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I have been conspicuously silent about Intel's new high-end desktop X299 platform
and the CPU's that they just announced to go with it.
And, this was on purpose, but probably not for the reasons that you think.
I've spent the last few days walking the show floor, chatting with industry folks,
and generally trying to wrap my head around
what the actual hell it is that Intel's trying to do with this launch.
Before we get into that though, a primer on X299.
So, socket 2011-v3 is old news,
socket 2066 is the hot new girl in class.
With the new chipset comes support for "up to" 7-series Skylake-based Intel Core i9 processors,
we get "up to" quad channel DDR4 memory running at "up to" DDR4 2666MHz,
we get "up to" 44 PCI express lanes for massive expansion,
"up to" greatly expanded NVMe and Optane storage capabilities
and "up to" two preferred Turbo [Boost] Max cores that run at higher boost frequencies.
Well, what's with all this "up to"?
I'll get to that, first let's take a look at the boards.
So Intel's partners have been out in full force with support for this new tech.
ASUS was showing about half a dozen boards based on the same basic DNA,
each with some same stand out features.
The Rampage VII Extreme includes dual water flow sensors
to go with the pump headers that are standard on this generation,
their deluxe board includes 802.11ad multi-gigabit wireless
and an OLED POST-in system monitoring display,
and the 'TOUGHMARK 1' comes with the usual extra thermal sensors,
tough armour, and a freaking graphics card sag holder!
GIGABYTE's Digital RGB header allows lighting effects with individual addressable LED strips,
their 'SmartFan 5' software now allows fans to be turned off outright
if system temperatures allow it, a huge boom to 'silence-freaks' like me.
They've gone ham on USB 3.1 10-gigabit ports including,
like the others, support for the new type-C front panel spec,
and they were showing off 4 PCIe NVMe SSDs running in RAID,
which in of itself, isn't exactly groundbreaking,
but that fact that they were running off of the CPU, and they were bootable, is.
MSI (on the subject of NVMe) has boards with native support for up to 5 M.2 SSDs,
and is putting a really strong emphasis on cooling for them.
Like everyone else, they've given a lot of thought to the aesthetics of their boards.
You can even 3D print accessories from templates and swap cooler covers in some cases,
and, unlike everybody else this is interesting, they've got a white or red LED
that tells you what kind of CPU you've you've got installed,
and in turn then, how many of the features that you're looking at on the board
are actually going to be enabled!
Which I guess brings us to a fairly natural conclusion to the nicely scripted part of this video,
because I've got some rough notes with some other stuff that I've gotta get off of my back,
but to do that I think, it's probably better if we go for a little walk.
Going back to my earlier question...
What is this platform?
Quite honestly what it looks like to me is that Intel themselves can't really decide.
It's like they've changed their mind multiple times,
and the whole thing just seems like this kneejerk reaction to
AMDs announcement of their up to 16-core 32-thread 'Threadripper' platform.
And then I mean, some of the things they're doing look just kind of like a
half-desperate attempt to appease enthusiasts, and gamers who... if they feel anything like me where...
you know, the mainstream's been stuck with quad-core processors for the last 10 years.
And even on the enthusiast level, we're lucky to get another 2 cores, and last time around,
we even had to pay another $700 just for the privilege
of going from 8 to 10 cores with the new 'Broadwell-E' generation.
I mean to be clear for me personally, a lot of this stuff can only be good.
I mean high core count, overclockable water-cooled servers,
that's right in my wheelhouse; that's perfect!
And when you're someone who doesn't pay for hardware then... it's expensive? No problem!
I mean not to mention that as a hardware enthusiast, I'm not gonna be struggling
to pair the correct board, and the correct memory, and the correct CPU together
to make sure that I'm getting the most out of the entire platform,
'cause honestly that's one of the biggest problems with the platform right now,
it's really confusing; Kaby Lake-X muddies the water
in a way that just makes absolutely no sense for Intel to do!
I mean, I've spoken to system integrators here at the show, I'm not going to name them by name or anything,
but they flat out said "we're not going to support this. This aspect of the platform is a mess, because what is Kaby Lake-X?"
Like on the surface, it sounds like they've gone ahead and they've added the latest architecture
to this platform in some, you know, amazing... "wow, we engineered a new generation overnight" kind of way,
but what actually happened was they took the existing Kaby Lake processors on the mainstream platform,
and just, like, stapled them on to socket 2066.
the only difference between the 7740 and the 7640 compared to the socket 1151 versions
is that they're rated at 20 watt higher TDPs,
they're clocked 100 MHz (0.1 GHz) higher and Intel is promising better overclocking on them.
but at the end of the day, am I going to spend another hundred dollars on a board just for that...
and why on earth would Intel neuter all the features on the motherboard
just for the sake of me being able to run a chip at like a little bit higher frequency?
They don't have more PCI express lanes!
They've still only got sixteen and, making matters even more confusing, they only run dual channel memory still.
So when you go and you buy an X299 motherboard, it can have
anywhere from four to eight memory slots on it which might support two sets of dual-channel memory,
a single set of quad-channel memory, or two sets of quad-channel memory.
So you might actually have DIMM slots that don't work if you install a Kaby Lake-X CPU!
Oh and I mean... right, this is crazy too; I even forgot the part how
X299 boards aren't going to have all the connectors for onboard graphics,
so the onboard graphics are fused off, which wouldn't inherently be a huge problem;
I expect someone spending, you know, $300 to $600 on a motherboard
to buy a dedicated graphics card but the issue is that then you can't even use features
that you would be able to on the mainstream platform like QuickSync, for example,
that rely on the integrated GPU in order to function.
Kaby Lake [X] just makes no sense. At. All.
Okay, so now let's talk about those reactionary high core count CPUs.
Again, I'm not complaining, an 18-core Extreme Edition that's overclockable sounds great to me.
But everyone and their dog knows that Intel was only planning to use the low core count version
of their Xeon processors to create their high-end desktop platform.
So that was going to be up to 12 cores, and surprise surprise here at the show,
the only chips they're showing are based on that one.
So what Intel did is they saw, "oh no, AMD has Threadripper;"
"They're making us look bad by announcing this stuff that people really want!"
"Uh, uh, uh, quick! Announce something! Even though..."
"...you know, we don't know how much power it's going to consume, we don't know what clock speeds it's going to run at;"
"We don't know how much we're going to charge for it; we need to make sure we're announcing something,"
"so that when AMD launches Threadripper, we're not caught completely with our pants down, and no way to react to it."
But here's the problem; they're taking this 'wait-and-see' approach for a reason that I personally don't really like.
They want to see what Threadripper turns into before they commit to what they're gonna deliver to the consumer,
and that's exactly the problem that they're running up against in the first place here.
Here's some corporate strategy advice, free of charge Intel.
Build the best thing you can for the best price that you can deliver it,
and you're not going to get blindsided by a competitor
that walks in and delivers something way better for a lower price!
So we've got this really confusing platform;
we've got these mid-core count harvested Xeon's on the high-end desktop platform
that are going to be differentiated by having lots of PCI express lanes
which I think is what gives them the Core i9 designation,
we're gonna have the normal chips, some of which still have lots of PCI express lanes and go up to 12 cores--
all of the ones I've mentioned so far support quad-channel memory and anywhere from 28 to 44 PCI express lanes.
Then we're going to have Kaby Lake-X, which only supports 16 PCI express lanes, and get this;
the motherboard manufacturers have to support any chip that you could put in the socket on every single board.
How do you build a board around 16 to 44 PCI express lanes,
dual to quad-channel memory, and anywhere from 4 to 18 cores!?
The whole launch is so rushed that Gigabyte flat-out isn't supporting Thunderbolt 3 on any of their X299 boards,
because they didn't have time to go through the certification process,
and the whole thing is confusing as hell to not just the general consumer, but even enthusiasts.
And I mean, there's other stuff here that just makes no sense to me as well.
VROC, okay?
So I talked about how you can have, you know, "up to", you know, better support for NVMe storage than ever before...
So this is a really cool feature; you can actually run bootable RAID through the CPU
rather than letting it get bottlenecked by the chipset now with NVMe devices.
But out of the box, Intel is only supporting RAID 0, and if you wanna run RAID 1 or RAID 10,
you need to buy a $99 physical key and plug it into the board,
and if you wanna support RAID 5 on top of all that other stuff,
you're gonna pay another $300! Like I get that they're worried about cannibalizing
their Xeon sales, and their server and high-end workstation sales with this platform
but this seems like such a step backwards
on a consumer product going back to buying like RAID keys,
and sticking them onto a motherboard. And as if that wasn't anti-consumer enough,
the word on the street now (and I really hope they reverse this decision if it is one)
is that this bootable RAID-- this VROC feature,
is only going to work with Intel branded NVMe SSDs.
They don't make the best NVMe SSDs, at least not till Optane lands,
so they're basically going, "ah, here's the highest end, you know, enthusiast thing. Oh, by the way,"
"Put some, you know, SSDs in here for your wicked RAID array that aren't even the best on the market."
So...
I'm sorry if this video was a little more ramble-y than what I usually do and, uh...
maybe a little longer than what I do these days,
but I guess it just felt appropriate given the the frustration that I've had, I mean...
you know, I've been asking for higher core count, and I've been...
you know, asking for really a lot of the things that they're doing right now,
which...
like it's funny, because here I am complaining about it,
but...
what's frustrating is not that they're doing it; what's frustrating is
my perception of the reasons that they're doing it so...
I guess that's pretty much it, like, leave a comment letting me know your guys' thoughts. Am I...
am I being nitpicky or are the criticisms fair?
Leave a comment below and let's...
let's at least talk about it!
If Intel's going to come across this video, I'd love for them to get
some real feedback not just from me, but also from you guys.
So thanks for watching this video here from Computex 2017, and beautiful Taiwan...
a huge shout out to Corsair for allowing us to be here;
the Corsair One is their 12 liter powerhouse of a gaming machine that's available
with up to a GTX 1080 graphics card with a 1080 Ti version coming soon,
and a huge shout out to Synergy for offering 25% off their mouse and keyboard sharing software
to all of our viewers and you can find links to both of those in the video description.