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Is it still the case that an AMD core is less powerful than an Intel core for the same frequency? I understand that AMD is making it up with more cores but in a
by cm2187 7y ago
Is it still the case that an AMD core is less powerful than an Intel core for the same frequency? I understand that AMD is making it up with more cores but in a cloud you get charged per core. Can a cloud substitute an Intel for an AMD cpu?
- nordsieck 7y ago> in a cloud you get charged per core. Can a cloud substitute an Intel for an AMD cpu? In a cloud you typically pay for cores from a specific CPU type. Presumably any clouds at offer AMD cpus will price them in a competitive manner.
- cm2187 7y agoI thought they had a “cpu x or equivalent” kind of language, like rental cars.
- Benjamin_Dobell 7y agoYeah, it depends on what they deem to be equivalent. AWS already offer AMD cores, and they're 10% cheaper compared to Intel cores - https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/amd/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/amd/
- wmf 7y agoAWS mostly did away with that years ago; AFAIK first-tier cloud providers all promise a specific CPU model. And yes, and AMD vCPU is cheaper than an Intel vCPU.
- alecmg 7y agoAll evidence hints to opposite. IPC gain from all improvements in Zen2 means AMD should be equal or faster at same frequency
- leetcrew 7y agofrom the (possibly cherrypicked) benchmarks in the original announcement [0], it looks like single thread performance is on par or slightly better even with a clock disadvantage. [0] https://images.anandtech.com/doci/14407/COMPUTEX_KEYNOTE_DRAFT_FOR_PREBRIEF.26.05.19-page-024.jpg https://images.anandtech.com/doci/14407/COMPUTEX_KEYNOTE_DRA...
- sbov 7y agoNot sure how much overall effect it will have, but Windows also recently released an update to perform better with Zen, and these benchmarks don't include that update. I'm not sure what the story was with CPU vulnerability mitigations were, but if those were turned off then Zen 2 could handily be beating Intel. It certainly looks promising, but I'll still hold my excitement until we get some 3rd party benchmarks.
- tracker1 7y agoIIRC, the benchmarks also don't include the spectre/meltdown patches for Intel. AMD, apparently, worked very hard to give a worst-case comparison for the most part.
- leetcrew 7y agoI believe the update is to optimize where threads are scheduled across CCXs. shouldn't affect a single threaded benchmark. I'm also skeptical of first party benchmarks, but I'm already pretty excited that I finally might be able to justify an upgrade from my old haswell setup.
- nicoburns 7y agoIt used to be the case, but it looks like that gap is almost nothing with zen 2. Clouds also often have different pricing for AMD cores.
- imtringued 7y agoThat hasn't been true since the release of Ryzen in 2017. The reason why AMD is lagging behind in single core performance is because Intel CPUs can be clocked higher. Often to 5GHz. Whereas AMD usually only boosts to somewhere around 4.4GHz. Gamers care about a 12% difference. Servers usually don't even go beyond 3GHz.
- lagadu 7y agoIPC varies according to the specific task but Ryzen 1xxx and 2xxx have always had IPC on average comparable to Broadwell CPUs (excluding AVX workloads). So intel has had a slight lead there from Skylake onwards. According to what we're seeing, the situation seems to be reversed with the 3xxx series, where AMD seems to have a small but significant lead; we'll have to wait for independent benchmarks.
- aphextim 7y agoRegardless who comes out ahead on the benchmarks, competition is always a good thing!
- penagwin 7y agoIt kinda matters because AMD hasn't been able to outperform Intel at single threaded tasks for like 5+ years. They aren't competition if they fall of the map. So a slightly edge would be great because it at least puts them back in the game.
- shaklee3 7y agoThat's not fair comparison. Servers are lower speeds because they have far more cores. AMD's desktop processors have more cores than Intel, so you'd expect the clock to be lower.
- monocasa 7y agoServers are lower speed because server owners at a pretty trivial scale generally care more about perf/watt than the number of servers they have, and the slower frequencies hit that sweet spot. There are some places where they care about individual node perf, and you'll see lot's of cores _and_ high clock speed there. Borg scheduler nodes come to mind there.