
The Intel Comet Lake Core i9-10900K, i7-10700K, i5-10500K CPU Review - willis936
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15785/the-intel-comet-lake-review-skylake-we-go-again
======
joenathanone
Money quote:

>"As mentioned, 10th Gen Comet Lake is, by and large, the same CPU core design
as 6th Gen Skylake from 2015. This is, for lack of a better explanation,
Skylake++++ built on 14++. Aside from increasing the core count, the
frequency, the memory support, some of the turbo responses, and enabling more
voltage/frequency customization (more on the next page), there has been no
significant increase in IPC from Intel all while AMD has gone from Excavator
to Zen to Zen 2, with sizable IPC increases and efficiency improvements. With
Intel late on 10nm, Comet Lake does feel like another hold-over until Intel
can either get its 10nm process right for the desktop market or backport its
newer architectures to 14nm; so Intel should be trying its best to avoid a
sixth generation of the same core design after this."

~~~
localhost
I would imagine that this is what Jim Keller is working day and night at Intel
to avoid. I’m really looking forward to what comes out of his work at Intel.
Competition is good.

~~~
baybal2
I don't think so. I'm not very confident if he is given design or architect
duties.

On last few employers, he was mostly a glorified project manager/lead first,
and an engineer later.

Intel has more than enough big name architects, and designers to deliver new
architectures.

The reason they cannot do it now is because they locked themselves into
iterative mode of operation by years of low risk, cow milking projects.

If they can't stop iterating, they have no alternative to continuing milking
Skylake just like AMD did with Nulldozer

~~~
localhost
Interesting! Do you have any anecdotes that you can share about his recent
roles at AMD and Tesla? From public information, he was the designer of the
Zen microarchitecture at AMD.

~~~
baybal2
Zen architecture team lead was Mike Clark, engineering lead Suzanne Plummer

------
neogodless
It's not all bad.

> On the face of it, the Core i9-10900K with its ability to boost all ten
> cores to 4.9 GHz sustained (in the right motherboard) as well as offering
> 5.3 GHz turbo will be a welcome recommendation to some users. It offers some
> of the best frame rates in our more CPU-limited gaming tests, and it
> competes at a similar price against an AMD processor that offers two more
> cores at a lower frequency.

If you don't mind your CPU drawing 254W of power.

> For recommendations, Intel’s Core i9 is currently performing the best in a
> lot of tests, and that’s hard to ignore. But will the end-user want that
> extra percent of performance, for the sake of spending more on cooling and
> more in power?

In my experience, I prefer cool running hardware as much as possible. I don't
need the absolute most powerful if the costs, heat and noise are going to move
the balance too far.

But I hope we see Intel succeed in improving their process and innovating a
bit more instead of just shoving more cylinders in the engine and adding
nitrous.

Disclaimer: Happy AMD Ryzen CPU owner

~~~
deng
Please someone correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAICS the core voltage of the i9
1,52V. So with 254W, that thing really draws 167 amps? I guess every μΩ of
resistance counts here or the board just explodes?

~~~
jeffbee
That's already been a problem for a long time. When CPU speed changes the
transient currents are ridiculous, and the dI/dt is bananas, too. This is one
reason why a few generations ago Intel had to go with a fully-integrated
voltage regulator. The mainboard people were unable to build good, efficient
VRMs off-chip.

~~~
eggsnbacon1
Maybe its not possible to regulate such a high current at gigahertz speeds off
chip? The board traces and pins might have inductance high enough to negate
smoothing capacitors at these speeds?

~~~
jeffbee
Yeah I mean there's no way a part on the other side of a CPU socket is doing
anything in the gigahertz range. Those frequencies are covered by layers and
capacitors in or on the package itself. What's hard about modern VRMs is being
able to step from Icc(max) to zero while overshooting < 25mv, or the forward
load step from nothing to ~200A in an instant without dropping. The specs are
in Intel's VRxx docs (eg VR13).

------
throwphoton
It's becoming really difficult to figure out whether an X-core i5 is better or
worse (even for a specific purpose) than a Y-core i7 or any other combination
of [model, clock_speed, num_cores].

Last time I bought a machine I cut this Gordian Knot by _not giving a shit_ ,
which has to count as some kind of failure of branding.

~~~
duxup
After GHz stopped mattering (and maybe to some extent it never did)... I lost
track of all things CPU and what matters.

Anytime I looked into it I felt like I got a lot of truisms and mixed advice,
and the PC enthusiast crowd seems equivalent to the 'pixel peeper' crowd of
photography, obsessed with misc stats that I'm not sure will matter to me, or
anyone.

~~~
snazz
These days, choose a processor that meets your core count needs and budget.
Some applications are primarily single-threaded, so for those you might want a
processor with fewer, faster cores. For parallelizable tasks like compiling
code (up until the linking stage), more cores is better.

It might also be worth buying an AMD just to support them, but OEMs still
mostly favor Intel. Performance per dollar is usually a lot better on the AMD
side.

~~~
harpratap
Depends on the form factor. On desktop yes AMD might be better for your money
but as an owner of Ryzen 3500u laptop I'd recommend Intel to anyone. For some
reason Chrome is more janky than my old i5 4300u and it lags when playing
1080p x265 files in every player I've tried.

~~~
snazz
Can you check chrome://gpu and make sure that Video Decode: Unavailable does
not appear? Video decode should be handled by your GPU, not the CPU. If this
is Linux, then you might not be using the GPU at all, which would explain both
symptoms.

~~~
harpratap
Hardware protected video decode and out-of-process rasterization are the only
ones unavailable. Everything else is Hardware accelerated. Another thing I
notice is that GPU stays a steady 20% and rarely every shoots up, which I
believe is what contributes to video player lags. No matter what I try in
Windows 10 - performance mode, gaming mode it still won't go beyond 20% when
playing videos.

------
greendave
> Through our tests, we saw the Intel Core i9-10900K peak at 254 W during our
> AVX2-accelerated y-cruncher test. LINPACK and 3DPMavx did not push the
> processor as hard.

That's a lot of power. Granted, on non-AVX code, the max they measured looks
closer to 190W but that's still dramatically more than the 140W max that the
16-core Ryzen needs.

~~~
Synaesthesia
That is but not beyond what most PSU’s can do these days. Also it’s only when
you’re stressing all 10 cores. But it is significant.

~~~
r00fus
A buyer might need to ask themselves if they're good with a liquid-cooled
setup. Because moving past air-cooled is expensive & potentially messy.

~~~
Drew_
I very much doubt these processors actually require liquid cooling.

~~~
beervirus
Nah, they'll just throttle.

~~~
Drew_
The test bed for this review uses a "Thermalright TRUE Copper" cooler which
looks to be an air cooler from the mid-to-late 2000's. Needless to say
Anandtech probably didn't run their benchmarks with insufficient cooling.

------
m0xte
I was humming and hawing over moving back to Intel until I read this. So the
conclusion I took from this is to wait for Zen 3 to come out and then use the
price dumping on Zen 2 cores to get a 65W TDP Ryzen 7 3700X for considerably
less coin than a 9700K.

Then do the same with Zen 3 when Zen vNext comes out because I'm not having to
buy a new board and socket just to get a miniscule increase in grunt this time
or next time.

------
samfisher83
I guess you got to give the skylake architecture some credit. Their 5 year old
uarch is still pretty competitive. This is is almost like Pentium 4 vs amd64
days. Wonder if intel will pull out a core2duo.

~~~
theevilsharpie
Skylake (and its derivatives) is only competitive if you disregard power
usage.

For environments where performance/watt matters (e.g., servers, laptops,
etc.), Skylake is significantly behind Zen 2.

~~~
fomine3
Skylake (or Intel platform) is still has advantage in laptop/tablet area
because of optimization for idle power usage than Ryzen.

~~~
blattimwind
The 4xxxHS parts seem to be rather competitive there as well. Note that these
are monolithic Zen 2 APUs, I suspect this is the same silicon that will ship
as 4xxxG parts on the desktop.

------
css
> The new CPUs have the LGA1200 socket, which means that current 300-series
> motherboards are not sufficient, and users will require new LGA1200
> motherboards. This is despite the socket being the same size.

Well that is disappointing.

~~~
leetcrew
seems like a dumb move, but I'm sure they have their reasons.

I bought z390 mobo last year with some very beefy VRMs. it was near the end of
the cycle for the 9th gen parts, so I was thinking I would consider upgrading
whenever they released the next line of chips. I would honestly consider
buying the 10900K if it were compatible with my motherboard, especially now
that I'm compiling code at home, but I'm not willing to also pay $200-300 for
another high-end motherboard.

I sort of suspect they looked at the last gen motherboards and worried that
they wouldn't all be able to handle the increased power demands. maybe they
decided not to support that to avoid making people look up each SKU to see if
it could handle the new processors.

~~~
blattimwind
> seems like a dumb move, but I'm sure they have their reasons.

Uhm, Intel has been doing this since always. One generation of boards for one
generation of CPUs. At most two.

------
Aardwolf
How comes that the fastest desktop CPU's from Intel don't have AVX-512?

The Xeon CPU's have AVX-512.

Laptop CPU's like i3-8121U have AVX-512.

Why not desktop too? This has been going on for years.

~~~
jeffbee
Perhaps this tells us something about the relative size of the high-
performance desktop market compared to the market for MacBook Pros, which have
Ice Lake CPUs with AVX-512.

~~~
willis936
Why speculate? If we take i9s to be considered par equivalents to high-end
CPUs we find in MacBook Pros, and the market distribution of cheap to
expensive CPUs is similar in both desktop and notebook segments, then we can
simply look at earnings reports.

[https://s21.q4cdn.com/600692695/files/doc_financials/2019/20...](https://s21.q4cdn.com/600692695/files/doc_financials/2019/2019-Annual-
Report.pdf)

From page 34:

6% of Intel's Desktop platform volume is $705Mn, so total volume is $11.75Bn.
5% of Intel's Notebook platform volume is $1080Mn, so total volume is $21.6Bn.

So the desktop market is slightly larger than half the size of the notebook
market, but $12Bn is a lot of money to leave on the table then turn your back
to. Especially since an aged microarchitecture threatens all CPU-related
revenue streams.

------
talmr
Each time I see these kinds of reviews, I take comfort in knowing my eight
year old i7 3770k is still chugging along at 4.7ghz OC. Its matched with 16gb
ram and a 980 TI, and it handles most modern games at 60fps just fine albeit
on lower settings. I also sometimes boot into Ubuntu to write some code while
my girlfriend wants to use the macbook, and I just mostly use VSC and write
Node or Go apps.

Maybe in the future I'll just get a newer GPU, but for my needs of primarily
gaming and coding I don't yet see a reason to upgrade the CPU and motherboard.

~~~
eropple
This is not an unreasonable spot to be in, but it's going to change in the
next year or so I think for most gaming stuff.

The Ivy Bridge stuff is a little on the pokey side now; my i5-3570K was in my
HTPC until earlier this year when I replaced it with an i7-6700K. But a
higher-end Ivy Bridge will still be OK for most games for a little while yet.
And a 980Ti is still a great card; I upgraded to a 2070 Super because I needed
Turing NVENC but the 980Ti was playing everything great at 1080p and most
things very well at 1440p. As things start to target the PS5 and Xbox Series X
as their lead platforms, however, I would expect that to change. The PS5 will
field eight Zen 2 cores and that's going to be a significant step up. Modern
game engines are already really happy with multicore systems (the 3900X in my
desktop gets _put to work_ by Doom Eternal) and this will only increase.
Increases in expected throughput is going to put the 980Ti in a bad spot, too.

That said, Ivy Bridge and Haswell really have to take the crown for "longest-
lived worthwhile CPUs". That HTPC (which was formerly my desktop, and had 32GB
of RAM because of it) is now a NAS, and it's great. I wonder how long it'll
last.

~~~
fishtacos
"That said, Ivy Bridge and Haswell really have to take the crown for "longest-
lived worthwhile CPUs"".

Sandy Bridge era CPUs (i5-2500/k, i7-2600/k, etc) were the ones that really
shook up the market. Much lower power envelope and a large jump in performance
from Nehalem. Ivy Bridge was the Tick-Tock iteration of SB, providing higher
power usage/heat output (counterintuitively), with about a 5% IPC increase
IIRC, based on the famous 3D Tri-Gate process. It was widely considered a bust
at the time.

~~~
eropple
I was thinking that, but I know a lot of folks still running Ivy Bridge and
don't know anybody still running Sandy Bridge!

~~~
fishtacos
Ivy Bridge was a minimal upgrade over SB. Higher power consumption with a
roughly 5% IPC improvement under certain workloads. It was the trial for the
Tri-Gate process, although it ended up being a bust (for that gen, at least -
not too up to date with the newer iterations).

Still running a slightly OC'ed i7-2700K here, and a Radeon 290X. In terms of
performance, older games run fine in my eyefinity triple-monitor setup, but
newer ones I've been playing only in one screen recently, which means it's
time for an update. A 9 year old CPU and 7 year old GPU being this fantastic
in performance so many years later just goes to show how slowly CPU and GPU
improvements have iterated.

------
Jonnax
These CPUs don't have PCIe 4.

With Microsoft and Sony going all in with their consoles and high speed gen4
SSDs, I'm imagining there's going to be a lot of faster drives on the market
soon.

Unless it's an upgrade, I feel buying this CPU for a new build is a bad idea.

If I needed Intel I'd wait until their next generation at least.

~~~
ebg13
> _These CPUs don 't have PCIe 4._

I'm fine with PCIe 4 not hitting mainstream for a few more years. AMD X570
motherboards all integrate noisy and failure-prone active fans directly on the
motherboard because the chips get so hot. The only one I know about that
didn't was wildly expensive, basically all heatsink, and apparently no longer
in production.

~~~
ben-schaaf
Motherboards used to have issues with the fan running when it didn't need to,
but to my knowledge that's been fixed. Unless you're running massive amounts
of data through the chipset it doesn't get hot and on most motherboards the
fan should stay off.

~~~
ebg13
If you're not running truly massive amounts of data through it, then PCIe 4.0
provides no benefit over PCIe 3.0 anyway.

~~~
ben-schaaf
The first PCIe slot, at least one of the nvme slots and a fair amount of the
IO is connected directly to the CPU, they don't touch the chipset. There's
plenty of benefit you can get by using just those. If you're really trying to
get the most out of PCIe 4 then you're on the wrong platform anyway.
Threadripper has way more IO going directly to the CPU and IIRC some Epyc
motherboards have all IO going directly to the CPU.

------
Causality1
Its ridiculous that a brand new 10600K only has at best 33% better single-
thread performance than my seven year old 4670K.

~~~
theevilsharpie
Outside of specialized instruction sets, I wouldn't expect major leaps in
single-threaded performance from either Intel or AMD for the foreseeable
future.

~~~
Causality1
Is that because more cores for a given transistor count better addresses
today's computing needs or because we've hit a limit where adding more
transistors to a single core doesn't give us more performance anymore?

~~~
theevilsharpie
It's because the design techniques that allow a core to run more instructions
per clock -- wider execution units, shorter pipelines, etc. -- also tend to
reduce the maximum achievable clock speed.

------
tryptophan
Does anyone know of a good article that explains why intel is having these
problems with crappy 5 year old CPUs? Is 10nm going to be competitive with AMD
when it finally comes out?

~~~
jeffbee
The Intel part is on top of every single-threaded benchmark in this article,
with a 5-year-old microarchitecture. Whatever you want to say about their
failure to scale out the core count or to shrink the lithography, they are
still in an enviable position of being able to spend the massive lead they had
banked. What's going to be really interesting from here on is the cadence of
innovation from both camps. Will Intel ship real product and leap ahead again?
Will they ship a new product that's a turd? Will AMD ship another generation
of improvements while Intel grinds out another Skylake SKU?

------
StillBored
Color me massively confused, but why on earth does the chipset have a 2.5G
Ethernet interface that doesn't support 5G/10G?

~~~
jeffbee
They can do it this way and only use a single PCIe lane; 2.5g works over
existing cat5e cable plants and 10g doesn't; their 10g and 40g controllers
cost $40 and this one costs $2?

~~~
StillBored
PCIe gen3 is nearly a GB/sec in each direction per lane (actual bandwidth
obviously less). Which is nearly enough to get to line rate with 10Gbit
ethernet, particularly if TSO is employed to remove the framing/etc overhead.
Getting 750MB/sec out of a 10G interface because its constricted by PCIe is a
lot better than getting 220MB/sec out of 2.5G. Consider the difference when
running a VM image from a NAS.

Further, the point with the multimode 1/2.5/5/10 phy's is they do line quality
detection and downgrade. So you plug in cat5, and it downgrades to 2.5 if the
line quality is bad. Someone runs a 10 foot cat6A cable they are going to get
the full speed. But in actuality, as I said on this board before, 10G requires
cat6a for 200 meter runs. If your in a house, small office, etc where the runs
are 5-10 meters or less cat5e works just fine. I've seen switch vendors
mention that quality cat5e can be good up to 45M, which is farther than cat8
is specified for 40GbaseT.

It just looks like more product segmentation since the 10GbaseT spec has been
around for about 15 years now.

edit: When it comes to UTP, the frequency response and cross talk
specifications effectively end up being per foot. So the line attenuation and
noise increases with cable length until it falls below the threshold required
to reconstruct the signal at the far end given a standard compliant part. The
length and cabling requirements also include the possibility of loss from
additional wall jacks or patch panels. So many of the bulk cat 5e cable packs
were sold for a long time as 350mhz (or similar) which in name is better than
basic cat6 at 250mhz because its actually pretty hard to screw up the
twist/etc requirements of the cable. The problems happen when it is poorly
terminated. So the whole thing ends up being a bit of a crapshoot whether any
given cable works to specification (most aren't) but because they are far
below the maximum line lengths it never matters. Plus, in the decade(s) since
the specs were initially created semiconductor advances have allowed advances
in the receiver sensitivity and efficiency of the drive signal. Meaning if one
went back at this point and tweaked the 1G spec its quite likely that the max
transmission lengths could at least be doubled due to specifying it with cat5e
and tighter margins.

This is also what allows 10GbaseT SFP's today, which weren't initially
possible (that and mandating that they aren't compliant to the full 200M).

~~~
jeffbee
It's not product segmentation. They cut the NIC price to $2 and increased the
speed by 2.5x. This is really the only part of the platform that is
dramatically faster than it was two years ago. Most of the AMD motherboards
are coming with 1gbps ethernet, no matter how many nonsense words are in the
product name.

~~~
StillBored
The pricing difference is part of the product segmentation, because 10G+ has
been reserved for "enterprise" parts despite not being much different at this
point. There are ARM SOC's out there, where the bare SOC is in the $40
ballpark and comes with 10G integrated. 10G isn't inherently more expensive,
its just been a decision not to repeat the "mistake" that was the 100-1G
transition where the price went from $$$$ to 1/10$ in the space of a year.

~~~
jeffbee
I don't understand what we are talking about. None of the CPUs in this article
have integrated NICs. The NIC is a little pea-sized peripheral device on a
PCIe port. If the motherboard makers thought anyone needed a desktop platform
with 10gbe, they'd ship that. But 10gbe controllers cost a lot of money and
draw a lot of power, and take more pci-e lanes. I think they are banking on
the idea that people who want it will be happy enough with expansion cards or
thunderbolt peripherals.

~~~
StillBored
I was mixing cpu+chipset=arm soc.

A 10G port takes the same PCIe lane as a 1G port, particularly if you have
PCIe gen4+ or are willing to potentially lose a bit with gen3. Similarly with
power, EEE doesn't use the power if its not needed. Which for users on short
runs, or with 1G switches the power utilization will be the same as a 1G port.
And given that we are talking 200W parts, a watt or two for 10G isn't going to
be missed.

And probably more of the motherboard manufactures would put 10G nics on board
if there weren't a dearth of 10G pci nic chips from manufactures not already
selling PCIe nics as high margin products. AKA intel selling its 10G part for
more than the rest of the parts on the motherboard is going to keep
motherboard manufactures from putting it on every motherboard.

Its sort of been a game of chicken, which will explode violently when the
patents expire and a company like etron or asmedia starts producing them.
(both of which have shown plenty of inhouse capability for producing high
speed phy/etc interfaces).

~~~
ksec
I think you severely under estimated the cost difference in 2.5G/5G SerDes to
10G, and the cut throat nature of PC business, where $1 of BOM cost is a world
of difference.

There is also the question of ecosystem like switches. The TCO of owning 10G
is still pretty much out of reach for most consumers.

------
nojito
The difference between CPU's at similiar price points is getting to be
negligible.

[https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph15785/116023.png](https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph15785/116023.png)

For 50% of the price, you're only losing 30% in performance.

~~~
navbaker
Any clue on why that $1700 CPU is performing so poorly relative to the rest in
the chart?

~~~
nullifidian
it's a 10 core from the time (2016) when that core count was somewhat exotic.

------
fomine3
> We know that AMD’s Zen 2 has as a slight 10-15% IPC advantage over 9th Gen
> Coffee Lake,

How they calculated it? I had only heard that Zen2 IPC is 15% increased from
Zen+. And from Single threaded benchmark, Zen2 not seems like 10% over
Skylake.

------
madengr
I’m more interested in the Xeon W-1260P, which seems to be an i9-10900K with
ECC enabled. It should work very well for my engineering software (which uses
Intel math libraries that are slow on AMD). Hopefully they come out with it
soon.

~~~
lliamander
Those are pretty interesting, especially with 40 PCIE lanes.

I wonder if (like the z490) the W480 motherboards will support PCIE gen4, and
whether there will be Rocket Lake Xeon W 1300 CPUs.

~~~
vbezhenar
According to [0] it has 16 lanes. They probably are counting chipset lanes
which are fake lanes.

0:
[https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/199336/...](https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/199336/intel-
xeon-w-1290p-processor-20m-cache-3-70-ghz.html)

~~~
lliamander
Ah, I see. Their marketing material referred to "total platform lanes"[0].
That's less helpful.

[0] [https://www.servethehome.com/wp-
content/uploads/2020/05/Inte...](https://www.servethehome.com/wp-
content/uploads/2020/05/Intel-Xeon-W-1200-Series-SKU-Stack.jpg)

~~~
jeffbee
If you want more PCIe lanes in a Xeon, you need a Cascade Lake part like the
W-2275, 48 lanes and 4-channel memory, too.

~~~
lliamander
Oh certainly. 16 CPU lanes is perfectly reasonable. I just feel somewhat
misled by the marketing material.

------
tibbydudeza
The price is usually the problem.

~~~
Synaesthesia
Frankly these look competitive with AMD price wise.

~~~
gruez
Are they? The i5-10600K sells for $262. Its closest competitor is ryzen
3600/3600x, which currently sell for $172/$200 respectively. For $62 (33%)
more, is it really 33% faster than AMD? There are lower tier skus (eg.
i5-10500) that match AMD's pricepoint, but I doubt they match 3600/3600x's
performance. At the high end, the i9-10900K ($488) is competing against the
ryzen 3900x, which currently sells for $400 and has 20% more cores.

~~~
gamegod
It's the motherboard prices that will make the difference. Intel motherboards
are always super overpriced, and you have to buy a new mobo with every
generation.

~~~
ben-schaaf
That and you also need to factor in the cooler. The consumer Ryzen chips all
come with an adequate cooler, which can save you a significant amount over the
Intel chips especially considering the extra heat output you'd need to handle.

------
znpy
The i9-10900T is interesting at 10C/20T at 35W tdp.

But I'm afraid that it's going to be one of those parts reserved to OEMs, like
the 45W Ryzen 3600 (non-X).

------
coronadisaster
I wonder if they will dare to go to i11?

