Intel’s newest desktop central processing units (CPUs) have arrived, boasting improved performance and higher speeds, despite still using the company’s ageing 14nm architecture.
There’s a lot of questions around Intel’s new processors, first and foremost being whether these new CPUs can fend off AMD’s excellent 7nm Ryzen chips.
However, for the purposes of this overview, we chose to explore a different avenue of Intel’s new processors, in part because the ‘Intel vs. AMD’ debate has been tackled by several other outlets already and in part because at the moment, we don’t have the means to test out the Ryzen hardware. Instead, I chose to approach Intel’s new products from the perspective of someone who already runs Intel in their PC and might be considering an upgrade.
One thing that stood out to me about Intel’s new CPUs is that the company kept comparing them to previous generations of Intel CPUs. If you look back to the 10th Gen Core announcement post, Intel kept comparing performance against three-year-old PCs with Intel hardware. The argument was that people typically upgrade once every three to four years.
It makes sense, and also put me squarely in the target demographic with a four-year-old Intel PC that was in need of an upgrade. So when Intel sent over some of the new 10th Gen CPUs to test, I thought it’d be a great opportunity to see how a CPU upgrade would directly benefit me, everything else being equal. If you’re curious about how that went, check out the full story here.
This piece, on the other hand, will focus almost exclusively on the new CPUs and whether they’re worth an upgrade for the average gamer who also uses their PC for light video and photo editing.
What’s inside Intel’s 10th Gen Core CPUs
The first CPU I tested was the i5-10600K, which boasts six cores and 12 threads, a base frequency of 4.1GHz and a max turbo frequency of 4.8GHz.
To me, this seemed like almost the perfect direct upgrade path choice for what I was currently running, a 6th Gen Core i5-6500. The 6500 launched back in 2015 and I picked one up in 2016 when I built my PC, largely on the advice that an i5 would be “more than enough” for gaming. Spoiler: it was not. Interestingly, the 6500 also operates on the 14nm architecture.
The other CPU I tested was the Core i9-10900K, the flagship of Intel’s new products. The 10900K sports 10 cores and 20 threads, a 3.7GHz base frequency and a 5.3GHz max turbo frequency. Further, the i9 has a 5.3GHz Intel Thermal Velocity Boost (TVB) frequency. TVB can automatically increase clock frequency above the single-core and multi-core turbo boost based on how much the CPU is operating below max temperature and power budget.
Additionally, Intel’s Turbo Boost Max 3.0 technology automatically detects the best performing core on a processor and pushes it harder. However, when running in this mode, the i9’s max frequency becomes 5.2GHz.
Both 10th Gen CPUs run on the 14nm architecture and sport 125W TDPs.
Significant performance uplift
While those numbers are impressive, numbers are just numbers until you put them to the test. I ran my old i5-6500 through a gamut of benchmarks alongside the 10th Gen i5 and i9 to see just what those numbers can do.
Testing included four CPU benchmarks; Cinebench R20, two Blender tests (bmw27 and classroom) as well as running 7-Zip’s LZMA benchmark tool for five minutes. It measures the speed of compressing and decompressing in million instructions per second (MIPS).
Additionally, I ran a few GPU benchmarks to test what impact, if any, the new CPUs had on GPU performance. I also tested some games, both through built-in benchmarks and in actual gameplay, to see what benefits the 10th Gen i5 and i9 brought to the table.
The test bench used for the benchmarks included 16GB of DDR4 RAM, an AMD Radeon 5600 XT GPU and a 128GB SSD to boot Windows 10 and the benchmarks. It’s worth noting that some of the game tests ran off hard drives instead of SSDs, but that shouldn’t significantly impact the performance metrics I measured. Additionally, due to a change in socket type, the i5-6500 uses a different motherboard than the 10th Gen CPUs. Again, it shouldn’t significantly impact performance scores, but since anyone making the leap to a 10th Gen will have to upgrade their motherboard, any performance benefit will count in the CPUs’ favour.
Unsurprisingly, the CPU benchmarks showed a massive gain in performance. In Cinebench, the 10600K more than doubled the score of the ageing 6500. While the 10900K did beat out the 10600K by a large margin, it didn’t quite double the 10th Gen i5’s score.
As for Blender, once again the new CPUs benched much better. The 6500 took forever to complete both benchmarks, sitting at almost 11-minutes to complete the bmw27 test and over 35-minutes to do classroom.
However, the 10600K and 10900K completed bmw27 in about three minutes and 45 seconds and two minutes and 18 seconds respectively.
The classroom test also saw impressive results from the 10th Gen i5, which completed it in just over 12-minutes while the i9 finished in almost seven and a half minutes.
Finally, the 7-Zip benchmark revealed an interesting twist with the performance. The MIPS rating for compression fell in each test, with the Core i9 scoring lowest at 4652 MIPS, almost a thousand below the 6500. Based on the 7-Zip benchmark page, this discrepancy likely has to do with RAM latency, which can significantly impact compression testing.
Decompression, on the other hand, isn’t impacted by RAM as much. It better measures the advantages of things like CPU architecture and hyper-threading. The test results showed huge gains in MIPS from 21,029 on the 6500 to 87,989 on the 10900K.
Diminishing returns
However, synthetic benchmarks are only part of the story. In a real-world use environment, I found that the 10600K felt like a marked improvement over the 6500. However, the i9 didn’t feel significantly faster than the 10th Gen i5 despite clearly benching better.
Whether I was browsing the web, editing photos or doing other day-to-day tasks, my desktop felt significantly snappier on 10th Gen Intel hardware. Moving large files around, such as pulling RAW photos off my camera, or saving images in Photoshop felt instant whereas the 6500 seemed sluggish by comparison.
Ultimately, the 10900K didn’t feel like a significant step up over the 10600K in typical use. However, I’d also argue that my typical use likely doesn’t significantly stretch the i9’s legs. If you find yourself picking between the two, strongly consider what you’ll be doing with your computer. The jump from the $399 10600K to the $749 10900K likely won’t be worth the cost if your use case doesn’t take full advantage of the CPU.
If you’re a gamer, however, your consideration may change.
Depending on what you play, your CPU could make a huge difference
Let’s kick things off with a look at some synthetic GPU benchmarks. Unsurprisingly, the CPUs didn’t significantly impact the outcome of tests designed to stress the GPU.
First up, I ran FurMark verison 1.21.1.0 with the 1080p preset, which saw scores over 6400 points on all three CPUs, with a slight gain of less than two frames per second (fps) between the older 6th Gen and the newer 10th Gen CPUs, which both registered 108fps averages. Interestingly, the 10900K scored six points lower on average than the 10600K, but I don’t think that’s indicative of a difference in performance between the two. If anything, it could be due to the i9’s lower base clock.
Similarly, the Heaven benchmark on the Extreme preset saw a score jump from 2684 on the 6500 to 2754 on the 10600K. It jumped again to 2767.67 on the 10900K. Framerates also slightly increased from the 6500 to 10600K but didn’t see a significant improvement to the 10900K.
In the first round of game tests, we used each game’s built-in benchmarking tool. Plus, every game tested ran at the highest settings preset. Interestingly, both Total War: Warhammer and Ghost Recon: Wildlands saw the biggest jump going from the 6500 to the 10600K, an improvement of about 10-15fps. Rise of the Tomb Raider on the other hand maintained consistent averages despite the CPU.
In all three tests, the 10900K saw about a one-frame difference in average performance. The biggest factor here would be the CPU usage, which was consistently lower on the 10th Gen processors than the 6500. In other words, we were bumping up against the upper limits of the 5600 XT, but the good news here is that both 10th Gen CPUs — especially the 10900K — should have lots of headroom for future gaming.
The Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers benchmark assigned a score based on performance instead of providing the average fps like the others. While ultimately less informative by comparison, it does indicate that the 10900K can provide some significant performance increase in some titles.
However, the actual gameplay tests I ran were the most telling. In both Battlefield V and Call of Duty: Warzone, the 10900K made a significant difference in gameplay. The caveat here is that unlike the other games with a preset, repeatable benchmark, neither BFV or Warzone offered that. Instead, I recorded the average framerate I got over a few sessions of a given game mode. The downside to this is it could mean variance in results from things like, for example, an easier to render map or a smaller player count. Still, I think the results are telling for both.
BFV saw about a 15fps increase from the 6500 to the 10600K and another 7fps to the 10900K. The most interesting factor here is that the 6500 saw about 90+ percent CPU usage throughout the session while the 10600K hovered around 60-70 percent usage. The 10900K was by far the lowest usage at around 40 percent.
While I wasn’t able to monitor CPU usage data in Warzone, the game also saw significant benefits from upgraded processors, with about a 15fps jump in fps between each CPU.
Both of these games have very high player counts, with BFV offering up to 64 gamers in a match while Warzone can have up to 150. That increases load on the CPU significantly (for example, past tests I’ve done in BFV with the older hardware saw much higher fps in single-player modes than multiplayer with the only real difference being number of players).
Consider your options
Ultimately, I think there are a few takeaways from the above results. On the one hand, making the switch from an older CPU to a newer one can bring some significant benefits both for productivity and gaming. However, temper your expectations — a new CPU won’t have nearly the same impact as, for example, a new GPU [link to companion 5600 XT story].
Further, the impact a new CPU has is heavily dependent on the game and other factors like the hardware it’s paired with. Your mileage in games may vary if you’re running more powerful graphics hardware, playing more CPU intensive games or if you’re trying to achieve higher resolutions than 1080p. I opted to test at 1080p since that’s what the majority of gamers still choose to play at.
If 1080p is your goal, the 10600K will likely be more than enough CPU for you, plus it will have some overclocking room if you’re into that. However, depending on how future games take advantage of things like higher CPU speeds and increased core counts, the 10600K may struggle in the future.
The 10900K is certainly a more futureproof option but at $749 is an expensive one. If you do streaming, video editing or any other tasks along with gaming, the extra cost may be well worth it the benefits it’ll bring in those areas. And while I didn’t get to test it, the Core i7-10700K could serve as an excellent middle ground between the two options at $579.
Performance at what cost
Aside from the upfront price, there are other costs to consider with Intel’s 10th Gen products. Although the company integrated a new thermal solution that helps with temperatures, I still found the CPUs ran a bit on the hot side.
The 10600K fared much better and stuck to around 50 degrees Celsius even in the more intense benchmarks. The 10900K pushed up to 70 degrees, the hottest I’ve ever seen in my own testing, but far from the hottest out there (my old GPU regularly hung out at 80 degrees). The 10900K is also a power-hungry chip with a peak power draw over 300 watts.
Ultimately, before you make any decision regarding a 10th Gen Intel CPU, make sure you compare against AMD’s Ryzen offerings as well. In many cases, Ryzen offers comparable or better performance for less. A Ryzen 9 3900X is currently on sale for $649 with 12 cores, 24 threads.
While the 3900X’s max boost isn’t as high at 4.2GHz, it draws less power and the extra cores help with performance in productivity workloads. In gaming, Intel will likely continue to lead the way.
Intel’s newest CPUs are good, but the company seems to have milked 14nm for all it’s worth now. It remains to be seen if Intel can push past the architecture next year, or if it will find a new way to squeeze 14nm.
The federal government is ordering the dissolution of TikTok’s Canadian business after a national security review of the Chinese company behind the social media platform, but stopped short of ordering people to stay off the app.
Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne announced the government’s “wind up” demand Wednesday, saying it is meant to address “risks” related to ByteDance Ltd.’s establishment of TikTok Technology Canada Inc.
“The decision was based on the information and evidence collected over the course of the review and on the advice of Canada’s security and intelligence community and other government partners,” he said in a statement.
The announcement added that the government is not blocking Canadians’ access to the TikTok application or their ability to create content.
However, it urged people to “adopt good cybersecurity practices and assess the possible risks of using social media platforms and applications, including how their information is likely to be protected, managed, used and shared by foreign actors, as well as to be aware of which country’s laws apply.”
Champagne’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment seeking details about what evidence led to the government’s dissolution demand, how long ByteDance has to comply and why the app is not being banned.
A TikTok spokesperson said in a statement that the shutdown of its Canadian offices will mean the loss of hundreds of well-paying local jobs.
“We will challenge this order in court,” the spokesperson said.
“The TikTok platform will remain available for creators to find an audience, explore new interests and for businesses to thrive.”
The federal Liberals ordered a national security review of TikTok in September 2023, but it was not public knowledge until The Canadian Press reported in March that it was investigating the company.
At the time, it said the review was based on the expansion of a business, which it said constituted the establishment of a new Canadian entity. It declined to provide any further details about what expansion it was reviewing.
A government database showed a notification of new business from TikTok in June 2023. It said Network Sense Ventures Ltd. in Toronto and Vancouver would engage in “marketing, advertising, and content/creator development activities in relation to the use of the TikTok app in Canada.”
Even before the review, ByteDance and TikTok were lightning rod for privacy and safety concerns because Chinese national security laws compel organizations in the country to assist with intelligence gathering.
Such concerns led the U.S. House of Representatives to pass a bill in March designed to ban TikTok unless its China-based owner sells its stake in the business.
Champagne’s office has maintained Canada’s review was not related to the U.S. bill, which has yet to pass.
Canada’s review was carried out through the Investment Canada Act, which allows the government to investigate any foreign investment with potential to might harm national security.
While cabinet can make investors sell parts of the business or shares, Champagne has said the act doesn’t allow him to disclose details of the review.
Wednesday’s dissolution order was made in accordance with the act.
The federal government banned TikTok from its mobile devices in February 2023 following the launch of an investigation into the company by federal and provincial privacy commissioners.
— With files from Anja Karadeglija in Ottawa
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 6, 2024.
LONDON (AP) — Most people have accumulated a pile of data — selfies, emails, videos and more — on their social media and digital accounts over their lifetimes. What happens to it when we die?
It’s wise to draft a will spelling out who inherits your physical assets after you’re gone, but don’t forget to take care of your digital estate too. Friends and family might treasure files and posts you’ve left behind, but they could get lost in digital purgatory after you pass away unless you take some simple steps.
Here’s how you can prepare your digital life for your survivors:
Apple
The iPhone maker lets you nominate a “ legacy contact ” who can access your Apple account’s data after you die. The company says it’s a secure way to give trusted people access to photos, files and messages. To set it up you’ll need an Apple device with a fairly recent operating system — iPhones and iPads need iOS or iPadOS 15.2 and MacBooks needs macOS Monterey 12.1.
For iPhones, go to settings, tap Sign-in & Security and then Legacy Contact. You can name one or more people, and they don’t need an Apple ID or device.
You’ll have to share an access key with your contact. It can be a digital version sent electronically, or you can print a copy or save it as a screenshot or PDF.
Take note that there are some types of files you won’t be able to pass on — including digital rights-protected music, movies and passwords stored in Apple’s password manager. Legacy contacts can only access a deceased user’s account for three years before Apple deletes the account.
Google
Google takes a different approach with its Inactive Account Manager, which allows you to share your data with someone if it notices that you’ve stopped using your account.
When setting it up, you need to decide how long Google should wait — from three to 18 months — before considering your account inactive. Once that time is up, Google can notify up to 10 people.
You can write a message informing them you’ve stopped using the account, and, optionally, include a link to download your data. You can choose what types of data they can access — including emails, photos, calendar entries and YouTube videos.
There’s also an option to automatically delete your account after three months of inactivity, so your contacts will have to download any data before that deadline.
Facebook and Instagram
Some social media platforms can preserve accounts for people who have died so that friends and family can honor their memories.
When users of Facebook or Instagram die, parent company Meta says it can memorialize the account if it gets a “valid request” from a friend or family member. Requests can be submitted through an online form.
The social media company strongly recommends Facebook users add a legacy contact to look after their memorial accounts. Legacy contacts can do things like respond to new friend requests and update pinned posts, but they can’t read private messages or remove or alter previous posts. You can only choose one person, who also has to have a Facebook account.
You can also ask Facebook or Instagram to delete a deceased user’s account if you’re a close family member or an executor. You’ll need to send in documents like a death certificate.
TikTok
The video-sharing platform says that if a user has died, people can submit a request to memorialize the account through the settings menu. Go to the Report a Problem section, then Account and profile, then Manage account, where you can report a deceased user.
Once an account has been memorialized, it will be labeled “Remembering.” No one will be able to log into the account, which prevents anyone from editing the profile or using the account to post new content or send messages.
X
It’s not possible to nominate a legacy contact on Elon Musk’s social media site. But family members or an authorized person can submit a request to deactivate a deceased user’s account.
Passwords
Besides the major online services, you’ll probably have dozens if not hundreds of other digital accounts that your survivors might need to access. You could just write all your login credentials down in a notebook and put it somewhere safe. But making a physical copy presents its own vulnerabilities. What if you lose track of it? What if someone finds it?
Instead, consider a password manager that has an emergency access feature. Password managers are digital vaults that you can use to store all your credentials. Some, like Keeper,Bitwarden and NordPass, allow users to nominate one or more trusted contacts who can access their keys in case of an emergency such as a death.
But there are a few catches: Those contacts also need to use the same password manager and you might have to pay for the service.
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Is there a tech challenge you need help figuring out? Write to us at onetechtip@ap.org with your questions.
LONDON (AP) — Britain’s competition watchdog said Thursday it’s opening a formal investigation into Google’s partnership with artificial intelligence startup Anthropic.
The Competition and Markets Authority said it has “sufficient information” to launch an initial probe after it sought input earlier this year on whether the deal would stifle competition.
The CMA has until Dec. 19 to decide whether to approve the deal or escalate its investigation.
“Google is committed to building the most open and innovative AI ecosystem in the world,” the company said. “Anthropic is free to use multiple cloud providers and does, and we don’t demand exclusive tech rights.”
San Francisco-based Anthropic was founded in 2021 by siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, who previously worked at ChatGPT maker OpenAI. The company has focused on increasing the safety and reliability of AI models. Google reportedly agreed last year to make a multibillion-dollar investment in Anthropic, which has a popular chatbot named Claude.
Anthropic said it’s cooperating with the regulator and will provide “the complete picture about Google’s investment and our commercial collaboration.”
“We are an independent company and none of our strategic partnerships or investor relationships diminish the independence of our corporate governance or our freedom to partner with others,” it said in a statement.
The U.K. regulator has been scrutinizing a raft of AI deals as investment money floods into the industry to capitalize on the artificial intelligence boom. Last month it cleared Anthropic’s $4 billion deal with Amazon and it has also signed off on Microsoft’s deals with two other AI startups, Inflection and Mistral.
