 Intel's 10th generation Core i9 processors are launching right now. So we need to update y'all on the changes to their high-end desktop product lineup, their massive price cuts, and their performance improvements. But... By setting the NDA lift to midnight the day before AMD's, Intel has forced us to also tackle another subject in today's video. Just how low their cowardly, pathetic, weasley behavior has sunk. Man, I hate reading sponsor spots when I'm like mad GlassWire. I don't mean to take this out on you. With GlassWire, you can detect malware and block badly behaving apps on your PC or Android device, use offer code Linus and get 25% off GlassWire at the link below. Okay, back to Intel now. What could you have possibly been thinking? That we wouldn't catch on? That tech reviewers have never seen this bullsh** before? That the enthusiasts and gaming communities are just stupid? Gee, Intel, I wonder why your embargo lift is mere hours before everyone knows, because they announced it publicly, that AMD will be unveiling their new third generation Threadripper processors. Make sure you subscribe by the way, so you don't miss our video about that. Could it be maybe because you're just so excited to get your hot new hardware in the hands of your valued customers? Or could it be because you know that even after slashing your prices as much as 50% on your rehashed hardware, you've still got nothing and you'll grasp at any desperate strategy to avoid any direct comparisons against your competitors product. I mean the worst part of all of this is that everyone that I have ever met on the enthusiast and the gaming teams at Intel is a good person. One with more than enough common sense to know that this was going to backfire f**king immediately. And what that means to me is that the only possible explanation for this is that some bonehead executive with no actual clue about the real world and how it works, who ignored those good people's excellent advice, then laid down the law and went ahead with this plan to launch first by a matter of hours. Why? So that the launch day reviews, which tend to get referenced by buyers over the entire product life cycle, couldn't contain direct comparisons to something you were afraid was going to be better. You are a weasel and you are a chicken. You seek to misrepresent the strength of your products to consumers, weasel, and you seek to duck away from a fight rather than take the criticism that you know you deserve, chicken. I hope you get fired because there are people with more integrity serving lunch in your cafeteria and maybe they could use a raise. They certainly wouldn't have handled this any worse than you did. LTTstore.com by the way, if you also need a drink. Let's talk about the product now. At its core, Intel's new Cascade Lake X is in fact a Sky Lake X refresh. Same basic core design, same cache layout, same process node, same number of cores, but there are a number of tweaks under the hood. The memory controller has gotten a nice bump in both max capacity and default speed, and we also get an extra four PCI Express lanes, albeit still running at Gen 3 speeds, unlike AMD's latest CPUs which are running at Gen 4. The turbo frequency on this skew, Intel opted to provide only one chip from their entire new lineup, gets a nice bump to 4.6 GHz and turbo boost max actually boosts it even higher on up to four cores now. The base clock is the same as last gen though, so it's clear that they aren't expecting people to run these with an all core overclock without incredible cooling. What's truly new this generation is what Intel is calling deep learning boost, which is to say that AVX 512 has been expanded with the new vector neural network construction extension. The extremely high level explanation for what this does is it accelerates repeated multiplication of numbers that happens to be quite common in convolutional neural network processing. Anyone who's using these types of workloads should therefore get a pretty decent performance boost, but unfortunately, that is currently a little bit out of our wheelhouse to verify. Oh right, and there's also some mystery meat mitigations for Intel's latest round of security vulnerabilities. The price drops, those look pretty good, at least against Intel's own lineup. We are now getting 18 cores for what used to be the price of just 10. But AMD's recently launched Ryzen 9 3950X 16 core for $750, not to mention that it's on a cheaper motherboard, makes that feel more like a defensive reaction than an earnest effort to just bring more value to the consumer out of the goodness of Intel's heart. Which brings us to performance testing then. We've gone with high speed DDR4 3600 memory for all the benches that support it, and we've got the highest end consumer chips being tested along with our HDDT ones. And here we go. Oh, oh dear. It's a really good thing Intel decided to drop their pricing because it looks to us at least like their 10th gen chips may actually have worse performance compared to last gen in some scenarios in spite of their higher boost clocks. We reached out to Intel about this and they said, yes, the 10980XC numbers that you have are in fact accurate, but your 9980XC numbers are higher than expected. We're not really sure what that means, but we retested a bunch of times and consistently got these results on what is quite literally the same motherboard with the same BIOS settings and operating system. So our best guess is that the new hardware vulnerability fixes are taking a toll here. Intel wouldn't confirm that, but come on Linus, it's half the price of last gen, right? Well, yeah, it is. But like even compared to AMD's $250 cheaper Ryzen 9 3950X, the Core i9 10980XC isn't doing so hot in most of these tests. And that is in spite of its two core advantage. Now some of the shorter or more lightly threaded workloads where Intel can really flex their clock speed advantage, those look all right. But once that boost window expires, the advantage moves clearly to Team Red. The Mozilla Firefox compile test is a great example of this, where we actually saved over a minute and 30 seconds on Ryzen versus the new Core i9. In fact, Intel pulls off a convincing win in exactly one scenario. Spec workstations energy test. Summary then, good job, I guess, at least in terms of productivity. Now for gaming, no HDDT processor is truly ideal, but the 10980XC refreshingly manages to pull off better performance than its predecessor here. And AMD's gaming king, the 3950X, also couldn't stand up to it. Only the Core i9 9900KS pulls off a substantial lead from the rest of the pack. So, I mean, that's not that terrible, but it's also not what most people would buy the CPU for, so... Thermals and power are an interesting thing to measure on the 10980XC. At face value, you might think it's as simple as having a base clock of 3 GHz and a boost of 4.6, but in reality, there's actually far more going on here. So just have a look at this mess of AVX offsets and per-core boost clocks. In fact, what Intel doesn't tell you on the box is that the all-core boost frequencies are actually the same between the 10980XC and its predecessor. We tested this for ourselves while we were trying to wrap our heads around the results from earlier, and... Yep. Higher, lightly threaded boost in the setup phase of this Blender render, then identical all-core boost through the rest of the test. Notice, by the way, how the 9980XC manages to catch up somewhat by the end of the test, despite its slower start. This seems to support our hardware mitigation handicap hypothesis. As for power consumption, we got this very bizarre reading and moderate core temperatures with our Corsair H159AIO water cooler, which suggests that the CPU would actually very much like to possess a higher base clock, but to hit their TDP targets, Intel didn't give it one. I mean, at least you might find a little bit of overclocking headroom on this thing, as long as you've got strong custom water cooling. To be clear, though, I've been really harsh today, but a lot of that was being mad about the chicken-sh** way that Intel handled this launch. I mean, this is not a bad product. It doesn't make your cat sick or randomly shout insults at burly men who pass you on the sidewalk or whatever. It's just clearly the result of far too much beating of far too many dead horses. This is the end of the line for X299. I mean, Zen 2-based mainstream chips are challenging Intel's best of the best, and Intel didn't even have the stones to go up against the Threadripper chips that are also launching today. So that should give you some idea how that's gonna go. And so with that in mind, the conclusion is this. 10th Gen isn't awful, but what it is is still very expensive and a dead-end platform with nowhere to go for upgrades. So it is clear that Intel needs to have a much more compelling response to Zen 3 when that launches, which will be in the first half of 2020, if AMD is to be believed. Now then, what are you guys waiting for? Hit subscribe and the bell icon so you don't miss the AMD side of this very exciting CPU launch today. And that's a hint, right? Cause I said it was an exciting CPU launch and this sure wasn't one. What is Audible? Oh, nothing. Just one of the largest collections of audiobooks on the planet. And audiobooks are great if you wanna listen to something while you're on the go, like if you're hiking, running, working out, or if you're not on the go and you're just laying on the couch doing absolutely nothing, it doesn't matter, you can still listen to an audiobook. Their Audible Originals collection features exclusive audio titles created by celebrated storytellers from worlds as diverse as theater, journalism, literature, and more. And check them out now because you can get three months of Audible for just 6.95 a month. Also, you get one audiobook and two Audible Originals, absolutely free. Give it a try at audible.com slash Linus or text Linus to 500 500. One book we suggest you check out is Computer Networking by Michael B. White. You might have heard about wireless access points, wireless networking, and wireless computing. It's a complete guide that highlights the benefits and challenges of wireless technology across various subjects. Check out audible.com slash Linus or text Linus to 500 500 to get it today. Don't miss out on that limited time offer. It's almost half the price at 6.95 per month. Remember guys, two plus one is three. Thanks for watching, subscribe. I think I kind of said that already. I'm done, I'm out. Why you do this to yourselves? It's like, it's not a terrible product. We could have talked about, you know, the pricing adjustments and the, you know, hey, at least they're finally reacting. But instead you go and make it all about how you're cowering in the corner with your tail between your legs. Shame on you. Okay, no, I'm done for real now.