That's because in the race to get the highest benchmark scores, both companies have set the stock clocks to a level that's way beyond what's optimal (eg. adding 100W of power consumption to get 5% higher benchmark scores). The CPUs themselves are fine, you just have to adjust the power/clock limit lower.
Someone on reddit did a power analysis of the 13900K and I reposted it here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34404683 https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/10bna5r/13900k_po... and it shows the CPU at 100W has 75% of the performance at 40% of the power consumption...
That said, Intel sure has magic dust given how far behind their node disadvantage. Serves them right, though. What a horrible company.
Sure, 30% better, but not a 2x improvement as marketing suggests.
I know you're poking fun at it, but, node names are completely made up and the points don't matter these days. It is a "5nm-class node", if nodes had continued to shrink according to the original plans in 2000 or whatever.
Intel's old naming scheme had "nm" after every number, and the one you're describing is "10nm".
Then they renamed everything to use smaller numbers, and no "nm". Newer versions of "10nm" became "Intel 7", still at ~100M transistors per mm².
Similarly "7nm" became "Intel 4", with an expected density of ~160M. And so on.
* 65W TDP, 88W PPT
This little bit of sleight-of-hand from AMD was really really effective, boost TDP used to be called boost TDP, and Intel expected their TDPs to cover full load when boosting or under AVX. Then AMD made up this new number but it's not TDP it's uh, PPT, and marketed all their chips under a 30% lower number.
It's obviously worked because people do this "my CPU is only 65W!" thing all the time and no, it's not, it's 88W, unless you've turned off boost.
[citation needed]
They might be 240W under extreme load, but I can play AAA titles on my i9 at 240hz barely cracking 50% CPU load. And that's with a 3090, so not exactly a mismatched CPU/GPU situation.
At those types of loads the CPU doesn't even try to hit boost clocks most of the time, so you're nowhere near the figures you often see touted based on benchmarks.
This is proven by any outlet which takes the time to measure Performance Per Watt (e.g. https://www.hwcooling.net/en/intel-core-i7-13700k-efficient-...). Intel has consistently driven higher PPW with every generation, when you're comparing like-for-like binned chips. AMD, on the other hand, has been a bigger victim of what the OP is describing; while their raw PPW is generally higher than Intel, so they have room to fall, their Ryzen 7x chips aren't consistently posting higher PPW numbers over Ryzen 5x.
In other words; both Intel and AMD are doing well here. If you're stressing every core on the CPU at 100%, you're going to draw a lot of power, but you're also going to be completing workloads much faster than on 12th or 11th gen, so your aggregate power draw will be lower. The low-tier media outlets that post "OMG 250W" aren't doing research, and also don't care to, because they get clicks from tons of people like the OP who eat outrage at face value.
People don't realize that mid range mobile chips from both Intel and AMD out perform top of the range desktop SKUs from a few years ago because they're constantly bombarded by hot takes based on things like CPU rendering and unzipping files...
At this point I'm convinced it's just an informal cycle, where if they actually reported in a realistic manner, no release would be exciting. If they didn't pair bottom of the line CPUs with top end GPUs and odd settings configurations under the guise of "not wanting to reflect a GPU bottleneck", it'd be a lot clearer how badly needs have stagnated vs the speed of these new SKUs
Hardware unboxed did a video explaining why reviews do that: https://youtu.be/Zy3w-VZyoiM
tl;dw: you're not caring about the performance today, you're caring about the performance a few years from now when you bought a faster GPU.
I'm sorry this is kind of long, but I really had to make sure I wasn't missing something with how obvious there were about it.
The complaint people have is that they're not matching up hardware realistically... so they take a ~$350 Intel CPU and pit it against a ~$250 AMD CPU, instead of the ~$350 AMD sibling it launched alongside of to artificially induce a larger gap!
How much do you want to bet the same graph with a 2700x would have given a much less convincing gap?
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Now you might be thinking I'm just being uncharitable... but they actually tested the correct SKUs specifically for future proofing, twice over the last few years! Talk about a smoking gun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11GvlWamF2E
And no surprise, it took using a $1000 GPU at 1080p to shake out half the gap shown for a similarly priced GPU in the video!
And even worse, if you actually go and look at the individual titles, unlike the graphs shown here, at no point was the difference enough to affect your ability to hit a playable refresh rate! The largest differences were in games where they were both getting over 300 FPS since again, they're using a $1000 GPU for 1080p!
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And if you're still not convinced it's an intentional attempt to push a misleading point, I mentioned they've done this comparison twice... the last time the entire point of the video was to not base your choice on future proofing! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZkJ_-vfQa8
They actually concluded by saying there was no meaningful difference, gaming is largely GPU limited, and specifically replied to people claiming that you can just wait for the difference to appear:
I wouldn't hold your breath, I expect you'll upgrade your [CPU] platform once or twice before those extra cores for gaming matter
I don't know how much more blatant you can get than that...
>I'm sorry this is kind of long, but I really had to make sure I wasn't missing something with how obvious there were about it.
>The complaint people have is that they're not matching up hardware realistically... so they take a ~$350 Intel CPU and pit it against a ~$250 AMD CPU, instead of the ~$350 AMD sibling it launched alongside of to artificially induce a larger gap!
I'm assuming the "chart" in question is the one shown at https://youtu.be/Zy3w-VZyoiM?t=278. The point of comparing the $250 amd cpu against the $350 intel cpu isn't to claim that they're in the same market segment, it's to point out that if benchmarked CPUs using "reasonable" GPU parings, you'll see little to no difference between high end and mid end CPUs. Now, you might argue that benchmarking this way is misleading because in reality, you'll never see the performance differential and therefore would waste money by buying the high end CPU. However, the CPUs are actually faster. Benchmarking them in such a way that their actual performance doesn't show because they're limited by some external factor would also be misleading. It'd be like putting out a benchmark between a sports car and an econobox and concluding that they're within 5% (or whatever) of each other in terms of "performance" because the speed limit is 60mph, so they both get you to your destination in around the same amount of time.
a) you need to use unrealistic pairings to get the true margin of the parts under review...
b) we prioritize exposing the margin to allow future-proofing your CPU choice
I'm totally agreeing that they need to use mismatched GPU to make the first point.
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But I'm strongly refuting the second: they expose the "hidden" margin because again, the real world gains for most owners wouldn't be there and the content would be a lot less exciting.
And they're claiming that it's not about today, but it will be once future GPUs at the same price point are faster... but they concluded the exact opposite before: stating that you should not bank on GPU futureproofing changing the math on which CPU is a better choice.
And what's so damning is that when they wanted to prove that opposite take about the exact same topic they used direct competitors twice.
As soon as they benefited from the gap they decided to downgrade the CPU.
Going back to your previous comment
>And if you're still not convinced it's an intentional attempt to push a misleading point, I mentioned they've done this comparison twice... the last time the entire point of the video was to not base your choice on future proofing! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZkJ_-vfQa8
>They actually concluded by saying there was no meaningful difference, gaming is largely GPU limited, and specifically replied to people claiming that you can just wait for the difference to appear:
>I wouldn't hold your breath, I expect you'll upgrade your [CPU] platform once or twice before those extra cores for gaming matter
>I don't know how much more blatant you can get than that...
I don't see the contradiction here. The specific advice he was arguing against in the video is "you should get ryzen CPUs because they have more cores and therefore they futureproof better". His argument against that is that games are still single threaded and will be in the near future, so any theoretical benefits you get from more cores will take forever to materialize. He's not making a blanket statement arguing against any sort of futureproofing.
In video 1 in the series he makes a side mention about viewers previously complaining "why are you comparing these at low resolutions, the differences you're exposing won't matter".
But the point of that video is to compare two CPUs for gaming, so he goes at length about the margin exposed in a way that would imply the 8700k "won"... despite briefly mentioning "under most conditions there is no actual difference" right afterwards.
3 years after that he says does that again, going at length about the 8700k winning, but then walking it back to "but really they're about the same"
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Fast forward to now, and this time he's making a video that directly addresses the complaints about low resolution testing.
So this time he chooses a slower CPU, even faster GPUs, ends up with slightly bigger gaps than the ones he previously wrote off (which are more than accounted for by both the even faster GPU this time, and slower competitor). Honesty would dictate a similar "they're essentially the same", but this time he goes on to beat his chest with "well this is why we call out the margin!"
I wonder if maybe you're missing that the dishonesty doesn't stem from having falsified anything, it's about the obvious conflict of interest where they intentionally set up each case to show as much as a gap as possible regardless of bearing on reality because that's the flashiest content that lets them make the hottest possible takes.
Didn't think I needed to explain load is not a binary concept. Understanding that is just table stakes for making a meaningful contribution the conversation.
The point is that the CPUs are massively capable at less than 100% utilization.
These reviewers are covering more use cases than "24/7 Linux Kernel compiles", yet they're selling conclusions that only apply in that sort of use case as much more relevant than they actually are.