10 ms·
AMD is dominating Intel in Amazon's best-selling CPUs list
- jaredtn 7y agoAMD is blowing Intel out of the water with the latest benchmarks. Intel's lone remaining advantage is its MKL performance in single-threaded performance (and they've done some shady handicapping of AMD CPUs to get there), but in multiprocessing and most ML workflows AMD is the clear winner. The ThreadRipper series is an amazing product.
- shaklee3 7y agoI would say that AMD should make their own mkl if they want to compete. It's fine that it runs on AMD, but it is, after all, a closed-source library made by Intel. At some point amd needs to take the software side seriously. Same goes for GPU.
- stevefan1999 7y agoWhat about OpenBLAS?
- shaklee3 7y agoOpenblas is significantly slower than mkl for most things, and doesn't have all the same features (only the blas part). It's also not developed by AMD. I think they need to take their software more seriously in general, since the best hardware doesn't matter with poor libraries.
- knweiss 7y agoFWIW: AMD offers this: https://developer.amd.com/amd-aocl/blas-library/ https://developer.amd.com/amd-aocl/blas-library/ The source code is available on GitHub.
- shaklee3 7y agoI think AMD needs to take a page from Nvidia and really get their software together. The CPU and GPU libraries are a mess. There are multiple versions of libraries where in some cases both are maintained and it's not clear which to use, and in others, one is dead but may perform better than the new one. Intel and Nvidia let you download a single package for all scientific computing.
- puranjay 7y agoThe 3950x Threadripper numbers make Intel look like a chump. The only areas where Intel still has an edge is single core performance. In anything multicore, AMD's numbers are downright outrageous
- fnord77 7y agofrom a developer point of view, AMD does not support record/replay debugging execution
- xeeeeeeeeeeenu 7y agoChanging that is a work in progress: https://github.com/mozilla/rr/issues/2034 https://github.com/mozilla/rr/issues/2034
- clarry 7y agoIs it? Based on the comments, the situation looks like "it doesn't work and nobody has figured out how to make it work."
- capableweb 7y agoYeah, no one is clearly saying "we won't work on this and if you do, we won't accept a pull request" but instead "we currently don't know how to do it", meaning that if they figure out a way to do it, it'll happen at one point, either from 3rd party or themselves.
- binarycrusader 7y agoWith rr maybe but visual studio’s or windbg’s time travel debugging works just fine afaik.
- rubber_duck 7y agoMeanwhile Intel is still the only good option for laptops and I haven't used a desktop for 5+ years. Not saying this to bring down Intel success just wondering how much volume is in desktop vs laptop and hoping AMD can transition here as well.
- neogodless 7y agoNah Zen isn't perfect for laptop but I've seen them in action and they are good options. Of course, Zen 2 APUs will help things there.
- Redoubts 7y agoI’m waiting for January where they release their mobile offerings. Hopefully they’ll be able to impress a little more this time around.
- gameswithgo 7y agolaptops are hard for amd due to oem backroom deals with intel, but with the popularity of zen2 that should start to crack i think. once zen2 mobile cpus hit the market we will start to see more amd laptops i think
- agumonkey 7y agoSome supermarket ads in the mail last month showed 3 laptops, 1 very low end atom x5 "skype machine" and 2 amd zen based medium class. I think zen will make a lot of sense for the majority of people. price/perf will reign over intel potential hedt products. If you give a 4 core + good gpu to the average joe for half the price of an intel he'll probably never look back.
- tsss 7y agoAMD has always been better at price/performance but in the laptop space the number 1 through 10 most important features are efficiency. Intel CPUs use less power and make less heat, which has always been the limiting factor.
- 7y ago
- Shakahs 7y agoI know AMD's resurgence is old news by now, but it's still impressive to look at Amazon's CPU best sellers and see them holding the entire top 10. The first Intel product is the i7-9700K at #12. https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Computers-Accessories-Computer-CPU-Processors/zgbs/pc/229189 https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Computers-Accessories-Co...
- xiphias2 7y agoIf I look at the AMD stock price it seems like when Lisa Su took over AMD in 2014 she brought it back from the dead (and made a 10x valuation in 5 years). Here's a relatively fresh iterview with her if others are interested as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amBe2bofVas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amBe2bofVas
- NOGDP 7y agoI'm no expert but the 200x P/E ratio seems risky in terms of investing.
- bgorman 7y agoAMD stock has been one of the most speculative stocks over the past ten years
- wahern 7y ago10 years? Try 20+. The last time AMD had this valuation was circa 2000, the first and last time I ever bought AMD stock. Not just AMD; I swore off technology stocks altogether after that, at least for speculation. What AMD taught me early on is that a good product is only a small element of success; a superior product doesn't give much of an advantage, if any at all. And knowing too much about a technology or industry can be dangerous, which is why I swore off technology stocks.
- lottin 7y agoMost people probably don't want to hold individual stocks anyway as it's too risky an investment. Mathematical models suggest that the optimal investing strategy for any investor is holding a "well-diversified" portfolio in which firm-specific risks cancel themselves out and you are left with the minimum possible amount of risk.
- jdsully 7y agoIt's a bet they can take dramatic share from Intel. Intel earned $21bln last year, if they had AMD's market cap it would be a P/E of 2.07. If you don't believe AMD can take significant share away from Intel then the valuation doesn't make sense.
- _nickwhite 7y agoBetter performance [2] with less cores, much better pricing, and the kicker for me is PCI Express 4.0 [1]. Intel doesn't even support the newest generation of NVMe storage. So yeah, AMD is dominating for a good reason- for now anyways. [1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/3400176/pcie-40-everything-you-need-to-know-specs-compatibility.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/3400176/pcie-40-everything-y... [2] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html
- judge2020 7y agoI think you mean "with more cores", not less.
- wmf 7y agoAMD has more cores available, but also AMD's cheaper 16-core beats Intel's 18-core in many tests.
- behnamoh 7y agoThere's this really fascinating paper about how AMD has made Intel to innovate more and that AMD itself has found cheaper ways to stay on the CPU quality frontier: https://www.its.caltech.edu/~mshum/gradio/papers/GoettlerGordon2011.pdf https://www.its.caltech.edu/~mshum/gradio/papers/GoettlerGor...
- behnamoh 7y agoI have to correct myself: with the presence of AMD, Intel has been innovating less than it would if the market were a monopoly.
- mey 7y agoPlus ECC support
- spamizbad 7y ago
- nknealk 7y agoThey’re also making headway into the data center space. AWS has recently announced that compute dense instances will have an AMD powered version. They already have AMD offerings for GP and RAM dense instances. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-new-amd-powered-compute-optimized-ec2-instances-c5a-c5ad/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-new-amd-powere...
- gundmc 7y agoGCP and Azure are offering AMD Epyc Rome based instances as well. Intel is losing their death grip on the data center space quickly. https://cloudblog.withgoogle.com/products/compute/amd-epyc-processors-come-to-google-and-to-google-cloud/amp/ https://cloudblog.withgoogle.com/products/compute/amd-epyc-p... https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-new-amd-epyc-based-azure-virtual-machines/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-new-amd-ep...
- pavelevst 7y agoHetzner also have some well priced offers with AMD cpus
- Bootwizard 7y agoThat's a last generation processor...their current generation is much more impressive. Twice as powerful than anything Intel has to offer at the SAME price as Intel.
- zaroth 7y agoCan anything beat the price/performance of the 2700x for $160 though?
- tyingq 7y agoInteresting for sure, but the market for people that buy a CPU chip as a standalone item probably doesn't relate much to the overall market. I am rooting for AMD though. Competition was sorely needed.
- topspin 7y ago> Interesting for sure, but the market for people that buy a CPU chip as a standalone item probably doesn't relate much to the overall market. The question then becomes how much the 'overall market' relates to profits. These manufacturers have consistently marketed to the enthusiast/home builder end of the market for decades now; they've never seriously neglected it. I suspect these sales are highly lucrative despite the relatively small volume. It astonishes me that one can mail order a 4096 pin device (sTRX4) and install it by hand in the kitchen, yet here we are, and it's been that way for a rather long time now. If it wasn't profitable the manufacturers would have stop feeding this market long ago.
- puranjay 7y agoBut this market influences purchase decisions at an enterprise level. You get the enthusiasts on your side and they'll recommend you over others when the CIO needs to find a new vendor.
- beatgammit 7y agoEh, gamers buy CPUs directly, and that's a growing market. That's smaller than the enterprise market, but many gamers are also tech professionals that make decisions about what hardware they buy. Hopefully that's enough to counteract the deals Intel has made in the past. Enterprises should run on the best products, not the best contract.
- ChuckMcM 7y agoMy TR3960X came in today, the TR3990X is on order :-). Since my current chassis isn't configured for liquid cooling I went with an air cooling solution and it is freakishly large, seriously.
- ssutch3 7y agoPics!
- ChuckMcM 7y agohttps://twitter.com/ChuckMcManis/status/1200587968341110786/photo/1 https://twitter.com/ChuckMcManis/status/1200587968341110786/...
- qes 7y ago> My TR3960X came in today From where?!? All I can find is B&H Photo with a pre-order estimating a month wait.
- ChuckMcM 7y agoA shop in the Bay Area called "Central Computers." Once ASUS announced their TR40 motherboard I told him I wanted that, 64GB of RAM, and a 3960 or 3970 when they came in. He called me Friday morning and said, "ok we have it". Since by that time the 3990 had been announced as well I told him to put me down for one of those when they got them as well to replace the 3960.
- qes 7y agoHuh, lucky. Apparently no one's got them online yet. Just hoping I don't have to wait as long as I did for my last CPU - an i7-6700k. It was quite a few weeks after "release" before I could actually buy one. I'll probably stick with 32GB of RAM for now - I don't run a lot of VM's or anything - but I'm going to try an Intel Optane as a main SSD drive this time. Thinking about the Aorus Master sTRX40 since I'm a bit partial to Gigabyte for motherboards. These TRX40 boards are not cheap.
- MikusR 7y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3817116 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3817116
- spicyramen 7y agoThis is great news for competition, same goes for GPU where Nvidia is still a monopoly
- jacek 7y agoWhen we consider deep learning practitioners and others relying on CUDA then yes, nvidia still has monopoly. But for gamers AMD's Radeon GPU is a compelling alternative.
- kungtotte 7y agoFor anyone on Linux it's also a better choice with Radeon, since they're actually cooperating with writing a FOSS driver for their cards. With nVidia you're stuck with a less than stellar third party FOSS driver or using nVidia's own proprietary driver.
- lottin 7y agoI think it's important that we support hardware vendors that cooperate with free software development, by buying their products - and punish those who don't, by not buying their products. Otherwise we can't complain.
- kungtotte 7y agoYep, voting with your wallet is the only direct action you can take in this world that will actually have an effect on corporations.
- ajconway 7y agoAs a mid-range option, maybe, but RTX absolutely dominates the high-end gaming this year.
- Roritharr 7y agoIt's really fascinating to watch them capture market share as you see where Intel is still entrenched for all kinds of reasons which are not price/perf wise. For example, we can't use AWS t3a instances with EPYC Cores as our Management Provider has all their images only compiled for, optimized and tested on Intel based VMs. The difference is still not large enough to bother to look into it, but next generation I expect the difference will be so large they can't ignore it.
- rwmj 7y agoAnother couple of differences: No support for rr because of some lack of performance counters[1]. I also found that lm-sensors can barely see my AMD Ryzen at all, missing all core temp information. I'm hoping that both of these will be fixed since it doesn't seem that AMD is missing anything intrinsicly. [1] https://github.com/mozilla/rr/issues/2034 https://github.com/mozilla/rr/issues/2034
- 62747478182 7y ago> I also found that lm-sensors can barely see my AMD Ryzen at all, missing all core temp information. This is fixed in Kernel 5.4, and some distros backported the fix to 5.3. I'm using Debian stable, with a kernel from buster-backports, and I can see the temperature for my CPU (Ryzen 7) and the GPU (Radeon RX 580).
- touisteur 7y agoAnd no support for Processor Trace or Coresight or some equivalent, which are amazing debug techs. Once you have them it's hard to live without...
- TheBobinator 7y agoIntel owns their own manufacturing process so they can crank out more volume than TSMC can on the smaller process nodes. TSMC Has a roadmap to 3nm by 2023, Intel is looking at 7nm by 2021. Unless Intel manufactures on TSMC's line, AMD will have a clear, near double to triple performance advantage for the next 2 generations. You're going to see Intel become the value brand for awhile and they're trying to avoid that because they are used to a cash cow.
- ComradeUlyanov 7y agoNot a surprise. AMD offers better CPUs at better prices.
- millstone 7y agoThe article ought to have acknowledged the numbers for whole PC sales, which paint a different picture: 8/10 of Amazon's best selling laptops are Intel: https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/pc/565108/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/pc/565108/ 9/10 for desktop PCs: https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Electronics-Desktop-Computers/zgbs/electronics/565098/ https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Electronics-Desktop-Comp...
- eklavya 7y agoI wish apple started providing an amd macbook.
- terramex 7y agoRight now AMD mobile chips are still less power efficient than Intel's.
- beatgammit 7y agoA little, but it's not that bad, especially since AMD's iGPU is way better. The 7nm mobile CPUs that are likely coming next year should fix that. That being said, I specifically sought out an AMD laptop because I want 4 cores and a better GPU without a dedicated GPU (battery and simplicity under Linux). I get enough battery life for now (~5 hours I think) on my ThinkPad E495, and if I need more, I'll get a USB power bank.
- jedisct1 7y agoIs it worth buying a Macbook Pro 16", or is Intel going to react with far better CPUs in the forthcoming months, including for laptops?
- Shorel 7y agoNow I want all these AMD CPU innovations to apply to Laptop processors too. Most computers sold nowadays are laptops. I am writing this from a Ryzen 5 laptop that's not really faster than the i5 laptop it replaced. If any, it is a bit slower, even with double the cores. The Radeon GPU on the other hand is way ahead of the previous integrated Intel GPU.
- mycall 7y agoI wonder how much of this is due to brain drain due to political immigration policies.