A Look At Intel’s Core i9-7900X X-Series 10-core Processor

(All of our tests are explained in detail on page 2.)

SiSoftware’s Sandra needs no introduction, but I’ll give one anyway. It’s been around for as long as the Internet, and has long provided both diagnostic and benchmark features to its users. SiSoftware keeps on top of architectural updates as they’re revealed, and often, the software supports a specific processor feature or design before consumers can even get their hands on the product.

As a synthetic tool, Sandra can give us the best possible look at the top-end performance from the hardware it can benchmark, which is the reason we use it to test CPUs, memory, motherboards, and even graphics cards (for compute). It also allows us to benchmark very specific tests, such as inter-core bandwidth and latency, financial and scientific scenarios, as well as cache performance.

Arithmetic & Multi-Media

The 7900X continues its strong lead here, which was to be expected given its strong performance elsewhere in the review, and not to mention that Sandra’s tests scale extremely well with cores and frequency. I should note that the 2017 version of Sandra was used for the i9-7900X, as it includes official support for it.

Cryptography

If you are wondering why there is such a huge gain with the i9-7900X, that comes down to the power of the AVX-512 instruction set, which is also capable of performing dual AVX-256 instructions, hence the 50% boost. The last time I remember an instruction set giving such a tremendous performance boost was when AES made its introduction with Clarkdale in 2010. With Ryzen, AMD gained a lead on the crypto front over Intel, but these top-end parts from Intel strike back hard. It’ll be interesting to see how Threadripper compares when it launches in a few weeks!

Financial & Scientific Analysis

Continuing its stampede, the 7900X obliterates not just the competition, but even its predecessor. The scalability of these benchmarks yield interesting results once AMD launches its 16-core Threadripper, and Intel, it’s even higher-end 18-core chips.

Memory & Core Bandwidth / Latencies

Prior to benchmarking the i7-6950X, I thought ~45GB was great for memory bandwidth, but here comes along the 7900X and 3200MHz memory to deliver ~60GB. That’s just a ton of bandwidth, and in the grand scheme, these modules are not even “that fast”.

Interestingly, the 7900X falls behind its 6950X predecessor in the latency and core tests, which could be a byproduct of the architectural design or benchmarks that leave room for optimization, or possible problems with the dual substrate package Intel is using.