10th generation Intel desktop CPUs arrived, still at 14nm

So far 2020 is a tough year for Intel CPU amateurs“Both ways of the word.” Chipzilla’s new generation of desktop CPU has arrived, and Intel is struggling to find ways (mostly overclocking) to make them look good compared to AMD’s 7nm Zen 2 pieces.

The tenth-generation parts Core, Pentium, and Celeron follow the trend established by the recent launch of the H-series of Intel notebooks: they are old process technology tuned to less than an inch of their lifespan, and Intel still doesn’t offer numbers. performance could be compared directly to the competition.

Performance

For the most part, pre-launch benchmark data from Intel looks like what we got for Comet Lake H-series laptop CPUs – a sharp focus on unrated clock speed and a healthy smudge of Vaseline on the lens when observing actual performance. Once again, we are seeing single core turbo speeds in the highest SKUs exceeding 5 GHz, and a noticeable deviation from hard performance data that could be directly compared to AMD’s 7nm Ryzen CPUs.

To Intel’s credit, we have at least some performance deltas from generation to generation this time. However, we still have almost no difficult performance numbers, let alone direct comparisons with AMD Ryzen. Intel is also very interested in comparisons to a “three-year-old PC”. Presumably, they expect people who aren’t up to date on the Intel-AMD rivalry to just think, “yes, that sounds good, let’s go ahead and update this year.”

This time, Intel’s marketing relies heavily on its optimization collaboration with game development companies, as well as, if not more, on the gross performance of the new CPUs. But without direct head-to-head comparisons to Ryzen processors, it’s impossible to determine if the brilliant testimonials from gaming companies about Intel’s help apply to Intel vs. AMD, or just the newer generations versus the older ones.

The gaming and gaming marketing approach with this series of CPUs is extreme and predictable: single-threaded performance is almost the last place where Intel can expect to compete directly against its AMD competition, and it’s hard to find someone who worry a lot about that statistic outside the gaming world.

Modern content creation and workload compilation tend to be massively multithreaded and focus more on performance than latency. Games, particularly higher levels of competitive games, tend to be more influenced by input and response latency. If a single core can traverse the main circuit of a faster game, an elite player may lose an extra few milliseconds of reaction time.

Trying to assess the real benefit of the fastest CPU games possible is made more difficult since none of the typical industry metrics measure this well: frames per second is a performance metric, not a latency metric. To make matters worse, FPS is generally displayed as a mean average, rather than a median or mode. It focuses heavily on the graphical dimension of the game cycle while effectively ignoring input and logic.