Intel Core i9-10850K Review: The Real Intel Flagship

[harlan4096]

When a company like Intel creates a CPU design, the process of manufacturing brings about variation on the quality of the product. Some cores will only reach a certain frequency, while others have surprisingly good voltage characteristics. Two goals of processor design are minimizing this variance, but also shifting the peak higher, all while controlling how much of the silicon is actually useable. This is part of the magic of ‘binning’, the process of filtering the silicon into different ‘bins’ for applicability to a given product. It is through this process that the Core i9-10850K exists, albeit reluctantly.

Intel’s Core i9-10850K: Doing The Heavy Lifting

The Core i9-10850K is the entry member to Intel’s Core i9 lineup, with 10 unlocked cores and hyperthreading, and can turbo up to 5.2 GHz under Thermal Velocity Boost. The added bonus is that it's more widely available in the market than the Core i9-10900K.

As with the other 10[sup]th[/sup] Gen Intel Core i9 processors, this one supports two channels of DDR4-2933, uses the LGA1200 socket on Intel 400-series motherboards, and has sixteen lanes of PCIe 3.0 for add-in hardware. Intel likes to point out it has another 24 PCIe 3.0 lanes through the chipset, however this is limited by the DMI/PCIe 3.0 x4 uplink to the processor.

With the Core i9-10850K, users are essentially getting the Core i9-10900K top tier model, but at 100 MHz lower across the board. The peak turbo is 5.2 GHz rather than 5.3 GHz, the base frequency is 3.6 GHz rather than 3.7 GHz, and both processors are set at a 125 W TDP. Saving 100 MHz also saves $35 from the bulk pricing of the processor, but because of the lack of availability in the 10900K, we’ve seen the difference between the two vary from $50 to $200 in recent months. This all feeds into the main story of what is going on here.

Despite being part of Intel 10[sup]th[/sup] Generation Core family, the Core i9-10850K was released after the launch of the more public and vocal members, such as the 10900K or 10700K. The email about the 10850K dropped in our inbox on July 27[sup]th[/sup], two months after the official launch of the rest of the family, and while Intel didn’t have samples ready for that launch today (to be honest, it took us by surprise), requests were lodged and our arrived a few weeks later.

While not completely surreptitious, Intel pushed this processor onto the market without so much fanfare.

The Secret Art of Binning

Binning is a fancy word for quality management and filtering – when the silicon is manufactured, some of it is better quality than others, and by testing the quality each product can be filtered into where it is best suited, filtered into ‘bins’. The nature of binning is not new in the industry by any stretch of the imagination, as depending on the manufacturing process quality can vary wildly, and binning enables a semiconductor company to make the most out of the fixed price wafer costs. If a given wafer provides 50 processors, only 10 meet the ideal quality level but another 35 meet a lower quality level, then the yield is 45 out of 50, rather than just 10, enabling less waste and arguably better value for the end customer. Normally when a company talks about yield, they are talking about this 45 out of 50 number.

The main element to how this binning manifests is in two forms of variability: the variability in the process and the variability in the design. Manufacturing is vastly complex, however the methods and order of tasks in the lithography process, as well as the speed of production, can affect this variability (it comes down to a lot of R&D). Design variability is somewhat different, as it requires engineers to build mechanisms into a processor design to minimize quality variability, and this might come at the expense of power or die area.

For a unique company like Intel, technically they can manipulate both of these sources of variability, but for others who rely on foundry manufacturing, it’s a one sided affair and the companies that pay the most to TSMC (like Apple) get key details on the other side of the equation.

The end goal is to minimize variability (make each processor off the line reach the same target), but also to move that variability peak nearer a more desirable goal, such as performance, or power. The whole process is a conveyor belt of 10000 levers and switches, where each one can affect the performance of a dozen others, and so finding the best configuration in a sea of options can be very difficult.

Simple pass/fail metrics are often graphed in a shmoo plot, like the one above. Beyond a pass/fail metric, companies like Intel have to also determine what percentage of the processors on a given wafer or batch meet those requirements. Because a graph of variability in the quality of silicon can be so varied, where the processor company defines its product binning targets is very important. A company like Intel needs to decide how many processors of each type it will need, what its customers will need, how that will change over time, and what it can do to maximize sales $ per square millimeter of silicon. In a situation where customers might want a cheaper product, Intel could take higher quality silicon and label it as a lower quality product, so it doesn’t sit on a lot of unsold processors. But contrary, if customers are demanding a higher quality product that manufacturing can’t deliver, then it can become an issue. It also matters when it comes to marketing as well.

A semiconductor company like Intel can do themselves a favor by choosing binning targets and metrics that are not as aggressive. But it’s really the high-end halo products that matter when it comes to promoting the best of the best. Intel has a history of very aggressive binning, to the point where its quality requirements for the top product are so strict that only a handful of processors will ever meet that level for every million produced.

Over the past two decades Intel has made super not-so-secret ‘Everest’ or ‘BlackOps’ processor models. These are technically off-roadmap processors not for general sale, because of the very strict quality requirements. These units are selected because of the super-high frequency possible, usually at a completely disregard for power or cooling requirements. One of the first good examples of this was the special-order-only dual core Xeon X5698 rated for 4.4 GHz in Q1 2011, based on Intel’s 32nm Westmere platform, and was built solely for high-frequency stock market traders who needed the lowest latency whatever the cost. The concept of a microsecond for these traders can be millions of dollars, so throwing $20k+ each for the fastest processor available is chump change (that includes OEM markup). These were 1000 MHz faster than any of Intel’s regularly binned processors for the open market.

Sandy Bridge also had an Everest model, whereas for Ivy Bridge it was known as BlackOps, offering 6 cores at 4.6 GHz all-core and a massive 250 W TDP.

These were again destined for Wall Street, but came with no product identifier, and as far as we can tell, no warranty except for dead-on-arrival (DOA). These were such at the edge of Intel’s manufacturing capabilities that if you wanted one, you had to accept that it might not work beyond a couple of months. Again, for these traders, we’re talking fractions of a percent of cost, so that was almost of zero concern.

The only reason we know about these is because over time some have filtered into the hands of enthusiasts and collectors. More recently, Intel’s latest high-frequency trading processor was a bit of a doozy. We overheard (and confirmed) at an event that Intel was planning to launch an auction-only OEM-only high-performance processor where it couldn’t guarantee stock nor would it offer any warranty.
...

Continue Reading