The Intel Core i9-9980XE CPU Review: Refresh Until it Hertz
by Ian Cutress on November 13, 2018 9:00 AM ESTHEDT Performance: SYSMark 2018
You either love it or hate it. BAPCo’s SYSMark suite of tests is both an interesting combination of benchmarks but also clouded in a substantial amount of ire. The altruistic original goal was to develop an industry standard suite of real-world tests. AMD (and NVIDIA) left BAPCo several years ago citing that workloads were being chosen on purpose that favoured Intel processors, and didn’t include enough several emerging computing paradigms for the industry. Intel disagrees with that statement, and here we are today.
We run this disclaimer on our SYSMark testing primarily to emphasise that this benchmark suite, while some consider it more than relevant and encompassing a lot of modern professional software, others feel is engineered with specific goals in mind.
We haven’t run SYSMark on every processor, as it requires a fresh OS image compared to our automated suite, and requires refreshing that image every seven days. As a result we are trying to do sets of processors at a time where it makes sense and when time is available.
It’s clear from the Intel comparisons that the i9-9980XE takes a lead here, with a nice bump over the 7980XE of around 7% in the overall test. Given that the 7900X is the best of the Skylake-X processors, it will be interesting to see what the 9900X scores here.
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nadim.kahwaji - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
Niceeee , keep up the great work Ian ‘:)AshlayW - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
In my opinion the entire Intel HEDT lineup is a joke. And the 9980XE: $180 more for literally just a bit over *half* the cores and threads. Sure it has better lightly threaded performance but surely that's not the intention of this processor, and surely it is not worth charging this insane 'Intel Tax' premium for it.TEAMSWITCHER - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
Intel is free to charge whatever they want for a device that I have zero intention of purchasing. Most professionals I know have stopped using desktop computers for their daily drivers. The Dell XPS 15 and Apple's 15" MacBook Pro seam to be the weapons of choice these days. These products surely have their uses, but in the real world, most users are happy to sacrifice absolute performance for mobility.imaheadcase - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
Most be a strange world you live on. Mobile won't ever be anything close to a desktop for daily tasks. I don't know any professional who have did that. They use mobile devices mainly to view items they did on desktop, not for working.TEAMSWITCHER - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
Really? I work in software development (WEB, C++, OpenGL, and yes our own ray tracing engine) We have one guy with a desktop, the rest of the developers use either an XPS 15, a MacBook Pro, and one guy with a Surface Book. All were given a choice...this was the result.Interesting story about how we got here... Windows used to be a requirement for developing browser plugins. But with the move to Web Assembly, we can now compile and test our plugin on the Mac just as easily as we do on Windows. While many fanboys will lament this change .. I personally love it!
Endda - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
Yea, for code development only. Mobility has been the choice for that for years.Not everyone is a coder though. Some need these desktops for rendering big animations, videos, etc. You're simply not going to do that in any meaningful way on a laptop
PeachNCream - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
Rendering and production work can indeed happen on laptop hardware. I don't argue that desktop hardware with fewer limits on TDP and storage aren't a faster way to accomplish the same tasks, but as Team noted, given a choice, a lot of people opt for mobility over raw compute power.nerd1 - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
It's a big joke to use XPS or Macbook GPU to do anything intensive. It's good for remote code editing though (except macbooks with absolute terrible keyboard)TEAMSWITCHER - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
Define "intensive." Our software does real-time (WebGL) and photo-realistic (ray-tracing) rendering. I suppose that a Path Tracing engine would be MORE intensive. But the goal of our software is to be as ubiquitous as possible. We support the iPad and some Android tablets.linuxgeex - Wednesday, November 14, 2018 - link
There's your answer: anything that runs on iPad and Android Tablets is not "intensive". I'll grant you that it's "intensive" compared to what we were doing on workstations a decade ago, and mobile is closing the gap... but a workstation today has 24-56 cores (not threads) at 5Ghz and dual NVidia 2080 GPUs. You can get a 12-core CPU and dual 1080 in the pinnacle gaming laptops but they don't have ECC or the certifications of a workstation. At best they have half to 2/3 the performance. If you're paying your engineers by the hour you don't want them sitting on their hands twice as long. But I can see how they might make that choice for themselves. You make an excellent point there, lol.