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Comment by daveguy | Hacker News Reader

I doubt gamers will be a big market for that chip. You don't get a whole lot of increased capability / FPS with a high end chip compared to a mid range chip when the GPU is generally the limiter. But I do think they are going to sell a ton of 3600-3800 chips.

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Came to say the same... the 3600 (non-X) is extremely competitive in gaming, and is pretty likely to have some good overclocking headroom with a good water cooler. Personally, I'm very much looking forward to the 3950X and will probably be my choice (even though waiting yet another 2 months to upgrade) unless something significant/soon happens in the next ThreadRipper, the 3950X is likely to be a very sweet spot carrying it for 5 years and more.

I've said in other comments my 4790K is getting a bit old at this point, not slow for most stuff, but definitely hungry for more cores for a lot of tasks, and looking to break past 32gb of ram. I'd also been considering Epyc or even Xeon, as older/used Xeons can be very well priced. Guess I'm waiting until September.

> I've said in other comments my 4790K is getting a bit old at this point, not slow for most stuff, but definitely hungry for more cores for a lot of tasks, and looking to break past 32gb of ram. I'd also been considering Epyc or even Xeon, as older/used Xeons can be very well priced.

I’m in nearly the exact some boat. I’d like to have ECC ram the second time around for my home server, which the Zen chips reportedly support though I don’t see people using. I’d also like better power usage. I think I’m going to wait one more year.

Just got a used Dell, dual 8-core CPUs and 128GB ECC ... main purpose is for a NAS and it'll sit in the garage because of the noise. I may look into what CPU upgrades are available and maybe throw some heavier workloads at it.

For now, planning on just playing around with it. I haven't decided if I'll be running Windows or Linux as the base OS yet.

Is it a rack server? I found the power usage too high on those servers compared to more traditional servers.

It's a standard 2U enclosure... haven't tested the power usage, but it's a relatively current Intel CPU (E5000 series iirc), so should idle reasonably well.

Well, at first gamers said dual-core chips are useless. Then that quad-core chips are useless. Now they're testing waters with octa-core chips.

Game developers have always made a good use of the available resources. They'll use the extra power available. The newest techniques they have, like work stealing queues, can scale to a large number of cores.

So games and gamers will use the extra cores. It's much less of a jump from 4 cores to 16 than from 1 to 2.

Give it a year or two.

In (recent) games made with Unity, a lot of workloads like scheduling the GPU and such are offloaded to separate threads with (almost) no developer intervention. Future games will extensively utilize the job system which provides safe and efficient multithreading. Not sure how Unreal and the remaining leading engines stand, but things seem to be looking very good for high core count CPU owners.

Pretty bleak for Unreal. UE4 uses only one core at a time and is often the limiting factor before GPU.

gamers will probably not be a big market for that chip, but it might be appealing for gamers with a large budget. unless intel has something big hidden up their sleeves (doubtful when they don't even plan to release their next mobile line until holiday 2019), that 16-core chip will likely have the best single-threaded performance on the market. plus it has to be a highly binned part to have the same TDP as the 12-core model even with a slightly higher boost clock. I for one am very interested to see overclocking results.

Just look at the cost of gaming GPUs (including the costs of watercooling?). Not to mention the fact that CPU can have a slower upgrade cycle than GPU (since a CPU upgrade will usually mean upgrading the motherboard, possibly the RAM, who knows what else while you're there), so getting a top GPU is not at all cheap in the long run.

No it's not worth it IMO, but some people spend crazy amounts chasing a few extra fps.

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