Intel i7-8700K CPU Review Leaks Onto The Web

#5475640 Posted on: 09/26/2017 07:40 AM

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I may be misinterpreting the images and please correct me should I be wrong: Since all the videos scores are pretty much equal the 7700K and 8700K seem to be the same in terms of power (frequency, IPC, so to speak) while the increase in FPS, more than anything, seems to be core/thread count related in combination with the given game's engine anyhow.

Meaning, ultimately, what I'm reading from those charts is that a 7700K is in fact a bottleneck due to core/thread count limitations in a lot of cases and likely has been for quite some time - pretty much all of Intel's lineup has been.

Or is it that the new manufacturer process is kicking in, assuming there's no fundamental architecture difference between the 7800X and 8700K? The 7800X feels quite off in terms of numbers and the 8700K seems to turn into a inexplainable wonderchild.

That's quite interesting, to say the least.

#5475643 Posted on: 09/26/2017 07:44 AM

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Look at that witcher 3 performance increase. Also nice to see that is beats the 7700k across the board, even if it is only by a fraction in some cases.

Besting the 7700k in more singlethreaded tasks where 7700k is at it's best and also having the multithreaded advantage, unlike ryzen which trades single threaded performance for multithreading.

I think this cpu is going to sell like crazy.

#5475647 Posted on: 09/26/2017 08:00 AM

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I may be misinterpreting the images and please correct me should I be wrong: Since all the videos scores are pretty much equal the 7700K and 8700K seem to be the same in terms of power (frequency, IPC, so to speak) while the increase in FPS, more than anything, seems to be core/thread count related in combination with the given game's engine anyhow.

Meaning, ultimately, what I'm reading from those charts is that a 7700K is in fact a bottleneck due to core/thread count limitations in a lot of cases and likely has been for quite some time - pretty much all of Intel's lineup has been.

Or is it that the new manufacturer process is kicking in, assuming there's no fundamental architecture difference between the 7800X and 8700K? The 7800X feels quite off in terms of numbers and the 8700K seems to turn into a inexplainable wonderchild.

That's quite interesting, to say the least.
Yes, from those tables you can see that the 7700K has bottlenecked a few games, and the 8700K is removing/reducing some of those bottlenecks. The 7800X and 8700K are different architectures, the 7800X has something similar to AMD's Infinity Fabric between the cores which decreases gaming efficiency - I think mainly through increased latency within the CPU itself between the various cores. 8700K is fundamentally the same architecture as the 7700K, which is actually the best architecture for gaming, so only difference is that 8700K is benefitting from 2 more cores - so 8700K is the best gaming CPU at the moment.

#5475656 Posted on: 09/26/2017 08:49 AM

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I can already hear the sweet cry of anguish from the horde of four cores is forever enough for gaming fanboys. That cry of terror is such pleasant music for weary ears.

It's pretty funny how Intel's one-sided decision to abandon all cooperation with review sites (apart from a couple of cherry-picked, dependent American ones supposedly) also means they have little NDA control. What are they going to do? Not send CPUs they already aren't sending?

#5475657 Posted on: 09/26/2017 09:00 AM

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Cue Ryzen price drop

#5475658 Posted on: 09/26/2017 09:02 AM

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It's good they had the same testing scenario such as RAM and clock speed. You need to consider though the i7-8700K is a 6 core processor, which is 50 percent more cores than the i7-7700K. Considering the clock speed and RAM is the same, does that relate to a 50 percent boost in cpu based processes? Not quite . So there's the scaling effect there with threads. What we really need to see is a 4 core Coffee Lake against a 4 core Kaby Lake at the same speed and RAM, at least that way we can see the real benefit of the architecture apart form cores. Alternatively in testing a direct comparison two cores of the i7-8700K could be disabled.

#5475660 Posted on: 09/26/2017 09:24 AM

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Re gaming, lets see performance @1440p and above.

#5475663 Posted on: 09/26/2017 09:44 AM

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Look at that witcher 3 performance increase. Also nice to see that is beats the 7700k across the board, even if it is only by a fraction in some cases.

Besting the 7700k in more singlethreaded tasks where 7700k is at it's best and also having the multithreaded advantage, unlike ryzen which trades single threaded performance for multithreading.

I think this cpu is going to sell like crazy.

I don't even think Ryzen trades st to mt. Those simply don't oc because of the process. Else they are somewhat behind, but what gives they jumped up from excavator more then enough to be competitive.

So 8700K is weaker in workstation then 7800x but better in games figures. For people with 6 core intels haswell up this won't make much of a difference if at all. Well for 7700k and 6700k owners regarding gaming this won't make a big difference.

#5475667 Posted on: 09/26/2017 10:13 AM

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Basically a 7800X on steroids.

#5475670 Posted on: 09/26/2017 10:38 AM

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The witcher 3 result doesnt make sense. Its the sort of jump one expects from a GPU upgrade, not CPU.

#5475674 Posted on: 09/26/2017 10:45 AM

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So would it be worth upgrading from a 4770k running at 4.5ghz ?
It seems to me the improvements to CPU's is going at a snails pace. Murphys law my @$$

Would help if the game developers made full use of all these cores and threads...

#5475678 Posted on: 09/26/2017 10:54 AM

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The witcher 3 result doesnt make sense. Its the sort of jump one expects from a GPU upgrade, not CPU.

1080p is where the CPU still can make a big difference in terms of the top end of the FPS, this becomes more GPU based the higher resolution you then go to.
But it could also be due to coding more than anything, maybe the witcher likes high single core performance from many cores.
Re gaming, lets see performance @1440p and above.

Problem with 1440p and 2160p is you would see very little differences due to them becoming GPU bottlenecks more than anything... specially with 2160p (4K) you can see that with many CPU's right now most differences are within 1/2fps which is often in the margin of error and normally can be considered void in many cases... 1440p might still show some minor differences but depends on if the games make use of the extra 2 cores


Will have to see what other reviews say about the product and if we get very comparable results. Just a shame these tests used slow ram rather than at least the standard 2666 these are meant to run off

So would it be worth upgrading from a 4770k running at 4.5ghz ?
It seems to me the improvements to CPU's is going at a snails pace. Murphys law my @$$

Would help if the game developers made full use of all these cores and threads...

As i've been saying i think in terms of Clock speeds right now we have reach limitations of around 5GHz the next step to pass the law is to go with muticore performance over strong single core... Maybe when we go off silicon to another material this might change and we might be able to surpass the current limitation but it seems to have been a road block since Sandy bridge. I still think we might be going into a core war a lot like the clock speed war we had years ago now... Hopefully with more computers having 6/8/10 cores inside of them will force developers to make and design programs and games around them making use of all these cores... we might then see stuff like DirectX12 come properly making full use of all these cores instead of the 1/2 cores we see many games use today.... Though bare in mind a lot of this is my own speculation of how the tech world's direction will go

#5475692 Posted on: 09/26/2017 11:42 AM

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I may be misinterpreting the images and please correct me should I be wrong: Since all the videos scores are pretty much equal the 7700K and 8700K seem to be the same in terms of power (frequency, IPC, so to speak) while the increase in FPS, more than anything, seems to be core/thread count related in combination with the given game's engine anyhow.

Meaning, ultimately, what I'm reading from those charts is that a 7700K is in fact a bottleneck due to core/thread count limitations in a lot of cases and likely has been for quite some time - pretty much all of Intel's lineup has been.
.

Yes, from those tables you can see that the 7700K has bottlenecked a few games, and the 8700K is removing/reducing some of those bottlenecks. The 7800X and 8700K are different architectures, the 7800X has something similar to AMD's Infinity Fabric between the cores which decreases gaming efficiency - I think mainly through increased latency within the CPU itself between the various cores. 8700K is fundamentally the same architecture as the 7700K, which is actually the best architecture for gaming, so only difference is that 8700K is benefitting from 2 more cores - so 8700K is the best gaming CPU at the moment.

I think the performance differences are not because of the higher core count but because of the bigger L3 cache of the 8700K. For some reason games love bigger L3 caches. I remember a test a site did a few years ago comparing the 2700K against the 2600K at the same clock speeds and with HT on and off and they discovered that the performance difference was due to the bigger L3 cache of the 2700K and that HT had almost no difference regarding the performance. The same happens with the 4790K with the L4 cache. And let´s not forget that the 7800X also has 6 cores but performs worse than the 7700K and the L3 cache has been reduced.
I could be wrong off course so lets wait for reviews before reaching any definitive conclusions.

#5475696 Posted on: 09/26/2017 12:03 PM

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This will be good for BF1.

#5475700 Posted on: 09/26/2017 12:13 PM

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1080p is where the CPU still can make a big difference in terms of the top end of the FPS, this becomes more GPU based the higher resolution you then go to.
But it could also be due to coding more than anything, maybe the witcher likes high single core performance from many cores.
This would be inconsistent with anything else we've seen with this game and all CPU variations that came before this. The IPC does not suggest anything greater than 5-7% as is typical of Intel releases, add to that the slight core speed bump. See Wprime and SuperPI single core results. And if the added cores make that much of a difference, again, nothing we've seen previously on that front matches this in W3.


Problem with 1440p and 2160p is you would see very little differences due to them becoming GPU bottlenecks more than anything... specially with 2160p (4K) you can see that with many CPU's right now most differences are within 1/2fps which is often in the margin of error and normally can be considered void in many cases... 1440p might still show some minor differences but depends on if the games make use of the extra 2 cores
Er.. that was the point.

Aside from all that, I see the 8700k as a great leap forward for the i7 line. Finally some added real cores to move past the 4c/4t formula we've been stuck with all these years. Big thanks to AMD for sticking that prod up Intels rear end with Ryzen.