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There'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 Ryz

by chx 7y ago

There'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 ago
Disagree. 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 ago
  There 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?
  - ken47 7y ago
    Of course such decisions are always political. But now with Google backing EPYC Rome, there is the political risk of not switching, and finding yourself in the Stone Age 5 years from now. There's a lot more incentive to explore EPYC than there was a day ago.
    - ta0943007 7y ago
      AMD's marketing department has addressed this point. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrJbT7AqcD0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrJbT7AqcD0
    - TomVDB 7y ago
      What if Google did not include that very old legacy code during their evaluation process? And exactly what kind of risk are you taking about? If switching is as easy as you claim it is, you can still do so next year or the year after.
- paulmd 7y ago
  Because there are soft costs to integrating a completely different platform into your environments. What happens when you try to pass a VM from an Intel system over to an Epyc system? Unless they have the same instruction sets you can't pass them between different processors - meaning, you have to go in and manually find the greatest common denominator and disable the rest of the instructions that aren't mutually supported. That kind of thing. Also, software is very often the largest cost for these systems. It's not hard to find yourself paying $100k a month for an Oracle license. A one-time expense of $50k for one piece of hardware vs another is barely a blip. And in fact that hardware is often charged based on spec. So if you have 4x as many cores on Epyc, you will pay more in software costs on a monthly basis as well. That, or the software will simply refuse to use them until you buy an upgrade, meaning those extra cores are sitting there doing nothing. It's counterintuitive to people whose experience is building a gaming desktop at home, but hardware expenses are not necessarily a big part of total cost of ownership for enterprise operators.
leetcrew 7y ago
> There'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. it's not a huge advantage, but I'm not sure I would go so far as to call it foolish to buy intel at this point. if your only serious workload is gaming, intel seems like the obvious choice to me. you can actually get a decent all-core overclock on the intel parts, which leads to a significant performance lead in esports titles.
- streb-lo 7y ago
  At 1080p on 100hz+ monitors...
- throwaway2048 7y ago
  We are talking a few percentage fps, at 1080p, where you are going from 200 fps to 220 fps. To call that a "significant" performance lead is silly.
  - kayoone 7y ago
    Thats a 10% gain which might help you in some games to stay above the 144Hz or even 200Hz refresh rate of your monitor. Does not matter for most of us, but some hardcore esports gamers might care. I guess that's a very small minority though.
  - leetcrew 7y ago
    if you think a 10% fps gain is silly, why buy a high-end cpu for gaming at all? also the "only at 1080p" meme is not really true for some esports titles. counterstrike is so cpu bound that it really doesn't matter what resolution you play at.
AgloeDreams 7y ago
A fun detail of this is Apple's involvement. The 7nm process was originally built to attract TSMC's largest customer, Apple's A Series. AMD adopting this same process inlines them with Apple's gains, spend, and chip quality. (and obviously they make a LOT of A series chips, much greater than any of AMD's production.) The hilarious gain of this is that this will drive down Intel's chip prices in attempts to compete, improving Mac margins.

by chx 7y ago

ken47 7y ago

Disagree. 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 ago
There 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?
- ken47 7y ago
  Of course such decisions are always political. But now with Google backing EPYC Rome, there is the political risk of not switching, and finding yourself in the Stone Age 5 years from now. There's a lot more incentive to explore EPYC than there was a day ago.
  - ta0943007 7y ago
    AMD's marketing department has addressed this point. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrJbT7AqcD0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrJbT7AqcD0
  - TomVDB 7y ago
    What if Google did not include that very old legacy code during their evaluation process? And exactly what kind of risk are you taking about? If switching is as easy as you claim it is, you can still do so next year or the year after.
paulmd 7y ago
Because there are soft costs to integrating a completely different platform into your environments. What happens when you try to pass a VM from an Intel system over to an Epyc system? Unless they have the same instruction sets you can't pass them between different processors - meaning, you have to go in and manually find the greatest common denominator and disable the rest of the instructions that aren't mutually supported. That kind of thing. Also, software is very often the largest cost for these systems. It's not hard to find yourself paying $100k a month for an Oracle license. A one-time expense of $50k for one piece of hardware vs another is barely a blip. And in fact that hardware is often charged based on spec. So if you have 4x as many cores on Epyc, you will pay more in software costs on a monthly basis as well. That, or the software will simply refuse to use them until you buy an upgrade, meaning those extra cores are sitting there doing nothing. It's counterintuitive to people whose experience is building a gaming desktop at home, but hardware expenses are not necessarily a big part of total cost of ownership for enterprise operators.

leetcrew 7y ago

> There'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. it's not a huge advantage, but I'm not sure I would go so far as to call it foolish to buy intel at this point. if your only serious workload is gaming, intel seems like the obvious choice to me. you can actually get a decent all-core overclock on the intel parts, which leads to a significant performance lead in esports titles.

streb-lo 7y ago
At 1080p on 100hz+ monitors...
throwaway2048 7y ago
We are talking a few percentage fps, at 1080p, where you are going from 200 fps to 220 fps. To call that a "significant" performance lead is silly.
- kayoone 7y ago
  Thats a 10% gain which might help you in some games to stay above the 144Hz or even 200Hz refresh rate of your monitor. Does not matter for most of us, but some hardcore esports gamers might care. I guess that's a very small minority though.
- leetcrew 7y ago
  if you think a 10% fps gain is silly, why buy a high-end cpu for gaming at all? also the "only at 1080p" meme is not really true for some esports titles. counterstrike is so cpu bound that it really doesn't matter what resolution you play at.

AgloeDreams 7y ago

A fun detail of this is Apple's involvement. The 7nm process was originally built to attract TSMC's largest customer, Apple's A Series. AMD adopting this same process inlines them with Apple's gains, spend, and chip quality. (and obviously they make a LOT of A series chips, much greater than any of AMD's production.) The hilarious gain of this is that this will drive down Intel's chip prices in attempts to compete, improving Mac margins.