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AMD Takes 10.4% CPU Share from Intel in Q2 2017

120 points by vanburen 9y ago

faragon 9y ago
AMD strategy is very ambitious: attack on desktop, workstation, and server. Can't wait for buying a Ryzen Threadripper (workstation CPU) with up to 16 cores (32 threads), DDR4 quad-channel, and huge L3 cache.
- NonEUCitizen 9y ago
  AMD is aiming for laptops as well: https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/5/18/15657480/amd-ryzen-processors-laptops-apu-intel-chips-cores https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/5/18/15657480/a...
taspeotis 9y ago
> It's important to note that because PassMark's market share data is based on benchmark submissions it counts actual systems in use, rather than systems sold. So AMD's market share would be overstated? I don't think a lot of machines get PassMark run on them, most would be enthusiasts or review sites benchmarking them. Ryzen has recently gotten a lot of attention. Compare that to the relative snoozefest that is/was Kaby Lake. Dell, HP etc. machines sold for home/business use would outnumber enthusiast builds ... ten-to-one? Steam's Hardware Survey [1] would be one to keep an eye on, although it hasn't been updated for June and would probably favour Intel because of Steam's audience: gaming benchmarks show Ryzen is competitive but in terms of highest performance for gaming Intel has the upper hand. [1] http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
- sandworm101 9y ago
  Things may change at steam. ATM many/most top games are not optimized for multiple cores, particularly the indi titles. That could change. A few updates to unity and other tools could see Ryzen become a gaming powerhouse. I'll be in the market for a new gaming PC in a couple months. I want to go with AMD-Ryzen. I like the concept.
  - mehwoot 9y ago
    ATM many/most top games are not optimized for multiple cores That's not a simple thing to fix. Even in platforms like unity.
  - desdiv 9y ago
    High-end Intel chips are 8 logical cores; high-end Ryzen chips are 16 to 32 logical cores. When games becomes optimized for multiple cores, both sides win. It's only when games are optimized for more than 8 logical cores that AMD will start having an advantage, and AFAIK no game engine has ever been optimized towards such a niche market (between 8 and 32 logical cores). There will always be mid-tier desktop systems and laptops with less than 8 logical cores that could be your potential customers.
    - sliken 9y ago
      Not sure what universe you live in. But for 99% of the world the "high end" is an i7-7700k with 4 cores/8 threads. Systems with nice parts designed for gaming are in the $1000-$2000 range ($350 for cpu, $150 for motherboard, $100-$200 for ram, $350-$650 for GPU, and a few $100 for the rest (SSD, case, fans, keyboard/mouse, etc) VERY few people spend more. AMD competes in this space with basically double the cores for the same money. Like say the R7-1700X, same price as the i7-7700k While 8 core intel's exist they are insanely expensive and don't typically do even 1% better at gaming. The 16-32 core Ryzen chips don't even exist yet.
      - desdiv 9y ago
        i7-7700k is 8 logical cores. Ryzen 7 is 16 logical cores. I used the phrase "logical core" in my comment 5 times because it is unambiguous whether as the unqualified word "core" isn't (it could be referring to physical cores or logical cores).
  - geezerjay 9y ago
    > ATM many/most top games are not optimized for multiple cores That tends to mean a complete redesign, as adding parallelism means following different programming models and rewriting whole software packages to accommodate them.
0xbear 9y ago
I hope they converge towards the middle and stay there until ARM takes over completely (which it will, within the next decade or so). I'm waiting for Threadripper and for AMD to address Linux-related problems with Ryzen (GCC crashes, general stability, etc), but we did build a couple of boxes with Ryzen at work to benchmark and optimize software for, and they hold their own against Intel performance wise, in spite of narrower SIMD.
- cptskippy 9y ago
  I don't see your hope for AMD or your prediction about ARM happening. I think it's much more likely that Intel will continue to produce backward compatible x86 chips and start producing a variant that eschews backwards compatibility in favor of performance by dropping legacy x86 features either gradually or entirely.
  - 0xbear 9y ago
    I bet you also don't see the impending cloud price wars which will make the current cost structures unsustainable. And you also don't see that it is vital for cloud providers to avoid a single vendor situation with the most expensive line item in their capex. For the first time in a very long time, you can compile your software with "-march-native" on Skylake and then just run it (with AVX2 and FMA!) on an AMD chip without it giving you "invalid instruction". Apple is a good canary for what's to come. Their most recent stuff is overtaking Intel's Core M. It's not even a question that e.g. iPhone 8 will leave it in the dust. Servers can't be that far behind, since x86 is no longer competitive either per dollar or in performance per watt. Meanwhile there's an uptick of interest in beefy ARM cores as well, in HPC and elsewhere. For Google it would be very little effort to migrate parts of their backend to ARM: they've been requiring their software to be compileable on ARM and PPCle for years. And no one would even know what they use.
  - iamnotlarry 9y ago
    Congratulations, cptskippy. You just predicted 2001. Intel and HP combined lost to amd64. This time around, Intel will have to take on more than just AMD. You think eschewing backwards compatibility will work better this time?
raverbashing 9y ago
When the product is good and there's no anti competitive behaviour, that's what happens
KaoruAoiShiho 9y ago
Basically fake news from wccftech haha. We'll see how much they sold next earnings!
pella 9y ago
"Mindfactory.de (Large german online store) CPU Market Share" https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NQU0FtsxI6qrX1ioDIOKMiFhZ9uBVClK29tf4vYjpUk/edit?usp=drive_web https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NQU0FtsxI6qrX1ioDIOK...
luord 9y ago
My next computer is going to be a Ryzen so I'm glad it's doing this well.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

120 points by vanburen 9y ago

AMD strategy is very ambitious: attack on desktop, workstation, and server. Can't wait for buying a Ryzen Threadripper (workstation CPU) with up to 16 cores (32 threads), DDR4 quad-channel, and huge L3 cache.

NonEUCitizen 9y ago
AMD is aiming for laptops as well: https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/5/18/15657480/amd-ryzen-processors-laptops-apu-intel-chips-cores https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/5/18/15657480/a...

taspeotis 9y ago

> It's important to note that because PassMark's market share data is based on benchmark submissions it counts actual systems in use, rather than systems sold. So AMD's market share would be overstated? I don't think a lot of machines get PassMark run on them, most would be enthusiasts or review sites benchmarking them. Ryzen has recently gotten a lot of attention. Compare that to the relative snoozefest that is/was Kaby Lake. Dell, HP etc. machines sold for home/business use would outnumber enthusiast builds ... ten-to-one? Steam's Hardware Survey [1] would be one to keep an eye on, although it hasn't been updated for June and would probably favour Intel because of Steam's audience: gaming benchmarks show Ryzen is competitive but in terms of highest performance for gaming Intel has the upper hand. [1] http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

sandworm101 9y ago
Things may change at steam. ATM many/most top games are not optimized for multiple cores, particularly the indi titles. That could change. A few updates to unity and other tools could see Ryzen become a gaming powerhouse. I'll be in the market for a new gaming PC in a couple months. I want to go with AMD-Ryzen. I like the concept.
- mehwoot 9y ago
  ATM many/most top games are not optimized for multiple cores That's not a simple thing to fix. Even in platforms like unity.
- desdiv 9y ago
  High-end Intel chips are 8 logical cores; high-end Ryzen chips are 16 to 32 logical cores. When games becomes optimized for multiple cores, both sides win. It's only when games are optimized for more than 8 logical cores that AMD will start having an advantage, and AFAIK no game engine has ever been optimized towards such a niche market (between 8 and 32 logical cores). There will always be mid-tier desktop systems and laptops with less than 8 logical cores that could be your potential customers.
  - sliken 9y ago
    Not sure what universe you live in. But for 99% of the world the "high end" is an i7-7700k with 4 cores/8 threads. Systems with nice parts designed for gaming are in the $1000-$2000 range ($350 for cpu, $150 for motherboard, $100-$200 for ram, $350-$650 for GPU, and a few $100 for the rest (SSD, case, fans, keyboard/mouse, etc) VERY few people spend more. AMD competes in this space with basically double the cores for the same money. Like say the R7-1700X, same price as the i7-7700k While 8 core intel's exist they are insanely expensive and don't typically do even 1% better at gaming. The 16-32 core Ryzen chips don't even exist yet.
    - desdiv 9y ago
      i7-7700k is 8 logical cores. Ryzen 7 is 16 logical cores. I used the phrase "logical core" in my comment 5 times because it is unambiguous whether as the unqualified word "core" isn't (it could be referring to physical cores or logical cores).
- geezerjay 9y ago
  > ATM many/most top games are not optimized for multiple cores That tends to mean a complete redesign, as adding parallelism means following different programming models and rewriting whole software packages to accommodate them.

0xbear 9y ago

I hope they converge towards the middle and stay there until ARM takes over completely (which it will, within the next decade or so). I'm waiting for Threadripper and for AMD to address Linux-related problems with Ryzen (GCC crashes, general stability, etc), but we did build a couple of boxes with Ryzen at work to benchmark and optimize software for, and they hold their own against Intel performance wise, in spite of narrower SIMD.

cptskippy 9y ago
I don't see your hope for AMD or your prediction about ARM happening. I think it's much more likely that Intel will continue to produce backward compatible x86 chips and start producing a variant that eschews backwards compatibility in favor of performance by dropping legacy x86 features either gradually or entirely.
- 0xbear 9y ago
  I bet you also don't see the impending cloud price wars which will make the current cost structures unsustainable. And you also don't see that it is vital for cloud providers to avoid a single vendor situation with the most expensive line item in their capex. For the first time in a very long time, you can compile your software with "-march-native" on Skylake and then just run it (with AVX2 and FMA!) on an AMD chip without it giving you "invalid instruction". Apple is a good canary for what's to come. Their most recent stuff is overtaking Intel's Core M. It's not even a question that e.g. iPhone 8 will leave it in the dust. Servers can't be that far behind, since x86 is no longer competitive either per dollar or in performance per watt. Meanwhile there's an uptick of interest in beefy ARM cores as well, in HPC and elsewhere. For Google it would be very little effort to migrate parts of their backend to ARM: they've been requiring their software to be compileable on ARM and PPCle for years. And no one would even know what they use.
- iamnotlarry 9y ago
  Congratulations, cptskippy. You just predicted 2001. Intel and HP combined lost to amd64. This time around, Intel will have to take on more than just AMD. You think eschewing backwards compatibility will work better this time?

raverbashing 9y ago

When the product is good and there's no anti competitive behaviour, that's what happens

KaoruAoiShiho 9y ago

Basically fake news from wccftech haha. We'll see how much they sold next earnings!

pella 9y ago

"Mindfactory.de (Large german online store) CPU Market Share" https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NQU0FtsxI6qrX1ioDIOKMiFhZ9uBVClK29tf4vYjpUk/edit?usp=drive_web https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NQU0FtsxI6qrX1ioDIOK...

luord 9y ago

My next computer is going to be a Ryzen so I'm glad it's doing this well.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]