 If we look back, Intel's high-end desktop or HEDT lineup has for the most part been pretty clearly segmented from their mainstream lineup. It's enjoyed processors with higher core counts and larger caches and the motherboards have had more RAM slots taking advantage of the bandwidth and capacity benefits of HEDT's beefier memory controllers. And of course on HEDT workstation users have been able to count on being able to install a greater number of high bandwidth PCI Express devices without running into bottlenecks. But I would actually make the argument that in the current environment Intel has actually damaged if not mostly destroyed the value proposition of their own entire high-end product stack. So what happened exactly? I will tell you after this message from our sponsor Thursday Boots. Thursday Boots is a bootstrapped startup ha ha that handcrafts boots using high quality materials and sells them at honest prices. Check them out at Thursdayboots.com forward slash LTT. Contrary to what you might think you can wear them on a casual Fridays. Intel had a really good thing going. In the absence of any competition they were able to stick with quad core processors for consumers for ten years. Making the argument that well mainstream workloads like gaming that they don't need more cores and anyone who does need more cores they've probably got real work to do and they can justify ponying up for HEDT. But then AMD happened. Getting eight true cores with Ryzen at the beginning of 2017 was a shock for the industry and I don't blame you if you've forgotten that eight core Ryzen started at $329 US dollars with performance that compared favorably to Intel's HEDT processors where eight cores at that time was going to cost you over a grand. Now Intel responded to that threat and they met AMD's high-end threadripper lineup head-on by dramatically increasing the core counts of its HEDT lineup from 10 in the previous generation all the way to 18 with their 7000 series core i9 CPUs, but that wasn't enough. While mainstream core i7 was still the clear leader in single threaded workloads for anyone who did anything other than just gaming on their machine consumer Ryzen had a huge price advantage thanks in part to its affordable motherboards. So Intel finally had to bump their consumer chips as well. First came the six core core i7-8700K at the end of 2017. Now it didn't quite bridge the gap in budget workstation performance with Ryzen but it did reduce AMD's lead somewhat and thanks to its superior single threaded performance it kept Intel on top for gaming and some other key workloads. Then fast forward another nine months and we got the core i9-9900K, the first Intel branded eight core consumer CPU and the first CPU ever on Intel's mainstream platform with core i9 branding along with the core i7-9700K. Also eight cores, but without SMT or hyper threading technology. And then with those CPUs we got the real reason that Intel has been sandbagging consumer core counts for so long. Because the HEDT lineup has been traditionally based on Intel's workstation and or server platform where by the nature of these markets tech actually tends to move a little slower. It has tended to lag behind their consumer processors architecturally sometimes as much as by two generations. So compounding this performance disadvantage is the fact that HEDT processors don't hit such high clock speeds due to power or thermal constraints and that they don't have an onboard graphics processor which over the last five years in particular has come to act as a co-processor for certain workloads on the consumer chips. So we're at a very interesting crossroads right now. Think about it. When we benchmark CPUs for our reviews or whatever we tend to go out looking for workloads that help us demonstrate the potential difference in performance from one chip to another. But in the real world how many workstation tasks like even workstation tasks do you actually perform in the course of a workday that require more than eight cores? And of those how many of them can't be GPU accelerated in some way? That is the ace up the sleeve of consumer chips and we'll be demonstrating that using the platforms you're looking at. So with consumer chips you now have up to 16 threads enough to handle H.264 encoding without breaking a sweat and the same goes for light rendering for your 3d modeling and CAD applications along with other traditionally CPU intensive tasks and this is especially true if you have a GPU that can be used to accelerate them. So just look at how little our high-end desktop CPUs affect spec view perf here. It's basically just run-to-run variants in most scenarios. In fact what's really interesting here is that our mainstream processors enjoy a significant advantage in applications like SOLIDWORKS, which is a traditionally workstation workload thanks to their much higher clock speeds. This is again apparent in the case of Adobe Premiere where as we've tested before more cores does matter but only to a point. So here we've reached that happy medium where the thread count, the superior per core performance, and the integrated graphics of the Core i9 9900K put it in a league of its own way out ahead of Intel's own HDDT chips, even though some of them have more cores. I mean this is amazing when you recall again that just two years ago we were stuck with four cores on Intel's consumer platform and had to pay a huge premium to get six or eight let alone the 10 core 6950X that actually cost more by itself than the entire mainstream test bench that we are running here. Because remember the difference in CPU price is just part of the story. The price difference between the platforms themselves can also be significant. So all it'll take now is for AMD to continue to press the advantage of their modular CPU design and push core counts even higher with Zen 2 and then assuming that Intel follows suit and we know by now that they will have to, the likely result we think is going to be the contraction and eventual disappearance of the traditional HDDT lineup from Intel. Like think about it, for light workstation use honestly Apple hit the nail on the head with the iMac. Photographers haven't really needed powerful workstations for a very long time. Now in video production, HDDT has offered clear performance improvements even as recently as two to three years ago and has also leveraged the increased PCI Express bandwidth with expansion cards like Red Rocket accelerators. But GPU compute has eroded the market for devices like that very significantly. I mean how many expansion cards do you have in your system? So we're not saying that chips like Threadripper and Intel's own high core count CPUs won't continue to have a place in desktop workstations. There are workloads for them. We're just saying that the use cases for those chips are not very mainstream anymore and that HDDT is the wrong product for those kinds of customers and the reason is ECC memory support. Ryzen supports ECC from the ground floor all the way up to Threadripper 2, which makes it perfect for an entry-level workstation that has a need for ECC. By contrast, Intel has desperately clung to the paradigm of removing ECC from its consumer and HDDT processors to force anyone doing more mission critical work to spend still more on a Xeon. That obviously isn't going to last. So the bottom line is this. We were wrong when we did our review of the Xeon W. We said Xeon W had no reason to exist with only ECC to differentiate it from HDDT because the performance was the same, but actually HDDT has no reason to exist if it doesn't support ECC because it's getting eaten away at from both the bottom and the top by Intel's own 9000 series consumer chips and AMD's Threadripper. So here's our new proposed lineup. You continue to expand the consumer chips with more cores when possible, but don't compromise single threaded performance. That's still your key advantage in certain workloads like gaming and SOLIDWORKS. Then once that's done, you replace the high core count lineup wholesale with Xeon W. So that's the lower end single socket only workstation Xeon line. And while you're at that, you get your head out of your butt when it comes to the pricing of those chips. They should end up in line with the core i9s that they will replace. That way you cut out one entire platform to support which makes life easier on marketing teams and board partners and consumers. Now I suspect Intel won't take my advice. They do like making money after all, but there may come a time when it's absolutely necessary. Just like they're eventually gonna have to bring coffee lake refresh to their LGA 1151 Xeons threatening even Xeon W. But that's a conversation for another day. For now the bottom line is this. Let's give credit where credit is due. AMD brought more cores to the table and Intel responded in kind so there has never been a better time to build a value oriented desktop machine that can do serious workstation work. And if this is what the death of HEDT as we know looks like then I am super okay with that. Ting is the mobile carrier that's focused on customer service and customer satisfaction. When you call Ting you don't speak to a robot. You get put through directly to a person and it doesn't cost extra. 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