from various workloads. Webapps only really
breaks the lesser ones singlehandedly though (most of my other systems are 4+
core with 32GB+ RAM).

~~~
la_barba
Well.. I don't know what to say, I guess you should report those bugs to the
appropriate vendors then. I don't believe a memory leak means we tell people
to buy more memory :)

>"Primarily because any modern OS will throttle crazy runaway threads to
ensure UI responsiveness" seems like you have a particular OS in mind, and I
would be interested in hearing more.

Sure. You should read up about thread scheduling and how an OS scheduler
works. I don't think I can explain that in a comment, and I'd do a poor job
anyway.

>I do not observe that behaviour on Debian 9 (and other Linux distros), Mac OS
X, and Windows 7/8\. I regularly bring any of those to UI stuttering/freeze
from various workloads. Webapps only really breaks the lesser ones
singlehandedly though (most of my other systems are 4+ core with 32GB+ RAM).

I don't observe that behavior. Just for fun I ran a CPU Stress test
([https://silver.urih.com/](https://silver.urih.com/)) as I'm typing this
comment. CPU pegged at 100%. Not feeling a thing...
[https://imgur.com/a/J0l9VaP](https://imgur.com/a/J0l9VaP)

~~~
xemdetia
CPU utilization is an extremely poor indicator for whether or not your system
will feel stuttering or freezing. What makes your system freeze is having more
tasks to complete than can be reasonably scheduled in a time frame to as to
appear continuous/realtime. Most OS schedulers that I am aware of do not
provide special treatment to UI processes and defer to the fact that most
modern UI's require many programs to respond in a timely fashion to provide a
user interface and do not assign priority unless specially instructed. Most
provide (relatively) even priority and have high priority interrupts like
Window's ctrl-alt-delete and higher priority to kernel threads.

In Linux actual scenarios for stuttering/freezing are generally represented as
a load average >1, and stuttering for me generally starts to happen when I get
above 3 and I assure you no Linux system will work without observable stutter
when you start getting into the 20+ load average range.

In earnest I have no idea why you tried to use a JavaScript based benchmark to
support your point. Even after observing it the number of nonvoluntary ctxt
switches barely even registered from baseline, probably from the variety of
ways browsers do their own internal threading strategies. I could not see how
to change that JavaScript benchmark to make it actually provide an interesting
load on my system, so I'll just leave it at that.

~~~
la_barba
I have no idea what happens under the hood in Linux, but I have never observed
my Linux desktop 'crawling to a halt' because of some silly webapp. This is
normal expected behavior. I know for a fact that ensuring responsiveness of
GUI apps has been in the NT scheduler for decades. Look up dynamic priority
groups. There is really no point rehashing and arguing over basic design
issues that anyone can lookup and as such this thread is not really productive
for either of us. Hope you have a nice day, Goodbye!

------
WarOnPrivacy
The single threaded performance of the i3 is about 3% higher than the i9.

Factoring in all the cores tho, the i9 performance is about 3x the i3 - but at
about 9x the cost. ref: [https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i9-9980XE-
vs-Inte...](https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i9-9980XE-vs-
Intel-i3-9350KF/3373vs3459)

On balance, the i3 looks like a solid chip if a bit pricey for an i3.

------
imtringued
So the 18 core chip is 5.48 times faster than the 4 core chip in multicore
performance and it has almost the same single core performance as a i3 chip
which is purely optimized for single core performance. Just by looking at the
core count you would expect it to have 4.5 times the performance. Very
impressive.

~~~
zamadatix
It's either not a linear scale with the 1 or 4 core benchmarks or just plain
incorrect. Treating it linearly results in the paradox that at stock the 18
cores each run significantly faster than if 1 core were running. This is the
opposite of what the boost algorithm would do. The quad core scores seem
reasonable though, just mildly lower per core than the single core bench.

