Intel pays for benchmarks, DECEIVES to make AMD look bad

Intel commissions Principled Technologies to benchmark Core i9 and AMD CPUs, has to LIE to look good.

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Intel unveiled its next-gen 9th generation CPUs barely over 24 hours ago, in a release that includes the new Core i9-9900K and Core i9-9980XE processors as well as the new 28C/56T beast in the Xeon W-3175W processor.

Intel pays for benchmarks, DECEIVES to make AMD look bad | TweakTown.com

But... the company contracted out the benchmarks of its new CPUs to a company called Principled Technologies, which created a white paper comparing the performance of the Core i9-9900K, Core i7-8700K, and a bunch of AMD processors including the high-end Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX, 2950X, and Ryzen 7 2700X processors.

The bad thing here is that Intel is showing the AMD processors in a really bad light, where it is downright playing consumers and the world for a fool. There are multiple issues with what Intel is trying to hustle here, where it has run the Ryzen systems without XMP enabled for starters... but it gets worse from there:

  • XMP disabled on Ryzen - reduces performance anywhere between 5-15%
  • All benchmarks were run at 1080p on a GTX 1080 Ti, where the Ryzen CPUs don't perform well
  • PT enabled "Game Mode" in AMD Ryzen Master utility - very bad for Ryzen, AMD doesn't recommend enabling it AT ALL unless its for Ryzen Threadripper

Enabling this disables half the CPU cores on Threadripper and enables NUMA, something that lets the CPU cores left enabled to schedule workloads to the CPU cores that reside closest to the memory controllers.

But on Ryzen 7, enabling Game Mode slices the CPU cores down in half. AMD themselves warn users that Game Mode is really used on Ryzen Threadripper CPUs, and that normal Ryzen users shouldn't use it, at all.

Anthony joined the TweakTown team in 2010 and has since reviewed 100s of graphics cards. Anthony is a long time PC enthusiast with a passion of hate for games built around consoles. FPS gaming since the pre-Quake days, where you were insulted if you used a mouse to aim, he has been addicted to gaming and hardware ever since. Working in IT retail for 10 years gave him great experience with custom-built PCs. His addiction to GPU tech is unwavering and has recently taken a keen interest in artificial intelligence (AI) hardware.

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