Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2020]

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It's like Intel want to retire from laptop and desktop computers, but they can't compete with Ryzen anymore. So I think they gave up....

Their next generation is all about renaming technology that they already have, which is much more inefficient than Ryzen, slower, filled with vulnerabilities, they can't reduce their chips size to 7nm and stuff. This looks to me like the last stone in Intel's grave -in the desktop/laptop market-.


AMD will be my next CPU purchase. Not a fan of having my system’s performance consistently reduced with every round of windows updates.
 
AMD will be my next CPU purchase. Not a fan of having my system’s performance consistently reduced with every round of windows updates.
the latest vulnerability they have found happened a month ago, and it is a serious one. Also their chips get a lot hotter, their power consumption is higher and so on and so forth. It is as if they decided to retire from the laptop and desktop market, I can't find any other explanation.
 
the latest vulnerability they have found happened a month ago, and it is a serious one. Also their chips get a lot hotter, their power consumption is higher and so on and so forth. It is as if they decided to retire from the laptop and desktop market, I can't find any other explanation.
Ya i have an older Skylake model. Performance has regressed quite noticeably over the last couple of years due to all these vulnerabilities. I'm surprised there hasn't been a class action lawsuit.
 
Ya i have an older Skylake model. Performance has regressed quite noticeably over the last couple of years due to all these vulnerabilities. I'm surprised there hasn't been a class action lawsuit.

Unlikely to happen.

This would be like bringing a lawsuit against a car manufacturer if a criminals suddenly started going around cutting people's brake lines in their cars (easy to do) thus causing a lot of people to get into accidents and potentially dying.

Just because people are doing malicious things now due to finding vulnerabilities in how CPUs were doing things doesn't mean that Intel (or any other CPU maker) was being malicious in not planning for behavior (exploiting the vulnerability) that didn't yet exist because no-one had discovered it (the vulnerability) yet.

If this were the case that you could bring a lawsuit for something like that, then every software and hardware company in the world would be liable for those lawsuits.

My Ryzen 1600x is noticeably slower than before the vulnerabilities were found, which is one of many reasons I upgraded to a Ryzen 3700x.

Regards,
SB
 
yea im noticing a lot of slow downs on my 6600 as well. Can't play a game and stream it without losing a ton of frames. All CPU limited at this point in time. I really want a new CPU. I have been eying a 3700x for some time now, but if Zen 3 is going to release in a few months, shouldn't I just wait?
 
yea im noticing a lot of slow downs on my 6600 as well. Can't play a game and stream it without losing a ton of frames. All CPU limited at this point in time. I really want a new CPU. I have been eying a 3700x for some time now, but if Zen 3 is going to release in a few months, shouldn't I just wait?

There's always something newer and better on the horizon, you just have to decide at what point is the current offering good enough for you as well as how long you want it to last.

I'm pretty sure the 3700x will hold me quite well for quite a few years, and Zen had matured enough that I was willing to commit to an 8 core model. I got the 1600x because I knew that the first iteration of the Zen arch. was going to be limited in many ways (for example the memory controller was pretty bad) so I just got the 6 core version knowing I would upgrade "soonish".

Regards,
SB
 
yea im noticing a lot of slow downs on my 6600 as well. Can't play a game and stream it without losing a ton of frames. All CPU limited at this point in time. I really want a new CPU. I have been eying a 3700x for some time now, but if Zen 3 is going to release in a few months, shouldn't I just wait?

Wow, such an old CPU. Even the CPU I replaced my Q6600 with, the Xeon E3-1270 (Sandy Bridge) 4 Core-8 Thread chugs along at times. I'd wait for Zen3 too if it's bound to release this year.
 
yea im noticing a lot of slow downs on my 6600 as well. Can't play a game and stream it without losing a ton of frames. All CPU limited at this point in time. I really want a new CPU. I have been eying a 3700x for some time now, but if Zen 3 is going to release in a few months, shouldn't I just wait?

What's the latest or most demanding game you've played on that? The benchmarks available shows that Core 2 Quad has aged much worse than the Phenom II X4, which I have used occasionally during the last years. But that could generally still get along with 30-ish FPS, aside from the games that required SSE4.

But many of the tests I've seen for modern games that still use a Core 2 Quad and have what you'd consider unplayable performance always have the settings on Ultra. If they can still yield 30-ish FPS at equal settings to the console versions, that's still awesome for such an old CPU.
 
Unlikely to happen.

This would be like bringing a lawsuit against a car manufacturer if a criminals suddenly started going around cutting people's brake lines in their cars (easy to do) thus causing a lot of people to get into accidents and potentially dying.

Just because people are doing malicious things now due to finding vulnerabilities in how CPUs were doing things doesn't mean that Intel (or any other CPU maker) was being malicious in not planning for behavior (exploiting the vulnerability) that didn't yet exist because no-one had discovered it (the vulnerability) yet.

If this were the case that you could bring a lawsuit for something like that, then every software and hardware company in the world would be liable for those lawsuits.

My Ryzen 1600x is noticeably slower than before the vulnerabilities were found, which is one of many reasons I upgraded to a Ryzen 3700x.

Regards,
SB
I suppose im just not so sure Intel wasnt aware of these potential exploits.
 
What's the latest or most demanding game you've played on that? The benchmarks available shows that Core 2 Quad has aged much worse than the Phenom II X4, which I have used occasionally during the last years. But that could generally still get along with 30-ish FPS, aside from the games that required SSE4.

But many of the tests I've seen for modern games that still use a Core 2 Quad and have what you'd consider unplayable performance always have the settings on Ultra. If they can still yield 30-ish FPS at equal settings to the console versions, that's still awesome for such an old CPU.
yea, I'm doing about 60-140 FPS on Apex Legends with a 1070 on low settings (trying to keep the game around 120 with gsync). But once i start streaming on twitch for my buddies, I'll drop to about 30-60fps, about 55-60fps average, a maximum of maybe 70-80 on the high. And I want it to stay around 120-144fps consistently at least 100+ while streaming. Luckily gsync smooths out the variation, but I'm not getting what I want ultimately. Any sort of alt-tabbing on my PC playing on any game seriously destroys framerates for a good 1-2 minutes before it settles back into a proper frame rate.

It's not something I noticed in the past, until I was asked to start streaming so that other buddies could see my screen while we were playing. I don't recall performance being this bad on this machine, but I wasn't benchmarking the performance of my PC after the patches. I completely forgot about the security issues that are leading to degraded performance from hence we purchased.

I do feel like I'm in a CPU limited scenario here. I can push this further until games can barely run, but the type of games I like to play on PC are all about frame rate for me.
 
shouldn't I just wait?

Yes. I'm on a 3900X, you won't be CPU limited anytime soon. Get that when prices go down.

Wow, such an old CPU. Even the CPU I replaced my Q6600 with, the Xeon E3-1270 (Sandy Bridge) 4 Core-8 Thread chugs along at times. I'd wait for Zen3 too if it's bound to release this year.

I have two 920 systems (one D0, one C0), both oc'ed to 3.6ghz. Most games are no problem, not even Eternal with a 7950, or even planetside 2 in large battles. Normal windows 10 usage is butter smooth. I bought those systems over a decade ago (2009).

I'm doing about 60-140 FPS on Apex Legends with a 1070 on low

Lol. Last i played Apex was last summer, but then a gtx960 was doing much better then that. That GPU is in a 920 system. I assume they added new settings?
Try variable resolutions, tweak the settings abit, some are heavier then others on the cpu.
 
yea im noticing a lot of slow downs on my 6600 as well. Can't play a game and stream it without losing a ton of frames. All CPU limited at this point in time. I really want a new CPU. I have been eying a 3700x for some time now, but if Zen 3 is going to release in a few months, shouldn't I just wait?
that would be a good idea, actually. Since you've had your current CPU for so long, I'd wait for the desktop CPUs of the new Ryzen 4000 series.
 
I have been eying a 3700x for some time now, but if Zen 3 is going to release in a few months, shouldn't I just wait?
Hold out for Zen3 if you can. You know you'll kick yourself upon release if you don't. :yep2:
 
Hold out for Zen3 if you can. You know you'll kick yourself upon release if you don't. :yep2:

Assuming Zen 3 will be socket AM4, almost seems pertinent to just build a new system with a cheap interim CPU like one of the quad core Ryzens. Can't imagine holding out with a Q6600 for so long. I was dying to get rid of my Phenom II X4 in 2014, and I'm sorta feeling the itch to upgrade from my i5-4690K now.
 
That new df retro for ff7 is just amazing. Great video john. Crazy to see how audio was handled for pc back in the day. Entirely different music depending on your set up
 
yea im noticing a lot of slow downs on my 6600 as well. Can't play a game and stream it without losing a ton of frames. All CPU limited at this point in time. I really want a new CPU. I have been eying a 3700x for some time now, but if Zen 3 is going to release in a few months, shouldn't I just wait?

I’d wait. Zen3 will reduce the latency issue that current gen has. Current gen is also very prone to voltage degradation so hopefully the process refinement is a bit more tolerant of voltage. If they can give infinity fabric (cross connect) a boost then you can run higher mem frequency also which again will show a nice boost. All this on top of ipc gains.

Intel sadly will be left to back port rocket lake cores onto 14nm and due to the larger size of those cores, expect a drop in clock speed.

Comet lake from what I know will be the frequency king if you have a custom loop and are willing to manually oc. For pure raw performance comet lake will be hard to beat. We are talking 5.4ghz core with 17/4600mts ram. That’s *really* fast but needs a lot of cooling and patience to tune.

enjoy the too much info! Lol
 
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Nah; gotta go nvidia for my needs. unless I want to starting learning openCL; I think I’m just going to stick with CUDA. Already too much going on as it is.
Yup. AMD is hard to overlook for a CPU but I can't see myself switching from Nvidia for GPU any time soon. I have a Radeon Pro 580 in the iMac bit that's hardly by choice - although it's fine for strategy games.
 
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