12 ms·

I find it interesting how desktop CPUs are essentially coming down to two enthusiast markets, developers/content creators/workstations and gaming. While the ga

I find it interesting how desktop CPUs are essentially coming down to two enthusiast markets, developers/content creators/workstations and gaming. While the gaming market is (usually) seeking the highest top single core clock speed with respect to CPUs, it also relies on other expensive hardware. Meanwhile the dev/content creator/workstation market is much better served by these multi-core behemoths. Intel really has their work cutout for them with performance to cost for consumer desktops.

CoolGuySteve 7y ago
Before Vulkan, there were more bottlenecks on multithreaded rendering. Most games pushed everything to a single drawing thread. Hopefully going forward that will change, but even with Red Dead Redemption 2's Vulkan implementation, a 6 core Intel/AMD chip is competitive with this processor at lower settings/resolutions where the GPU is less of a bottleneck. Compute bound games like Civilization 6 do scale with processor count however.
- swebs 7y ago
  Factorio is also limited by single core performance, with the developers saying they have no plans to implement multithreading.
  - kuzko_topia 7y ago
    This is unfortunate, and I'm saying this as an AMD owner and factorio player. Do you have a source for this?
- jsgo 7y ago
  that reminds me of what I had read on EverQuest 2. I downloaded it when it went f2p years after launch. My gaming PC had some issues with it which seemed nuts as it could handle more intensive games. After reading up on it, EQ2 came about a little bit before the shift to multiple cores which was to their detriment: they basically expected single core performance to keep going up substantially (as it had during EQ1 era) and not expanding to multiple cores. As such, they optimized against a configuration that never ended up existing.
- shmerl 7y ago
  The Witcher 3 likes all 12 cores on my Ryzen 9 3900X when running in Wine+dxvk, thanks to Vulkan (especially for faster shader compilation). Same as they are useful for compiling Mesa and Linux kernel ;)
api 7y ago
It's like vehicles. Desktops/workstations and even most non-tablet laptops are now analogous to small trucks such as pickups. Tablets and phones are cars. Most people drive cars. Trucks are for work or people who like to haul stuff. Servers and huge workstations I guess are like 18-wheelers and locomotives. :) The "mobile is the future of everything" people were wrong. It's not that desktop is going away, but the market is re-segmenting. Most casual users don't need a desktop. They just need a UI device that can run apps and access services. So you now have a bisection of the computing device market into pro/workplace type devices and casual user devices. I suppose there's a third category too: hobbyist and enthusiast devices. That's where I'd put things like the Raspberry Pi or more techie geared laptops that run Linux. I predict that rather than converging with mobile, desktop will actually pivot more toward pro, developer, and power user needs. Apple's recent 16 inch Pro release is a baby step in that direction on the hardware level. You'll probably see it at the software and OS level too. Desktop might actually shed a little bit of its user-friendliness gloss in favor of being unabashedly "pro." "If you don't want to know what a network, a folder, a file, or an IP address is, get a tablet."
- neogodless 7y ago
  Suddenly number of wheels is analogous to cores... Motorcycle - fast for gaming Car/SUV - good general purpose Truck (dually) - serious work (probably fun) 18-wheeler - move a load of loads at once But apparently that makes the Ryzen 9 3950X a 16-wheel Porsche Cayenne Turbo S? Super fun to drive but you can use it to haul...
  - api 7y ago
    Hah... yeah the analogy gets silly if you make it literal and stretch it too far. I was just using it to talk about how different types of devices specialize for different use cases. Phones: ultra-portable communication and rapid service interaction device -- basically a pocket terminal. Skill level: beginner / non-technical. Tablets: casual computing devices suitable for reading, writing, some forms of content creation, and games. Skill level: beginner / non-technical. Desktops/Laptops: more powerful and flexible devices for serious content creation, high-end gaming, development, heavy number crunching, etc. Skill level: intermediate to advanced users. They're still relatively easy to use for casual use cases but they have more knobs, expose more details, and have less training wheels / guard rails to keep you from breaking things. Servers: big machines that sit in one place in a data center, office, or basement and run lots of stuff. Skill level: mostly advanced users. SBCs like the Pi: hobbyist devices for hacking, DIY IOT, DIY automation, etc. Skill level: mostly advanced users. Then of course there's a long tail of specialized and smaller devices like watches, FitBits, IOT, etc.
intarga 7y ago
>While the gaming market is (usually) seeking the highest top single core clock speed with respect to CPUs, it also relies on other expensive hardware. Meanwhile the dev/content creator/workstation market is much better served by these multi-core behemoths. It's not really that cut and dried, plenty of dev workloads are better served by high top single core, while plenty of gaming workloads are better served by multi core.
- zamubafoo 7y ago
  You are absolutely correct. I might be wrong but I've always heard that the general rule of thumb for gaming CPU purchases is get best single core speed if you aren't buying for a specific game. Also, I based my statement on my workloads which involves a lot of virtualization.
  - orclev 7y ago
    The gaming market is in some ways on the trailing edge of technology. While they're often one of the first to embrace new hardware, they're very slow to adopt changes in software or architecture because the engines that drive most of that are few and tend to evolve slowly. Until Unreal Engine, Unity, or one of the other major game engines fully embrace an architecture that allows developers to easily saturate multiple cores, most games are still going to be bottlenecked by single core performance. On the other hand, it should be blatantly obvious to anyone even remotely connected with development that full multi-core utilization is the only way to keep improving performance going forward, so sooner or later the game engine developers are going to need to fully embrace that.
    - e_proxus 7y ago
      Unity's new Data-Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS) aims to take advantage of multi-threading by default. It's done transparently as far as it is possible, with the help of a new burst comipiler system, their new job system and the Entity Component System (ECS). https://unity.com/dots https://unity.com/dots
  - paulmd 7y ago
Someone1234 7y ago
I agree with your overall synopsis of the status quo. We might however see gaming shift more to multi-core workloads as the next gen of consoles are highly likely to contain 8 core (16T) AMD CPUs based on Zen2 (and a lot of games are made for the lowest common denominator). This shouldn't be confused with the 8 core APUs found in current gen. Next gen will have an 8 core CPU and a NAVI 12+ GPU.
- undersuit 7y ago
  LinusTechTips made a video recently where they took an Intel Skulltrail, which is an enthusiast dual-socket Core 2 Quad platform from 2008(!), through a modern OS and game test. They platform was struggling until the enabled the Vulkan API in games. We have consoles to thank for that, without the low speed, high core count CPUs of the PS4 and Xbox One there'd be little justification for optimizing games for Vulkan and DX12
- paulmd 7y ago
  To be clear it's a shift from 8C8T to 8C16T (8C with SMT). The main change here is a massive (~3x) improvement in per-core performance. It's not actually a shift to (significantly) more threading but actually a shift to more per-core performance, like desktop PCs currently use. Consoles are getting desktop-like processors for the first time. This is creating quite a bit of anxiety in the desktop gaming community since high framerates depend on desktop processors being able to significantly outperform consoles on a per-core basis, and that will no longer be the case.
Tepix 7y ago
You're forgetting about the low budget CPUs used for desktop PCs. AMD has a pretty good standing with their Vega GPUs built into the Ryzen/Athlon APUs. Or are you only talking about enthusiasts?
- zamubafoo 7y ago
  If we are looking at the budget systems, then AMD wins hands down. Not only do their Athlon 200 CPUs have appallingly good cost to performance ratios (with Vega GPUs and a CPU cooler), they also share the same socket with the Ryzen lineup. At the moment, I wouldn't recommend anything but AMD for CPU since you can buy at any price point then upgrade. I think the only price point that Intel does have a slight advantage is the ~$500 mark.
  - aoeusnth1 7y ago
    And even then Intel's only advantage is on single-threaded workloads. At $500, you can get a 12-core AMD (3900X) for the same price as the 8-core Intel (9900K).
burtonator 7y ago
I LOVE that the gaming market has created a serious desire for quality desktop hardware. I now build my workstations by hand and install Ubuntu. It's really nice to work on quality hardware!
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  As long as you want unnecessary lighting and gaping, EMI releasing, windowed cases.
  - overcast 7y ago
    All easily avoidable.
    - redisman 7y ago
      I just build a mid-range gaming PC. CPUs don't have RGB, memory modules don't have RGB, some overpriced motherboards have RGB, HDD/SSD don't have RGB, some overpriced GPUs had them but I was looking for value for money.
      - jsgo 7y ago
        on the GPU side, it seems RGB is the common thread. There are ways to disable it, but they aren't particularly great as they really only come into play post-OS loading (I have my GPU in an external enclosure so I see it more than I would in a desktop). Memory modules do have RGB, but you specifically have to buy them (they're the exception, currently). CPUs don't have RGB, but the fans that are going to be mounted on them may be (Ryzen's CPU fans that come with the CPUs have them iirc). I don't see HDD/SDD going the RGB route considering they tend to be somewhat obfuscated, but the faster storage sticks that are all the rage in gaming PCs now may be a candidate (I say that mostly because of the RGB memory modules mentioned earlier). It is a trend I wish didn't happen, honestly, but I know it is a case of trying to consolidate and appease two audiences (performance hungry users and enthusiasts) so it is what it is.
      - 7y ago
pmoriarty 7y ago
I'd expect there are far, far more servers than there are developer machines. There are probably many more servers than hardcore gamers as well, and maybe even more than all gamers put together. It'd be nice to see some hard stats on this, however.
- streb-lo 7y ago
  Which don't use desktop CPUs...
- jwandborg 7y ago
  The vast majority of servers run on server CPUs, not on desktop CPUs. AMDs server CPUs are called EPYC, Intel's are called Xeon.

CoolGuySteve 7y ago

Before Vulkan, there were more bottlenecks on multithreaded rendering. Most games pushed everything to a single drawing thread. Hopefully going forward that will change, but even with Red Dead Redemption 2's Vulkan implementation, a 6 core Intel/AMD chip is competitive with this processor at lower settings/resolutions where the GPU is less of a bottleneck. Compute bound games like Civilization 6 do scale with processor count however.

swebs 7y ago
Factorio is also limited by single core performance, with the developers saying they have no plans to implement multithreading.
- kuzko_topia 7y ago
  This is unfortunate, and I'm saying this as an AMD owner and factorio player. Do you have a source for this?
jsgo 7y ago
that reminds me of what I had read on EverQuest 2. I downloaded it when it went f2p years after launch. My gaming PC had some issues with it which seemed nuts as it could handle more intensive games. After reading up on it, EQ2 came about a little bit before the shift to multiple cores which was to their detriment: they basically expected single core performance to keep going up substantially (as it had during EQ1 era) and not expanding to multiple cores. As such, they optimized against a configuration that never ended up existing.
shmerl 7y ago
The Witcher 3 likes all 12 cores on my Ryzen 9 3900X when running in Wine+dxvk, thanks to Vulkan (especially for faster shader compilation). Same as they are useful for compiling Mesa and Linux kernel ;)

api 7y ago

It's like vehicles. Desktops/workstations and even most non-tablet laptops are now analogous to small trucks such as pickups. Tablets and phones are cars. Most people drive cars. Trucks are for work or people who like to haul stuff. Servers and huge workstations I guess are like 18-wheelers and locomotives. :) The "mobile is the future of everything" people were wrong. It's not that desktop is going away, but the market is re-segmenting. Most casual users don't need a desktop. They just need a UI device that can run apps and access services. So you now have a bisection of the computing device market into pro/workplace type devices and casual user devices. I suppose there's a third category too: hobbyist and enthusiast devices. That's where I'd put things like the Raspberry Pi or more techie geared laptops that run Linux. I predict that rather than converging with mobile, desktop will actually pivot more toward pro, developer, and power user needs. Apple's recent 16 inch Pro release is a baby step in that direction on the hardware level. You'll probably see it at the software and OS level too. Desktop might actually shed a little bit of its user-friendliness gloss in favor of being unabashedly "pro." "If you don't want to know what a network, a folder, a file, or an IP address is, get a tablet."

neogodless 7y ago
Suddenly number of wheels is analogous to cores... Motorcycle - fast for gaming Car/SUV - good general purpose Truck (dually) - serious work (probably fun) 18-wheeler - move a load of loads at once But apparently that makes the Ryzen 9 3950X a 16-wheel Porsche Cayenne Turbo S? Super fun to drive but you can use it to haul...
- api 7y ago
  Hah... yeah the analogy gets silly if you make it literal and stretch it too far. I was just using it to talk about how different types of devices specialize for different use cases. Phones: ultra-portable communication and rapid service interaction device -- basically a pocket terminal. Skill level: beginner / non-technical. Tablets: casual computing devices suitable for reading, writing, some forms of content creation, and games. Skill level: beginner / non-technical. Desktops/Laptops: more powerful and flexible devices for serious content creation, high-end gaming, development, heavy number crunching, etc. Skill level: intermediate to advanced users. They're still relatively easy to use for casual use cases but they have more knobs, expose more details, and have less training wheels / guard rails to keep you from breaking things. Servers: big machines that sit in one place in a data center, office, or basement and run lots of stuff. Skill level: mostly advanced users. SBCs like the Pi: hobbyist devices for hacking, DIY IOT, DIY automation, etc. Skill level: mostly advanced users. Then of course there's a long tail of specialized and smaller devices like watches, FitBits, IOT, etc.

intarga 7y ago

>While the gaming market is (usually) seeking the highest top single core clock speed with respect to CPUs, it also relies on other expensive hardware. Meanwhile the dev/content creator/workstation market is much better served by these multi-core behemoths. It's not really that cut and dried, plenty of dev workloads are better served by high top single core, while plenty of gaming workloads are better served by multi core.

zamubafoo 7y ago
You are absolutely correct. I might be wrong but I've always heard that the general rule of thumb for gaming CPU purchases is get best single core speed if you aren't buying for a specific game. Also, I based my statement on my workloads which involves a lot of virtualization.
- orclev 7y ago
  The gaming market is in some ways on the trailing edge of technology. While they're often one of the first to embrace new hardware, they're very slow to adopt changes in software or architecture because the engines that drive most of that are few and tend to evolve slowly. Until Unreal Engine, Unity, or one of the other major game engines fully embrace an architecture that allows developers to easily saturate multiple cores, most games are still going to be bottlenecked by single core performance. On the other hand, it should be blatantly obvious to anyone even remotely connected with development that full multi-core utilization is the only way to keep improving performance going forward, so sooner or later the game engine developers are going to need to fully embrace that.
  - e_proxus 7y ago
    Unity's new Data-Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS) aims to take advantage of multi-threading by default. It's done transparently as far as it is possible, with the help of a new burst comipiler system, their new job system and the Entity Component System (ECS). https://unity.com/dots https://unity.com/dots
- paulmd 7y ago

Someone1234 7y ago

I agree with your overall synopsis of the status quo. We might however see gaming shift more to multi-core workloads as the next gen of consoles are highly likely to contain 8 core (16T) AMD CPUs based on Zen2 (and a lot of games are made for the lowest common denominator). This shouldn't be confused with the 8 core APUs found in current gen. Next gen will have an 8 core CPU and a NAVI 12+ GPU.

undersuit 7y ago
LinusTechTips made a video recently where they took an Intel Skulltrail, which is an enthusiast dual-socket Core 2 Quad platform from 2008(!), through a modern OS and game test. They platform was struggling until the enabled the Vulkan API in games. We have consoles to thank for that, without the low speed, high core count CPUs of the PS4 and Xbox One there'd be little justification for optimizing games for Vulkan and DX12
paulmd 7y ago
To be clear it's a shift from 8C8T to 8C16T (8C with SMT). The main change here is a massive (~3x) improvement in per-core performance. It's not actually a shift to (significantly) more threading but actually a shift to more per-core performance, like desktop PCs currently use. Consoles are getting desktop-like processors for the first time. This is creating quite a bit of anxiety in the desktop gaming community since high framerates depend on desktop processors being able to significantly outperform consoles on a per-core basis, and that will no longer be the case.

Tepix 7y ago

You're forgetting about the low budget CPUs used for desktop PCs. AMD has a pretty good standing with their Vega GPUs built into the Ryzen/Athlon APUs. Or are you only talking about enthusiasts?

zamubafoo 7y ago
If we are looking at the budget systems, then AMD wins hands down. Not only do their Athlon 200 CPUs have appallingly good cost to performance ratios (with Vega GPUs and a CPU cooler), they also share the same socket with the Ryzen lineup. At the moment, I wouldn't recommend anything but AMD for CPU since you can buy at any price point then upgrade. I think the only price point that Intel does have a slight advantage is the ~$500 mark.
- aoeusnth1 7y ago
  And even then Intel's only advantage is on single-threaded workloads. At $500, you can get a 12-core AMD (3900X) for the same price as the 8-core Intel (9900K).

burtonator 7y ago

I LOVE that the gaming market has created a serious desire for quality desktop hardware. I now build my workstations by hand and install Ubuntu. It's really nice to work on quality hardware!

kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
As long as you want unnecessary lighting and gaping, EMI releasing, windowed cases.
- overcast 7y ago
  All easily avoidable.
  - redisman 7y ago
    I just build a mid-range gaming PC. CPUs don't have RGB, memory modules don't have RGB, some overpriced motherboards have RGB, HDD/SSD don't have RGB, some overpriced GPUs had them but I was looking for value for money.
    - jsgo 7y ago
      on the GPU side, it seems RGB is the common thread. There are ways to disable it, but they aren't particularly great as they really only come into play post-OS loading (I have my GPU in an external enclosure so I see it more than I would in a desktop). Memory modules do have RGB, but you specifically have to buy them (they're the exception, currently). CPUs don't have RGB, but the fans that are going to be mounted on them may be (Ryzen's CPU fans that come with the CPUs have them iirc). I don't see HDD/SDD going the RGB route considering they tend to be somewhat obfuscated, but the faster storage sticks that are all the rage in gaming PCs now may be a candidate (I say that mostly because of the RGB memory modules mentioned earlier). It is a trend I wish didn't happen, honestly, but I know it is a case of trying to consolidate and appease two audiences (performance hungry users and enthusiasts) so it is what it is.
    - 7y ago

pmoriarty 7y ago

I'd expect there are far, far more servers than there are developer machines. There are probably many more servers than hardcore gamers as well, and maybe even more than all gamers put together. It'd be nice to see some hard stats on this, however.

streb-lo 7y ago
Which don't use desktop CPUs...
jwandborg 7y ago
The vast majority of servers run on server CPUs, not on desktop CPUs. AMDs server CPUs are called EPYC, Intel's are called Xeon.