Could someone please sum up the main results? I don't really want to watch a youtube video on this...
2.9 i9 versus the 2.6 i7 - both cloned to have the exact copy contents in drive. i9 has 4TB and the i7 has 2TB.
"CINEBENCH After 4 consecutive runs, Cinebench clocked in with 990 on the i9 and 942 on the i7, with matching CPU temps and fan noise levels. In the OpenGL test the i9 clocked in 5-6 frames higher than the i7 in both runs.
CODING For my Xcode project on the first clean and compile the i9 clocked in 3% faster coming in at 16.1 seconds and the i7 at 16.6, and on the second rebuild, the i9 came in 6% faster with 12.9 seconds and the i7 at 13.7 seconds. Taking a look at compiling larger codebases, the i9 performed 4% faster at compiling ffmpeg from source, clocking in at 273 seconds, with the i7 clocking 284 seconds. The iOS simulator, well that took only 0.1 seconds longer to launch on the i7 compared to the i9 and using it caused similar heat and fan levels.
FINAL CUT PRO Stabilising a 5 minute clip was 6% faster, with the i9 clocking in at 6 minutes and 22 (382) seconds, and the i7 taking 6 minutes and 45 (405) seconds. Exporting the effects heavy BruceX project was only 2 seconds slower on the i7. So to better test the difference, I duplicated BruceX 10 times and exported that, which took the i9 7 minutes and 37 (457) seconds, and the i7 7 minutes 46 (466) seconds which was still only just a 2% difference. For the actual export, exporting a short clip at 1080p best quality, the i7 came in 2 seconds behind the i9. These differences compounded when exporting a longer multicam 10 minute clip. With the i9 taking 26 minutes on the dot and the i7 taking an extra 65 seconds to complete giving the i9 a 4% edge in Final Cut Pro exports.
ENCODING For vanilla CPU encoding a 4k DJI drone clip, the i9 took 20 minutes and 15 (1220) seconds to encode 4 minutes of footage, and the i7 took 20 minutes and 48 (1248) seconds, giving the i9 a 2% lead. Interestingly though and we'll be looking into this in detail in the battery life section, the i9 was using slightly less power draw to get the faster speeds compared to the i7. On the i9 after a power limit throttle, the i9 drops lower than the i7 does.
MINING Crypto was an easy win for the i9, with 3MBs more L3 cache, it was able to hit 3GHz mining around 200 Hashes a second, with the i7 hitting 2.4GHz mining 120Hashs a second. So if you're doing heavy number operations, this is what you want an i9 for as here it's getting a 66% boost.
WEB The world wide web is a perfect place for single and dual core operations, with websites primarily coded in Javascript which is predominately single-threaded. So I figured the i9 might edge loading websites here, but after loading a few sites, the main bottleneck was clearly bandwidth.
BATTERY LIFE Alright, this is an interesting one, I ran a comprehensive set of tasks ranging from compiling and running an Xcode iOS app, to playing YouTube to Final Cut Pro playback and export. In the end the i7 drained 1830 milliAmps, and the i9 drained 1603 milliAmps after half an hours usage. Which is a delta of 227 milliAmps, or 14%. With this load of I'd say heavy professional usage compiling code and video editing on a linear scale, the i7 would last 2 hours and the i9 would get you an extra 18 minutes. Looking at the reason why, just take a look at the power management of the units. Even during simple YouTube playbacks you can see that the i7 has more aggressive peaks than the i9. This trend continued on every task that requires the unit to get into Turbo. As Turbo requires a lot more power than regular base clock speeds, the i7 would eat into the battery for slightly longer, compounding those small percentage performance decrements into worse battery performance.
WINDOWS Just a note on gaming, I didn't notice any difference between them as all the games I tried were GPU bound, maybe if you have a beefier eGPU the difference between the i9 and i7 would come into play, but using stock graphics it didn't. Ok, so what's interesting is, when I clocked both units using Intel XTU to use only 30W, the i9 was clocking in 0.1GHz faster than the i7. Ok it's not much of a difference, but it suggests why the i7 demands ever so slightly more energy as it scales up to Turbo boosting." - quoted from Vtudio video description.
For the second video, Prime95 CPU torture tests and the i9 wins again.
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- Intel Power Gadget shows that the 2.6 i7 boosts to a higher speed and could sometimes maintain a higher speed than the i9 but in all tests, the i9 finished the task faster (or almost same time in a few of them). Could be because Intel Power Gadget doesn’t actually average the speed reported by all cores, it just shows the fastest core.
- Intel Power Gadget shows that the 2.6 i7 pulls more power so the i9 actually used a little less battery life
- In shorter tasks the i9 run cooler than the i7. In long tasks they both average at the same temperature
And these are the interesting points found in the video.
