Intel 13th Gen CPU's

[RCHeliguy]

I guess it's time for a new thread.

Hopefully they'll get the chip clamp right this time

 

[RCHeliguy]

According to this video:
1. 13th Gen still supports DDR4
2. Can be plugged into an existing Z90 board.
3. Appears to be very efficient and may be an excellent under-volt CPU. They show it offering similar multi thread performance to the 12900K at 25% power (65W) because it has piles of cores.

Also interesting was the power user multi-task support in Windows 11 that allows it to do multiple big things simultaneously and smoothly transition large tasks to background processing.

For sim gaming they showed F1 2022 at what looks like 15% or higher performance, but Forza Horizon 5 at what might be only a 5% improvement and many titles saw little or no benefit. So hmm....

If you are a YouTuber running a Game and live streaming video etc. it could be great, but for just running a game, it may not be that much of a difference.

 

[Terry Rock]

Seems to be a much better option from a build standpoint than AMD this time out.
The cost of DDR5 plus horribly expensive AM5 motherboards, push the pricing into the stratosphere for AMD builds...despite them being very good CPUs.

 

[R8pilot]

If Linus could report without all the constant "yuk, yuk, yuk" frippery, I might actually learn something.

 

[Neilski]

Appears to be very efficient and may be an excellent under-volt CPU. They show it offering similar multi thread performance to the 12900K at 25% power (65W) because it has piles of cores.

Wellll, yeah that's one way to look at it. However, I'd be intrigued to hear how well a 65 W 12900K does against a 65 W 13900K...
...because, for me, the stand-out thing from the picture below is really the fact that when you increase the power to a 13900K by a factor of almost 4 (!!!!!???!!), the speed only goes up by 41%. I mean, WTFFF? (253/65 = 3.89)

The picture below is also highly suspect for another reason: we're asked to believe that the final hop from 241 to 253 W (a 5.0% power hike) somehow magically yields an extra 2.9% in performance, but yet the previous two hops gave much less impressive returns for the extra power. The 65 to 115 W hop (77% more power) gives a pathetic 21% extra performance. The 115 to 241 W hop (110% more power) gives an almost pointless 13% more perfomance. This feels like serious horseshit to me, unless there's something really funky going on (but if that's the case, real-world performance might have all kinds of issues). Diminishing returns should make the final few percent of the power curve the least valuable in terms of additional performance, or at least that's how things work on my planet.

(NB: even if you take the "On Par" as meaning something like 95% as fast as the 12900K, it doesn't change the above anomalies by much.)

 

[RCHeliguy]

I don't see the 13th gen as any kind of quantum leap.

In fact for gaming, it may be a very marginal improvement.

Getting a single core 15% improvement "some" of the time isn't a ringing endorsement.

Without a lot more testing and more positive numbers, I'm having trouble getting excited iover it.

 

[BrightCandle]

I am not excited about either really. AMD seem to have failed to beat their 5800X3D in performance for games and Intel is bringing only small improvements as well. The difference is the pricing on Intel is going to be a lot more reasonable on motherboards and RAM (especially since many will have DDR4 RAM to utilise) and the price difference is quite dramatic for platform costs as a result. The new E core behaviour looks interesting, minimise a batch program and it all runs on the E cores in the background and you could still game on the P cores or get that performance for the active app, I wish Windows could do that without Intel having to get involved with heavy handed rescheduling of threads.

The best cheapest gaming CPU this generation is probably the 5800X3D.

 

[Novopaine]

I'm at a cross-roads myself on all of this.
1) Build a 5800X3D system, knowing it's an and EOL platform
2) Build a 7700X system, knowing it's significantly more expensive, and even looses to the 5800X3D in some important game titles (like ACC)
3) Wait for Intel 13th gen and assess options
4) Say "screw it" and wait another 4-6 months for AMD to release a 7800X with 3D cache, knowing it will most likely cost more than all of the above

Other considerations:
- Ryzen 7000 can still work on Windows 10. I have not heard about any performance issues yet
- Intel 13th gen prefers Windows 11 due to the P/E core scheduling. I'm on the fence to use Win 11 as it seems more intrusive than Win 10. Then again, it's a dedicated SIM PC, so do I really care?

 

[blekenbleu]

wait another 4-6 months for AMD to release a 7800X with 3D cache

.. by which time:

• Nvidia 4000 VR drivers and power requirements may be sorted,
• DDR5 more cost-effective, and
• next-generation Radeon VR shortcomings evaluated.

I suspect that RTX 4090 prices will have increased, though

 

[Neilski]

As it happens, I am seriously considering the 13th gen Intel, because I'm yet to upgrade my 7700K
(Not gonna be an early adopter though, and the Win11 baggage weighs against it.)

 

[Deleted member 197115]

As it happens, I am seriously considering the 13th gen Intel, because I'm yet to upgrade my 7700K
(Not gonna be an early adopter though, and the Win11 baggage weighs against it.)

Availability

13th Gen Intel Core desktop “K” processors and the Intel Z790 chipset will be available starting Oct. 20, 2022, including boxed processors, motherboards and desktop system sales.

Jumping on this one as well.

ASUS already have motherboards lineup.

 

[Neilski]

One of the key things I like to know about about any new CPU is the single-threaded performance, since so many tasks are still basically limited by one or just a few threads. There's no magic metric for that (relative performance on different workloads can vary massively), but for years I've been using the Passmark figures on https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html and they seem to be a reasonably good guide.

My 7700K gets 2731. Newer CPUs: 12700K = 4061, 12900K = 4209 (KS = 4408), 13900K = 4833 (big error bar tho for now [see edit below]).
Given the roughly 5 years between 7th and 12th gen, and 6 years to 13th gen, that equates to a feeble 8-10% improvement per year. (I'm sure most of us fondly remember the days of 40%+ per year!)
I know this isn't a revelation but I still find it sobering that the brakes have been slammed on sooo damn hard. 6 years and still well short of doubling the single-threaded performance...
It does however help me feel less rushed about upgrading

Edit: it's 15th Jan 2023, and the 13900K data now has a much smaller error bar (almost 1000 submissions now) and an average single-thread score of 4687 :-|

 

[RCHeliguy]

We are well past the large speed increases between generations, but now that the upper limits of speed are getting harder and harder to increase we are forced to find ways to build a better mouse trap.

Sadly that means that the single core speed improvements involve tweaks to efficiency, like branch prediction and and finding ways to optimize the cycles needed to complete various operations. Cache optimization has been another area that is getting a lot of attention. Both AMD and Intel have been dramatically increasing the sizes of their Caches. Operation optimization is tweaked pretty well. Now they are throwing massive numbers of transistors at processing multiple branches simultaneously. They are examining each section of the CPU looking for any tiny bottleneck that can be reduced.

The next REALLY BIG advancement will be having CPU driven parallel processing which is a hard ask. They've been working on that for a long time. When it happens, we will have big jumps again.

This is why it surprises me that we have DRAM approaching 7GHz. If the CPU can't move data from the DRAM into it's caches that fast, it seems like it would be wasted. But maybe the upper limit will be twice the CPU's clock speed. Increasing the Gear 1 speed seems like it would make a huge difference.

 

[Neilski]

like branch prediction

Yup, this is great but it (along with caching) is also what brought us side-channel attacks. I kinda don't really wanna know how much the performance of my 7700K has been nerfed by all of the mitigations for them. I hope the newest gens don't have equivalent vulns but that doesn't seem likely given how insanely complex CPUs are now.

CPU driven parallel processing which is a hard ask

I've not been paying attention to that but I'll be suitably impressed if anyone ever makes it work.
I'm also not remotely up to speed (pun ) on the latest RAM tech, so I will have to swot up on it before my next upgrade.

 

[RCHeliguy]

Intel Core i9-13900K Raptor Lake CPU Overclocked To 8.2 GHz With Room For More​

https://wccftech.com/intel-core-i9-13900k-raptor-lake-cpu-overclocked-to-8-2-ghz-with-room-for-more/

 

[RasmusP]

German store Caseking had the prices leaked.
375€ for 13600KF, 410€ for 13600K.

Gonna be interesting how the i5 performs compared to the 7600X, which also costs 375€ over here.
A bit ironic that it now has an iGPU for the first time, while it costs 35€ extra on the Intel...

Imo the price to performance ratio is a bit off.. Normally it gets better for each generation. Costing more but also giving proportionally more performance, then slowly getting cheaper.

These new generations are way worse though. With AMD you're at least getting future compatibility. Not so with Intel.
So if the absolute fps of the older and lower tier CPUs are enough for your usecase, the new CPUs simply don't make any sense financially...

I personally hope for a 220€ 13400F that performs as good or slightly better than the 12600k, which would force AMD to lower the price of the 7600x, release a 7600 non-x or a 7600X3D.

 

[Wrath85_ita]

I personally hope for a 220€ 13400F that performs as good or slightly better than the 12600k, which would force AMD to lower the price of the 7600x, release a 7600 non-x or a 7600X3D.

I hope the same thing but if i understood intel' slides then 13500/13400 should be based on Alder lake, something like the non-K 12600.
if that's the case a 12600K/KF should perform better because of higher power limit/clock.

Spoiler: slide from TPU.com

 

[RCHeliguy]

So update my bios and install a new CPU for a 10-15% gaming improvement? Seems like very little fuss.

If nothing else, I want to update the firmware to see if that improved DDR compatibility will allow me to go to full 4000MHz of the memory I've got rather than 3800MHz.

Edit: 4,000Mhz appears to be working now, so the bios update was worth it for that alone.

 

[Spinelli]

Talk about underwhelming, wow.

 

[RCHeliguy]

Talk about underwhelming, wow.

Interesting, but I think I'll wait to see the benchmarks from Gamer's Nexus and others.

My gut reaction is that he was pushing for a clickbait outcome. In a couple days we will know more.

If you read specs from a reputable source, you see a large clock speed improvement up to 5.8GHz for cores 1 and 2, and 5.5GHz for cores 3-8,as well as a 5-11% latency improvements between the L1,L2,L3 cache with a chunk larger cache.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/core-i9-13900k-early-review-shows-big-gains-over-core-i9-12900k

Single core should be about 12% faster and multi-core 41% faster even if that doesn't matter a lot to us. Most estimates are 10-15% improvement in gaming performance.

"Gaming tests were also conducted in several games, including Ashes of the Singularity, CSGO, and more. Overall, the Core i9-13900K netted a 10%+ improvement over the Core i9-12900KF."