13 ms·
> For those with little time: at the high end with socketed x86 CPUs, AMD offers you up to 50 to 100% higher performance while offering at a 40% lower price. Un
by DuskStar 7y ago
> For those with little time: at the high end with socketed x86 CPUs, AMD offers you up to 50 to 100% higher performance while offering at a 40% lower price. Unless you go for the low end server CPUs, there is no contest: AMD offers much better performance for a much lower price than Intel, with more memory channels and over 2x the number of PCIe lanes. These are also PCIe 4.0 lanes. What if you want to more than 2 TB of RAM in your dual socket server? The discount in favor of AMD just became 50%.
Well isn't that a kick in the pants.
- snazz 7y agoI'll be interested to see how long it will be before this devastates Intel's business. At the moment, there's literally no reason to buy an Intel desktop or server processor, so how many of the Intel purchases coming from OEMs and big cloud companies are just because of contracts that might let up in a few years?
- steve19 7y agoI think the one reason is that if you need the best gaming desktop performance Intel still dominates, but that little extra performance is coming at a very steep price. My next desktop of will be AMD+Nvidia. Now if only I could avoid the Nvidia tax for deep learning...
- indemnity 7y agoI’ve looked at a lot of the benchmarks and the difference was in the ballpark of 1-5%, which isn’t dominating from my perspective... did I miss a few?
- Funnnny 7y agoDigitalFoundry had an interesting take on frame rate/frame time performance on Intel/AMD. If you look at the graph you can see Ryzen dip down more for a few times when there's more computation or memory throughput needed.
- manbatman 7y agoThat's not true, with more core Ryzen can run game with other apps without any problems it's not the same with Intel though.
- leetcrew 7y agounless you are compiling chrome in the background or streaming, you're not going to saturate even eight cores while gaming. in most benchmarks I've seen, the 9900k still performs better while streaming.
- ivalm 7y agoPart of it is intel k parts have quite a bit of overclocking headroom while zen 2 has none.
- indemnity 7y agoRight. I guess the Ryzen boost clock debacle is also part of it...
- kllrnohj 7y agoIntel has almost no overclocking headroom. It's only about 5% or so. Both AMD and Intel have squeezed everything they can out at this point, there's not really anything left. The main difference is on Intel you get that magical sounding 5ghz number by overclocking, but it's not actually much higher than stock (4.7ghz on the 9900k is the "all-core turbo")
- chx 7y agoThere's a very slight advantage of Intel CPUs in non-GPU constrained games (which means more or less 1080p only...). Very slight. Price/performance falls on Ryzen 3 so hard it's foolish to get an Intel for sure. There's no business reason on desktop or server for Intel for sure but there's so much inertia here which AMD needs to counter, it'll take years. Intel is down on the floor until 2021-2022 when their 7nm (which is a smaller node than TSMC's 7nm) begins to ship because a) there's no reason to believe 10nm actually will ship in quantity b) there's every reason to believe even if it does, it's not going to be great, the first iteration of a process is never so and 14nm is so fine tuned by now, it is better in watt/performance which makes Ice Lake look stupid. 7nm is said to be a totally different, independent development and not a fine tune of the (dead) 10nm. Intel has 12B cash at hand though so don't expect them to just go out with a whimper. If their profits go down a little for 2-3 years, they will live. The stock price didn't crash, with good reason. AMD had a net loss for seven consecutive quarters before turning a profit in Q2 2016. Intel won't even turn unprofitable for a similar period of time, just it'll have a littles less profit. And, again, they have a decent sized war chest to draw on if necessary. The chip business is a slow business. In 2012, Intel said they will ship 10m chips in 2015. https://www.crn.com/news/components-peripherals/240007274/intel-charts-course-to-10nm-chips-by-2015.htm https://www.crn.com/news/components-peripherals/240007274/in... This is about the same time when AMD re-hired Jim Keller. AMD saw their window in 2015 when Intel 10nm didn't ship, thrown away K12 in a hurry and brought Zen to market in 2016 -- surely they didn't expect they will have a five year run when Intel can't put up a competition. The fun will start in 2021 when TSMC is expected to have a refined 5nm (they call it 5nm Plus) process which you bet AMD will use vs Intel 7nm.
- ken47 7y agoDisagree. Why would it take years to counter this "inertia?" It's not like you're asking someone to give up a religion they've had from birth. They are being asked to make economic purchasing decisions, and the economics are crystal clear.
- positr0n 7y agoThere are many small and large companies with relatively small compute needs (small meaning the own a small datacenter or two). Lots of the code they are running is _extremely_ legacy, and it may or may not be in their risk tolerance to switch vendors to save a hundred grand a year on CPU costs. Especially if they think like OP and believe Intel will match them again in just a few more years. Why rock the boat?
- devonkim 7y agoCome on, "literally no reason"? Maybe because AMD can't keep up with demand for their new CPUs. I can't buy a Ryzen 3900X without paying substantially inflated ebay prices, the BIOS issues out of the gate are super annoying, and all of these factors are not necessarily technical or performance factors but the fact is that I can get a 9900K right now with mature UEFI firmware on them from reputable motherboard manufacturers, and then I can actually do something with the hardware. I've been holding out on building a desktop because I could go for a while without it but my patience is wearing very thin after waiting months and now having to wait even longer just to get CPUs in stock in the first place. Intel's advantage is OEMs and sheer output volume, but the hyperscale infrastructure folks are going to be shoring up AMD financially while Intel has problems and maybe in two years or so of this nonsense AMD might be much more of a serious decision, but as of this moment it isn't a slam dunk for AMD at all.
- chubbyrabbit 7y ago> I can't buy a Ryzen 3900X without paying substantially inflated ebay prices. I'm experiencing the opposite. There has been so many deals on 3900X that I have to constantly tell myself I don't need an upgrade.
- snazz 7y agoSame here. Find nearest Micro Center, see wonderful deal, spend more than you came in looking to spend, repeat. Unless you don’t have any kind of physical computer store near you, I don’t see why buying it on eBay would be useful.
- gwicks56 7y agoDamn, I have been desperately trying to get one since launch. Think the USA is getting them all, and the rest of the world is getting screwed. I paid on launch day, my store is getting 2 3900x's this month, they have 78 people who have paid in full and are waiting.
- 7y ago
- bobdole12345 7y agoWell, other than the unbroken history of AMD managing to fail when ahead. Intel is a juggernaut because even if it's not shipping the best, it's always shipping something on time, every time.
- clhodapp 7y agoWhat? Intel have been slipping the ship date on their 10 nm process node for years. It's slipped so much that it's likely to not to even be fully released before it is discarded for its successor.
- theevilsharpie 7y ago> Intel is a juggernaut because even if it's not shipping the best, it's always shipping something on time, every time. Intel is in their current situation because their 10 nm process is years late, and is still not able to manufacture high-performance parts like server CPUs in any meaningful quantity for a price that the market would bear. They've also had severe shortages over the past year, which has resulted in orders being delayed for weeks or months. And of course, there's the matter of their products basically being warmed-over refreshes of a nearly 5-year-old architecture (because their new architectures are dependent on 10 nm), which has resulted in comically lopsided performance in AMD's favor, in basically every objective metric that matters.
- crazydoggers 7y agoThere’s still a slight performance advantage with gaming. On top of the fact that it’s still hit or miss getting any Ryzen 9s and getting an i9 is easy, anyone who is shelling out for the RTX 2080 GPUs will probably go Intel. On top of which, given the history, those building gaming machines will assume Intel’s next 10nm cpus will still outshine AMDs in gaming for the foreseeable future.
- leetcrew 7y agoexactly, if you're going to spend $1200 on a GPU, why would you care about saving $30 on a processor?
- gigatexal 7y agoIt’s a good set of first steps. AMD needs to keep executing as they have spent decades as second fiddle to Intel. Intel meanwhile has mindshare, enterprise agreements, and other partnerships that make its position as the market leader very sticky.
- ivalm 7y agoFor desktops gaming still drives a huge market segment where 9700k/9900k still have higher performance (esp if you overclock).
- kilburn 7y agoEven for gaming, the advantage is marginal though, and it comes with a price increase that is often better put into a better GPU. Even formerly die-hard intel gaming shops (Linus Tech Tips and similar) are recommending AMD for most gaming rigs nowadays.
- crazydoggers 7y agoi9 9900K: $484 on Newegg https://www.newegg.com/core-i9-9th-gen-intel-core-i9-9900k/p/N82E16819117957 https://www.newegg.com/core-i9-9th-gen-intel-core-i9-9900k/p... Ryzen 9 3900x: $499 and sold out https://www.newegg.com/amd-ryzen-9-3900x/p/N82E16819113103 https://www.newegg.com/amd-ryzen-9-3900x/p/N82E16819113103 And here’s gaming performance. Far Cry 5 has a 25fps advantage. And yes, I have an RTX 2080 Ti https://www.pcworld.com/article/3405567/ryzen-3000-review-amds-12-core-ryzen-9-3900x.html?page=4 https://www.pcworld.com/article/3405567/ryzen-3000-review-am... So for a large group of people, Intel still makes sense. And my reply was in response to “literally no reason to buy an Intel“ which is clearly just not true.
- archagon 7y agoThunderbolt?
- ipsum2 7y agoFWIW Intel still has an edge over AMD for speciality use cases, I would like to see some benchmarks that use Intel's MKL library to AMD (OpenBLAS).
- wickedsickeune 7y agoYou are correct at that, and that's because for over 10 years, especially in academia / HPC / Sci Comp, AMD was non existent. If they get the edge long enough for the HPC community to care, maybe an alternative will be present. Otherwise, if AMD just overpowers intel in hardware / clocks so much, then it might not be an issue. In addition, some specific software (eg Android emulator on Windows) doesn't exist for AMD CPUs.
- makomk 7y agoThe Android emulator can run on AMD CPUs under Windows 10 as of a year or so ago, actually. It now only requires Intel's HAXM on older versions of Windows and I don't think Zen 2 or recent Intel chips officially support those versions of Windows anymore.
- tsoernes 7y agoYou can still use MKL on AMD and it does yield a perf increase over OpenBLAS
- ummonk 7y agoDoes price matter though? I would imagine power consumption is a much bigger deal.
- ken47 7y agoEPYC Rome wins on perf/watt as well.
- Nokinside 7y agoXeon has been making 50–70% profit margin depending on the Xeon type. Intel's profit margins will take a hit when they are forced to cut prices. It's unlikely that AMD has enough manufacturing capacity to fill all demand, so Intel will still make profit. History: AMD had similar upper hand against Intel with their Athlon processor 20 years ago. Intel's transition to the 180 nm process was delayed and AMD's K7 Athlon was superior microarchitecture. Intel's response was to lower profit margins until AMD was in the ropes again. This time AMD has better change, but don't count out Intel. AMD's success depends on their profit margins when competing against Intel. If Intel force AMD's profits close to zero, it can spoil AMD's technical win. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/INTC/intel/profit-margins https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/INTC/intel/profit-... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMD/amd/profit-margins https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMD/amd/profit-mar...
- onli 7y agoCorrect me if I'm mixing up the timeline, but that's the moment in history when Intel used illegal market manipulation to keep AMD out of the OEM market, right? So Intel did more than lower their profit margin, they basically bribed their way through that period. An option they are unlikely to have again, and which as a strategy shouldn't even work anymore for the type of data centers existing today.
- Nokinside 7y agoThey did everything they could, but Intel did not win with just bribery and dirty tricks.
- ncmncm 7y agoI am curious why you think it will not work as well as last time. It is not as if law enforcement is more active now. Generally law enforcement at the moment is forbidden to touch the big fish, since the biggest fish sets policy.
- onli 7y agoWhile I'm similarly critical of US corruption and too big to fail thinking in general, there was a bit of (EU) progress in terms of monopoly control. Like the huge fines Microsoft and Google had to pay. But that would be retroactive and not help AMD. But what helps AMD in advance is the data center landscape. How would Intel force Google, Microsoft and Amazon to use their server processors in their custom servers for their cloud data centers? They can compete on price (though price dumping could alert regulators again), but Intel has zero influence on those three. Thus we see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20643604 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20643604. And smaller OEMs should be hard to pressure given the history and hard to mislead given the big companies validating AMDs processors. Regular vendors for desktops and laptops are already offering AMD, so there seems to be limited danger there.
- StreamBright 7y agoWhat about the motherboard chipsets? In the past AMD had decent CPUs but their other chips were not that great.