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by dis-sys 3270 days ago
1. the Xeon I am using can Turbo to 3.1Ghz, sure, it is slower than 4G, but the sheer core count makes it much faster in the day to day development tasks many people face. consumer grade or not, it doesn't matter when there is no special requirements. you just buy components from your favourite vendors and put it together, that is all.

2. you can buy a pair of such 10-core Xeon for almost the same price of a single i9-7900x.

3. i9-7900x faces the exact same problem when the workload can not be paralleled - you can buy a much cheaper quad core intel processor that overclock well, you can push it to say 4.5 or 5G and beat the "fastest chip in the world".

1 comments

You are comparing 2 chips to a single chip and trying to argue against the claim that the single chip is the fastest yet.

I'll humour you however.

Your Xeon turbos to 3.1 if only 1 core is stressed, but it's all core boost is 2.4 as per https://www.pugetsystems.com/blog/2015/07/09/Actual-CPU-Spee...

I don't see how your 10core part boosting to 2.4 Ghz is "much faster in the day to day development tasks" given that it's 2 CPU architectures behind and clocks at almost half the 4.0 Ghz achieved by the 7900x (all-cores boost).

But even a pair of those 10 cores is probably slower (caches are not shared, all-core boost almost half while roughly 5% slower in IPC performance due to the jump from Broadwell to Skylake).

So I don't think you're actually trying to argue that this isn't the fastest chip yet, but that it's a bad deal compared to looking around and buying some used server parts.

And yes, that's a better deal, but also a used i9-7900x is a better deal than a new i9-7900x...

The link I provided contains detailed benchmark results of the mentioned system against 6950x. In quite a few workloads, e.g. SPECwpc, it is beating 6950x by up to 42%. See page 4. The maths is really simple here - i9-7900x need to beat i7-6950x by 40% to match that performance.

i9-7900x is _NOT_ the fastest chip in the world, not even the fastest intel chip. Consumer/server difference is purely a marketing thing, my Xeon based workstation running CS:GO on daily basis is not a server.