What Happened to High End Desktop (HEDT) Processors?

For several years, both AMD and Intel have offered five general categories of CPUs: Mobile, Consumer Desktop, High-End Desktop, Server, and Workstation. Something strange has been happening to the middle segment, though: HEDT processors are disappearing!

State of the CPU

Earlier this year I wrote about AMD’s comeback, as their processors were being included in more than half of the workstations we sold. It has been a few months now, marked by a lot of hardware shortages in this industry, so I wanted to revisit the situation and look at some additional metrics regarding CPU sales here at Puget Systems.

AMD – Return of the King?

Back in 2015, we quietly dropped AMD processor options from our workstations. At the time, I wrote a post explaining what had happened, and ended it with a hope that AMD would come back someday with a more competitive CPU. That did, in fact, happen – and over the last couple of years we have seen them surge back into our product line with a vengeance!

New CPU Announcement: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X

AMD has launched the top-end model in their 3rd gen Ryzen processor family, a 16-core processor named Ryzen 9 3950X! We’ve tested it across a wide range of real-world applications, and are very excited about being able to offer this CPU in our workstations after AMD releases it for sale November 25th, 2019.

Intels Core Xperiment i9 9990XE

Intel launched a new processor in their Core X series recently, and it is novel in many ways. It combines a fairly high core count with very high clock speeds, at the cost of power consumption and high heat output. It also is very limited in availability, being offered only to select system integrators via a private auction. We got our hands on one in the first auction, and have been putting it through several rounds of benchmarking to see if it is worth the price and hassle, as well as to determine if we will be offering it in our workstations.

How to Use Cinebench to Predict Cinema 4D Performance

Here at Puget Systems, it is our goal to perform realistic testing on the software packages we tailor our workstations toward. Sometimes this is easy, sometimes it is harder… and sometimes a software maker already provides their own benchmark tool. That is the case with Maxon, makers of Cinema 4D, as well as the free benchmark, took Cinebench. To determine whether we should use it, though, we have to ask some questions. Is Cinebench really a good benchmark for Cinema 4D? How do the tests it runs relate to real-world performance?