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Intel chips are still significantly better than AMD for many common workloads. If you are running SpecCPU or Cinebench in production then AMD might be right for

Intel chips are still significantly better than AMD for many common workloads. If you are running SpecCPU or Cinebench in production then AMD might be right for you; in all other cases I urge you to run your own realistic benchmarks before buying. Intel’s “response” to Rome came out in April. It’s a 28-core chip that costs $12k. The reason Intel doesn’t feel price pressure here is they are still way ahead in performance on real high-end workloads like DBMSs etc.

jannyfer 7y ago
Sources?
bitL 7y ago
That used to be true for original EPYC but might not be true for Rome (outside AVX-512 workloads). IMO it's more due to continuous Apple + Intel collaboration and supply chain, AMD not being able to supply large market (they share TSMC with Apple for their CPUs), and overall unknown situation for AMD (will they stick with what they do now or abort?). If AMD just matches single thread performance of 9900k, there's not much point in switching. And Apple already uses their GPUs anyway, even if NVidia is still much better.
kllrnohj 7y ago
Rome is Zen 2. You have absolutely no clue whatsoever how it performs. It may still have the weaknesses of Zen 1, but it very well might not. AMD made a bunch of changes, including a complete overhaul of the memory system (no more NUMA). We'll know for sure when the product is actually out and we have independent benchmarks, but at this point you're just making things up and stating them as facts. That aside Epyc was already ahead on real high-end workloads like povray or NAMD ( http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/namd/ http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/namd/ ). Epyc also puts up top numbers on compilation performance and OpenSSL. So it already isn't as black & white as you're pretending anyway. MySQL/DMBS is not the only server workload that exists, even though it may be the only workload you specifically care about.
- shereadsthenews 7y ago
  Don’t assume everyone suffers from the same ignorance that you suffer. All buyers in a position to order large quantities of CPUs have Rome samples and have had them for a long time, yet Intel price doesn’t budge. Why?
  - kllrnohj 7y ago
    Don’t assume everyone suffers from the same ignorance that you suffer. The buyers in a position to get early samples of Rome are not paying retail prices on Intel. And those players have already announced AMD is being added to their offerings: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/amd/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/amd/
tempguy9999 7y ago
> on real high-end workloads like DBMSs DBMSs are normally IO constrained or memory constrained, or lack-of-index index constrained or query-plan-gone-mental-from-cardinality-misestimation constrained, or others. It's very unusual IME to find one that is CPU constrained. Bringing up DBs in this context is peculiar to say the least. I've literally just lost 20 hours trying to debug a query that intermittently ran many times too slow. It was a memory misconfiguration. Extra CPU is at best a bandage over these kinds of problems, at worst, just wasted.

jannyfer 7y ago

Sources?

bitL 7y ago

That used to be true for original EPYC but might not be true for Rome (outside AVX-512 workloads). IMO it's more due to continuous Apple + Intel collaboration and supply chain, AMD not being able to supply large market (they share TSMC with Apple for their CPUs), and overall unknown situation for AMD (will they stick with what they do now or abort?). If AMD just matches single thread performance of 9900k, there's not much point in switching. And Apple already uses their GPUs anyway, even if NVidia is still much better.

kllrnohj 7y ago

Rome is Zen 2. You have absolutely no clue whatsoever how it performs. It may still have the weaknesses of Zen 1, but it very well might not. AMD made a bunch of changes, including a complete overhaul of the memory system (no more NUMA). We'll know for sure when the product is actually out and we have independent benchmarks, but at this point you're just making things up and stating them as facts. That aside Epyc was already ahead on real high-end workloads like povray or NAMD ( http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/namd/ http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/namd/ ). Epyc also puts up top numbers on compilation performance and OpenSSL. So it already isn't as black & white as you're pretending anyway. MySQL/DMBS is not the only server workload that exists, even though it may be the only workload you specifically care about.

shereadsthenews 7y ago
Don’t assume everyone suffers from the same ignorance that you suffer. All buyers in a position to order large quantities of CPUs have Rome samples and have had them for a long time, yet Intel price doesn’t budge. Why?
- kllrnohj 7y ago
  Don’t assume everyone suffers from the same ignorance that you suffer. The buyers in a position to get early samples of Rome are not paying retail prices on Intel. And those players have already announced AMD is being added to their offerings: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/amd/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/amd/

tempguy9999 7y ago

> on real high-end workloads like DBMSs DBMSs are normally IO constrained or memory constrained, or lack-of-index index constrained or query-plan-gone-mental-from-cardinality-misestimation constrained, or others. It's very unusual IME to find one that is CPU constrained. Bringing up DBs in this context is peculiar to say the least. I've literally just lost 20 hours trying to debug a query that intermittently ran many times too slow. It was a memory misconfiguration. Extra CPU is at best a bandage over these kinds of problems, at worst, just wasted.