260: CPUs Have Been Juicing for Too Long

00:00SPEAKER- Okay, as mentioned last week,

00:01SPEAKERthere was one thing that we forgot to touch on

00:03SPEAKERabout my time back home, and that was?

00:05SPEAKER- Barbecue sauce.

00:06SPEAKER- Barbecue sauce.

00:08SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, you're a mustard guy.

00:09SPEAKERIt's forgivable.

00:10SPEAKERI'm gonna let it pass on this case.

00:11SPEAKER- That was a very poor attempt at the chilies ad.

00:13SPEAKERBarbecue sauce.

00:14SPEAKER- Barbecue sauce.

00:15SPEAKERNo, no, it's, does he say barbecue sauce?

00:18SPEAKER- Yeah, oh yeah, no, it's chilies, baby back ribs.

00:21SPEAKER- Chilies, baby back ribs.

00:22SPEAKERYeah, okay, okay.

00:23SPEAKER- Barbecue sauce.

00:24SPEAKEROkay, anyway, power tools.

00:26SPEAKER- Power tools?

00:27SPEAKERI love power tools.

00:28SPEAKER- Power tools operated by barbecue sauce.

00:30SPEAKERI mean, batteries.

00:31SPEAKER- Oh, it seems like you had a big power outage.

00:33SPEAKERBattery-based power tools, probably not the ideal.

00:37SPEAKER- Yeah, well, this was after the power came back on

00:39SPEAKERfor the most part, but it's not my first time.

00:42SPEAKERLike, they have a battery-operated lawnmower,

00:44SPEAKERand I've cut the grass before,

00:45SPEAKERso it's not my first time touching all this stuff.

00:47SPEAKER- Wow, really?

00:48SPEAKEROkay.

00:49SPEAKER- But battery-operated leaf blower,

00:51SPEAKERand this was the big one.

00:52SPEAKERIn fact, this is really most of why I'm bringing this up.

00:55SPEAKERBattery-powered chainsaw?

00:57SPEAKER- Wait, really?

00:58SPEAKER- Yes.

00:59SPEAKER- Man, that sounds nice.

01:00SPEAKERDoes it just make a good whirring cutting sound,

01:02SPEAKERand there's no like, (imitates whirring)

01:04SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, it's still louder than you might think.

01:07SPEAKER- Okay.

01:08SPEAKER- But it's not like that gas engine,

01:10SPEAKERlike extreme wildness, you know?

01:11SPEAKER- How long does it last?

01:13SPEAKER- I don't know, we just got a couple of limbs down

01:15SPEAKERover the driveway, and I cut those up,

01:17SPEAKERso I wasn't using it.

01:18SPEAKERI bet I ran it total for like 10, 15 minutes.

01:21SPEAKER- That's better than I would have expected, I guess.

01:24SPEAKER- And actually, maybe the coolest thing

01:25SPEAKERabout all this stuff is, and I guess my parents

01:28SPEAKERwent out of their way maybe to make this happen,

01:30SPEAKERbut the batteries are all basically interchangeable.

01:32SPEAKER- Yeah, so if you buy everything from the same company,

01:34SPEAKERyou can make that happen.

01:36SPEAKERMy electric stuff is all hand tools,

01:38SPEAKER'cause we pay somebody to mow the lawn.

01:41SPEAKER- Yeah, and of course, you still have to dump

01:43SPEAKERa bunch of oil into the chainsaw to lubricate the blade.

01:46SPEAKER- Well, yeah, 'cause I have to assume

01:49SPEAKERthis isn't like a logging-style chainsaw.

01:50SPEAKERThis is like a trimming up stuff

01:52SPEAKERaround your house chainsaw.

01:53SPEAKER- It's a handheld, it's got the same form factor

01:56SPEAKERas you would think of a chainsaw having,

01:58SPEAKERbut yeah, I guess it's on the smaller side.

02:01SPEAKERIt's probably, you're not gonna cut

02:02SPEAKERa whole tree down with it, probably.

02:04SPEAKER- So we do have an electric lawn mower,

02:06SPEAKERbut it's a plug-in, which is why I pay people

02:08SPEAKERto mow the lawn, because having a 200-foot extension cord

02:11SPEAKERis kind of a pain in the ass.

02:13SPEAKER- Wait. - Yeah.

02:15SPEAKER- It's plug-in while operating?

02:17SPEAKERLike it only runs off the, oh, wow.

02:19SPEAKER- Yeah, so basically, I put the plug-in

02:21SPEAKERand I chuck the cord over my shoulder,

02:24SPEAKERand I just dull out cord and roll cord back as I'm going.

02:27SPEAKER- Seems like the risk of running over the cord

02:29SPEAKERwith the lawn mower might make things complicated.

02:31SPEAKER- I think that's probably a mistake you'd only make once.

02:33SPEAKER- Yeah, fair.

02:34SPEAKERWell, yeah, I don't think you'd be using

02:36SPEAKERthe lawn mower again after that.

02:37SPEAKER- So how was your chainsawing?

02:38SPEAKER- It was good. - Okay.

02:40SPEAKER- Like, I haven't used a gas chainsaw that much in my life,

02:42SPEAKERbut- - They're terrifying.

02:44SPEAKER- Yes, partially because I'm afraid of them,

02:46SPEAKERand frankly, I was a little afraid of this one, but-

02:48SPEAKER- There's a guy down the street from me that I see,

02:50SPEAKERhe has a bunch of scrub trees,

02:52SPEAKERand he's often up there with the chainsaw

02:54SPEAKERworking on the scrub trees, and he does it wearing shorts,

02:57SPEAKERand I'm just like, man, that is a level of lack of fear

03:02SPEAKERof the tool that I do not understand, but-

03:05SPEAKER- I was also wearing shorts when I used the chainsaw.

03:08SPEAKER- No, you gotta wear real pants, man.

03:10SPEAKER- Like how, I guess thick enough denim,

03:13SPEAKERit might make a difference.

03:14SPEAKERSome guy was gonna say if the chainsaw slips badly enough,

03:17SPEAKERI don't know that a layer of cloth is gonna do much.

03:19SPEAKER- You want leather chaps on there, man.

03:21SPEAKERYou want something that's gonna really bite into the blade.

03:23SPEAKER- Do they make plate mail for yard work?

03:26SPEAKER- They make, you can get Kevlar-ish gloves

03:31SPEAKERand stuff like that, but yeah,

03:34SPEAKERI'm interested in the electric chainsaw.

03:36SPEAKERThat's an interesting idea.

03:37SPEAKERIs it one of those ones that's also,

03:38SPEAKERyou can put on the end of a long stick

03:39SPEAKERand do conversion on trimming branches and stuff?

03:44SPEAKER- No, this was, like I said, regular,

03:46SPEAKERlike the handles are in the place you expect them to be.

03:48SPEAKER- Okay.

03:49SPEAKER- It just looks like a chainsaw,

03:50SPEAKERlike maybe a little smaller.

03:52SPEAKER- Oh, okay.

03:52SPEAKER- Yeah, it was fun.

03:53SPEAKERI'm kind of into it.

03:55SPEAKER- I mean, look, you get a chainsaw,

03:56SPEAKERyou go cut down trees, you live near enough the park,

03:59SPEAKERyou can cut down trees anytime you want.

04:00SPEAKER- That's right.

04:02SPEAKER(upbeat music)

04:20SPEAKER(upbeat music continues)

04:30SPEAKER- Welcome to "Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod."

04:34SPEAKERI'm Will.

04:35SPEAKER- Whoa, I'm Brad.

04:36SPEAKER- I just, I fixed it.

04:37SPEAKERI worked on my compressor the other day,

04:39SPEAKERso I can do, I can get wild up in here.

04:42SPEAKER- Doing a little live.

04:43SPEAKERI was just looking right before this.

04:44SPEAKERI think I'm finally gonna buy that,

04:47SPEAKERwhat do we wanna call it?

04:47SPEAKERA channel strip, a preprocessor?

04:50SPEAKER- It's a magic thing that lets you yell into your microphone

04:53SPEAKERand not clip.

04:54SPEAKERThat's all I know about it.

04:55SPEAKER- And not blow out your audio

04:56SPEAKERand make people hate the way you sound.

04:57SPEAKER- Also, does it have a gate?

04:59SPEAKER- Yes, it has a noise gate.

05:01SPEAKERIt's got a compressor.

05:02SPEAKERIt's got a, I believe it's got a de-esser on it.

05:06SPEAKER- Oh.

05:07SPEAKER- And like one other thing, it's a DBX.

05:09SPEAKERIt's one that people on the Discord recommended.

05:10SPEAKERThis is, what we're talking about is

05:11SPEAKERif you have an analog microphone, like an XLR mic,

05:14SPEAKERI think we've talked about this before,

05:15SPEAKERbut you can run that mic through a thing

05:18SPEAKERthat kind of cleans up and massages the audio

05:20SPEAKERbefore it comes into the computer.

05:22SPEAKER- Which is nice when you do live stuff, it turns out.

05:24SPEAKER- Yes, well actually, so ironically,

05:26SPEAKERI've got a bunch of, OBS has got some pretty good

05:28SPEAKERlive filters for a lot of the stuff we're talking about.

05:32SPEAKERSo actually my OBS, when I stream,

05:33SPEAKERis like fairly well cleaned up now.

05:36SPEAKER- But you gotta have the CPU power to run that stuff,

05:39SPEAKER'cause that's all, this is just a box

05:41SPEAKERthat sits there and does it with magic.

05:43SPEAKER- Yes, but also it's a safeguard for these recordings,

05:45SPEAKER'cause I clip on our recordings way more

05:48SPEAKERthan I would like.

05:49SPEAKER- Well, and also having the noise gate,

05:51SPEAKERlike when I'm doing podcast edits or something

05:53SPEAKERand we have somebody who has a noise gate

05:55SPEAKERversus somebody who doesn't have a noise gate,

05:56SPEAKERit is a noticeable difference.

05:58SPEAKERIt's funny to me that there's not,

06:01SPEAKERI mean, well, okay, your voice call stuff

06:05SPEAKERtypically handles this, so like Zoom and Google Meet

06:07SPEAKERand Teams and all that stuff kind of handles

06:09SPEAKERthis kind of processing automatically,

06:11SPEAKERbut it also makes your audio sound a little crap,

06:13SPEAKERso you don't wanna record that for podcast purposes,

06:16SPEAKER'cause we wanna sound nice for y'all.

06:17SPEAKER- Yeah.

06:18SPEAKER- But the, I'm surprised that there's no software stack

06:23SPEAKERthat works like the OBS virtual camera

06:26SPEAKERthat you can put between your,

06:27SPEAKERI mean, I guess NVIDIA broadcast does this,

06:29SPEAKERbut it also has some downstream consequences.

06:32SPEAKERSo anyway, maybe there's something out there,

06:34SPEAKERwe just don't know about it, but.

06:35SPEAKER- Yeah, actually, well, I've looked quite a bit.

06:37SPEAKERI was looking for real-time recording plugins,

06:39SPEAKERlike VST-style plugins for a limiter and stuff like that,

06:42SPEAKERand I just don't think that exists,

06:44SPEAKERor at least you need a way higher quality

06:46SPEAKERaudio software than I'm using.

06:47SPEAKER- Or, I mean, VoiceMeeter does some of that stuff too,

06:50SPEAKERbut VoiceMeeter has its own unique set of problems, so.

06:52SPEAKER- Yep, yep.

06:54SPEAKERHardware, just chuck a box in line and let it do the work.

06:58SPEAKER- Here's a bunch of dials and knobs, get turning.

07:01SPEAKER- Yep.

07:03SPEAKER- Brad, speaking of CPU utilization.

07:05SPEAKER- And turning dials and knobs.

07:07SPEAKER- And turning dials and knobs.

07:10SPEAKERIt's finally, the last of this year's CPU models

07:15SPEAKERare updated.

07:16SPEAKERIntel and AMD both have released entirely,

07:19SPEAKERwell, updated CPU lines, updated architectures.

07:22SPEAKERIntel's rolled out an entirely new architecture this year.

07:25SPEAKEREverything's disaggregated now.

07:28SPEAKERSo if you don't know what that means,

07:30SPEAKERit means that inside your CPU package

07:32SPEAKERthat you plug into your motherboard,

07:33SPEAKERthere's a chip that has a bunch of other chips

07:36SPEAKERglued to it, smaller chips,

07:39SPEAKERand those chips can be made on different processes.

07:41SPEAKERThey handle different parts of the CPU job,

07:44SPEAKERand it's kind of changed the way CPUs work

07:48SPEAKERover the last five, six years.

07:49SPEAKER- Yeah, traditionally they would fabricate one chip,

07:52SPEAKERand that one chip had literally everything

07:53SPEAKERthat the CPU did on it.

07:55SPEAKER- Yeah, so yeah, traditionally you have a wafer.

07:57SPEAKERIt's a big piece of silicon, special silicon.

08:00SPEAKERThey carve some stuff into it.

08:01SPEAKERThey do some baths, and it's all sorts

08:04SPEAKERof really toxic chemicals and gold and business.

08:06SPEAKERAnd then there's a bunch of little chips on there,

08:10SPEAKERand they cut each of those out of that big wafer.

08:12SPEAKERAnd then each of those little chips gets glued

08:15SPEAKERonto this package,

08:16SPEAKERand then it becomes the CPU of your computer.

08:18SPEAKERNow-

08:18SPEAKER- Right, so like, yeah, in the past,

08:19SPEAKERit was just the one chip getting fabricated

08:21SPEAKERthat did everything.

08:22SPEAKERBut yeah, now they fabricate a bunch of different chips,

08:24SPEAKERlike you said, sometimes at different sizes,

08:26SPEAKER'cause not everything on the CPU,

08:27SPEAKERand it needs to be tiny necessarily.

08:29SPEAKERAnd then they get, yes,

08:30SPEAKERthey get aggregated together onto a package.

08:33SPEAKER- Yeah, so AMD has been doing this for a long time now.

08:36SPEAKERThis is their fifth generation of those.

08:37SPEAKERThey started with the Ryzen years and years ago.

08:41SPEAKERIt was a little hinky in the early days.

08:45SPEAKER- Oh yes, yes.

08:46SPEAKERI'm glad I didn't, like, you read stories

08:48SPEAKERabout the first and second gen Ryzons.

08:50SPEAKERIt sounded like a real mess.

08:52SPEAKER- Well, and the first and second gen Ryzons,

08:54SPEAKERpart of it is that things that hadn't been a problem before

08:57SPEAKERwere suddenly a problem like latency between CPU dies,

09:00SPEAKERor CPU cores.

09:02SPEAKERAnd AMD did a really good job of reaching out

09:05SPEAKERto software developers and OS, operating system providers,

09:10SPEAKERand a bunch of other people to kind of work around

09:13SPEAKERand work through those kinks

09:14SPEAKERuntil we're in a pretty good place with it now

09:16SPEAKERon the AMD side.

09:18SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, and it's probably worth pointing out.

09:19SPEAKERI mean, people might be asking,

09:20SPEAKERlike, what's the benefit of this stuff?

09:22SPEAKERLike, I think this is a big part of what's gotten us

09:23SPEAKERto much higher core counts on consumer CPUs,

09:26SPEAKERbecause previously having a ton of cores

09:29SPEAKERwas the domain of like big workstation chips

09:31SPEAKERand server parts.

09:32SPEAKER- And big clock speeds too.

09:34SPEAKERLike, this is why clock speeds continue to improve,

09:36SPEAKERis 'cause thermal management at different,

09:38SPEAKERlike, you don't have to build an enormous

09:41SPEAKEReight billion transistor CPU

09:44SPEAKERall on the most expensive process in the world.

09:46SPEAKERYou can do the parts that are not as expensive

09:48SPEAKERto build on.

09:49SPEAKERProcess in this case is the kind of resolution

09:52SPEAKERof the chip etching.

09:53SPEAKERSo how small the little traces and stuff are in the CPU.

09:56SPEAKER- Yeah, this also, on the manufacturing side,

09:59SPEAKERthis increases yields because, you know,

10:01SPEAKERsome chips that come out of the fab are bad.

10:03SPEAKERAnd if the entire chip is one chip,

10:05SPEAKERthen you have to throw the entire chip away.

10:06SPEAKERBut if it's a bunch of different chips,

10:08SPEAKERyou can, theoretically, you have more good chips

10:11SPEAKERto plug together.

10:12SPEAKERNow, do they pass those savings along to the consumer, maybe?

10:17SPEAKER- I mean, the chips keep getting faster

10:19SPEAKERis the savings that we get as consumers.

10:20SPEAKER- Fair.

10:21SPEAKER- Asterisk.

10:22SPEAKER- Fair.

10:23SPEAKER- Now, so, okay, so on the AMD side,

10:26SPEAKERthe new chips are the Zen 5.

10:28SPEAKERThis is the Ryzen 9000 series chips.

10:32SPEAKERAnd there's, let's see, 16 core, eight core,

10:35SPEAKERand six core versions of that.

10:37SPEAKEROn the Intel side-

10:39SPEAKER- I'm sorry, did they not do a 12 core for Zen 5?

10:42SPEAKER- Sorry, they did do a 12 core, yeah, it's two.

10:44SPEAKERSo they, well, we'll talk about it in a minute,

10:47SPEAKERbut on the Intel side, this is Aero Lake.

10:50SPEAKERThese are called the Core Ultra S series 2.

10:53SPEAKER- Yeah, this is where they also have dumped the i5,

10:56SPEAKERi7, i9 branding is totally gone now, right?

10:59SPEAKER- Well, but they've, yes, but the sevens and the,

11:02SPEAKERI guess the sevens and nines are gone.

11:03SPEAKERYeah, they have.

11:05SPEAKERThey're using the same branding as on mobile now, basically.

11:07SPEAKERSo the difference is that the desktop parts have an S

11:11SPEAKERin the name where the mobile parts don't.

11:13SPEAKER- Okay.

11:14SPEAKER- And then there's other,

11:15SPEAKERsome other letters that come up in the name.

11:16SPEAKERLike if it has a K, it means that it's overclockable.

11:19SPEAKERIf it has an F, it means there's no GPU.

11:21SPEAKER- Do they always use the word ultra?

11:22SPEAKERWhat I was getting at is, effectively, they dropped the i.

11:25SPEAKERLike it's still Core Ultra 9, 285K for the top end part,

11:29SPEAKERbut it's not the i9 anymore.

11:30SPEAKER- Yeah, the i9, the i is gone.

11:32SPEAKERThe people just refer to these as the 285, the 265, 245.

11:37SPEAKER- Yeah, what I was wondering though,

11:38SPEAKERis does the ultra label denote anything in particular?

11:41SPEAKERLike, does that mean like it has graphics

11:43SPEAKERor it does this or that, or is that just marketing?

11:45SPEAKER- I think Core Ultra means it's the disaggregated one,

11:48SPEAKER'cause Core has been around for a long time.

11:50SPEAKER- Okay.

11:53SPEAKER- I would have to look to be sure,

11:54SPEAKERbut like ultimately the branding doesn't matter.

11:57SPEAKER- Yeah, it's just, you know,

11:58SPEAKERit's just CPU branding is always confusing.

12:00SPEAKERSo you have to kind of like read some tea leaves

12:01SPEAKERto make sure you know what they're talking about.

12:03SPEAKER- Yeah, so, and then the other wild card on all this

12:07SPEAKERis that AMD does this thing with an enormous cache

12:11SPEAKERthat they glue onto the chips

12:13SPEAKERto make them really fast for games, basically.

12:16SPEAKERThey're fine for other things.

12:17SPEAKERIn the past, these are the X3D parts.

12:20SPEAKERThey just rolled out the first of the X3D parts

12:22SPEAKERfor this generation, the Ryzen 9800.

12:26SPEAKERThe TLD, so we're gonna unwrap the onion,

12:29SPEAKERunpeel the onion this week,

12:30SPEAKERand we're gonna give everybody the high level here first,

12:33SPEAKERand then you can drill down further if you want.

12:36SPEAKER- I don't know, we could just core straight

12:38SPEAKERto the center of the onion right now really quickly

12:40SPEAKERand just say, if you want a gaming PC,

12:42SPEAKERjust get a 9800 X3D.

12:44SPEAKER- Yeah, that's the answer.

12:45SPEAKER- Now you can turn off the podcast.

12:46SPEAKER- Yeah, and if you care about a lot, a lot of cores,

12:49SPEAKERthen the, and do a lot of like workload stuff

12:51SPEAKERthat requires a lot of CPU cores, the Intel stuff is okay,

12:55SPEAKERbut you might be better off going with last gen.

12:58SPEAKERYou've got to look at the benchmarks a little bit

13:00SPEAKERand see what the things that you do matter for.

13:03SPEAKERAnd then the high end, big core Ryzons also are fine.

13:11SPEAKERSo now why is all that the case?

13:13SPEAKER- Why is all that the case?

13:15SPEAKER- Well, let's start, all of these launches had problems,

13:19SPEAKERwell, with the exception of the X3D part.

13:21SPEAKERThe Ryzen 9000, when they came out a month and a half ago,

13:25SPEAKERthey messed up some testing stuff that caused them,

13:30SPEAKERcaused everybody who was doing the benchmarks

13:32SPEAKERto get lower than expected results.

13:34SPEAKER- When you say expecting,

13:35SPEAKERyou mean lower than AMD was expecting?

13:37SPEAKER'Cause like they provide numbers to testers and say,

13:40SPEAKERhey, this is what we got,

13:41SPEAKERthis is what we think you should be seeing with them.

13:43SPEAKER- Yeah, we think of those as kind of sanity check numbers

13:46SPEAKERso that when you're doing testing,

13:48SPEAKERif you have something that's way off of what they're,

13:50SPEAKERlike for example, benchmarks like Cinebench,

13:53SPEAKERwhich is a heavily multi-threaded benchmark

13:55SPEAKERare really repeatable and an easy way to tell

13:58SPEAKERif there's something messed up with your bio settings

14:00SPEAKERor your Windows configuration or something like that.

14:03SPEAKERAnd we were seeing numbers that were like 9% lower

14:06SPEAKERthan the provided sanity check numbers,

14:09SPEAKERwhich is pretty unheard of.

14:11SPEAKER- It was bad, I mean, like, you know,

14:12SPEAKERif you get into the like slightly more contentious regions

14:15SPEAKERof YouTube hardware reviews,

14:16SPEAKERlike you were straight up seeing video titles

14:18SPEAKERjust like Zen 5 sucks, like Ryzen 9000 fail.

14:22SPEAKER- So there were a couple of reasons that that happened.

14:25SPEAKEROne is that AMD was running their tests

14:28SPEAKERas the administrator account

14:31SPEAKERversus an administrator account,

14:32SPEAKERwhich had never mattered before.

14:34SPEAKERBut something changed with this release

14:38SPEAKERthat caused the administrator account

14:41SPEAKERto have a pretty significant performance advantage

14:43SPEAKERover just running as an administrator.

14:45SPEAKERI don't know why that is.

14:47SPEAKERThey've stopped doing their sanity check tests

14:49SPEAKERas the administrator.

14:51SPEAKERYou shouldn't run as the administrator account in Windows.

14:54SPEAKERPlease don't do that.

14:55SPEAKER- Oh, we're talking about like the,

14:58SPEAKERlike not a administrator enabled user account at all.

15:02SPEAKERIs there some kind of like core built in?

15:03SPEAKER- I'm talking about the user named administrator,

15:06SPEAKERwhich is built into every Windows install.

15:07SPEAKER- Oh, that's right.

15:08SPEAKERIf you look at like file permissions,

15:09SPEAKERyou'll see that account, right?

15:11SPEAKER- Yeah, it's kind of like running Windows as root,

15:13SPEAKERbut you shouldn't do that, right?

15:14SPEAKER- Right.

15:15SPEAKER- It's not exactly the same.

15:16SPEAKERAnyway, so we, at PC World, we were doing our benchmarks

15:20SPEAKERand we saw numbers that were off significantly enough

15:23SPEAKERthat we thought we had messed up our testing process.

15:28SPEAKERAnd as a result, we held,

15:30SPEAKERwe ended up doing a live stream the day of the embargo,

15:32SPEAKERbut we did not release our review at embargo time

15:35SPEAKER'cause we thought we'd messed something up.

15:36SPEAKERAnd then we looked at everybody else's numbers

15:38SPEAKERand they got the exact same results as us.

15:39SPEAKERAnd we were like, oh, well, we better get this going.

15:43SPEAKERThe upshot is AMD did a post a couple of weeks later

15:48SPEAKERexplaining what had happened exactly.

15:50SPEAKERThey went through it.

15:51SPEAKERThere have also been some Windows updates for 23H2

15:55SPEAKERand 24H2 that changed the way branch prediction works.

15:59SPEAKER- Yeah.

16:01SPEAKER- Like they're not, you should have,

16:03SPEAKERif you have one of these processors,

16:04SPEAKERincluding Zen 4 dual CCD chips,

16:06SPEAKERwhich we'll talk about in a minute,

16:08SPEAKERyou'll get a pretty significant performance boost

16:11SPEAKERby running this stuff.

16:12SPEAKER- Yeah, and I want to say, I don't have it in front of me,

16:14SPEAKERbut I think, didn't they backport this fix

16:16SPEAKERto even like, I believe Windows 10?

16:17SPEAKERLike I think it was pervasive enough that they were like,

16:19SPEAKERhey, we need to make sure,

16:20SPEAKERthis shouldn't be something we hold back

16:22SPEAKERfor modern Windows 11, I think everybody needs this.

16:25SPEAKER- I think it's just 23H2 and 24H2 last I saw.

16:28SPEAKER- Maybe you want to be on Windows 11 then

16:30SPEAKERif you have one of these,

16:31SPEAKERbut if you care, branch prediction is the thing where,

16:34SPEAKERdo you know much about modern CPU design?

16:36SPEAKERIt's the thing in the pipeline

16:37SPEAKERwhere CPUs kind of pre-compute multiple outcomes

16:41SPEAKERfor the instructions that are running,

16:42SPEAKERkind of like in a control flow kind of way,

16:45SPEAKERlike an if/then sort of thing.

16:46SPEAKERLike CPU looks at what instructions are being pumped through

16:51SPEAKERit and kind of goes ahead

16:52SPEAKERand does both versions of the math or whatever.

16:54SPEAKER- And then switches back to the one

16:55SPEAKERthat ended up being right.

16:56SPEAKER- And then just takes whichever

16:57SPEAKERand just discards the unneeded result

16:59SPEAKERand goes with the one that was correct.

17:01SPEAKERIt's part of how, you know,

17:04SPEAKERperformance has continued to increase over time.

17:06SPEAKERAnyway, that's my like not a computer scientist

17:09SPEAKERunderstanding of it, but apparently something about Zen 5,

17:12SPEAKERactually, I've got the quote here from AMD,

17:15SPEAKERthe Zen 5 architecture incorporates

17:16SPEAKERa wider branch prediction capacity

17:18SPEAKERthan prior Zen generations.

17:20SPEAKERAnd then they go on to basically say,

17:22SPEAKERlike that's what they were optimizing around

17:23SPEAKERin Windows with this update.

17:25SPEAKERSo it is like, it is a legit hardware improvement.

17:28SPEAKERThis is not some smoke and mirrors type of thing.

17:31SPEAKER- Yeah, no, and if you install the updates for Windows,

17:33SPEAKERthen you'll see the same similar impact.

17:39SPEAKERAnd also worth mentioning,

17:40SPEAKERit impacted the chips with two compute dies,

17:43SPEAKERthe dual CCD chips, like the 9950 and the 9900

17:48SPEAKERmore than the single CCD.

17:51SPEAKERAlthough it does show improvements

17:52SPEAKERon the single CCD chips when you install it.

17:57SPEAKERAnyway, that's the TLDR.

18:00SPEAKERNow, like you said, there were a lot of people saying,

18:04SPEAKERis AMD screwed at the end of this?

18:07SPEAKERPart of the issue I think with this

18:10SPEAKERis also that they locked the single die chips

18:13SPEAKERto 65 watts TDP, which is pretty low for a desktop part.

18:18SPEAKERI don't think that's ultimately a bad thing, but-

18:20SPEAKER- Oh, that's music to my ears, honestly.

18:23SPEAKER- Yeah, the downside is that the numbers were not,

18:29SPEAKERbetween these two things, between the 65 watt

18:32SPEAKERand the performance problems related

18:33SPEAKERto the branch prediction stuff and the admin account,

18:37SPEAKERthey were coming in like 9% under what they expected.

18:40SPEAKERAnd those numbers looked exactly the same

18:43SPEAKERas says 7,000 series or somewhat worse in some cases.

18:47SPEAKERSince the release, AMD has come out and said,

18:49SPEAKER"Hey, if you want to run the PBO mode,"

18:52SPEAKERwhich is their precision boost overdrive,

18:55SPEAKERwhich is basically like built-in overclocking,

18:57SPEAKERit's a little more configurable than,

19:00SPEAKERit's not, "Hey, I'm gonna open this up

19:03SPEAKERand turn the multiplier up,

19:04SPEAKERor I'm gonna open this up and turn the bus up."

19:05SPEAKERIt's, "Oh, I want to lock, run as fast as you can

19:10SPEAKERand keep the CPU under 80 Celsius," right?

19:12SPEAKERWhich if you have a big cooler attached to it,

19:14SPEAKERmeans you can get some really nice performance boosts

19:17SPEAKERwithout any danger to the chip or whatever.

19:20SPEAKERThey've rolled out and said,

19:21SPEAKER"We're gonna honor warranty for people

19:21SPEAKERwho have flipped PBO on and cranked up their TDP

19:26SPEAKERon the 96 and 9,700 to 105 watts,"

19:29SPEAKERwhich is what the last gen parts shipped at.

19:32SPEAKER- Yeah, or actually was 105 the eco mode on Zen 4?

19:36SPEAKERI want to say that's the case.

19:37SPEAKER- For the high end parts, yeah,

19:37SPEAKERbut for the low end, it was what it shipped at.

19:40SPEAKER- Right, but the point is, even 105 is not that high

19:43SPEAKERby the standards of modern CPUs.

19:45SPEAKERSo the fact that you can get very good performance

19:47SPEAKERat 65 or 105 watts

19:49SPEAKERis a pretty damn huge improvement in efficiency.

19:53SPEAKER- Yeah, if you care about efficiency,

19:55SPEAKEReverything that we're gonna talk about today is good.

19:58SPEAKERIf you care about performance, eh.

20:00SPEAKER- Yeah, but maybe we'll get to it more

20:03SPEAKERwhen we kind of wrap this up.

20:04SPEAKERBut I think a general reset

20:06SPEAKERon efficiency to performance ratios was needed.

20:09SPEAKER- Well, especially after Intel was burning the world down

20:12SPEAKERwith the Raptor lakes, yeah.

20:13SPEAKER- And AMD briefly did that with Zen 4 as well.

20:16SPEAKERThe point is like everybody was playing too fast and loose

20:19SPEAKERwith voltages and power consumption

20:21SPEAKERto try to eke out like 0.1% more benchmark.

20:23SPEAKER- I compared this to the steroid era

20:27SPEAKERin baseball the other day.

20:28SPEAKER- Okay.

20:29SPEAKER- Where, you know, after you're used to Mark McGuire

20:31SPEAKERand Barry Bonds and Sammy Sosa

20:33SPEAKERjust teeing them off constantly

20:34SPEAKERfor years and years and years, you know,

20:38SPEAKERmaybe it's gonna be a little more, we're gonna have more

20:39SPEAKERpitchy games for a few years here, right?

20:41SPEAKER- See the CPUs have been juicing for too long.

20:43SPEAKER- That's what I'm saying.

20:45SPEAKERSo, okay, so overall Zen 5 Ryzen 9000

20:48SPEAKERis a kind of incremental advancement to Zen 4.

20:52SPEAKERThey have the branch prediction enhancements.

20:56SPEAKERThey add full AVX 512 support,

20:58SPEAKERwhich is a new instruction set that helps.

21:00SPEAKER- I thought Zen 4 had AVX 512.

21:03SPEAKERAlthough, well, I'm getting out over my skis here.

21:06SPEAKERI think it was like maybe limited in some way.

21:08SPEAKER- It was not a full implementation is my understanding.

21:11SPEAKER- Yeah, I should say, I mean,

21:12SPEAKERthis doesn't matter to consumers normal typically,

21:14SPEAKERbut like when you say Zen 5 is an incremental improvement,

21:17SPEAKERlike on the benchmarks, that's true.

21:19SPEAKERMy understanding is that it's actually,

21:20SPEAKERit's the first like new from the ground up architecture

21:23SPEAKERsince they've moved to Ryzen though.

21:25SPEAKERLike Zen 1 through 4 was all like iteratively improved on

21:28SPEAKERfrom the same design and Zen 5, I believe,

21:31SPEAKERwas a pretty much like a brand new micro architecture.

21:34SPEAKERSo it's the foundation for the next several years

21:39SPEAKERof Risons is the point.

21:40SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.

21:42SPEAKERSo they doubled the cache bandwidth versus Zen 4.

21:46SPEAKERThey rearranged how things connect on the chip

21:49SPEAKERin some ways that make that possible.

21:52SPEAKERIt's a four nanometer process size.

21:56SPEAKERAnd all of these chips have 28 lanes of PCIe 5

22:00SPEAKERout of the CPU, which is a lot of PCIe 5 lanes.

22:04SPEAKERDo you know what it was on Zen 4?

22:07SPEAKERI don't know if 20 comes to mind.

22:09SPEAKERI'm not sure if that's right.

22:10SPEAKERI had a Zen 4 for some months and I want to,

22:13SPEAKERI feel like it was like 20 ish on that 7950 X3D I had,

22:17SPEAKERbut I can't remember.

22:17SPEAKERAnyway, that's a lot of lanes.

22:19SPEAKERThat's a good, generous number of lanes.

22:21SPEAKERNow with only motherboard makers,

22:23SPEAKERwe'll devote all of them to M.2, I'll be happy.

22:27SPEAKER- Well, I mean, I think the point is you can get an M.2

22:31SPEAKERand a 16 lane PCI express slot and still have some stuff,

22:35SPEAKERmaybe you have two M.2s that are five PCIe 5 or whatever.

22:41SPEAKERThe Ryzen 9 dual CCD designs also get stuff

22:45SPEAKERthat was limited to the X3D chips in the past.

22:48SPEAKER- Really?

22:49SPEAKER- So there's, this is one of those,

22:52SPEAKERhey, this is kind of good, maybe not for everyone features,

22:56SPEAKERwhere if you have the right stuff installed on Windows,

22:59SPEAKERwhen you do something that needs to run on one,

23:03SPEAKERso, okay, we should take a step back.

23:05SPEAKERWhen you have these dual CCD designs

23:06SPEAKERwhere they have two eight core compute dies, right?

23:10SPEAKERSo you can get 16 CPU cores with 32 threads total

23:14SPEAKERbetween them because the hyper-threading

23:16SPEAKERis enabled on these chips.

23:18SPEAKERThen you can, if say a game is running part of its threads

23:24SPEAKERon one of these dies and part of its threads on the other,

23:26SPEAKERyou see pretty significant performance impacts

23:29SPEAKERbecause of the cross-die communication

23:30SPEAKERbeing a slower speed than intra-die communication, right?

23:34SPEAKER- Yeah, which is important to understand this

23:36SPEAKER'cause when we get to Intel,

23:37SPEAKERthey are doing things differently here.

23:39SPEAKER- Yeah, with the X3D chips,

23:41SPEAKERbecause they put the cache on the dual CCD chips

23:44SPEAKERonly on one of the CCDs,

23:47SPEAKERthey would just turn off the die you weren't using

23:50SPEAKERand crank up the, so the game has to run on the CCD

23:55SPEAKERthat has the V-cache on it.

23:57SPEAKER- Yes, or at least theoretically.

23:58SPEAKERNow, so I had one of those chips, like I said,

24:00SPEAKERand I never ran into this problem.

24:02SPEAKERLike this never really seemed like an issue to me,

24:04SPEAKERbut some games, the other CCD would get unparked

24:08SPEAKERand threads would kind of migrate over anyway.

24:10SPEAKERLike that was kind of something people were frustrated with

24:13SPEAKERwas like, okay, not every game actually knows

24:15SPEAKERhow to do this correctly and you're still getting problems,

24:17SPEAKERbut I never really saw an issue with it.

24:19SPEAKER- So when I said this is like these disaggregated designs

24:24SPEAKERare hinky and have required a fair amount of work

24:26SPEAKERon the part of ISVs and OS vendors

24:28SPEAKERto make everything work the way you'd expect,

24:30SPEAKERthis is a perfect example of that, right?

24:33SPEAKERIn order to get this to work,

24:34SPEAKERyou have to have the right BIOS, the right chipset driver.

24:36SPEAKERYou have to have Windows game mode turned on

24:38SPEAKERand a new version of the Xbox app.

24:40SPEAKERAnd if that all happens, the Xbox app says,

24:43SPEAKERhey man, you're running a game.

24:45SPEAKERI'm gonna put it in game mode and game mode says,

24:46SPEAKERoh, okay, if you're running a game and we're in game mode,

24:49SPEAKERthen we got to do this.

24:49SPEAKERAnd it turns off the slower CCD chips.

24:53SPEAKER- Theoretically, theoretically that entire stack

24:55SPEAKERwill make that work.

24:56SPEAKERLike I said, though, I would see games.

24:57SPEAKERI would see the other CCD get unparked

24:59SPEAKERin the middle of games sometimes.

25:01SPEAKERBut the thing I never saw was I never got

25:03SPEAKERlike significant hitching,

25:04SPEAKERwhich is the type of thing you would see

25:06SPEAKERwhen threads were misbehaving and stuff.

25:10SPEAKER- And part of the challenge is that Windows,

25:15SPEAKERWindows just fundamentally doesn't exactly understand

25:18SPEAKERwhat's going on in these chips, right?

25:19SPEAKERWindows at its core thinks that all CPUs are created equal

25:24SPEAKER'cause that's the way they've been for a really long time.

25:26SPEAKER- Scheduling is hard, it turns out.

25:28SPEAKER- It's a problem in this design.

25:30SPEAKERIt's also a problem on the Intel design

25:31SPEAKERbecause they have the big cores and the little cores

25:33SPEAKERand that's complicated for other reasons.

25:34SPEAKERWe'll get into it in a minute.

25:35SPEAKER- Yeah, so like I've got an Intel chip

25:39SPEAKERwith big and little cores in my server.

25:42SPEAKERAnd because I'm this kind of nerd,

25:43SPEAKERlike I've watched some of the like Linux kernel mailing list

25:47SPEAKERdevelopment chatter because like Intel

25:49SPEAKERhas a ton of engineers that contribute to the Linux kernel,

25:51SPEAKERfor example, like every hardware company contributes

25:54SPEAKERto the Linux kernel.

25:54SPEAKERAnd you still to this day see Intel engineers

25:57SPEAKERtalking about tweaks, regressions,

25:59SPEAKERlike new X, Y, and Z things they're introducing.

26:02SPEAKERLike they are still even on the Linux side,

26:04SPEAKERlike working on the kind of heterogeneous scheduling

26:08SPEAKERbetween different types of cores.

26:09SPEAKERLike it's a hard challenge to solve or problem to solve.

26:13SPEAKER- Yeah, and it's-

26:14SPEAKER- Getting the OS to know like which applications

26:17SPEAKERneed more priority, which ones can run like on lower cores,

26:20SPEAKERlike blah, blah, blah.

26:20SPEAKERLike it's not an easy thing.

26:22SPEAKER- And it's to the point that like Intel on the server side

26:26SPEAKERfor data centers, partly for power reasons,

26:28SPEAKERbut partly just because it makes some applications easier

26:31SPEAKERare building chips that are all P cores are all E cores,

26:35SPEAKERall big cores are all little cores

26:37SPEAKERfor different applications.

26:39SPEAKER'Cause sometimes you just want something

26:40SPEAKERthat has a whole shitload of threads.

26:41SPEAKER- Yeah, don't they have some server part

26:43SPEAKERthat's nothing but like a bajillion E cores?

26:45SPEAKER- Yeah.

26:46SPEAKER- Like a horrifying number of E cores.

26:48SPEAKER- That's mostly to go into old data centers

26:50SPEAKERthat have lower power requirements for each rack.

26:53SPEAKERBut anyway, okay, so two new chip sets announced

26:59SPEAKERwhen they rolled out these CPUs,

27:00SPEAKERthey just came out a couple of weeks ago.

27:01SPEAKER- Yeah, that's crazy.

27:02SPEAKERI mean, I know AMD does the thing Intel never does,

27:05SPEAKERwhich is although Intel did do this with 1700 socket, but-

27:09SPEAKER- I don't think that was intentional for what it's worth.

27:11SPEAKER- I think that was more, they were forced into it.

27:14SPEAKERBut AMD does the thing where, you know,

27:15SPEAKERmultiple generations of CPU can run on the same board.

27:18SPEAKERBut I don't know that I've ever seen it

27:20SPEAKERwhere they didn't put out new motherboards

27:22SPEAKERat launch of the CPU.

27:23SPEAKERIt was like two, three months of you had to buy

27:25SPEAKERan old last gen motherboard to even use these things.

27:28SPEAKER- Yeah, so AM5 is the socket.

27:32SPEAKERIt's gonna be around, they've said,

27:33SPEAKERwe're gonna support this until 2027 at least.

27:36SPEAKERI think 2027 plus is what the slides say.

27:39SPEAKER- Well, that's at least one more generation

27:40SPEAKERafter these M5 parts, if not two, maybe.

27:44SPEAKER- I mean, and for what it's worth,

27:45SPEAKERthey announced new AM4 CPUs this year.

27:48SPEAKER- Yeah, didn't they announce a Zen 3,

27:51SPEAKERa new Zen 3 part in the last month?

27:53SPEAKER- I don't know about that, that sounds crazy.

27:54SPEAKER- I thought I saw that, I could be wrong.

27:57SPEAKER- But anyway, the X870 and X870e chipsets are out now.

28:01SPEAKERThey all have USB 4.

28:03SPEAKERThey're specifying the USB 4 chips, I believe,

28:05SPEAKERthat are allowed to be used by the motherboard vendors

28:07SPEAKERfor at least some subset of the ports.

28:09SPEAKER- Really?

28:11SPEAKERYou mean third party USB controllers?

28:13SPEAKER- Yeah, they had a list of, here are the controllers

28:16SPEAKERthat are gonna be supported on their deck.

28:18SPEAKER- Interesting, okay, I wonder,

28:20SPEAKER'cause the USB compatibility was probably

28:22SPEAKERthe biggest problem I had when I was on AMD,

28:24SPEAKERso if they're devoting attention to making that better

28:26SPEAKERand more compatible, that's very good.

28:28SPEAKER- I think this is one of those situations

28:30SPEAKERwhere Intel builds a lot of their own USB chipsets

28:34SPEAKERand AMD does not.

28:35SPEAKER- Yeah, I think that's probably the case

28:38SPEAKER'cause I've had infinitely better experience

28:39SPEAKERwith USB peripherals on this Intel machine.

28:42SPEAKER- Yeah, I think my board has Intel USB chips on it, I think.

28:46SPEAKERAnyway, and PCIe Gen 5 for graphics plus NVMe

28:52SPEAKERis standard across, like, for multiple NVMe slots

28:56SPEAKERand the main graphics slot.

28:59SPEAKERAnd I think it has Wi-Fi 7 support as well.

29:01SPEAKER- Yeah, we talked about it on the Wi-Fi 7 episode

29:03SPEAKERa few weeks ago, but every X870 board I looked up

29:06SPEAKERhad Wi-Fi 7 built in, although I don't know,

29:08SPEAKERI wonder what the market spread is

29:10SPEAKERon people using Wi-Fi on desktops.

29:13SPEAKER- It's surprisingly high would be my guess.

29:16SPEAKER- I think so.

29:17SPEAKER- Yeah.

29:18SPEAKER- Well, some people just don't wanna run ethernet cords.

29:19SPEAKER- Some people can't run ethernet cords.

29:20SPEAKER- Or don't have the layout that supports it, yeah.

29:23SPEAKER- Yeah.

29:24SPEAKERFaster memory clocks supported on the new chipsets as well,

29:27SPEAKERup to 64 mega transfers per second.

29:30SPEAKER- 6400.

29:31SPEAKER- 6400, did I say 64?

29:33SPEAKER- Yeah.

29:33SPEAKER- 64 mega transfers per second would be very low.

29:35SPEAKER- That would be pretty slow.

29:36SPEAKER- Yeah, that would be unfortunate, but 6400.

29:39SPEAKER- No, that's supported, right?

29:40SPEAKERThat's like out of the box spec 6400.

29:43SPEAKER- That is JEDEC spec 6400 mega transfers per second, yeah.

29:47SPEAKER- 'Cause you were seeing people go 8000 or higher

29:49SPEAKEReven on the previous gen, but that's like way out of spec.

29:51SPEAKERThat's kind of overclocking territory.

29:53SPEAKER- Well, and you have to turn some ratios down

29:54SPEAKERso that you're doing like a limited number of transfers

29:56SPEAKERor run single channel motors.

29:57SPEAKERThere's goofy stuff you do when that happens.

29:59SPEAKER- So 6400 supported out of the box

30:02SPEAKERseems like it's getting there.

30:04SPEAKER- Like officially rock solid support is the thing.

30:08SPEAKERThere's four parts out now.

30:10SPEAKERI'm sure they'll fill out the stack more later

30:11SPEAKERas time goes on.

30:13SPEAKERThe high end is the 9950X,

30:15SPEAKERwhich is a 4.3 gigahertz to 5.7 gigahertz,

30:19SPEAKERdepending on boosts and how many cores

30:21SPEAKERyou're running and all that.

30:22SPEAKERFor 600 bucks, it's 16 cores with hyper-threading,

30:25SPEAKERso that means 32 threads on two CCDs, two dies,

30:29SPEAKERand it's 170 watts total TDP.

30:32SPEAKERThe 9900X, which is 4.4 gigahertz to 5.6 gigahertz

30:37SPEAKERhas been dropped to $430 already.

30:39SPEAKERI don't know if that's permanent or not,

30:41SPEAKERbut this one is underperforming

30:43SPEAKERcompared to the other people's part.

30:45SPEAKERPrice is 12 cores with hyper-threading on two dies.

30:49SPEAKERThe 9700X is a single CCD 3.8 to 5.5 gigahertz for 330 bucks

30:58SPEAKERand that's shipped at 65 watts TDP,

31:00SPEAKERbut that's one of the ones you can overclock to 105

31:02SPEAKERusing PBO and they'll honor the warranty on.

31:06SPEAKERAnd then the 9600X is a six-core version of that same thing,

31:10SPEAKER3.9 gigahertz to 5.4 gigahertz for 250 bucks

31:14SPEAKERwith hyper-threading, 65 watt TDP,

31:17SPEAKERagain, overclockable to 105.

31:19SPEAKER- Yeah, I know this is just branding,

31:21SPEAKERbut it seems like they have possibly now reserved

31:24SPEAKERthe 800 label purely for the X3D chips

31:26SPEAKER'cause it used to be the eight-core was an 800.

31:28SPEAKERIt was a 5800X, 7800X.

31:31SPEAKERThose were the non-VCash eight-core parts,

31:35SPEAKERbut it looks like they've moved to 9700X.

31:37SPEAKERI guess that's just to make it more obvious

31:38SPEAKERwhich one is the good gaming one.

31:40SPEAKER- So we can talk about the 9800X now if you want,

31:42SPEAKERX3D now if you want,

31:44SPEAKER'cause they kind of did a surprise

31:46SPEAKERright as Intel was rolling out their Aero Lake CPUs.

31:50SPEAKERThey were like, "Hey, by the way, guys,

31:51SPEAKERwe got an X3D coming, it's gonna be here week after next."

31:54SPEAKER- Almost like they planned it that way.

31:56SPEAKER- Yeah, it was real, real, real suspicious timing.

31:58SPEAKER- Yeah, I guess it does make sense

32:00SPEAKERto do all the AMD stuff now,

32:01SPEAKEReven though we're kind of leapfrogging the Intel stuff,

32:03SPEAKERwhich we'll get back to.

32:03SPEAKERThe other thing I was gonna say real quick

32:05SPEAKERis that I still find the 12-core part a little weird here.

32:09SPEAKERLike it kind of feels like- - I'm sure that that's a,

32:10SPEAKERhey, we have some dies that fail.

32:13SPEAKER- Oh yeah, for sure, it's absolute.

32:14SPEAKERWell, I think it's a six-core CCD

32:17SPEAKERthat they put in that thing, right?

32:19SPEAKERI'm pretty sure. - I believe,

32:21SPEAKERthey don't specify a six-core.

32:25SPEAKER- Or do you think they're only fabbing one eight-core CCD now

32:28SPEAKERand like they're the ones that have bad cores,

32:30SPEAKERthey're just dropping down to six?

32:32SPEAKER- My guess is that they have ones that have bad cores

32:34SPEAKERthat fail that they're dropping down to six,

32:36SPEAKERbut I don't know.

32:36SPEAKER- I'm sure people have de-lidded these things

32:38SPEAKERand looked at the dies by now to maybe figure that out.

32:40SPEAKERI'm not sure.

32:42SPEAKER- Yeah.

32:43SPEAKER- I mean, this doesn't matter to the average end user,

32:44SPEAKERbut I mean, we're not average end users, we're huge nerds.

32:48SPEAKERAnd I just am curious about this kind of thing.

32:50SPEAKERBut the bigger point though with the 12-core one

32:53SPEAKERis you're still having the two CCDs,

32:56SPEAKERso you still have to worry about threads migrating across

32:58SPEAKERand taking a performance penalty.

33:00SPEAKER- Yeah.

33:01SPEAKER- But especially for games,

33:02SPEAKERlike consoles are all eight-cores now.

33:04SPEAKERSo like, I always feel like a six-core die

33:08SPEAKERdevoted to gaming is maybe shortchanging you a little bit.

33:10SPEAKERI mean, these are not gaming parts to be fair.

33:12SPEAKER- I think that the six-core stuff made a lot more sense

33:16SPEAKERbefore the current gen consoles were out.

33:18SPEAKER- Right.

33:19SPEAKER- I think that as we're looking at games

33:21SPEAKERthat hit all eight-cores,

33:24SPEAKERthere are a pretty substantial number of games

33:26SPEAKERthat are multi-threaded enough

33:28SPEAKERthat you actually see eight CPU cores in use now.

33:32SPEAKER- Yeah.

33:32SPEAKER- And I would not probably buy one of those six-core machines

33:38SPEAKERif you're looking at playing games.

33:41SPEAKERNow, if you're just doing multi-threaded stuff,

33:43SPEAKERlike it's a pretty substantial price drop

33:46SPEAKERfrom the 9950X with 16-cores.

33:48SPEAKER- To get 12-cores.

33:49SPEAKER- To get 12, yeah.

33:51SPEAKER- If you're doing like video encoding or Photoshop

33:53SPEAKERor like productivity stuff should be fine

33:55SPEAKER'cause those are way less latency dependent than games.

33:58SPEAKER- Yeah, it's like, but even like video encoding

34:00SPEAKERis less of a hey, I need a lot of CPU cores thing

34:03SPEAKERfor it these days

34:04SPEAKERbecause most people are doing that on the GPU.

34:07SPEAKERSo it feels like it's like rendering and stuff like that.

34:10SPEAKER- Yeah, well, it depends on if you're doing like streaming,

34:13SPEAKERyou're on the GPU.

34:14SPEAKERIf you're encoding for maximum quality,

34:16SPEAKERyou're probably still doing software encodes.

34:18SPEAKER- I think you'd be surprised.

34:19SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, it's, yes, there's still,

34:21SPEAKERthe hardware encoders are much better, but.

34:23SPEAKER- Yeah, anyway, so the 9800X3D is a $480 MSRP.

34:30SPEAKERIt's 30 bucks more than the 7800X3D at launch.

34:34SPEAKERThe 7800X3D is basically impossible to find now.

34:37SPEAKERIt seems like they stopped making them.

34:39SPEAKER- No kidding, okay.

34:41SPEAKER- It's a new 3DV cache design.

34:43SPEAKERIt's the first time they've done that

34:44SPEAKERsince they launched the 3DV cache stuff.

34:45SPEAKER- This is huge.

34:46SPEAKERI did not realize they had done this.

34:48SPEAKER- Yeah, so previously the 3DV cache

34:50SPEAKERwas on the top of the chip,

34:51SPEAKERwhich meant it was basically like an insulating layer

34:53SPEAKERbetween the hot part of the disaggregated chip.

34:59SPEAKER- Yeah, like the actual chip,

35:00SPEAKERlike the actual CPU cores were buried

35:02SPEAKERunderneath the extra cache,

35:03SPEAKERwhich is a strange design choice.

35:06SPEAKER- Well, and as a result,

35:07SPEAKERyou couldn't run those at quite as high a clock.

35:10SPEAKERSo if you had a single CCD design,

35:14SPEAKERlike a Ryzen 7800, for example,

35:16SPEAKERthen you would just know that you're gonna sacrifice

35:19SPEAKERsome clock performance, some upper bounds of that,

35:22SPEAKERbecause the massive amount of L3 cache on this V cache

35:27SPEAKERgave you enormous performance in stuff

35:29SPEAKERthat's like memory latency sensitive,

35:32SPEAKERlike games and things like that.

35:34SPEAKERNow, if you had a dual CCD design,

35:36SPEAKERyou were in a weird situation

35:38SPEAKERwhere Windows didn't know where to put stuff,

35:40SPEAKER'cause your non-V cache cores would be way faster

35:43SPEAKERat compute stuff. - Dramatically.

35:45SPEAKERYeah, 'cause that's what I had, you know,

35:46SPEAKERlike it was like six or 800 megahertz difference, I think,

35:49SPEAKERbetween the non-V cache die and the one with.

35:53SPEAKER- Yeah, and as a result,

35:56SPEAKERif Windows put your threads on the right cores,

35:59SPEAKERstuff was great, and if they didn't,

36:01SPEAKERthen you were running at non-optimal speeds.

36:03SPEAKER- Yeah, and in fact, what you would see,

36:04SPEAKER'cause I watch Task Manager and stuff a lot,

36:07SPEAKERlike you would see, I believe they parked

36:09SPEAKERthe V cache die in Windows normally,

36:13SPEAKERbecause you want all your Windows tasks

36:15SPEAKERon the die with a higher clock speed, right?

36:19SPEAKER- Yeah, exactly.

36:20SPEAKER- So you were only running on the eight cores

36:21SPEAKERof the faster, higher clock speed die,

36:24SPEAKERunless it needed the extra eight cores,

36:25SPEAKERlike it was a weird, weird split thing.

36:27SPEAKERAnd worth pointing out here,

36:30SPEAKERthe X3D parts on Zen 4,

36:31SPEAKERthey launched eight, 12, and 16 core parts all at once.

36:35SPEAKER- Yes, and it was like six months later, five months later.

36:38SPEAKER- Well, it was some time later, right?

36:40SPEAKERBut the point is they have only launched

36:42SPEAKERthe eight core part now.

36:43SPEAKER- Well, that's, people wanted the eight core part.

36:46SPEAKER- That's exactly it.

36:47SPEAKERI'm wondering if the 7800 X3D outsold

36:51SPEAKERthe 12 and 16 core parts so much

36:52SPEAKERthat I wonder if they'll even bother this time.

36:55SPEAKER- Well, so the thing about the eight core part

36:58SPEAKERis that the eight core part is faster,

37:01SPEAKERnot to skip to the chase,

37:02SPEAKERthe eight core 7800 X3D from the Zen 4 generation

37:05SPEAKERis faster than pretty much anything Intel launched this time

37:08SPEAKERand anything AMD launched,

37:10SPEAKERexcept for the new X3D part in games.

37:13SPEAKER- Yeah.

37:14SPEAKER- So it's an incredible,

37:16SPEAKERthe V cache is incredible for games, is the kind of TLDR.

37:19SPEAKER- Yes, real quick, just googling around,

37:22SPEAKERit looks like there are benchmarks leaking

37:24SPEAKERfor the 16 core X3D part.

37:27SPEAKERSo that probably is happening.

37:32SPEAKER- So the new design is that they put the V cache

37:34SPEAKERon the bottom of the chip.

37:36SPEAKERSo it's no longer insulating the dyes,

37:39SPEAKERwhich means you get a base clock

37:41SPEAKERthat's 500 megahertz faster than before

37:43SPEAKERand it's unlocked for overclocking, which is new.

37:47SPEAKERSo it's really, really, really good for games.

37:51SPEAKERLike it's the first of all of the CPUs

37:53SPEAKERthat have come out so far this year.

37:55SPEAKERIt's the only one that the enthusiast gaming channels

37:58SPEAKERhave been like, this is a real good CPU,

38:00SPEAKEReverybody should get this.

38:02SPEAKERAnd the overclocking results for it are kind of crazy.

38:06SPEAKER- That's cool, I'm flipping the cache to the bottom

38:08SPEAKERis a huge thing that I'm glad to hear they did that.

38:11SPEAKER- Yeah, I think they pitched it as,

38:13SPEAKERhey, this is the first time we've redesigned this

38:14SPEAKERsince we started doing the V cache, the 3D V cache stuff.

38:19SPEAKER- Worth pointing out that not every game

38:20SPEAKERis gonna see massive gains from the extra cache.

38:22SPEAKERLike it's very dependent on the type of game.

38:24SPEAKER- Yes.

38:25SPEAKER- And specific game engines, even like strategy games,

38:28SPEAKERanything that does a ton of like math constantly,

38:31SPEAKERfactorio or like civilization type,

38:33SPEAKERsimilar like 4X games and stuff,

38:35SPEAKERlike just like huge, huge, huge gains.

38:39SPEAKERAnd a lot of like 3D action games as well

38:42SPEAKERalso get a huge boost, but there are some other games

38:44SPEAKERthat see next to no improvement on the X3.

38:46SPEAKER- 2D pixel art games aren't gonna see a whole lot.

38:49SPEAKER- Or even like certain 3D, you know, like I wanna say,

38:51SPEAKERI think Far Cry, the Far Cry games, for example,

38:54SPEAKERlike Ubisoft's engine doesn't see much of a lift.

38:57SPEAKERLike it's highly game dependent,

38:58SPEAKERbut it is a lot of games that get a huge boost.

39:02SPEAKER- So the TLDR is if you just wanna kind of general

39:05SPEAKERall-purpose CPU and you play games,

39:07SPEAKERthat X3D at $450, $500 is a pretty good deal.

39:11SPEAKERThey're sold out everywhere right now.

39:13SPEAKER- Yeah.

39:14SPEAKER- You can't get them anywhere.

39:14SPEAKER- I think it, how long has it been out

39:15SPEAKERat the time of this recording?

39:17SPEAKER- So three days.

39:18SPEAKER- Okay.

39:19SPEAKER- Two days.

39:20SPEAKER- Yeah, that makes sense.

39:21SPEAKER- Yeah.

39:22SPEAKER- But I assume they'll be making a lot of these

39:24SPEAKERbecause they're going to sell a lot of these.

39:26SPEAKER- Yeah, this is how they gain market share

39:28SPEAKERagainst Intel in enthusiast spaces.

39:30SPEAKERIt's a small part of the market,

39:31SPEAKERbut it's one that they seem to care about quite a bit.

39:34SPEAKERSo that's what AMD's got going.

39:36SPEAKERLike these chips are pretty good.

39:38SPEAKERThe power efficiency, like I actually really liked

39:41SPEAKERthat they shipped them at 65 watts versus 105

39:45SPEAKERbecause defaults, this is a situation where defaults matter

39:48SPEAKERand the vast majority of people who buy a 9600 or 9700

39:51SPEAKERdon't care that it's only the same speed

39:54SPEAKERas last generation part.

39:57SPEAKERAnd like, it'll be nice that their rooms are less warm

39:59SPEAKERand they're not wasting as much electricity

40:01SPEAKERdoing the same exact work.

40:02SPEAKER- Yeah, and they're not risking their hardware.

40:04SPEAKER- Yeah, but if you want that perf, you can, right?

40:06SPEAKER- Right, I guess both companies have had examples

40:08SPEAKERin the last two years of CPUs committing suicide

40:11SPEAKERbecause of the amount of juice they're-

40:12SPEAKER- Wildly different scales in which it happened.

40:14SPEAKER- Well, I know, yes, but it shouldn't be happening

40:16SPEAKERat all anywhere ever.

40:17SPEAKER- That's true.

40:18SPEAKER- So for them to take steps to alleviate the problem

40:22SPEAKERis extremely welcome.

40:24SPEAKER- Yeah, okay, next up is Intel's Aero Lake,

40:26SPEAKERAKA the Core Ultra S Series 2.

40:30SPEAKERThey skipped the 100 series for reasons

40:32SPEAKERthat I don't understand.

40:33SPEAKER- I wonder is it because Meteor Lake

40:35SPEAKERwas technically the first generation

40:37SPEAKERwhere they did the disaggregated,

40:38SPEAKERbut that was only in mobile and laptop?

40:41SPEAKER- It's possible, this is technically,

40:43SPEAKERlike Lunar Lake is the mobile part

40:45SPEAKERthat came out earlier this year.

40:47SPEAKER- This is actually, you can follow on to the Meteor Lake

40:51SPEAKERmore than the Lunar Lake.

40:52SPEAKERThe Lunar Lake is a different thing.

40:53SPEAKER- Aero Lake is descended from Meteor Lake

40:55SPEAKERis what you're saying?

40:56SPEAKER- Aero Lake, it comes from Meteor Lake is my understanding.

40:58SPEAKER- Interesting.

41:00SPEAKER- The Chiplets are built by TSMC on a variety of processes,

41:03SPEAKERthree and four nanohertz, nanometers rather.

41:06SPEAKER- Yes, which is I think up to six,

41:08SPEAKERI think at least one of the tiles.

41:10SPEAKERSo just terminology, Intel calls their little chips tiles

41:14SPEAKERthat go on there, disaggregated packages,

41:17SPEAKERAMD calls them Chiplets,

41:18SPEAKERor at least Chiplet is their kind of colloquial term.

41:20SPEAKER- Yeah.

41:22SPEAKER- But I think some of, you know,

41:23SPEAKERthere's like an IO tile and a memory controller

41:25SPEAKERand blah, blah, blah.

41:26SPEAKERI think it's like between three and six nanometers.

41:29SPEAKER- Yeah, that's probably right.

41:30SPEAKERAnd TSMC makes all of those,

41:32SPEAKERwhich is the first time that's ever happened

41:33SPEAKERfor an Intel desktop part.

41:35SPEAKER- Yeah, except for the, I looked it up,

41:36SPEAKERlike the base tile,

41:38SPEAKERwhich is basically just the interconnect

41:39SPEAKERwith all the actual tiles sit on is made by Intel,

41:41SPEAKERbut I didn't realize literally the entire rest of the chip

41:44SPEAKERis made by TSMC.

41:45SPEAKERLike that's, that's like big from a historic perspective

41:48SPEAKERand a business perspective,

41:49SPEAKERbecause like Intel has always made all their own stuff

41:52SPEAKERand their fabrication traditionally

41:55SPEAKERhas been extremely capable and has high capacity,

41:57SPEAKERbut they have fallen so far behind on that front.

42:03SPEAKER- Dr. Ian Cutrus over at Tech Tech Potato

42:05SPEAKERhas a really good video about why this is a big deal

42:08SPEAKERbecause they, Intel doesn't just make their own stuff.

42:11SPEAKERThey also have a completely different process

42:13SPEAKERfor like how the designs are transferred

42:15SPEAKERto the machines and the flabs and all that stuff.

42:18SPEAKERIt's, it is as it's over,

42:20SPEAKERit's impossible to overemphasize what a big deal it is.

42:22SPEAKER- Like, like it's kind of,

42:23SPEAKERit's kind of like they are kind of eating crow, right?

42:25SPEAKERLike it's sort of, it is sort of an admission

42:27SPEAKERof maybe failure is too strong a word,

42:30SPEAKERbut like they have really fallen behind the market

42:32SPEAKERto have to go to TSMC to make this thing.

42:35SPEAKER- Well, they were able to be iconic class for a long time.

42:37SPEAKERAnd finally, as often happens with people,

42:41SPEAKERwith companies that are iconic class

42:42SPEAKERin the industry at this scale,

42:44SPEAKERit caught up with them.

42:46SPEAKER- Yeah, there's a whole story there about, you know,

42:48SPEAKERwho was running Intel for the last decade

42:49SPEAKERand how complacent they may have gotten and blah, blah, blah.

42:53SPEAKER- But also like they had,

42:55SPEAKERthey had a fab process that this was supposed to roll out on

42:58SPEAKERat least part of it that flopped and they had to cancel.

43:01SPEAKERAnd then they're moving future stuff

43:02SPEAKERto a different, different process.

43:03SPEAKERLike it's, it's difficult.

43:07SPEAKERLike, I don't think we need to get

43:08SPEAKERinto why Intel is having problems right now,

43:11SPEAKERbut Intel is having problems right now

43:13SPEAKERthat are related to some management stuff

43:15SPEAKERover the last decade.

43:16SPEAKER- For sure, for sure.

43:17SPEAKERI mean, I think it's enough to say

43:17SPEAKERthat they are having problems, but they also, like you said,

43:20SPEAKERthey've got this, they've got this new process spinning up

43:23SPEAKERthat's supposed to be pretty competitive with TSMC.

43:25SPEAKERThey're also moving, or not moving,

43:27SPEAKERbut they are building a ton of fabrication

43:29SPEAKERin the United States.

43:30SPEAKER- Yeah, which is taking longer than expected,

43:32SPEAKERwhich is costing them a bunch of money, which is, anyway.

43:34SPEAKER- They got in, they got in big on the CHIPS Act,

43:36SPEAKERwhich God knows if that'll survive

43:38SPEAKERthe incoming administration or not.

43:39SPEAKERBut I think, I think Intel is supposed to be getting

43:41SPEAKERlike three billion from the government

43:43SPEAKERto spin up all this new fabrication in the United States.

43:46SPEAKER- Yeah.

43:47SPEAKER- The point is, like, they have their own process

43:50SPEAKERthat is supposedly going to be competitive,

43:52SPEAKERbut it may not be online for another year or two.

43:55SPEAKER- It's taking time.

43:56SPEAKER- And my understanding is, the little bit I've read,

43:58SPEAKERlike the thing you were talking about

43:59SPEAKERwith the way designs are transferred,

44:01SPEAKERkind of industry standard inner workings of the fab process,

44:05SPEAKERlike they are getting more standardized

44:07SPEAKERon that stuff as well.

44:08SPEAKER- That is part of the thing that's changing as well,

44:10SPEAKER'cause they wanna be able to get

44:11SPEAKERinto other people's business as well as just Intel.

44:13SPEAKERTypically, Intel built Intel chips on Intel fabs

44:15SPEAKERand nothing else was built on Intel fabs

44:17SPEAKERbecause their tooling wasn't set up

44:19SPEAKERto accept files from other.

44:22SPEAKER- Exactly.

44:23SPEAKER- It's like they were using WordStar still

44:24SPEAKERand everybody else has moved onto Google documents.

44:26SPEAKER- Right, right.

44:28SPEAKERThat all, like to my mind,

44:29SPEAKERlike that's actually all pretty important

44:30SPEAKERand I'm not gonna even get into

44:32SPEAKERthe national security conversation

44:34SPEAKERabout having fab in different countries.

44:36SPEAKERBut even just like the thing you always hear

44:39SPEAKERis that Apple and NVIDIA are just completely dominating

44:42SPEAKERTSMC's output, because the phones,

44:45SPEAKERlike Apple mobile stuff and NVIDIA AI stuff

44:48SPEAKERis so in demand that everybody else

44:51SPEAKERjust has to fight over the table scraps

44:53SPEAKERof whatever capacity is left.

44:56SPEAKER- And you're in a situation where you're buying capacity

44:58SPEAKERyears and years in advance, right?

44:59SPEAKERLike this stuff is scheduled for like,

45:02SPEAKERby the time the fab opens its doors,

45:04SPEAKERits first five plus years of time are probably booked.

45:09SPEAKER- Right, like I'm not gonna place the bet

45:10SPEAKERthat Intel's new stuff is gonna be

45:12SPEAKERand like directly competitive on day one,

45:14SPEAKERbut like more next generation fab capacity

45:19SPEAKERin more places just seems good

45:20SPEAKERfrom a demand standpoint, if nothing else.

45:22SPEAKER- Well, and from like a natural disaster

45:24SPEAKERand like you said, Taiwan is challenging

45:29SPEAKERfor a lot of reasons.

45:31SPEAKEROkay, so this is the first whole new design,

45:34SPEAKERground up soup to nuts redesign from Intel on desktop

45:38SPEAKERsince like Nehalem, which was early 2010s.

45:43SPEAKER- Wait, Nehalem was not the first dual core part, right?

45:46SPEAKER- It was the first real dual core.

45:47SPEAKERPreviously it was that they had two CPU's

45:49SPEAKERon the same chip that talked through memory

45:52SPEAKERor Northbridge or something, I can't remember specifics.

45:54SPEAKER- But yeah, 'cause I was gonna say,

45:55SPEAKERthis is basically like from a basic level,

45:57SPEAKERthis is the biggest design change Intel has made

45:59SPEAKERsince they went to multi-core CPUs.

46:01SPEAKER- Since they went to real multi-core, yeah.

46:04SPEAKERThere's new, so this uses, like I said,

46:06SPEAKERit's disaggregated just like the rises have been for ages.

46:09SPEAKERThere's a Foveros is their kind of underlying 3D packaging

46:13SPEAKERtech that they've been talking about for years.

46:15SPEAKERAnd this is the first thing that ships on it for desktop.

46:18SPEAKERThere's the tiles connect to the Foveros layer

46:23SPEAKERor the Interposer layer based tile.

46:25SPEAKERThey call it four different things at different places.

46:27SPEAKER- Yeah, I love the term Interposer.

46:29SPEAKER- Yeah, it's pretty good. - It sounds so high tech.

46:32SPEAKER- But there's a system on a chip tile,

46:34SPEAKERwhich has like the basic housekeeping stuff.

46:36SPEAKERThere's a compute tile, there's an IO tile,

46:38SPEAKERwhich has the memory controller and that stuff, I believe.

46:41SPEAKERPCI express lanes, all of that.

46:43SPEAKERAnd a GPU tile that's optional.

46:45SPEAKERAnd then sometimes they also put a filler tile in

46:47SPEAKERthat makes the whole thing nice and square.

46:49SPEAKERI don't understand why that's necessary, but I guess it is.

46:53SPEAKER- So this is the thing I mentioned earlier

46:54SPEAKERwhere they differ significantly from AMD, at least for now.

46:58SPEAKERAll their CPU dies, or I'm sorry,

47:00SPEAKERall their CPU cores are still on one die.

47:02SPEAKER- Yeah, single die.

47:03SPEAKERThe three nanometer Intel, three nanometer TSMC package,

47:07SPEAKERI believe.

47:08SPEAKER- So for now, at least for as long as they're gonna do that,

47:11SPEAKERI guess that avoids the problem AMD has

47:13SPEAKERof different dies with CPU tile,

47:16SPEAKERor God, I'm sorry, a lot of terminology.

47:19SPEAKERDifferent CPU cores on different dies

47:21SPEAKERtrying to talk to each other over a slower interconnect.

47:23SPEAKERLike Intel, for the moment at least,

47:26SPEAKERdoes not have that problem

47:27SPEAKERbecause every CPU core is still on one chip.

47:29SPEAKER- Well, 'cause the thing to remember always

47:31SPEAKERis that as you get further,

47:34SPEAKERlike when you're inside the same piece of silicon,

47:36SPEAKERyou can talk at an incredibly high speed

47:38SPEAKERacross CPU cores, right?

47:41SPEAKERSo for example, on the P cores

47:44SPEAKERthat are in this new package,

47:48SPEAKERyou have 33 megs of L2 cache each, right?

47:54SPEAKERAnd if one of those P cores wants to talk to another P core,

47:57SPEAKERit goes out to the L3 cache,

47:58SPEAKERwhich is shared with all of the L2 caches in the system.

48:01SPEAKER36 megs of that.

48:04SPEAKERWith the E cores, the E cores all share four megabytes

48:08SPEAKERof L2 cache in each of these four CPU core clusters.

48:12SPEAKERSo that means those four E cores

48:14SPEAKERcan talk to each other very, very quickly

48:15SPEAKERacross this L2 connection,

48:17SPEAKERwhich is a lot faster than the L3 connection

48:19SPEAKERthat the P cores are using to talk to.

48:22SPEAKERThis all, here's the thing.

48:25SPEAKERThe upshot is it's way faster to talk through the L3 cache

48:28SPEAKERbetween these cores, no matter which core you're talking to,

48:31SPEAKERthan it is to go out to that Foveros layer

48:34SPEAKERand talk to another chip on the die,

48:36SPEAKERon the same CPU, on the same CPU.

48:38SPEAKER- Yeah, on the AMD side, they call it the infinity fabric

48:41SPEAKERis the name of the interconnect between chips.

48:43SPEAKER- Yeah, but infinity fabric is slower

48:45SPEAKERthan talking to cross L2 cache inside the chest.

48:47SPEAKERAnyway. - Enormously.

48:50SPEAKER- So these are Skymod E cores,

48:51SPEAKERwhich are supposed to be significantly faster

48:53SPEAKERthan previous gen E cores.

48:54SPEAKERAnd the thing about the E cores and the P cores

48:55SPEAKERis the E cores are smaller, they're less capable

48:58SPEAKERin that they sometimes don't have the same instruction sets,

49:01SPEAKERaccessible to them as the P cores do.

49:04SPEAKERThey have different cache configurations.

49:06SPEAKERThey're mostly there to run on benchmarks

49:11SPEAKERwhere you benefit from having lots of CPU cores,

49:13SPEAKERon workloads that you benefit from having lots of CPU cores.

49:17SPEAKERSo your video encodes, your rendering, stuff like that.

49:19SPEAKER- Yeah, everything I've seen is that like

49:21SPEAKERfor whatever other problems Intel is having,

49:23SPEAKERlike they're the group that's doing the E cores

49:24SPEAKERis just going ham.

49:26SPEAKER- Yeah, I think that's a fair assessment.

49:27SPEAKER- Like the E cores, the Skymod E cores

49:29SPEAKERare like very good.

49:32SPEAKERAnd that is, I'm trying to think,

49:34SPEAKERI was keeping track of this for a while

49:36SPEAKER'cause like I've got this Alder Lake, for example,

49:38SPEAKERas of Alder Lake, I can't remember which Mont it was,

49:41SPEAKERthat might be Grace Mont.

49:43SPEAKERAnyway, the E cores in the Alder Lakes,

49:45SPEAKERwhich are 12th gen were said to be about equivalent

49:47SPEAKERto a Skylake desktop part.

49:50SPEAKER- Which was like- - Which was a 6700K.

49:52SPEAKER- Yeah.

49:53SPEAKER- So basically the cores, even a generation or two ago,

49:56SPEAKERthe E cores were roughly equivalent

49:57SPEAKERto a high-end desktop part of what, eight years ago?

50:02SPEAKER- Yeah. - 7700, 6700?

50:04SPEAKER- No, more than that. - Skylake came out in 2015.

50:06SPEAKER- Yeah, it's nine years ago. - About nine years ago.

50:07SPEAKERAnyway, the point is, the point is the E cores

50:09SPEAKERare getting like very capable themselves.

50:13SPEAKERAnd you wouldn't wanna play games on them to be clear, but.

50:16SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, you'd probably be fine

50:17SPEAKERdepending on what kind of resolutions you're playing

50:19SPEAKERand stuff like that.

50:20SPEAKERThe point is the E cores this year

50:22SPEAKERis supposed to be 30% faster than previous years.

50:25SPEAKER- Which is, 'cause again, they were getting pretty good

50:27SPEAKERand part of the reason I'm harping on this

50:29SPEAKERis because there's like,

50:30SPEAKERI think people probably are getting familiar with this.

50:32SPEAKERThere's this whole scene of like lower end fanless X86 boxes

50:39SPEAKERcoming out of like AliExpress and stuff.

50:40SPEAKERIt's like things that people were building routers out of

50:42SPEAKERand like appliance type stuff.

50:44SPEAKERLiterally like low power enough to not even need fans.

50:46SPEAKERThey're all passive cooled.

50:48SPEAKERI am extremely eager for those Skymont cores

50:52SPEAKERto start migrating to those things.

50:54SPEAKER- Yeah, and I think that's the kind of thing

50:55SPEAKERthat'll come over time.

50:56SPEAKERLike Intel launches four or five CPUs, six CPUs,

51:01SPEAKERand then they'll roll out a hundred different variants

51:03SPEAKERin all to fill every available market niche.

51:06SPEAKER- Yeah.

51:08SPEAKER- Okay, so big deal this year, no more hyper-threading.

51:13SPEAKER- Yeah, I wish I understood CPU design better enough

51:17SPEAKERto understand why this is apparently a good thing

51:19SPEAKERand not a bad thing.

51:20SPEAKER- Well, so it used to be that the P cores

51:23SPEAKERhad hyper-threading and the E cores didn't.

51:24SPEAKERSo hyper-threading basically lets you segment off

51:28SPEAKERdifferent parts of the CPU and do disparate tasks

51:33SPEAKERon the same CPU as if they're the two virtual CPUs,

51:37SPEAKERbasically is the kind of the easy analogy.

51:41SPEAKERThe upshot is that the overhead of hyper-threading

51:44SPEAKERmakes the CPUs a lot bigger

51:47SPEAKERand they were able to pack more in

51:49SPEAKERif they got rid of it is my understanding of this.

51:51SPEAKER- Interesting, okay.

51:52SPEAKERAnd also with a whole shitload of E cores.

51:56SPEAKERSo just to be clear, the high-end part here

51:58SPEAKERhas eight P cores and 16 E cores.

52:02SPEAKERMy guess is that the overhead of having hyper-threading

52:04SPEAKERwas less efficient than having just more E cores

52:08SPEAKERjammed into the same space.

52:09SPEAKER- That makes sense.

52:10SPEAKERI mean, that's still 24 threads.

52:11SPEAKERLike that's not really anything to scoff at.

52:14SPEAKER- Yeah, because the thing is, if you're using the same,

52:17SPEAKERif you're doing the same kind of math

52:19SPEAKERwith hyper-threading on, it can't use different parts of it.

52:25SPEAKERHyper-threading only works if you're using different tasks,

52:27SPEAKERdifferent kinds of math on the same parts of the CPU.

52:30SPEAKERIf you're doing the same math, it doesn't scale.

52:32SPEAKERAnd a lot of the heavily multi-threaded workloads

52:35SPEAKERare gonna do the same math, just lots of it.

52:37SPEAKERSo the AI stuff and things like that.

52:42SPEAKERIntegrated graphics are the Xe LPG architecture,

52:44SPEAKERwhich is like a mini arc stack from their desktop parts.

52:48SPEAKER- Yeah, or from the cards, the GPU.

52:50SPEAKER- Yeah, the screen parts, yeah.

52:53SPEAKER- Stronger push in graphics cards the last couple of years,

52:55SPEAKERwhich sounds like that's kind of paying off.

52:58SPEAKERLike they're still not super competitive with Nvidia and AMD,

53:01SPEAKERbut they're getting better.

53:02SPEAKER- I mean, I think the baseline for integrated graphics

53:05SPEAKERis way up from what it was four years ago.

53:08SPEAKERIt's not the Battlemage stuff that's in Lunar Lake, though.

53:11SPEAKERIt's worth mentioning.

53:12SPEAKER- Okay, I wanna say, I thought I saw people were talking

53:15SPEAKERlike these integrated graphics are getting into like kind of

53:18SPEAKERlow end 10 series Nvidia performance levels now,

53:21SPEAKERlike a 1060 or something, which like.

53:23SPEAKER- Like eight year old video card seems about right

53:25SPEAKERfor integrated graphics.

53:26SPEAKER- Yeah, which is like not nothing.

53:27SPEAKERI mean, you could play Fortnite on that, right?

53:29SPEAKERAt low settings.

53:31SPEAKER- I mean, you can play Fortnite on a Switch if you want.

53:33SPEAKER- Oh, sure.

53:34SPEAKER- It's two GPU cores, it's,

53:39SPEAKERI would describe it as fairly underwhelming, but you know.

53:42SPEAKER- Obviously anybody who's serious about games

53:44SPEAKERstill wants a graphics card,

53:45SPEAKERbut it's great for embedded situations or use cases

53:49SPEAKERwhere you don't wanna put a graphics card in.

53:51SPEAKER- And the real reason you buy a chip with a GPU on it

53:54SPEAKERis 'cause you want quick sync support, which has AV1 now.

53:57SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, you can now do AV1 encode

53:59SPEAKERwith their video encoder on here,

54:01SPEAKERwhich is gonna be huge for streaming and Plex

54:04SPEAKERand all kinds of stuff.

54:05SPEAKER- Yeah, if you, it also includes, this is worth mentioning,

54:10SPEAKERthe AMD parts don't include NPUs this time.

54:12SPEAKER- Really?

54:13SPEAKER- This does include the Aero Lake NPU,

54:16SPEAKERwhich isn't fast enough to get the Copilot Plus features

54:20SPEAKERturned on.

54:20SPEAKER- Oh, no kidding.

54:21SPEAKER- It's only 13 tops, but it is in there.

54:24SPEAKERSo congratulations.

54:26SPEAKERI think it's probably, they specifically said,

54:29SPEAKERif you care about that kind of performance,

54:30SPEAKERyou're probably gonna put a discrete graphics card in,

54:33SPEAKERand it wasn't worth taking up die space on NPU core stuff

54:39SPEAKERto get it to the 40, 40 tops that Copilot Plus requires.

54:42SPEAKER- Can you run all the Copilot Plus stuff on a graphics card?

54:45SPEAKER- Oh, no, of course not.

54:46SPEAKERWhy would you do that?

54:47SPEAKER- I was gonna say, like, I hadn't heard that.

54:48SPEAKERLike, I don't know why that's the case, but.

54:52SPEAKER- To give you a sense of scale here,

54:54SPEAKERthis is a 13 top NPU, tops NPU.

54:58SPEAKER4060 is 240-ish tops of perf.

55:01SPEAKER- Okay.

55:02SPEAKER- So that's the lowest end Nvidia 4 series card

55:05SPEAKERthat's available today.

55:06SPEAKER- Do you have any idea why you can't use a graphics card

55:08SPEAKERfor those features?

55:09SPEAKERI'm not saying I want to use them necessarily.

55:10SPEAKER- Microsoft?

55:11SPEAKER- Yeah, is that just an arbitrary restriction?

55:14SPEAKER- I'm gonna go ahead and tell you,

55:15SPEAKERyou probably are okay not having those features.

55:17SPEAKER- Again, I don't want them.

55:18SPEAKERI don't care.

55:18SPEAKERIt's just conceptually, it doesn't seem to make sense

55:21SPEAKERwhy you would lock that off.

55:23SPEAKER- It's, yeah, I don't understand that.

55:27SPEAKERIt's a weird choice by Microsoft.

55:28SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, you know, it goes back to like,

55:30SPEAKERI wonder about things like this,

55:31SPEAKER'cause you remember the days of which DirectX

55:33SPEAKERdid they lock up to Windows Vista?

55:35SPEAKERWas it eight, no?

55:36SPEAKER- Eight.

55:37SPEAKER- 10?

55:38SPEAKER- No, eight.

55:39SPEAKER- Wait, DX8, anyway, the point is,

55:40SPEAKERMicrosoft has a history of,

55:43SPEAKERI think it might've been 10.

55:44SPEAKERI think it was DX10 that you had to,

55:45SPEAKER'cause I forget which Halo it was that you had to get.

55:48SPEAKER- Halo 3, right?

55:50SPEAKER- I forget.

55:50SPEAKERThere was some, anyway, it's been a while.

55:53SPEAKERBut Microsoft has a history of locking,

55:55SPEAKERarbitrarily locking features behind new Windows versions,

55:58SPEAKERwhich just made me wonder

55:59SPEAKERif there's something going on here.

56:00SPEAKER- Yeah, DirectX 10 was Vista only,

56:03SPEAKERbecause you needed WDVM graphics drivers,

56:05SPEAKERwhich is a kind of like, that's a choice, but whatever.

56:08SPEAKER- Anyway, my guess is that this is more,

56:11SPEAKERwe just haven't built the APIs for this

56:14SPEAKERto work with the GPUs at this point.

56:16SPEAKER- That also is believable.

56:18SPEAKER- And also the kind of things

56:19SPEAKERthat are copilot plus features are so low power required

56:24SPEAKERthat it's massive overkill to put a 4990 or something on it.

56:28SPEAKERAnyway, the new chipset, 'cause it's Intel.

56:32SPEAKER- Yes, new chipset, new socket.

56:33SPEAKER- Intel's move is always new chipset, new CPU socket.

56:37SPEAKERThey haven't done it for the last three releases

56:39SPEAKERof Core i9, Core i parts.

56:42SPEAKER- Yeah, well, 12th, 13th, and 14th gen

56:44SPEAKERall work across the same motherboard,

56:45SPEAKERwhich is extremely out of character for them.

56:48SPEAKER- That is literally the longest run

56:49SPEAKERI've ever had an Intel board last.

56:52SPEAKER- I assume they make a decent amount of money

56:53SPEAKERon their chipsets.

56:55SPEAKER- I think that they just wanna keep selling

56:57SPEAKERnew motherboards every year when they sell, yeah, probably.

56:59SPEAKER- Well, that's what I mean.

57:00SPEAKERThey're making money selling chipsets to motherboard makers.

57:03SPEAKER- Yeah, so the new chipsets, the Z890,

57:06SPEAKERthe new sockets, LGA 1851.

57:09SPEAKERI would assume that you're never going to get

57:11SPEAKERanother generation of CPUs that goes in this socket

57:13SPEAKERor this chipset when you buy these boards.

57:15SPEAKER- Probably not.

57:16SPEAKER- Which is fine.

57:17SPEAKERI mean, that's how most people,

57:18SPEAKERthat's how computers work for most people, right?

57:20SPEAKER- Yeah.

57:22SPEAKER- The parts are the 285K, which is a 5.7 gigahertz max

57:26SPEAKERat 590 bucks, unavailable everywhere.

57:29SPEAKERIt's 8P cores, 16E cores, four GPU cores, and the NPU.

57:34SPEAKER- Wait, you're saying it's sold out?

57:35SPEAKERLike you just can't find it right now?

57:36SPEAKER- Can't buy 'em.

57:37SPEAKER- Really?

57:38SPEAKER- Yeah.

57:38SPEAKER- Weird, 'cause I mean, we're getting into it in a minute,

57:41SPEAKERbut considering the drubbing this thing took in the press,

57:43SPEAKERmaybe this didn't make a lot of them?

57:45SPEAKER- I think they put 'em all to the OEMs.

57:47SPEAKER- Uh-huh, okay.

57:49SPEAKER- The 265K and KF parts.

57:52SPEAKERKF parts, as a reminder, are unlocked, but with no GPU.

57:57SPEAKEROur 5.5 gigahertz max, 394 for the K, 379 for the KF,

58:03SPEAKERso you save like 15 bucks not getting an integrated GPU

58:07SPEAKERand probably a little bit of thermal overhead.

58:09SPEAKER8P cores, 16E cores, and four GPU cores,

58:12SPEAKERexcept for in the F1.

58:14SPEAKER- Oh, same number of cores.

58:16SPEAKER- Same number of cores.

58:16SPEAKER- Oh, that's interesting.

58:18SPEAKER- Clocked down a little bit.

58:19SPEAKER- Okay.

58:20SPEAKER- Just a smidge.

58:21SPEAKERAnd then the 245K and KF, again, no graphics on the KF,

58:25SPEAKER5.2 gigahertz max, and it's six P cores, eight E cores,

58:30SPEAKERfour GPU cores, and the NPU.

58:32SPEAKER- And the K is 320 and 300 for the no graphics F part.

58:41SPEAKER- AF.

58:42SPEAKER- AF.

58:43SPEAKER- Yeah.

58:43SPEAKER- All overclockable, all unlocked, so you can overclock 'em.

58:46SPEAKERAnd again, this is a situation where they'll fill out

58:48SPEAKERmore CPUs that most of them will probably just go to OEMs,

58:51SPEAKERbut these are like the enthusiast box parts.

58:53SPEAKER- Yeah, so is the 245K what you would think of as an i7?

58:56SPEAKERNo, 'cause that's six cores.

58:58SPEAKERLike, typically the i7 is like the same number

59:00SPEAKERof performance cores and just somewhat smaller E cores.

59:05SPEAKERI feel like there's still room

59:06SPEAKERfor an i7 equivalent in this lineup.

59:08SPEAKER- There are some weird holes here.

59:10SPEAKERAlso, they used to do things with hyper-threading

59:12SPEAKERand not hyper-threading, and they want to say like i3s

59:13SPEAKERdidn't have hyper-threading or something like that.

59:16SPEAKERLike, it's a brave new world.

59:19SPEAKERWe're going to talk about what's weird here

59:21SPEAKERand where there are big perf holes.

59:23SPEAKERI think that they priced these based on perf,

59:26SPEAKERwould be my guess compared to previous generation.

59:28SPEAKER- Okay.

59:29SPEAKER- So, okay, they're pushing power consumption

59:34SPEAKERwith all of their marketing for these

59:36SPEAKERwas about power consumption

59:37SPEAKERbecause the power consumption bits real good

59:40SPEAKERand perf is kind of eh, especially,

59:42SPEAKERlike if you compare it to 9,000 series Ryzen,

59:46SPEAKERit's pretty meh, which was already meh.

59:50SPEAKERAnd if you compare it to last generation 14th gen Raptor Lake

59:57SPEAKERit's real, double meh.

59:59SPEAKER- That's so damning, like not being great

1:00:02SPEAKERagainst your competitors contemporaneous release

1:00:05SPEAKERis one thing, not being great

1:00:07SPEAKERagainst your own previous generation

1:00:09SPEAKERis really hard to swallow.

1:00:10SPEAKER- Now, okay, so there's some asterisks here, right?

1:00:14SPEAKERIt's real good in workloads that use a load of threads,

1:00:17SPEAKERright, so like Cinebench, Handbrake, video CPU transcodes,

1:00:22SPEAKERthings like Premiere does real well.

1:00:25SPEAKERIt's not good in games because the clocks

1:00:29SPEAKERand the thermals are a little bit constrained

1:00:30SPEAKERcompared to the 14th gen Intel.

1:00:34SPEAKERAnd it gets its ass kicked by the 3DV cache AMD parts.

1:00:37SPEAKER- Yeah, but to be fair, everything does.

1:00:39SPEAKER- Yeah, like the Ryzen, the new Ryzen stuff did too

1:00:42SPEAKERuntil the 9900 was out.

1:00:44SPEAKER- Yeah, I had thought about trading up to an Aero Lake

1:00:47SPEAKERuntil I saw the game performance stuff

1:00:49SPEAKERand that's just a little hard to swallow.

1:00:52SPEAKER- I mean, now the thing that's worth mentioning

1:00:54SPEAKERis when you're getting 14900K performance out of this thing,

1:00:58SPEAKERit's drawing like 30% less power in a lot of cases.

1:01:01SPEAKERSo like you're basically getting,

1:01:05SPEAKERthis is basically the Intel equivalent

1:01:07SPEAKERof what we saw with Zen 4 last go round

1:01:10SPEAKERor Zen 5 in terms of power consumption, right?

1:01:14SPEAKERAnd when you compare, the place that's interesting

1:01:16SPEAKERwhen you're doing the power tests is the idle draw

1:01:19SPEAKERfor Intel is way, way, way lower than the idle draw for AMD.

1:01:24SPEAKERAnd we're honestly, we're working on ways

1:01:26SPEAKERto show this in benchmarks 'cause it's a little bit tricky.

1:01:33SPEAKERBut if you're thinking about a normal workload

1:01:35SPEAKERwhere you're using your computer,

1:01:36SPEAKERit's idle most of the time for most people, right?

1:01:40SPEAKER- Or 80 to 90% of the chip is idle,

1:01:43SPEAKERlike one or two cores are active at any given time.

1:01:46SPEAKER- Yeah, and like the idle draw on these Intel chips

1:01:48SPEAKERwas like 90 watts versus 120 or 125

1:01:51SPEAKERfor the comparable Ryzens.

1:01:54SPEAKERSo like it's a significant amount of power

1:01:56SPEAKERover a long period of time if you're talking about

1:01:59SPEAKERlike not running full bore,

1:02:01SPEAKERlike if you're running full bore all the time,

1:02:03SPEAKERthe AMD chips have a little bit of an advantage.

1:02:05SPEAKERIf you're running normal human computing workloads

1:02:08SPEAKERwhere you sit in front of your computer

1:02:09SPEAKERand doing some zooms and doing some emails

1:02:10SPEAKERand then playing a game,

1:02:12SPEAKERprobably it's gonna be a wash at best

1:02:14SPEAKERand probably favor the Intel side.

1:02:16SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:02:18SPEAKER- The gaming perf problems here

1:02:19SPEAKERare probably due to memory latency

1:02:21SPEAKERis what the consensus was amongst reviewers.

1:02:24SPEAKERThe memory controller is on its own chiplet.

1:02:26SPEAKERIt's not integrated in the compute chiplet,

1:02:28SPEAKERwhich was like the assumption,

1:02:31SPEAKERmy assumption there is that that's a design choice

1:02:35SPEAKERto get more compute time,

1:02:36SPEAKERmore CPU cores on the same, sorry,

1:02:39SPEAKERmore compute wafer chips out of each wafer

1:02:42SPEAKER'cause those compute chips

1:02:43SPEAKERare the expensive wafers from TSMC.

1:02:46SPEAKER- Right. - Right.

1:02:47SPEAKER- Now I have not lived in this world for long,

1:02:49SPEAKERlike you've been in it for 30 years or whatever,

1:02:50SPEAKERbut like the hardware,

1:02:51SPEAKERthe iterative hardware review kind of thing,

1:02:54SPEAKERbut even I have seen enough like slide decks

1:02:56SPEAKERand been enough presentations to suspect

1:02:59SPEAKERlike maybe the next generation of this thing,

1:03:02SPEAKERlike that's a prime candidate for like,

1:03:03SPEAKERwe've improved the memory controller to the X, you know,

1:03:07SPEAKER20% or, you know, like that's one of those things

1:03:09SPEAKERthat'll be like, or more broadly,

1:03:11SPEAKERthat's one of those optimization points

1:03:13SPEAKERwhere there's something they didn't do as well

1:03:15SPEAKERas it could have been done,

1:03:16SPEAKERbut that they will, you know,

1:03:18SPEAKERimprove and iterate on in future generations.

1:03:20SPEAKER- Yeah, so the thing to remember with all of the CPU stuff

1:03:23SPEAKERand GPU stuff too is that the pipelines for design

1:03:27SPEAKERand building these things are years deep,

1:03:30SPEAKERit's five, seven years in some cases.

1:03:33SPEAKERSo they aren't going to realize that this is a bottleneck

1:03:37SPEAKERuntil they start seeing the first runs of chips

1:03:39SPEAKERoff of the actual fab

1:03:40SPEAKER'cause you can't actually SIM these anymore

1:03:42SPEAKER'cause they're too complicated.

1:03:44SPEAKER- Right. - So like they get

1:03:46SPEAKERthe first ones back and by the time they get

1:03:47SPEAKERthose first chips back off the line,

1:03:51SPEAKERit's too late to make any significant changes.

1:03:54SPEAKERSo they're not gonna realize that, oh yeah, okay,

1:03:57SPEAKERmemory bandwidth is gonna be, latency's janky.

1:04:00SPEAKERThey also had some problems we'll talk about in a minute

1:04:03SPEAKERthat seemed to be Windows and or BIOS related issues.

1:04:09SPEAKERSo anyway, to your point, yes, this is, I would assume,

1:04:13SPEAKERif not the next generation, the one after that,

1:04:15SPEAKERwe'll see a significant change in the way

1:04:17SPEAKERthe memory latency works.

1:04:19SPEAKERAnd we may even see some substantial improvements

1:04:21SPEAKERin the interim, don't buy stuff based on future promises.

1:04:25SPEAKERThis is always the rule.

1:04:27SPEAKERThe other thing that's worth mentioning here

1:04:29SPEAKERis that all of the chiplets on the, sorry,

1:04:33SPEAKERtiles on their disaggregated design,

1:04:36SPEAKERalmost all of them are overclockable independently,

1:04:39SPEAKERincluding the base layer.

1:04:41SPEAKERSo you can overclock the SOC, you can overclock the IO tile,

1:04:44SPEAKERyou can overclock the Foveros connection layer,

1:04:49SPEAKERlike wild ham, they put all the dials into this thing.

1:04:53SPEAKER- They expose all the settings for that stuff?

1:04:54SPEAKER- Yeah. - That's crazy.

1:04:56SPEAKER- Yeah, so I mean, you have to have the right board,

1:04:57SPEAKERbut yeah, so we haven't tested any of that stuff yet.

1:05:02SPEAKER- Overclocking the base layer, which does nothing,

1:05:05SPEAKERbut facilitate communications between the other tiles

1:05:08SPEAKERis hilarious.

1:05:09SPEAKER- Well, but if you think about it,

1:05:10SPEAKERif it's memory latency and memory bandwidth,

1:05:12SPEAKERit's the problem, then overclocking that

1:05:13SPEAKERactually might have a significant improvement.

1:05:15SPEAKER- Totally, totally.

1:05:16SPEAKER- Don't overclock your, like, this is,

1:05:18SPEAKERlet other people figure this out.

1:05:19SPEAKER- Yeah, absolutely. - Do it with your CPUs.

1:05:20SPEAKER- Like I've never ever in a million years

1:05:22SPEAKERdo something like this,

1:05:23SPEAKERbut it's pretty funny that it's possible.

1:05:26SPEAKER- Yeah, and we talked about this before,

1:05:29SPEAKERbut like this is the most complicated, biggest change

1:05:32SPEAKERin the way these CPUs are built for a long time.

1:05:34SPEAKERSo I would have been shocked if this thing came out

1:05:37SPEAKERas this is the fastest thing we've ever seen.

1:05:39SPEAKERWhen RYZENs came out, the thing that they had going for them

1:05:42SPEAKERis they had a buttload of CPUs, CPU cores,

1:05:45SPEAKERand a whole bunch of weird issues

1:05:47SPEAKERwhen you were doing things that needed like communication

1:05:50SPEAKERbetween dies and stuff like that.

1:05:52SPEAKERSo to be expected.

1:05:54SPEAKER- Like it's actually, I mean, I feel like,

1:05:57SPEAKERI'm not saying you should go out and buy one of these

1:05:58SPEAKER'cause like at the end of the day,

1:06:00SPEAKERperformance is what it is, but it seems somewhat impressive

1:06:02SPEAKERthat it actually did come in

1:06:03SPEAKERat some like reasonable level of performance.

1:06:06SPEAKERAnd like so far, not a ton of, you know,

1:06:09SPEAKERreal deal-breaking issues.

1:06:11SPEAKER- I mean, and that's the thing is like,

1:06:13SPEAKERif you're a normal user and just doing computing stuff

1:06:15SPEAKERand encoding some video and stuff,

1:06:17SPEAKERyou're not gonna notice these problems.

1:06:18SPEAKERLike this is gonna feel fast.

1:06:19SPEAKERIf you're upgrading from 11th gen Intel to this,

1:06:23SPEAKERit's gonna feel fast as hell, right?

1:06:24SPEAKERIt's only when you're comparing it against everything else

1:06:27SPEAKERthat's on the market that it feels slow.

1:06:28SPEAKERAnd if you're spending money and you care,

1:06:30SPEAKERthen you should buy the thing that's fastest

1:06:31SPEAKERfor what you do.

1:06:32SPEAKER- Yeah, like to reiterate again,

1:06:34SPEAKERif you wanna build a gaming machine,

1:06:35SPEAKERget a 9800X3D once you can get them.

1:06:38SPEAKER- That seems right.

1:06:39SPEAKER- But again, you know, just conceptually

1:06:41SPEAKERor in terms of laying foundation for the future,

1:06:43SPEAKERlike the fact that this thing works generally

1:06:45SPEAKERis a good sign.

1:06:47SPEAKER- It's very exciting,

1:06:49SPEAKERespecially given the problems they had with Raptor Lake.

1:06:50SPEAKER- Right.

1:06:52SPEAKER- So in our testing at PC World,

1:06:53SPEAKERwe found some issues with power settings.

1:06:55SPEAKEROther people corroborated this.

1:06:57SPEAKERSo you know that setting that you have in Windows,

1:06:59SPEAKERyou can say most efficient, balanced or most performant.

1:07:02SPEAKER- Yeah, a little slider.

1:07:03SPEAKER- If you're not on most performant, weird shit happens.

1:07:07SPEAKERSo for example, at the balanced settings,

1:07:09SPEAKERwe saw like a significant double digit performance drop

1:07:12SPEAKERacross pretty much every CPU benchmark.

1:07:14SPEAKER- Yikes.

1:07:15SPEAKER- When you're on the most efficient settings,

1:07:17SPEAKERit just ran everything at idle

1:07:19SPEAKERfor single threaded benchmarks.

1:07:20SPEAKERSo it never clocked up the boost clocks on the CPU core.

1:07:24SPEAKERThis is stuff that they'll fix over time for sure.

1:07:27SPEAKER- That seems like a pretty egregious oversight.

1:07:29SPEAKER- I mean, this is again,

1:07:32SPEAKERthis is the kind of thing that happens.

1:07:34SPEAKERPart of this is that Windows 24H, Windows 11, 24H2,

1:07:38SPEAKERwhich is what everybody tested on, came in a little hot

1:07:41SPEAKERand reworked a lot of how this stuff works.

1:07:44SPEAKERBut yeah, I was shocked that we had these problems.

1:07:46SPEAKERI wouldn't have expected this at all.

1:07:47SPEAKERAnd like, I wouldn't buy these until they resolve that.

1:07:52SPEAKERThe edge case, oh, this is your question.

1:07:54SPEAKER- This is, so I guess we can just talk about this now.

1:07:57SPEAKER- Hit me.

1:07:58SPEAKER- What I'm curious about, and again,

1:07:59SPEAKERI had thought about trading up to one of these from a 1400K

1:08:02SPEAKERuntil I saw some of the benchmarks.

1:08:05SPEAKERMy question is I am limiting the power on my 14900K.

1:08:09SPEAKERI'm not running at full bore

1:08:10SPEAKERbecause I'm still on an air cooler.

1:08:11SPEAKER- Okay.

1:08:12SPEAKER- So I've like, for example, it boosts up to 253 Watts,

1:08:16SPEAKERbut I've got it capped at 190 just because basically

1:08:19SPEAKERyou need liquid cooling to actually handle 253.

1:08:22SPEAKERSo I'm wondering how my power limited 14900K

1:08:25SPEAKERwould compare to a 285K at stock,

1:08:28SPEAKERsince it runs better at lower wattage, higher efficiency.

1:08:33SPEAKERYou know what I mean?

1:08:34SPEAKERLike you're getting more performance per watt

1:08:36SPEAKERon the newer part.

1:08:37SPEAKERSo I'm wondering like obviously pound for pound,

1:08:39SPEAKERit doesn't measure up very well,

1:08:41SPEAKERbut if I'm running the 285K at its full capacity

1:08:46SPEAKERversus a 14900K that is limited by 20% or more,

1:08:50SPEAKERI wonder if I would actually be coming out ahead

1:08:52SPEAKERon the newer one.

1:08:53SPEAKER- Well, so the max, okay, so first off,

1:08:55SPEAKERI don't think I can answer this without actually doing tests.

1:08:57SPEAKER- This is definitely a, this is not a like,

1:08:59SPEAKERwhat should I do?

1:09:00SPEAKERThis is more just a general thought experiment,

1:09:03SPEAKERconversation starter.

1:09:04SPEAKER- The thought experiment is that the reason

1:09:06SPEAKERyou're doing that is 'cause you're on an air cooler, right?

1:09:07SPEAKER- Yeah, like it was hitting, it was hitting 100 Celsius.

1:09:09SPEAKERIt was throttling constantly in games at max power draw.

1:09:14SPEAKER- Yeah, so you're not going to,

1:09:16SPEAKERyou're gonna have the same thermal limit

1:09:18SPEAKERand the 285K does go up to 250 watts,

1:09:21SPEAKERI think is the max TDP for boost.

1:09:23SPEAKER- For boost, okay.

1:09:24SPEAKER- Yeah, so you're gonna hit,

1:09:25SPEAKERyou're gonna hit a limit somewhere in there.

1:09:28SPEAKER- Okay.

1:09:29SPEAKER- It doesn't hit boost a whole lot.

1:09:31SPEAKERLike we, it was, I don't know.

1:09:35SPEAKERWe put it on, the real answer to your question

1:09:38SPEAKERis that you need a big air, a big water, AIO.

1:09:41SPEAKER- Yeah, I know, I know.

1:09:42SPEAKER- Yeah, like air cooling is not the right thing

1:09:45SPEAKERfor top of line CPU's these days.

1:09:47SPEAKER- It's so much simpler though.

1:09:49SPEAKER- In some ways, in other ways, you know,

1:09:50SPEAKERI've never looked at my PL1, PL2.

1:09:52SPEAKER- Fair, fair.

1:09:53SPEAKER- Yeah, my guess is you're gonna end up,

1:09:57SPEAKERyou'll do more at that thermal at the same limit

1:10:01SPEAKERthan you would on the new chips.

1:10:03SPEAKERI mean, the new chips will you get more work

1:10:05SPEAKERout of the same amount of watts on the new chips, I believe.

1:10:09SPEAKER- Is it enough more to warrant the upgrade?

1:10:11SPEAKERProbably not.

1:10:12SPEAKER- No, absolutely not.

1:10:13SPEAKER- Probably not.

1:10:14SPEAKER- Like here, the real TLDR out of all this

1:10:16SPEAKERis that if you're upgrading your CPU every generation,

1:10:18SPEAKERyou're just kind of wasting a lot of money.

1:10:20SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:10:20SPEAKER- It's like the 7800 X3D is gonna end up being

1:10:23SPEAKERthe same level of performance as all of these chips,

1:10:28SPEAKERexcept for the 9800 X3D, right?

1:10:30SPEAKER- I think even, isn't the 5800 X3D

1:10:33SPEAKERstill like pretty competitive?

1:10:34SPEAKER- The 5800 X, if you have a 5800 X3D, you're doing great.

1:10:37SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:10:38SPEAKER- Yeah, so, okay, so the other thing that comes

1:10:41SPEAKERwith this new chipset and this new CPU is CU DIMM support.

1:10:46SPEAKERThese are, this is a new memory standard.

1:10:48SPEAKERIt basically adds this clock driver chip to the DIMMs

1:10:52SPEAKERthat generates the timing clocks for the RAM

1:10:55SPEAKERon the RAM stick itself,

1:10:57SPEAKERinstead of taking it from the rest of the CPU.

1:11:00SPEAKERThe practical upshot is that you're supposed to be able

1:11:04SPEAKERto run much, much higher clocked speeds on the RAM.

1:11:09SPEAKERAnd like the JEDEC limit is like 6,400 mega transfers

1:11:13SPEAKERper second, I think.

1:11:14SPEAKERThe, hey, if you want to do some crazy shit,

1:11:17SPEAKERyou can get all the way up to 8,400.

1:11:20SPEAKERThere's some big caveats in that you have to do,

1:11:22SPEAKERlike you have to adjust some ratios

1:11:24SPEAKERso that the number of transfers per cycle go down

1:11:26SPEAKERand stuff like that.

1:11:27SPEAKERYou might have to run them in single channel mode,

1:11:29SPEAKERwhich means your effective, your clock speeds will go up,

1:11:32SPEAKERbut your effective bandwidth will go down.

1:11:35SPEAKERSo it's, it's, it's early.

1:11:38SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:11:38SPEAKER- This is what I'm going to say.

1:11:39SPEAKER- I was going to say like,

1:11:40SPEAKERthis sounds like a good improvement in the longterm.

1:11:41SPEAKERLike obviously new stuff like this is never quite

1:11:44SPEAKERwhere you want it to be right out of the gates,

1:11:46SPEAKERbut the problems they've been having with DDR5 stability,

1:11:49SPEAKERgenerally since DDR5 came out,

1:11:52SPEAKERlike clearly this was necessary if they took the step.

1:11:54SPEAKERSo it seems, it seems like a good thing for the future.

1:11:56SPEAKERTo be clear, DDR5 stability at JEDEC speeds, no problem.

1:12:00SPEAKER- Yeah, sure.

1:12:01SPEAKER- GDDR5 stability at 7,200 mega transfers per second,

1:12:04SPEAKERnot great for most people.

1:12:06SPEAKER- But you know, if you go back and look at the DDR4,

1:12:08SPEAKERlike what was the JEDEC was like 2,133, I want to say,

1:12:12SPEAKERor maybe 2,400 for, for DDR4 out of the gate,

1:12:14SPEAKERbut people were routinely getting up 3,600,

1:12:17SPEAKERpushing 4,000 without issue.

1:12:19SPEAKERSo like there, the point is,

1:12:21SPEAKERthere was just a lot less headroom on DDR5

1:12:23SPEAKERuntil they took a step like this, it seems.

1:12:24SPEAKER- And, and this is the, so this is the path, right?

1:12:27SPEAKERLike I, it's funny, I was working on my,

1:12:28SPEAKERon an old 9900K machine the other day and I looked at,

1:12:32SPEAKERI was in the BIOS and I was like, oh, what's, let's,

1:12:34SPEAKERlet's put the XMP on for this and see what it is.

1:12:36SPEAKER3,600 mega transfers per second.

1:12:39SPEAKERIt's not, it's, it's an entirely respectable machine still,

1:12:42SPEAKERbut yeah, we've, we've, we've,

1:12:45SPEAKERthis is the path to higher memory clock speeds.

1:12:48SPEAKERAnd my assumption is we'll see better support

1:12:52SPEAKERand performance in the future.

1:12:53SPEAKER- Now, it fits in the existing slots.

1:12:57SPEAKERIf you plug in one of these chips into a BIOS

1:13:01SPEAKERthat understands that these chips can be on the DIMMs,

1:13:04SPEAKERit'll say, hey, we're going to turn off the CU DIMM chip,

1:13:07SPEAKERthe clock driver chip.

1:13:08SPEAKERSo this is just normal DDR5 that'll run at JetX speeds.

1:13:12SPEAKER- So it's backwards compatible is what you're saying?

1:13:13SPEAKER- Kind of, the BIOS has to understand it.

1:13:16SPEAKER- Oh, oh, oh, I see.

1:13:17SPEAKER- Right now, you're not going to,

1:13:19SPEAKERlike there's only a handful of BIOSes that understand.

1:13:21SPEAKERWe plugged into a bunch of machines that were in the lab

1:13:24SPEAKERand it was weird every time.

1:13:25SPEAKER- Interesting, okay, that's good to know.

1:13:27SPEAKER- Yeah, so, but, but like you don't have to make this choice

1:13:31SPEAKERand do it now when, when we, when the kinks get worked out,

1:13:33SPEAKERyou can do it later if you, if you're upgrading memory

1:13:35SPEAKERat some point in the future or something.

1:13:37SPEAKER- Are these widely available yet?

1:13:39SPEAKER- No, there's like one kit in the world.

1:13:40SPEAKER(laughing)

1:13:42SPEAKER- Okay, so it's that kind of launch.

1:13:43SPEAKER- I don't even know if they're selling it.

1:13:45SPEAKERThey might've just sent us kits.

1:13:46SPEAKER- Interesting, okay, 'cause I wanted to know what the pricing,

1:13:48SPEAKERI wonder how much more of these might be

1:13:50SPEAKERwith an extra chip on there,

1:13:51SPEAKERbut I guess we can't quite say yet.

1:13:52SPEAKER- I'm going to go to Newegg right now

1:13:54SPEAKERand see if you can buy CU DIMMs.

1:13:56SPEAKERI think when I searched this the other day on The Full Nerd,

1:14:00SPEAKERit looked out, it came up with SO DIMMs

1:14:02SPEAKER'cause it thought I was typing something wrong.

1:14:05SPEAKER- Here's a, here's a Crucial, this is on,

1:14:07SPEAKERthis is on crucial.com.

1:14:09SPEAKER- Okay.

1:14:11SPEAKER- 32 gigabyte, 16 by two, DDR5 6400 CU DIMM, $170.

1:14:16SPEAKER- Okay, here's a 48 gigabyte kit from,

1:14:19SPEAKERkit from Manta V color, Manta Xfinity,

1:14:23SPEAKER48 gigabytes CU DIMMs, 8,800 mega transfer for 400 bucks.

1:14:29SPEAKER- Wow, well that's 8,400 though, that's.

1:14:32SPEAKER- 8,800.

1:14:33SPEAKER- Or 8,800, sorry, that is extreme bleeding edge

1:14:35SPEAKERRAM speed right now.

1:14:36SPEAKER- Yeah, the 8,200 are 269.

1:14:40SPEAKERI wouldn't, here's the thing,

1:14:42SPEAKERthis is going to be janky for a while, right?

1:14:44SPEAKERLike this is a let everybody else figure this out situation.

1:14:48SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:14:49SPEAKER- It's not a you should do this today situation.

1:14:51SPEAKER- Okay, this is what I was trying to find

1:14:52SPEAKERan apples to apples comparison and I have found it.

1:14:55SPEAKER- Okay.

1:14:56SPEAKER- Here's a similar Crucial DDR5 6400 kit,

1:14:59SPEAKER32 gigabytes for $119.

1:15:02SPEAKER- Okay.

1:15:02SPEAKER- On their site.

1:15:04SPEAKERSo it's 119 for the regular DIMM or U-DIMM, the CU DIMM.

1:15:08SPEAKER- What size?

1:15:09SPEAKER- For, it's 16 by two.

1:15:10SPEAKER- Okay.

1:15:11SPEAKER- The exact same 16 by two 6400 in a CU DIMM

1:15:14SPEAKERis 170 right now.

1:15:15SPEAKERSo there is actually a pretty.

1:15:17SPEAKER- Pretty hefty price bump.

1:15:19SPEAKER- Pretty big premium on that at the moment.

1:15:21SPEAKER- Yeah, so anyway, like let them figure that out.

1:15:25SPEAKERDon't worry about that right now.

1:15:26SPEAKERJust find normal DDR5 and run it like 6400

1:15:28SPEAKERand you'll be fine.

1:15:29SPEAKER- Yes, yes.

1:15:31SPEAKER- So Intel has said, this isn't the performance

1:15:34SPEAKERwe want out of this chip and we expect out of this chip.

1:15:37SPEAKERWe think that there is some things wrong

1:15:38SPEAKERwith the BIOS and OS configuration

1:15:40SPEAKERthat we're working with vendors to solve.

1:15:42SPEAKER- Also, I just found this this morning.

1:15:43SPEAKERThe weird thing is, so this is reported by videocards.com

1:15:46SPEAKERwith a Z.

1:15:47SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:15:49SPEAKER- They linked to, this is an interview

1:15:50SPEAKERthat supposedly Robert Halleck, Intel vice president

1:15:53SPEAKERdid with hot hardware.

1:15:55SPEAKER- Okay.

1:15:55SPEAKER- The odd thing is it's a YouTube interview

1:15:57SPEAKERand when I click through the video has been pulled.

1:16:00SPEAKER- Weird.

1:16:01SPEAKER- But I do have the quote they pulled from the video here,

1:16:04SPEAKERif you want me to read it.

1:16:05SPEAKER- Yeah, go for it.

1:16:05SPEAKER- Even though the video is no longer up

1:16:07SPEAKERand I'm not sure what's up with that,

1:16:08SPEAKERbut here's the quote they pulled out of the video.

1:16:11SPEAKERI think people, I think what people have been interested

1:16:13SPEAKERto hear is what happened.

1:16:14SPEAKERI can't go into all the details yet,

1:16:16SPEAKERbut we identified a series of multi-factor issues

1:16:19SPEAKERat the OS level, at the BIOS level.

1:16:21SPEAKERAnd I will say that the performance we saw in reviews

1:16:24SPEAKERthrough no fault of reviewers is not what we expected

1:16:26SPEAKERand not what we intended.

1:16:28SPEAKERLaunch just didn't go as planned.

1:16:30SPEAKERThat has been a humbling lesson for all of us,

1:16:32SPEAKERinspiring a fairly large response internally

1:16:35SPEAKERto get to the bottom of what happened and to fix it.

1:16:38SPEAKERSo.

1:16:39SPEAKER- Look, what they should do is they should set the microcode

1:16:41SPEAKERto keep increasing the voltage.

1:16:42SPEAKER- There you go.

1:16:43SPEAKER- Every time there's more demand

1:16:44SPEAKERuntil it hits just infinity.

1:16:46SPEAKERThat's just crazy enough to work.

1:16:48SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:16:49SPEAKER- So I don't know, I don't know if who,

1:16:53SPEAKERwho or what caused that video to go down,

1:16:55SPEAKERbut I assume we can still take that quote at face value.

1:16:57SPEAKER- Weird that it got pulled.

1:16:59SPEAKER- But, but you know, the upshot is AMD had the same thing

1:17:02SPEAKERwhere they had to put out a Windows update, right?

1:17:03SPEAKERTo improve performance.

1:17:05SPEAKERAnd now it looks like Intel might be doing both OS

1:17:08SPEAKERand the BIOS updates to try to help things here.

1:17:11SPEAKERI guess that just, is that just the world we live in now?

1:17:13SPEAKERLike, or is it just like,

1:17:15SPEAKERon one level it seems insane to me