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Yes, there are lots of stories of individuals and companies choosing AMD over Intel. For me, what's more interesting would be any contrarian view listing the c

by jasode 7y ago

Yes, there are lots of stories of individuals and companies choosing AMD over Intel. For me, what's more interesting would be any contrarian view listing the compelling reasons to pay the higher price for Intel instead of AMD. Off the top my head, some reasons would be: - Intel AVX-512 instruction set - Intel 4 and 8 sockets What realistic workloads have a better performance/cost advantage on Intel vs AMD EPYC? If you're a home user (gamer, programmer), is there any reason to buy Intel today? I'm about to buy another motherboard & CPU and considering AMD for the first time. In the past, I avoided it because AMD had an incompatibility (e.g. VMware) that kept me on Intel. (E.g. previous example of AMD showstopping bug affecting VMware: https://communities.vmware.com/thread/456094 https://communities.vmware.com/thread/456094)

pedrocr 7y ago
> If you're a home user (gamer, programmer), is there any reason to buy Intel today? There's definitely not much. I believe absolute peak single-core performance can still be slightly higher on Intel which is important for gaming, but maybe the last few AMD chips also killed that. And there are also some tools that are not well optimized or don't yet fully support AMD yet. For example: https://github.com/mozilla/rr/issues/2034 https://github.com/mozilla/rr/issues/2034 This year's release of Zen 3 looks very promising. Hopefully RAM manufacturers wake up and we also get a bunch more ECC options that aren't so overpriced and slow.
- MrStonedOne 7y ago
  > There's definitely not much. I believe absolute peak single-core performance can still be slightly higher on Intel https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html It's still weird to see amd anywhere near the top of this list, a few years ago the first few screenfulls were intel.
  - pedrocr 7y ago
    >>but maybe the last few AMD chips also killed that. It's definitely quite close but PassMark just shows that it's a tie and it's not necessarily representative of game workloads. It all depends on how much overclocking headroom there is. The enthusiasts for this kind of thing will throw great cooling at these chips and get the best out of them. I wouldn't be surprised if the advantage AMD now has in fabrication meant it also won there though.
PaulKeeble 7y ago
Clockspeed/IPC. Intel still is a bit quicker on average in games, about 7% compared to the equivalently priced Ryzen CPU. Some games, especially older ones, it can be as much as 20% for some outliers that are still quite popular. Intel is also tending to win in lowly threaded desktop applications because it can boost higher for longer. AMD's single-core boost is for quite short periods and only on one core with a quicker drop off as more cores are utilised, but Intel will maintain its boost in well-cooled conditions for many minutes or forever with a bios setting (many motherboards come this way by default although it's technically outside of spec) and it will happily also run the single-core overclock with all cores, again with a bios setting (also out of spec, also often comes turned on by default). AMD's CPUs are pushed much harder out of the factory and only 1 core on the chip can achieve the stated highest clock speed so it just can't do the same thing. Intel ends up better somewhat better in low threaded stuff, games and applications, due to similar IPC but higher clock speed. But AMD CPUs beat it soundly for anything that can utilise more threads as at the same price you get 50% more cores than you do with Intel at least. Below a certain clock speed boost and price Intel just isn't worth it at all, neither are its productivity chips. 9700k, 9900K, 9900kS the soon to be released equivalent 10000 chips, those are still worth it compared to the 3900k, 3800k for certain gaming. Below that however I wouldn't bother with Intel at all and I certainly wouldn't bother with Intel at 60hz, it only really plays at high refresh rates or very particular games. Saying that just be aware that the Intel CPU will probably age worse as threading continues to increase, all be it a very slow process. It really is going to depend on if you play AAA games or whether you play something particular or indy games and if they have problems with performance and are also lowly threaded.
- lumberingjack 7y ago
  The only thing that matters to me is that Intel has been screwing us over monetarily for almost a decade. I wouldn't care if AMD was 30% slower( it's not more like 5%) I'm giving them my money cuz they're not screwing me over
- LeoNatan25 7y ago
  You are several years out of date. Please take a look at benchmarks and real usage from the last few months. With Zen 2, AMD has won the IPC game. Their Threadripper 64 core CPUs boost to 4GHz. There is just no alternative to this kind of performance to be found anywhere in Intel products right now.
sebow 7y ago
Honestly, unless you eventually want to build a hackintosh(which is very easy with Intel if you know what parts to buy compared to AMD), not really. For special cases where you need intel MKL then you might be forced to use intel,but at that point you're not really restrained by a budget and it's more than a home/consumer experience.
vbezhenar 7y ago
I'm not considering AMD because I'm afraid of stability issues. Too many things that's just unacceptable for me happened with AMD CPUs in the past (kernel panic when compiling stuff; RNG issues zeros after suspend and so on). I don't really need that many cores and price difference is not that big to consider moving from Intel. But that's for my home usage. Anyway I'm really happy that AMD exists and releases good products, because Intel slashes prices like crazy. Another practical issue is running hackintosh in VM. It was not possible on AMD few years ago and even if it's possible now, it's unlikely as stable and I want to keep that ability.
- read_if_gay_ 7y ago
  > I'm not considering AMD because I'm afraid of stability issues What about the plethora of security issues that are present in Intel but not AMD CPUs? Not sure there's a case to be made that Intel CPUs have less bugs.
  - vbezhenar 7y ago
    Those are theoretical threats for personal computer. I don't care about them and I'm disabling software mitigations on my computer.
Spooky23 7y ago
For home users, nothing. For larger businesses, it’s all about dollars, and there are some good use cases for AMD. I would say that in the past, some OEMs have very fickle support for AMD lines, and you can run into problems if you have many of them affected by some obscure bug that isn’t getting fixed.
throw_554323 7y ago
> If you're a home user (gamer, programmer), is there any reason to buy Intel today? If you need EEC ram? I know technically AMD supports it for their Ryzen line, but everything I’ve read says it’s up to the motherboard manufacturer to support it. And even if the motherboard manufacturer says you can use ECC ram, it doesn’t mean it will actually “use” it correctly. So you mainly need to rely on others doing tests on their own systems to confirm if the motherboard actually uses it. My understanding is that you need to use the EPYC line for guaranteed ECC usage, which is really expensive. Intel’s W series Xeons start off at a reasonable price, and there are even cheaper Celerons that will use ECC ram.
- microcolonel 7y ago
  > I know technically AMD supports it for their Ryzen line, but everything I’ve read says it’s up to the motherboard manufacturer to support it. AFAIK every ASRock AM4 motherboard supports ECC. Also, most Intel processors do not support ECC at all, except the ones which are competing (in some limited sense, since they are being absolutely crushed at most price points) with Threadripper, in which case, ECC is available across the board (and glorious quad-channel memory).
- ohmaigad 7y ago
  It is the same thing with Intel - motherboard must support ECC and actually use it.
- balls187 7y ago
  Anecdotally, I've heard similar issues with AMD chip-sets and RAM.
endorphone 7y ago
While we haven't seen it for a while, this is real competition. In response Intel dramatically dropped prices (by over half) of their Xeon's within the past couple of days. And hopefully they'll refresh their line again. https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/3352/intel-refreshes-2nd-gen-xeon-scalable-slashes-prices/ https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/3352/intel-refreshes-2nd-gen-...
KaiserPro 7y ago
I think the real reason people are sticking with intel is the support and supplychain. Intel have a reasonable two-way communications system with big customers, they also write their own firmware still, instead of slinging it out to contractors (although AMD are apparently changing that) crucially they are able to supply 500k procs at a fixed price in a fixed deadline. AMD are yet to be able to do that for big non-consumer suppliers(is what my hardware contacts tell me that is. )
thedance 7y ago
For a home user I would think a relevant aspect might be the ready availability of well-integrated systems like the NUC. I just replaced a NUC with a new NUC even though I am aware of Zen2, I know it has its qualities, and I know how to build computers.
764_OC 7y ago
I'm interested to know where people use AVX-512. Off the top of my head, I can think of machine learning and crypto. Machine learning---that is, matrix/tensor stuff---seems more like a GPU workload. That leaves crypto, but most crypto (eg ChaCha or Keccak) only make use of 128 or 256-bit extensions (in fact, they seem to designed with this constraint in mind.)
- brobinson 7y ago
  Video encoding comes to mind.
  - arsome 7y ago
    Depends on your use case but the most recent GPU encoders are pretty solid actually. Used to be that they were awful for quality, but more recently they seem to have vastly improved.
    - BubRoss 7y ago
      The person above was asking what people use AVX512 for and video encoding is a big use case, better GPU encoders don't change that.
      - arsome 7y ago
        The person above also pointed out that things like machine learning are often better done on a GPU anyways. Certainly if you offload your video encoding to your GPU it does change the value proposition of that entirely.
        BubRoss 7y ago
        I'm not sure what you are trying to say exactly but it seems like you are making some sort of prediction of the future. Video encoding, especially newer codecs like HEVC and VP9 are CPU intensive and SIMD optimized tasks that people are doing right now.
balls187 7y ago
https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-9700K-vs-AMD-Ryzen-7-3800X/4030vs4047 https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-9700K-vs... Comparing the similar priced Intel and AMD CPU's shows Intel has a slight advantage. Reading the conclusion, it seems for Overclocked performance, AMD is the winner, especially when factoring in large core workloads. As games and typical "home-user" scenarios are not designed to take advantage of large multi-core CPU's, Intel would appear to be the better choice at the ~$350 CPU level.
- unlinked_dll 7y ago
  I mean gamers probably shouldn't be buying a processor for $350 unless they plan on doing parallel workloads anyway. The tier below it won't be a bottleneck.
- tuananh 7y ago
  dont use this site. they do all kind of shady things to make Intel CPUs look better https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/chco8h/userbenchmark_should_no_longer_be_used_after_they/ https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/chco8h/userbenchm...
  - balls187 7y ago
    Thank you. I was not aware of that.
alexhutcheson 7y ago
The rr debugger, which is an amazing productivity enhancer for C/C++ development, still doesn't support AMD: https://github.com/mozilla/rr/issues/2034 https://github.com/mozilla/rr/issues/2034
- tuananh 7y ago
  i wonder why doesn't AMD sponsor these kind of projects to get maintainers to support their CPU. it helps both parties.
  - roca 7y ago
    If you look at the rr issue, there is plenty of interest from the rr maintainers (of whom I am one), and also some engagement from AMD. The problem is there is a deep bug in AMD's performance counters or their kernel PMU driver, it's really hard to figure out, and the AMD staff best placed to figure it out are (I assume) really busy.

by jasode 7y ago

pedrocr 7y ago

> If you're a home user (gamer, programmer), is there any reason to buy Intel today? There's definitely not much. I believe absolute peak single-core performance can still be slightly higher on Intel which is important for gaming, but maybe the last few AMD chips also killed that. And there are also some tools that are not well optimized or don't yet fully support AMD yet. For example: https://github.com/mozilla/rr/issues/2034 https://github.com/mozilla/rr/issues/2034 This year's release of Zen 3 looks very promising. Hopefully RAM manufacturers wake up and we also get a bunch more ECC options that aren't so overpriced and slow.

MrStonedOne 7y ago
> There's definitely not much. I believe absolute peak single-core performance can still be slightly higher on Intel https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html It's still weird to see amd anywhere near the top of this list, a few years ago the first few screenfulls were intel.
- pedrocr 7y ago
  >>but maybe the last few AMD chips also killed that. It's definitely quite close but PassMark just shows that it's a tie and it's not necessarily representative of game workloads. It all depends on how much overclocking headroom there is. The enthusiasts for this kind of thing will throw great cooling at these chips and get the best out of them. I wouldn't be surprised if the advantage AMD now has in fabrication meant it also won there though.

PaulKeeble 7y ago

Clockspeed/IPC. Intel still is a bit quicker on average in games, about 7% compared to the equivalently priced Ryzen CPU. Some games, especially older ones, it can be as much as 20% for some outliers that are still quite popular. Intel is also tending to win in lowly threaded desktop applications because it can boost higher for longer. AMD's single-core boost is for quite short periods and only on one core with a quicker drop off as more cores are utilised, but Intel will maintain its boost in well-cooled conditions for many minutes or forever with a bios setting (many motherboards come this way by default although it's technically outside of spec) and it will happily also run the single-core overclock with all cores, again with a bios setting (also out of spec, also often comes turned on by default). AMD's CPUs are pushed much harder out of the factory and only 1 core on the chip can achieve the stated highest clock speed so it just can't do the same thing. Intel ends up better somewhat better in low threaded stuff, games and applications, due to similar IPC but higher clock speed. But AMD CPUs beat it soundly for anything that can utilise more threads as at the same price you get 50% more cores than you do with Intel at least. Below a certain clock speed boost and price Intel just isn't worth it at all, neither are its productivity chips. 9700k, 9900K, 9900kS the soon to be released equivalent 10000 chips, those are still worth it compared to the 3900k, 3800k for certain gaming. Below that however I wouldn't bother with Intel at all and I certainly wouldn't bother with Intel at 60hz, it only really plays at high refresh rates or very particular games. Saying that just be aware that the Intel CPU will probably age worse as threading continues to increase, all be it a very slow process. It really is going to depend on if you play AAA games or whether you play something particular or indy games and if they have problems with performance and are also lowly threaded.

lumberingjack 7y ago
The only thing that matters to me is that Intel has been screwing us over monetarily for almost a decade. I wouldn't care if AMD was 30% slower( it's not more like 5%) I'm giving them my money cuz they're not screwing me over
LeoNatan25 7y ago
You are several years out of date. Please take a look at benchmarks and real usage from the last few months. With Zen 2, AMD has won the IPC game. Their Threadripper 64 core CPUs boost to 4GHz. There is just no alternative to this kind of performance to be found anywhere in Intel products right now.

sebow 7y ago

Honestly, unless you eventually want to build a hackintosh(which is very easy with Intel if you know what parts to buy compared to AMD), not really. For special cases where you need intel MKL then you might be forced to use intel,but at that point you're not really restrained by a budget and it's more than a home/consumer experience.

vbezhenar 7y ago

I'm not considering AMD because I'm afraid of stability issues. Too many things that's just unacceptable for me happened with AMD CPUs in the past (kernel panic when compiling stuff; RNG issues zeros after suspend and so on). I don't really need that many cores and price difference is not that big to consider moving from Intel. But that's for my home usage. Anyway I'm really happy that AMD exists and releases good products, because Intel slashes prices like crazy. Another practical issue is running hackintosh in VM. It was not possible on AMD few years ago and even if it's possible now, it's unlikely as stable and I want to keep that ability.

read_if_gay_ 7y ago
> I'm not considering AMD because I'm afraid of stability issues What about the plethora of security issues that are present in Intel but not AMD CPUs? Not sure there's a case to be made that Intel CPUs have less bugs.
- vbezhenar 7y ago
  Those are theoretical threats for personal computer. I don't care about them and I'm disabling software mitigations on my computer.

Spooky23 7y ago

For home users, nothing. For larger businesses, it’s all about dollars, and there are some good use cases for AMD. I would say that in the past, some OEMs have very fickle support for AMD lines, and you can run into problems if you have many of them affected by some obscure bug that isn’t getting fixed.

throw_554323 7y ago

> If you're a home user (gamer, programmer), is there any reason to buy Intel today? If you need EEC ram? I know technically AMD supports it for their Ryzen line, but everything I’ve read says it’s up to the motherboard manufacturer to support it. And even if the motherboard manufacturer says you can use ECC ram, it doesn’t mean it will actually “use” it correctly. So you mainly need to rely on others doing tests on their own systems to confirm if the motherboard actually uses it. My understanding is that you need to use the EPYC line for guaranteed ECC usage, which is really expensive. Intel’s W series Xeons start off at a reasonable price, and there are even cheaper Celerons that will use ECC ram.

microcolonel 7y ago
> I know technically AMD supports it for their Ryzen line, but everything I’ve read says it’s up to the motherboard manufacturer to support it. AFAIK every ASRock AM4 motherboard supports ECC. Also, most Intel processors do not support ECC at all, except the ones which are competing (in some limited sense, since they are being absolutely crushed at most price points) with Threadripper, in which case, ECC is available across the board (and glorious quad-channel memory).
ohmaigad 7y ago
It is the same thing with Intel - motherboard must support ECC and actually use it.
balls187 7y ago
Anecdotally, I've heard similar issues with AMD chip-sets and RAM.

endorphone 7y ago

While we haven't seen it for a while, this is real competition. In response Intel dramatically dropped prices (by over half) of their Xeon's within the past couple of days. And hopefully they'll refresh their line again. https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/3352/intel-refreshes-2nd-gen-xeon-scalable-slashes-prices/ https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/3352/intel-refreshes-2nd-gen-...

KaiserPro 7y ago

I think the real reason people are sticking with intel is the support and supplychain. Intel have a reasonable two-way communications system with big customers, they also write their own firmware still, instead of slinging it out to contractors (although AMD are apparently changing that) crucially they are able to supply 500k procs at a fixed price in a fixed deadline. AMD are yet to be able to do that for big non-consumer suppliers(is what my hardware contacts tell me that is. )

thedance 7y ago

For a home user I would think a relevant aspect might be the ready availability of well-integrated systems like the NUC. I just replaced a NUC with a new NUC even though I am aware of Zen2, I know it has its qualities, and I know how to build computers.

764_OC 7y ago

I'm interested to know where people use AVX-512. Off the top of my head, I can think of machine learning and crypto. Machine learning---that is, matrix/tensor stuff---seems more like a GPU workload. That leaves crypto, but most crypto (eg ChaCha or Keccak) only make use of 128 or 256-bit extensions (in fact, they seem to designed with this constraint in mind.)

brobinson 7y ago
Video encoding comes to mind.
- arsome 7y ago
  Depends on your use case but the most recent GPU encoders are pretty solid actually. Used to be that they were awful for quality, but more recently they seem to have vastly improved.
  - BubRoss 7y ago
    The person above was asking what people use AVX512 for and video encoding is a big use case, better GPU encoders don't change that.
    - arsome 7y ago
      The person above also pointed out that things like machine learning are often better done on a GPU anyways. Certainly if you offload your video encoding to your GPU it does change the value proposition of that entirely.
      - BubRoss 7y ago
        I'm not sure what you are trying to say exactly but it seems like you are making some sort of prediction of the future. Video encoding, especially newer codecs like HEVC and VP9 are CPU intensive and SIMD optimized tasks that people are doing right now.

balls187 7y ago

https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-9700K-vs-AMD-Ryzen-7-3800X/4030vs4047 https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-9700K-vs... Comparing the similar priced Intel and AMD CPU's shows Intel has a slight advantage. Reading the conclusion, it seems for Overclocked performance, AMD is the winner, especially when factoring in large core workloads. As games and typical "home-user" scenarios are not designed to take advantage of large multi-core CPU's, Intel would appear to be the better choice at the ~$350 CPU level.

unlinked_dll 7y ago
I mean gamers probably shouldn't be buying a processor for $350 unless they plan on doing parallel workloads anyway. The tier below it won't be a bottleneck.
tuananh 7y ago
dont use this site. they do all kind of shady things to make Intel CPUs look better https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/chco8h/userbenchmark_should_no_longer_be_used_after_they/ https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/chco8h/userbenchm...
- balls187 7y ago
  Thank you. I was not aware of that.

alexhutcheson 7y ago

The rr debugger, which is an amazing productivity enhancer for C/C++ development, still doesn't support AMD: https://github.com/mozilla/rr/issues/2034 https://github.com/mozilla/rr/issues/2034

tuananh 7y ago
i wonder why doesn't AMD sponsor these kind of projects to get maintainers to support their CPU. it helps both parties.
- roca 7y ago
  If you look at the rr issue, there is plenty of interest from the rr maintainers (of whom I am one), and also some engagement from AMD. The problem is there is a deep bug in AMD's performance counters or their kernel PMU driver, it's really hard to figure out, and the AMD staff best placed to figure it out are (I assume) really busy.