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Intel 28-core fantasy vs. AMD 32-core reality
- chrisper 8y agoI just recently replaced my old i7 920 in the homeserver with an AMD Ryzen 5 2600. Really like it so far. Price / performance is great. This is my first AMD since probably ever.... The two things I don't like is that their CPUs are pin based. It seemed kind of old fashioned after Intel CPUs. But this is really a minor thing. The other issue is memory compatibility is a bit finicky. Maybe it has to do with the CPU being so new. Not sure.
- AndrewDavis 8y ago> don't like is that their CPUs are pin based To me that's a win. If a CPU pin is bent it's typically fairly easy to straighten it. Fixing a bent pin a socket is a massive pain. But it's much easier to protect socket pins with the cover. So there are pros and cons either way.
- dpedu 8y agoTrue, though it is much easier to damage a pin-based CPU in the first place.
- zaarn 8y agoUsually, I'm very careful with the CPU, more than the motherboard, so I think that balances out.
- frankharv 8y agoMassive pain is an undestatement. Fixing a socket pin with a that small of a package size and 1151 pins is nearly impossible. Good luck. You better have a loop or magnifier. I buy Intel Mobile CPU boards for exactly this reason. Pins. I have not bent a single one in years. The Notebook CPU's are so thermally efficient it is a real selling point to me.
- CoolGuySteve 8y agoRyzen chips scale in performance more than Intel when you overclock the RAM. Some part of the chip cache is more tightly coupled to the RAM latency, and my rampant speculation is that Intel doesn’t really care about memory bandwidth as much on the desktop anyways.
- theandrewbailey 8y agoRyzen CPUs divide the cores into two "core complexes" that communicate over a bus called infinity fabric. Probably to make the engineering easier, the memory controller and RAM speed is the same as the infinity fabric's speed. You'll get good gains up to 3000 MHz, less so with more. https://www.anandtech.com/show/11857/memory-scaling-on-ryzen-7-with-team-groups-night-hawk-rgb https://www.anandtech.com/show/11857/memory-scaling-on-ryzen... http://www.legitreviews.com/ddr4-memory-scaling-amd-am4-platform-best-memory-kit-amd-ryzen-cpus_192259 http://www.legitreviews.com/ddr4-memory-scaling-amd-am4-plat...
- dragontamer 8y agoAnd the only thing I'll add is that "infinity fabric" is a singular clock-domain across all dies. So in Ryzen, its not a big deal cause there's only one die. But in Threadripper (2-dies) or EPYC (4-dies), the "infinity fabric" bus is what connects the CPUs and Memory-controllers together.
- iamforreal 8y agoThreadripper is lga ;-)
- chrisper 8y agoPutting a Threadripper in a homeserver is overkill. Besides I wanted to replace the i7 920, so that it won't be that hot anymore in that room (130W TDP vs 65W). I think a threadripper would achieve the opposite. Maybe I should just do seasonal CPUs... Threadripper in Winter and Ryzen in Summer.
- bitL 8y agoFor home server/NAS/HTPC you are likely fine with some Atom-based Celeron/Pentium ;-)
- chrisper 8y agoBut where is the fun in that!
- doommius 8y agoI would say get something a bit more beefy like i3 or i5, as most people will want to run some basic things like Game servers, database or maybe a plex server, and it's good to be able just to run things compared to either rebuilding or renting something in the cloud in a lot of instances.
- bitL 8y agoLatest Gemini Lake is already past the level of Phenom 2/Core 2 but with 10W TDP. They are also faster than Broadwell i3 on the same frequency in single thread (but have no hyperthreading).
- sorenjan 8y agoIf you still have the old motherboard you can buy an old Xeon X56xx and use it as a drop in replacement in the LGA1366 socket. An X5650 for instance cost about $25 on ebay, is clocked at 2.66 GHz like the i7 920, has six cores, a TDP of 95W, and overclocks really well. I don't know if most i7 motherboards support ECC, but the CPU supports it. The LGA1366 motherboards still fetch some money too, if you'd rather sell it.
- solomatov 8y agoAMD did a great job with Threadripper, making high end CPUs much more affordable. It's interesting that Intel doesn't lower their prices. What's the logic behind it?
- loeg 8y agoIntel did lower prices on several chips in response.
- lsiq 8y agoThey spent such a long time making the "best" that now they get to ride that goodwill for a while with consumers, regardless of where they are presently with respect to competition. Toyota and Honda enjoy the same luxury, they outsell the competition today more because of what they did in 90s than what they did in 2016-17.
- dboreham 8y agoRetail sales must be a very small percentage of the market. Perhaps they don't expect to sell any units anyway so the price doesn't matter.
- wmf 8y agoIntel was selling 18-core chips for >$2,400 then when Threadripper came out Intel released the 18-core i9 for "only" $2,000, so that is something of a price drop. Also, Intel's $350 8700K was cheaper at launch than AMD's $450 1800X even though the 8700K is faster in gaming.
- zaarn 8y agoKeep in mind that AMD has an inherent advantage: the Zen architecture and Glue. When AMD fabs a TR2 they have to find 4 good Ryzen dies which are fairly small and they make a lot of them since they are part of the entire lineup. Once they have 4 good dies, they get glued together. If they wanted 64 cores they'd just have to look for 8 good Ryzen dies, halving their yield compared to 32. On the Intel side they have to increase the silicon area and then hope that all 64 cores are capable of full core speed in the current setup. Glueing CPUs together makes it cheap to scale at little cost.
- dingo_bat 8y agoIt's awesome that TR2 will be a drop in replacement on existing motherboards! Props to AMD for delivering real value to consumers.
- kmfrk 8y agoAMD's forward compatibility is one of the most amazing things to me, so much so that I still can't believe AM4 is going to remain viable for future CPUs for a while hence despite its age. It's also a big reason I'm not going with Intel, since I know I can upgrade to something significantly better without having to get a new motherboard.
- dTal 8y agoWorth noting that with AMD sockets, physical compatibility is no guarantee that it'll work without a software update. If you're unlucky/incautious during a system build, you can end up in a catch 22 with a motherboard that requires a BIOS update for your new CPU to work, and no way to boot it to update the BIOS because your CPU doesn't work. AMD will loan you an older CPU if you jump through enough hoops, but it's probably less hassle just to buy the cheapest last-gen CPU you can find on Amazon. Still a better scenario than changing the socket all the time, but it can catch you out if you're used to Intel's "socket = generation" philosophy. Source: happened to me a few weeks back.
- kmfrk 8y agoOh yeah, I've read the 2200G/2400G horror stories and taken precautions, thanks. :)
- havemylife 8y agoI recall reading that the thread ripper 2 is supposed to use more power so early motherboards with that socket my not be able to handle it. Just something to keep in mind. Regardless damn good on AMD.
- loeg 8y ago
- jopython 8y agoI believe Intel's designs are based on a single die compared to AMD threadripper which are multichip.
- bluedino 8y agoCould Intel stick more than one on a single chip?
- CarVac 8y agoTheir first dual-core processors were multiple chip modules.
- zeusk 8y agoThey however did not have a proper on-die interconnect and instead communicated over the FSB which made them quite bad at scaling.
- tadfisher 8y agoYes, but so far they have not, instead investing in on-die mesh interconnects for scaling up core count. Here's an opinion piece on the subject: https://www.anandtech.com/show/12814/a-thought-on-silicon-design-intels-lcc-on-hedt-is-dead https://www.anandtech.com/show/12814/a-thought-on-silicon-de...
- MBCook 8y agoYou’re right, but obviously the advantage that used to give them isn’t working out anymore. AMD’s interconnect seems fast enough, and they don’t have the yield/cost problems from massive single die chips.
- sliken 8y agoMore importantly that they can target desktops, high end desktops, and servers with the same exact silicon. So they can amortize their R&D across more units, and of course the supply line is much simpler. So AMD doesn't have to guess ahead of time what mix of ryzen, threadripper, and epyc chips they will sell.
- hyperrail 8y agoI think of AMD's current approach - a microarchitecture with slower cores, but more cores, than Intel - as very similar to what Sun/Oracle tried to do from 2005 to 2010 with the Niagara family (UltraSPARC T1-T3). Each core in those chips was seriously underclocked compared to a Xeon of similar vintage and price point (1-1.67 GHz; compared to 1.6 GHz to 3 or more), and lacked features like out-of-order execution and big caches that are almost minimum requirements for a modern server CPU. Sun hoped to make up for the slow cores in server applications with having more cores and having multiple threads per core (though with a simpler technology than SMT/hyper-threading). However, Oracle eventually decided to focus on single-threaded performance with its more recent chips - it turns out that no OoO and < 2 GHz nominal speeds look pretty bad for many server applications. My suspicion is that even though the CPU-bound parts of games are becoming more multi-threaded, AMD will be forced to fix its slower architecture or lose out to Intel again in the server AND high-end desktop markets in a few years.
- kankroc 8y agoThis is a gross overestimate of how far behind AMD is in single core performance. We're talking a few lost frames per second in games not some crazy sun vs oracle stuff.
- wmf 8y agoIt's not similar at all. AMD's cores are 10-20% slower while Niagara was 80-90% slower. And AMD isn't intentionally slower; they designed the Zen core for maximum single-thread performance but they just didn't do as good a job as Intel because their budget is vastly smaller.
- snuxoll 8y agoZen does a decent job in clock-for-clock performance, huge killer on the desktop is raw clock speed. When you pit a Ryzen chip maxing out around 3.8-4.2GHz (depending on generation and silicon lottery) to an i7-8700K that has a base frequency of 4.7GHz it's pretty obvious which is going to come out on top. Most of that clock hit comes from the 12nm LPP process that AMD is currently using too from what I can tell, low-power process typically equates to lower clocks (see mobile chips) so it's not surprising - and why Zen 2 being based on GloFo's 7nm process will hopefully close that gap.
- jejones3141 8y agoFor a long time I saved a copy of a publication by Motorola about how Intel played fast and loose with benchmarks in comparisons of the 80386 with the 68020. (I lost it in a move, alas.) Can't say I was surprised to read about the 28-core fiasco.
- NullPrefix 8y agolink?
- manual 8y agoNot specific to the Motorola but there have been a number of allegations of Intel doing this over the years: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2842647/intel-will-pay-you-15-to-settle-claims-it-fudged-pentium-4-benchmarks.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/2842647/intel-will-pay-you-1... http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49 http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49
- nikanj 8y agoThis is a game all CPU manufacturers play. I still remember the days of Apple claiming their G4 processors were faster than Intel ones. Then they swapped platforms, and all of those claims evaporated without a trace.
- yomritoyj 8y agoAs an outsider to 'enterprise-grade' computing, I'm curious about situations where a high number of cores in a single processor would be superior to multiple processors with the same total energy draw sitting on a single motherboard? I can understand HPC applications where the high-speed interconnect on the chip would make a big difference. But in business applications where the cores are dedicated to running independent VMs, or are handling independent client requests, what is really gained? There would still be some benefits from a shared cache, but how large quantitatively would that be?
- loeg 8y agoNUMA. Latency between sockets is far higher than in a single socket. If your workload is truly wholly independent threads as you've described, then it's quite possible there is no benefit. (Although, sibling comments bring up good points about licensing fees.)
- downrightmike 8y agoWhen VMware charges per socket and not per core.
- NickNameNick 8y agoBig ditto for Oracle. probably others.
- downrightmike 8y agoRealistically, it is easy to count cores. Some companies still count MAC addresses.
- haikuginger 8y agoThe way Oracle and VMWare bill is not bound by a technical limitation.
- wmantly 8y ago
- rocky1138 8y agoWhich one of these companies does at better job with free/libre software? I've always had a soft spot for AMD because it's the underdog, but I want to make sure that they are free, too.
- Senderman 8y agoIf the answer turned out to be Intel, would you overlook the misleading 28-core demo the article discusses?
- bayindirh 8y agoIntel provides a lot of patches for Linux Kernel, for their hardware, performance counters, and their graphics drivers are open source under mainline. I'm not mentioning their wired Ethernet and other various drivers. Being one of the top contributors in Linux/OSS/FLOSS doesn't allow them to come clean from their 28-core, inadvertently but conveniently miscommunicated demo.
- rocky1138 8y agoYeah, though it's not the best thing to have on the resume. That's for sure.
- flafla2 8y agoGPUOpen [1] is AMD's branded Open Source / Open protocol initiative. [1] https://gpuopen.com/ https://gpuopen.com/
- zaarn 8y agoAMD has been doing a lot of hardwork to get their stuff into mainline (AMDGPU as a recent example) and they opensource a lot of their GPU stuff on github. On the CPU side, AMD has patched Linux way before Ryzen was available in shops and has been contributing various patches afterwards. I'd say they are working to get a decent track record for their Ryzen and Vega lineups.
- robin_reala 8y agoAre you talking about contributions to OSS in general, or specifically around processors?
- Phylter 8y agoThis article repeats itself many times. Are they trying to hit a word count quota? Is this high school again?
- vbezhenar 8y agoIn the end Intel got bad PR and AMD got good PR. Is it a major PR failure from Intel?
- lbill 8y agoI get that Intel feels threatened by AMD. They are trying to impress the consumers... but bullshitting a demo is a very bad move! When a consumer decides to build a new PC, the characteristics of the product matter, but so does the reputation of the company that manufactures it. Right now Intel is putting too much effort into sketchy marketing practices: it undermines the actual work being done on their processors by some very talented people. Presenting it as an extreme overclocking demo would have been a much wiser option.
- xxs 8y agoThat would be akin to i7 8086k on 7.2GHz... just add LN2. What they presented was an extreme overclocking area with insulation (due to subambient condensation), a one HP chiller that runs on a banned gas and a 4 second benchmark (seriously aside CB being free is not a true testament of overclocking prowess). Such a demo is as pointless as it is almost as practical as daily LN2 use. I can imagine few cases where first-to-right-the-bell performance on a single core determines if you get a specific quote in HFT but that's that.
- zeusk 8y ago> I can imagine few cases where first-to-right-the-bell performance on a single core determines if you get a specific quote in HFT but that's that. That is actually the case from what I've heard, A lot of them buy consumer chips then disable all but one core and overclock it to the max. Here is a guy from optiver talking about their process at CppCon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH1Tta7purM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH1Tta7purM
- softawre 8y agoWhat a great talk, thanks for sharing!
- jacob019 8y agoUnfortunately it might work. With today's news cycles, an average consumer may have noticed the headline about Intel's 5GHz 28-core monster, and that's it. Follow up articles aren't as interesting.
- hardwaresofton 8y agoI'm excited for what this will do to the cost of dedicated servers in ~1 year. Also, as a person who used to work at Intel, I don't know whose idea this was, but that person should probably have a long hard look at themselves -- hardware people are exactly the people that this kind of shit wouldn't fly with, because they'll almost always ask for details and can spot a hack from a mile away. On the one hand I can sympathize with Intel -- seeing how tough it was to stay on the market year over year, trying to predict and start developing the next trend in hardware. But on the other hand... Why in the world would you do this -- Intel basically dominates the high end market right now, just take your time and make a properly better thing.
- dragontamer 8y ago> I'm excited for what this will do to the cost of dedicated servers in ~1 year. This is the opposite though? The dedicated servers are turning into HEDTs. AMD 32-core EPYC has been available since last year, and Intel's 28-core Skylake (although $10,000) has been also available for a year. So dedicated servers got this tech first, then HEDT got it a bit later. I guess Threadripper is Zen+ so its technically HEDT gets the 12nm tech first, but the 32-core infrastructure was in EPYC first.
- x0f1a 8y agoThe problem IMO is that Intel HEDTs don't support ECC (as far as I know), so not very good idea when you are working with workloads that need 64GB - 128GB of RAM (video editing, etc)
- hardwaresofton 8y agoAhh I deal with bare metal cloud companies that sell dedicated HEDTs so I was thinking that I'd be able to find even more HEDTs with great specs in a year's time as Threadrippers make their way through the market. People (including me) pay a premium for faster Intel cores and I'm excited to make the switch to slower, more plentiful AMD cores when I can, because I've invested in learning languages that do their best to handle parallelism well. In practice the only difference between the dedicated servers of yesteryear and HEDTs of today is becoming perception (well and some very specific features), and considering computational load of most things hasn't actually gotten that much bigger, in addition to a proliferation of langauges that can adequately use multiple cores, feels like everything is looking to get cheaper yet better -- that's what excites me.
- ben509 8y agoThere was an interview with an Intel engineer on this, it was quite revealing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozcEel1rNKM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozcEel1rNKM
- orev 8y agoThis is a short term loss for Intel, but could end up being a long term win as an attack on AMD. Making this announcement forced AMD to advance their plans for the 32-core, possibly faster than they really wanted to right now. That depletes their product pipeline faster, making it more difficult to keep pace with future advances. Edit: initial reports said that AMD was only planning to announce the 24-core CPU, and may have advanced the announcement of the 32-core chip due to Intel’a stunt. TFA doesn’t mention that, so possibly the initial reports were not accurate.
- BlackMonday 8y agoThey maxed out the number of cores they can ship in a single CPU for now but that doesn't seem like a problem. AMD will already launch their 7nm EPYC processor based on Zen 2 in 2019 (skipping Zen+ used by the new Threadripper and Ryzen 2xxx) which is expected to have 48 cores (some rumors even suggest 64 cores but that seems more likely for 7nm EUV instead of the first 7nm processes). So they will have no problem releasing more cores with Threadripper 3 next year (if they keep the yearly releases). On top of that, in my layman eyes AMDs aproach of using infinity fabric to connect dies seems better suited to react to changes compared to Intels monolithic design.
- glonq 8y agoIt appears that Intel wanted to trump AMD. ...and also wanted to Trump AMD.