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An interesting proxy for CPU evolution is seeing the recommendations shift in communities like reddit.com/r/buildapc. Last year many medium to high end builds w

• traden209 7y ago
  You still can't beat intel at the high end. Both in terms of heat and performance. If you have a task that doesn't parallelize well, you can't beat intel. Games are traditionally single threaded and hard to parallelize. However: you don't need to be the best, you just need to be at the "agreed upon" high end for game requirements, which is the xbox and ps4 (soon to be next gen). And so, if you're trying to build a "generation proof" gaming PC in a standard sized case, the 3800X is currently your best bet for a new build (or waiting for zen3). If you're trying to do SFF, Intel may be a better choice. Regardless: AMD's competition has dropped the prices in the "enthusiast" segment. My next build will be AMD, simply because I don't need the best of the best, but rather, good enough.
  • Polylactic_acid 7y ago
    From what I have seen, the single threaded tasks are slightly better on intel but even in this linked article the AMD chips are winning slightly in single threaded. And in multi threaded the AMD CPUs absolutely blow away intel by a huge margin at a lower price.
  • ksec 7y ago
    >Games are traditionally single threaded and hard to parallelize. It is not that the Gamers and Prosumers dont know. But they are willing to trade ~10% of Single Thread Performance for Double the Core at a similar or less price point. Sounds like a very reasonable decision to me.
    • Polylactic_acid 7y ago
      Also games are hardly limited by CPU at all a 10% loss in single threaded won't be noticed at all but more cores will make a huge difference for other tasks.
      • brailsafe 7y ago
        Tell that to Cities Skylines or any game based on Unity
        • p1necone 7y ago
          Add Ashes of the Singularity to that list too, great worst case for benching gaming rigs cpu bottleneck.
        • Polylactic_acid 7y ago
          I haven't played in a while but I was happily playing it on an i7 4770k which is way under what both Intel and AMD sell now.
          • brailsafe 7y ago
            It doesn't appear to scale past a certain size of city very well. Lot's of people get best case baseline fps of around 50. Great game for the most part though.
        • jdietrich 7y ago
          Unity is transitioning to DOTS, a vastly more performant and parallelisable architecture. Obviously this isn't relevant to legacy titles, but "games are mostly single-threaded" is increasingly a thing of the past. https://unity.com/dots https://unity.com/dots
          • mrguyorama 7y ago
            And Unity is pretty much dead last in that spot too. Remember that both the PS4 and Xbox One are (formerly) high core AMD cpus. Anything that runs on them can handle multi-threaded processors pretty well
  • shmerl 7y ago
    > Games are traditionally single threaded and hard to parallelize. That's some dinosaur games from the past. Modern games are using all available CPU cores with something like Vulkan and saturate GPU fully. So Intel CPUs are left in the dust with all the cores you get from high end Ryzens.
    • p1necone 7y ago
      Yeah, this was true for basically everything like, 12? years ago. But it has been steadily getting less and less true as time goes on. Doesn't stop it being repeated constantly though. There should be a formalized law for this - anything that was once widely known as true (because it was) will continue to be treated as gospel far after it ceases to be the case.
      • bearbin 7y ago
        In technology, it seems to be the case that once some fact is old enough to be known as gospel, the world will have moved on enough that it's not true anymore. And when challenged by the new norm, the old guard repeat their gospel louder and in greater numbers! So if you hear some technological rule of thumb repeated often enough, you should doubt it even more than if you hadn't heard it at all.
  • gameswithgo 7y ago
    the new ryzens compile gcc things faster, even on one thread. and you get more cores per dollar all the way up
  • onli 7y ago
    That's a bit outdated. Yes, the fastest cpu for games is still an Intel cpu, the i9-9900K. But the distance is not big. The 3950X is very close, the more reasonable AMD cpus - Ryzen 7 3700X and Ryzen 5 3600 - are also close. I collect benchmarks, comparison here [0]. When the next Ryzen generation arrives on the desktop even that small top spot for Intel will likely end. It's not only that the turbo boost of those Ryzen cpus is high and at the same clock Intel does not have a lead anymore. It's also that recent games are already pretty parallelized. There is no need to wait for the next console generation to see that effect. Btw, the 3800X is not a good pick. It is just a minimally higher clocked 3700X. If you want 8 cores, get the 3700X, the higher price of the 3800X is just a waste of your money. But for gaming you want to stick to a Ryzen 5 3600. [0]: https://www.pc-kombo.com/us/benchmark/games/cpu/compare?ids[]=Intel+Core+i9-9900K&ids[]=AMD+Ryzen+9+3950X&ids[]=AMD+Ryzen+7+3700X&ids[]=AMD+Ryzen+5+3600 https://www.pc-kombo.com/us/benchmark/games/cpu/compare?ids[...
    • freeflight 7y ago
      > Btw, the 3800X is not a good pick. That really depends on the pricing situation, very much like with the 3600x. Over the months I've seen the price difference between a 3800x and 3700x see as low as 20€, the same with the 3600 and the 3600x. That's because the 3600 and 3700x are recommended, and sold so often that retailers sometimes end up sitting on large stocks of 3600x/3800x too long and clear them out at discounts. Imho even for gaming the 3800x might be a pretty good long term choice. The higher clocks are particularly relevant yet you still get the core advantage of the 3700x, without taking the same clock hit. But if it's all about the budget and price/performance then it's really difficult to beat the 3600.
      • onli 7y ago
        There is no big clock hit. The turbo clock is 4.4GHz vs 4.5GHz, that's nothing. In practice the difference is mostly 1 FPS. The base clock difference looks bigger, 300 MHz, but Ryzen does not stay at the base clock like old Intel cpus did, it always turbos. Now, if it's the same price there is no reason not to get the 3800X over the 3700X :)
  • blattimwind 7y ago
    > Games are traditionally single threaded and hard to parallelize. On my 3900X I've seen even single player action titles utilize 16+ threads with overall CPU utilization reaching peaks of 80-90 %. Yes, it maybe be hard to parallelize game engines, but all major ones heavily use multiple cores. A bunch of years ago (4-5) people would recommend an i3-K dual core for gaming, because you could overclock it to 5+ GHz on air. That was sufficient for many titles back then. (And these i3s would sometimes give you higher FPS compared to the more expensive quad-core options). But a CPU like that is far too weak for newer titles. > You still can't beat intel at the high end. Both in terms of heat and performance. If you have a task that doesn't parallelize well, you can't beat intel. In terms of heat, that is, performance per Watt, Intel's high end is quite a bit worse than AMD's. It is true however that you can get slightly higher single-threaded performance out of Intel's highest-end CPUs, but not because they are more efficient (- AMD is better both perf/W and IPC-wise), but just by raw, unadulterated clock speed, pushing them to 5+ GHz. And that causes them to burn a lot of power. Zen 2 has consistently ~10-15 % higher performance clock-for-clock compared to Intel's best while achieving approximately 60-80 % higher perf/W. This LTT review captures the massive advantage Zen 2 has in efficiency: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYqG31V4qtA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYqG31V4qtA
    • velox_io 7y ago
      The efficiency at load is great, the power usage at idle could use some improvement (I feel there's a missing update). My previous system (6700k boasting to 4.6ghz) used about 50 watts at idle (from the wall). After I switched motherboard and CPU (a 3950x, the rest is the same, plus new Windows install) the power usage at idle is ~90 watts. The power management is too eager to use all the cores, I'm pretty sure their would be zero decernable difference if they shutdown one of the CCDs (chiplets) when utilisation is low. I've played around with the power settings and ~90w is about the best it gets. Under load the system is brilliant (it's 4x faster with the same power usage, makes using my laptop painfully slow in comparison). The power management on these CPUs is incredibly advanced (each core runs at different speeds & voltages), I'm just surprised that it doesn't do better at idle.
      • 7y ago
  • jakogut 7y ago
    > You still can't beat intel at the high end. Both in terms of heat and performance. This sentiment is almost a year out of date. Since Zen 2 launched, Intel has a measurable disadvantage in IPC. Intel's single-thread performance is only partially won back with higher clock speeds at the expense of far greater power usage.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  • brobinson 7y ago
    >Games are traditionally single threaded and hard to parallelize. ECS and being able to safely run "systems" within your game concurrently is becoming a thing rapidly as "lists of objects" do not scale. I just checked Doom Eternal: it's running 81 threads. (Of course, not all of them are always active or doing things concurrently. It's just a datapoint.) Intel basically only wins by a non-significant margin at video encoding nowadays thanks to AVX512 which AMD does not implement. AMD wins or is comparable at a lower TDP on everything else.
    • p1necone 7y ago
      Learning about ECS and how to use them made gamedev so much easier for me. Although now I'm hamstrung by only being able to work on games in languages/frameworks with a solid ECS library (does a good/community agreed upon one exist for rust yet?). ECS, the observer pattern, and behavior trees are probably the three main things that answered all the "how on earth do they build something this complex" questions for me.
      • gentleman11 7y ago
        I would add state machines to any list of amazing techniques
        • p1necone 7y ago
          Definitely. Behaviour trees are kind of a special case/evolution of regular ol state machines, but I find both useful in different situations.
          • gentleman11 7y ago
            I was considering learning them soon for enemy ai. Are they useful in other situations too?
            • p1necone 7y ago
              Basic state machines are useful for controlling flow between different menus/game screens - this "current mode" state exists across iterations of the game loop so you need some kind of data based state machine. e.g. in say a jrpg you have "new game/continue" menu -> world map -> battles and character menu and back again. Edit: oh I misunderstood you - you were asking about behaviour trees. I haven't used them for anything other than controlling game unit behaviour (although not necessarily just enemy ai - one other example is using them to combine a bunch of simple actions into one thing that the user can tell a unit to do - so like an attack move in an RTS is actually "loop (is enemy nearby? -> no -> move towards location -> yes -> attack (which is probably it's own behaviour tree))
  • vondur 7y ago
    I would think as of now, the main lead that Intel has in with AVX-512 computations.
  • LoSboccacc 7y ago
    I wonder what games really stress the CPU these days and I wish to get some example beyond dwarf fortress of games that actually stutter without a top end system, I got a midrange one built around a old core i5 and a modern Radeon 570 and even physic bound games like beam.ng and games with lots of agents like arma 3 run just fine.
    • ycombinete 7y ago
      There is some difference. The most marked difference is between dual core, and quad core. There are quite a few youtube videos out there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eMh-SZQuWM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eMh-SZQuWM
      • LoSboccacc 7y ago
        yeah so it just does 80-90 fps? I'm not talking about "any difference", I'm talking games right now that require a high end cpu, since everyone upward in the thread was claiming gamers need top end cpu, and I can't think of a game that stutters with a mid range one. also, the fps reduction seems more in line with the low end intels having less pci lanes, and not the game being cpu capped.
        • tracker1 7y ago
          Unless you're a competitive gamer, and young with very good vision, keeping above 100fps at 1440p or better, you're very unlikely to notice the difference. Very few people genuinely notice the difference. I ran a 3600 while waiting for a 3950X, and if I had it to do over, would probably have just gone 3900X to start with... For the most part, I don't notice the difference, only after I'm running a couple databases and a few services that are active to I even come close to seeing a difference in general use. I know GPU and Monitor options are similar, and CPU/GPU combination in terms of balance are important. Unless you're going RTX 2080 or higher, then it's much less of a difference in general use anyway.
    • alecmg 7y ago
      Battlefield V likes as much CPU power as it can get. But it also likes GPU... There is a free to play game Armored Warfare (crysis engine?), which I genuinely used to test stability of my cpu. 8 threads fully loaded and probably with some form of AVX. Reviews of upcoming Mount&Blade also note how it loads 16+ threads (mostly for NPC on battlefield). Arma3 was notorious for being bound by single thread performance and low latency memory.
  • lowbloodsugar 7y ago
    > Games are traditionally single threaded and hard to parallelize. Citation needed. Games are about the least "Traditional" software engineering culture on the planet. We've had multicore CPUs for the last two gens of consoles (and I've seen multi-core programming on the Saturn and N64). On PC we've had mainstream multicore since 2009-ish. That's about when I left games. But given the need to win big on consoles, I can't imagine anyone has a main loop anymore that does everything on one thread.
    • lonelappde 7y ago
      What N64 had multicore?
    • lonelappde 7y ago
      What N64 had multicore? >> traditionally > anymore > does everything on one thread Multithreading is useful for concurrent programming separately from its value in parallel programming.
      • lowbloodsugar 7y ago
        The N64 had two MIPS processors.
        • throwaway2048 7y ago
          It did not.
          • lowbloodsugar 7y ago
            Yeah, it really did. The RSP was just another MIPS processor that couldn't access main memory (like the SPEs on the PS3). Usually developers treated it like a graphics card, feeding it display lists that were interpreted and rendered by Nintendo's own microcode. But if you got hold of the RSP Dev Kit, then you could write your own microcode. And if you were really ambitious, you could write an MPEG player that used both the RSP and the main CPU to deliver FMV off a cartridge. That was Todd [0]. That's why N64 emulators couldn't run Resident Evil 2 for the longest time: they had native implementations of the RSP-as-a-graphics-card, and just drew the display lists. But RE2 didn't use the normal microcode, and it couldn't be played until someone wrote an emulator for the RSP. [0] https://ultra64.ca/files/other/Game-Developer-Magazine/GDM_September_2000_Achieving_Full-Motion_Video_on_the_Nintnedo_64.pdf https://ultra64.ca/files/other/Game-Developer-Magazine/GDM_S...
  • tracker1 7y ago
    Most CPU reviews are showing up to twice the heat or more for around 5% better performance on single-cpu loads. Most games are lightly threaded, with newer games being much better optimized for 6+ cores. Even for Gaming, only the 9900K/KS are even in consideration for a good choice, and if you're doing anything besides gaming or quicksync loads, odds are you're better off with AMD. The 3900X is less expensive and does as good or better in most workloads, and even in gaming, most wouldn't be able to tell the difference. As to best of the best for higher end, the Threadripper has no peer.
• ckastner 7y ago
  I built a new workstation in December, and I like my computers to be as quiet as possible, so I looked for a huge cooler and a top-quality fan. Reading reviews of coolers and fans was just eye-opening with regards to AMD's recent success. Most reviews proudly mentioned some Ryzen product, and barely any mentioned Intel at all (and most coolers are compatible with both). I realize that the build-your-own-PC enthusiast represents only a minor fraction of the overall market, but seeing AMD's reputation going from "the budget CPU" to becoming the new Coca-Cola whereas Intel is now Pepsi, all in the span of what, 2 years? was amazing. The server and laptop markets have other dynamics (a few large buyers, instead of many individuals) and I'm not sure AMD can compete with Intel on these dynamics, but I really wish them success.
  • sjtindell 7y ago
    One anecdote data point; we’re building new bare metal clusters, about 500 new quad chassis servers. I did the performance testing and per performance/price from Dell we went with AMD Epyc CPUs whereas at my job only 2 years ago doing a similar build it never even came up, Intel was the unquestioned default. Also personally built a gaming PC this year, picked a Ryzen just for fun.
    • myself248 7y ago
      I built a gaming PC last fall, also Ryzen, but I picked it specifically because I know AMD likes to keep a CPU socket around a good long time. So really, my main goal was to buy a Socket AM4 motherboard, and then stuff a cheap CPU and some RAM into it. Right now, it's low-end gaming, I got a 3200G because the integrated graphics are adequate for the games I play. The PCIe slot sits empty, waiting. In some years when AM5 comes out and AM4 chips get cheap, I'll look at the last/best of the breed and pick a new chip. It probably won't have integrated graphics, so at that time, I'll add a discrete GPU. I plan to have this motherboard and RAM for probably 15-20 years. (Just like its predecessor, an AthlonX2 4850e, in an AM2+ board from 2008. Which I recently dropped a $30 Phenom into, and it's a relevant machine again, my workbench workhorse.)
      • 7y ago
• Symmetry 7y ago
  When I built my first computer the conventional wisdom was that you wanted to use an AMD Athalon-64 processor and an NVidia graphics card. And there we are again.
  • thijsvandien 7y ago
    Indeed, the last time when the answer was 'definitely AMD' (for home use at least) was when the Athlon 64 crushed the Pentium 4.
• drngdds 7y ago
  I've been patiently waiting for them to do the same thing in the high-end/upper-midrange GPU market for a few years now. Unfortunately Nvidia basically has free reign right now to charge whatever prices they want for the RTX 2070 on up.
• agilebyte 7y ago
  Out of 1,206 CPUs tracked on UserBenchmark, the top 4 out of 5 are Zen 2 architecture and they collectively amount to 10.22% market share out of all CPUs with 931k samples. https://cpu.userbenchmark.com https://cpu.userbenchmark.com
  • distances 7y ago
    UserBenchmark is pretty notorious in trying to keep Intel at the top and doesn't shy from dirty tricks to do that, such as redefining CPU scoring to be based on single-thread performance as soon as Intel is losing the crown. I'd suggest avoiding them in favor of some more reliable benchmark.
    • distances 7y ago
      Replying to myself -- case in point: the page you linked doesn't have a single sorting method that makes any kind of practical sense. It's carefully curated to have an Intel product at top in every category. I'd go as far as declare UserBenchmark actively harmful if you are trying to figure out benchmarking results. You're likely better off by just throwing dice!
      • agilebyte 7y ago
        Try the "Mkt. share %" column.
• wyoh 7y ago
  Intel is sponsoring lots of pro gamers and streamers, I think many will keep going Intel as they believe AMD don't make good gaming chips.