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That's an issue yes, but it's not the main reason why Intel isn't offering more cores for decent prices, otherwise we would've never even moved to two cores or

by mtgx 10y ago

That's an issue yes, but it's not the main reason why Intel isn't offering more cores for decent prices, otherwise we would've never even moved to two cores or four cores. The main reason is Intel doesn't feel like it needs to because AMD doesn't offer much competition with its current architecture, even with twice as many cores. But that will change when Zen chips arrive. http://www.extremetech.com/computing/233453-amd-zen-benchmarks-leak-point-to-potent-performance-against-intel-huge-gains-over-piledriver http://www.extremetech.com/computing/233453-amd-zen-benchmar... So wait until AMD launches Zen-based chips with twice as many cores and competitive single-thread performance, for only slightly higher price. Then you'll see Intel suddenly being interested in increasing the number of cores for decent prices. Intel does offer more cores right now, too. They've just launched a 10-core chip this year for consumers, but because they think they have no competition, they sell it for ridiculous amounts like $1,700. https://www.engadget.com/2016/05/31/intel-debuts-its-first-1.. https://www.engadget.com/2016/05/31/intel-debuts-its-first-1.... No sane person should ever pay that much for it. Not when AMD is going to offer 8-10 core chips for less than half that price soon, with similar performance.

dogma1138 10y ago
>Not when AMD is going to offer 8-10 core chips for less than half that price soon, with similar performance. This has been touted every year since the initial Athlon 64 came out and knocked intel's teeth out until it came back with the pentium pro based Yona and Nehalem chips and buried netburst. It's still yet to be determined of Zen has anywhere near the SCP IPC that Skylake/Haswell based CPU's do so far there was only one leaked benchmark of a game in which it scored anywhere from pretty low to close to what a Haswell-E CPU brings to the table. The pricing on Zen, especially big Zen which was the only CPU that was close to Intel's Haswell-E lineup is also unlikely to be a <200-250$ card, it's likely to cost just under what the 6800K costs which might not make it very competitive. Also it's yet to be seen what chipset we are getting, atm you shouldn't buy AMD not because the CPU's are utter garbage, but the chipset is utter trash. No PCIE 3.0 support, no USB 3.0/3.1, no NVME, no M.2 no many other things. Intel's chipsets are and always were the golden standard (ever since NVIDIA stopped making Nforce 2:)) and AMD really needs to not only be competitive but to match them or beat them as far as peripherals go. AMD is in a disadvantage out of the bat for no Thunderbolt support but it needs to come strong with low latency PCIE, a lot of PCIE interconnects, 10 gig USB 3.1 and native displayport and many other things. If that will be a standard and the performance are at least in the 90th percentile compared to Intel AMD stands a chance, anything below that people again would not even bother.
- valarauca1 10y ago
  Also it's yet to be seen what chipset we are getting, atm you shouldn't buy AMD not because the CPU's are utter garbage, but the chipset is utter trash. Zen is going to have an integrated memory controller/PCIe root complex on dye. So this should help with IO concerns (no north bridge). Ofc this is gen 1 tech so who knows it could be crippled for certain tasks.
  - dogma1138 10y ago
    Intel does the same, there is still a "north/south bridge" (AMD had on die memory controller since the Athlon 64 days IIRC) which adds "additional" (via a bridge, you aren't getting additional bandwidth unless you are using QPI with multiple CPU's) PCIE lanes and centralizes I/O in Intel's case it's the PCH. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_Controller_Hub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_Controller_Hub AMD will have something similar even if the CPU will control most of the PCIE lanes in the system (usually GPU + high speed storage is over the CPU, the rest of the IO is over the PCH).
- onli 10y ago
  There was a launch of some more modern AM3+ boards. Like https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/970-PRO-GAMING-AURA/specifications/ https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/970-PRO-GAMING-AURA/specif..., those boards support USB 3.1 Gen2, they bring M.2 slots and NVMe (on PCI-E 2.0 of course).
  - dogma1138 10y ago
    Those aren't supported natively via the chipset, these are implemented using extensions which result in poorer performance and eating quite a bit of the PCIE bandwidth available. The lack of USB 3.1 support is also the problem I have with Haswell-E, I have an X99 motherboard for my Broadwell-E setup and USB 3.1/TB is only available via the ASUS extension card which eats up 4 PCIE lanes and doesn't perform nearly as well as the "native" Skylake Z170 series chipsets. As PCIE3.0 is not supported on AM3+ motherboards because this requires native CPU/Chipset support so you are overloading a potentially already contested PCIE (especially if you are running multiple GPU's) bus which has overall less bandwidth to offer which can yield even worse performance than what is available on X99 chipsets currently which lack some of the same features but at least support PCIE3.0.

by mtgx 10y ago

dogma1138 10y ago

>Not when AMD is going to offer 8-10 core chips for less than half that price soon, with similar performance. This has been touted every year since the initial Athlon 64 came out and knocked intel's teeth out until it came back with the pentium pro based Yona and Nehalem chips and buried netburst. It's still yet to be determined of Zen has anywhere near the SCP IPC that Skylake/Haswell based CPU's do so far there was only one leaked benchmark of a game in which it scored anywhere from pretty low to close to what a Haswell-E CPU brings to the table. The pricing on Zen, especially big Zen which was the only CPU that was close to Intel's Haswell-E lineup is also unlikely to be a <200-250$ card, it's likely to cost just under what the 6800K costs which might not make it very competitive. Also it's yet to be seen what chipset we are getting, atm you shouldn't buy AMD not because the CPU's are utter garbage, but the chipset is utter trash. No PCIE 3.0 support, no USB 3.0/3.1, no NVME, no M.2 no many other things. Intel's chipsets are and always were the golden standard (ever since NVIDIA stopped making Nforce 2:)) and AMD really needs to not only be competitive but to match them or beat them as far as peripherals go. AMD is in a disadvantage out of the bat for no Thunderbolt support but it needs to come strong with low latency PCIE, a lot of PCIE interconnects, 10 gig USB 3.1 and native displayport and many other things. If that will be a standard and the performance are at least in the 90th percentile compared to Intel AMD stands a chance, anything below that people again would not even bother.

valarauca1 10y ago
Also it's yet to be seen what chipset we are getting, atm you shouldn't buy AMD not because the CPU's are utter garbage, but the chipset is utter trash. Zen is going to have an integrated memory controller/PCIe root complex on dye. So this should help with IO concerns (no north bridge). Ofc this is gen 1 tech so who knows it could be crippled for certain tasks.
- dogma1138 10y ago
  Intel does the same, there is still a "north/south bridge" (AMD had on die memory controller since the Athlon 64 days IIRC) which adds "additional" (via a bridge, you aren't getting additional bandwidth unless you are using QPI with multiple CPU's) PCIE lanes and centralizes I/O in Intel's case it's the PCH. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_Controller_Hub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_Controller_Hub AMD will have something similar even if the CPU will control most of the PCIE lanes in the system (usually GPU + high speed storage is over the CPU, the rest of the IO is over the PCH).
onli 10y ago
There was a launch of some more modern AM3+ boards. Like https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/970-PRO-GAMING-AURA/specifications/ https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/970-PRO-GAMING-AURA/specif..., those boards support USB 3.1 Gen2, they bring M.2 slots and NVMe (on PCI-E 2.0 of course).
- dogma1138 10y ago
  Those aren't supported natively via the chipset, these are implemented using extensions which result in poorer performance and eating quite a bit of the PCIE bandwidth available. The lack of USB 3.1 support is also the problem I have with Haswell-E, I have an X99 motherboard for my Broadwell-E setup and USB 3.1/TB is only available via the ASUS extension card which eats up 4 PCIE lanes and doesn't perform nearly as well as the "native" Skylake Z170 series chipsets. As PCIE3.0 is not supported on AM3+ motherboards because this requires native CPU/Chipset support so you are overloading a potentially already contested PCIE (especially if you are running multiple GPU's) bus which has overall less bandwidth to offer which can yield even worse performance than what is available on X99 chipsets currently which lack some of the same features but at least support PCIE3.0.