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AMD has always had great OC performance but my impression is that they have been power hogs. Is that incorrect or has it changed?

sigi45 8y ago
CPU wise they are holy shit close. GPU wise not that much.
iforgotpassword 8y ago
They had their ups and downs. The athlon 64 was a masterpiece in both performance and power consumption, in part because they made power management an integral part of the platform not just for laptops. At the time it was released Intel was busy pushing the pentium 4 to its limits, making it a great replacement for central heating during winter. Then Intel was on top of the game again with the core architecture and while bulldozer (iirc) improved in that regard again Intel was still ahead, especially as bulldozer sucked pretty much in every other regard. Ryzen seems to be about on par with current Intel CPUs (performance per watt), depending on benchmark.
- B1FF_PSUVM 8y ago
  > Intel was on top of the game again with the core architecture Funny thing is that Core, AFAIK, came from a separate laptop chip branch. For 64 bits Intel was betting on Itanium, which crashed and burned like iAPX-432 did before. And so Intel once again was forced to stay on the 8080 treadmill ...
  - iforgotpassword 8y ago
    Yup. If was a little "side project" by their team in Haifa that turned out much better than expected. So the Israelis saved Intel. (Dramatization mine)
  - harias 8y ago
    Threadripper was born out of side-projects too. "They worked on it in their spare time and it was really a passion project for about a year before they sought the green light from management, which is quite unusual – it was something they really cared about."
paulmd 8y ago
Zen (both Ryzen 2000 and 1000) is on a fairly low-power node, optimized for efficiency rather than clocks. Zen is pretty much comparable to Intel these days, if not slightly better, but runs into a voltage wall much quicker. If you force your way into that wall they do pull a fair bit of power. The Ryzen 2000 chips have a smarter SpeedStep-type functionality than Intel does, it pretty much squeezes out all the OC performance from the chip while maintaining normal power management, while Intel (and Ryzen 1000) needs to manage voltages on a processor-wide basis, which eats more power.
llampx 8y ago
They haven't always been power hogs. Nowadays they have a clear advantage. You don't want to know how much heat a Xeon machine with 32 cores will have to dissipate.

sigi45 8y ago

CPU wise they are holy shit close. GPU wise not that much.

iforgotpassword 8y ago

They had their ups and downs. The athlon 64 was a masterpiece in both performance and power consumption, in part because they made power management an integral part of the platform not just for laptops. At the time it was released Intel was busy pushing the pentium 4 to its limits, making it a great replacement for central heating during winter. Then Intel was on top of the game again with the core architecture and while bulldozer (iirc) improved in that regard again Intel was still ahead, especially as bulldozer sucked pretty much in every other regard. Ryzen seems to be about on par with current Intel CPUs (performance per watt), depending on benchmark.

B1FF_PSUVM 8y ago
> Intel was on top of the game again with the core architecture Funny thing is that Core, AFAIK, came from a separate laptop chip branch. For 64 bits Intel was betting on Itanium, which crashed and burned like iAPX-432 did before. And so Intel once again was forced to stay on the 8080 treadmill ...
- iforgotpassword 8y ago
  Yup. If was a little "side project" by their team in Haifa that turned out much better than expected. So the Israelis saved Intel. (Dramatization mine)
- harias 8y ago
  Threadripper was born out of side-projects too. "They worked on it in their spare time and it was really a passion project for about a year before they sought the green light from management, which is quite unusual – it was something they really cared about."

paulmd 8y ago

Zen (both Ryzen 2000 and 1000) is on a fairly low-power node, optimized for efficiency rather than clocks. Zen is pretty much comparable to Intel these days, if not slightly better, but runs into a voltage wall much quicker. If you force your way into that wall they do pull a fair bit of power. The Ryzen 2000 chips have a smarter SpeedStep-type functionality than Intel does, it pretty much squeezes out all the OC performance from the chip while maintaining normal power management, while Intel (and Ryzen 1000) needs to manage voltages on a processor-wide basis, which eats more power.

llampx 8y ago

They haven't always been power hogs. Nowadays they have a clear advantage. You don't want to know how much heat a Xeon machine with 32 cores will have to dissipate.