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AMD vs. Intel 2020: Who Makes the Best CPUs?
- celeritascelery 6y agoFor me the single biggest factor is still single threaded performance. There are still many apps that are not multithreaded so all those extra cores are useless. Single thread performance will benefit any application. Intel still holds the lead in this category.
- djd20 6y agoMarginally, and not really when perf/$ is taken into account...
- hddherman 6y agoI don't like this argument for three reasons: 1. The single thread performance gap is very small (5-10% depending on application) or even non-existent in some cases. 2. Your computer runs more than one process at any given moment. The more cores, the more processes you can run without an impact on performance 3. That single core performance comes at the cost of efficiency and general power usage. Intel has had to clock their 14nm process very high to achieve that small lead in single thread performance.
- Theodores 6y agoThe key words in the parent post are 'for me'. Imagine you have a single core compilation process that takes two minutes that you must run 50 times a day. This can happen. Ten percent brings 12 seconds per compile or ten minutes a day. This might not sound great but it means you can get an extra five compiles done. You can also get increased likelihood that you can remember what you were working on. Therefore the marginal gain in single thread performance is well worth having in this use case. The expense of genuine Intel becomes worth it even if you don't have so many cores.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoI have a dual core dev machine. Using -j 2 builds twice as fast (approx 35 mins -> 17 mins). Are current compiles really obligatory single thread? Because I sure would like to prop up intel with my wallet.
- tbrock 6y agoAnything JavaScript for example is single threaded for the most part. Also something like linking is typically in parallelized.
- chitza 6y agoMost web development toolchains depend on Node.js, which compiles on a single core.
- kohtatsu 6y agoNode takes advantage of multiple cores. The code is all async by default and that is easy to load onto green threads. This used to be implemented with callback hell, now it's Promises which is actually really cosy (and what Rust is adopting). Random article I found on it: https://medium.com/better-programming/is-node-js-really-single-threaded-7ea59bcc8d64 https://medium.com/better-programming/is-node-js-really-sing...
- oppositelock 6y agoSure, but you're also running a browser at the same time probably with a ton of tabs open as separate processes. Our computers do quite a lot these days, in parallel, and more cores help. Both AMD and Intel are ridiculously fast! You can't really go wrong with either.
- daxfohl 6y agoIt also assumes that this important single threaded process's dev team isn't actively working on parallelizing it. And that the primary purpose of the computer will be running this process until its end of life. Both pretty bad assumptions given the minimal benefit and high cost.
- GhostVII 6y agoMulti core performance is still useful if you are running many single-threaded applications at once.
- vbezhenar 6y agoIf you are running many single-threaded applications at once AND if you care about their performance. For example my Windows might run some background processes from time to time, but I don't care about their execution time, all I care is about my foreground application.
- s9w 6y agoBarely, if at all. Not all benchmarks have been done with all exploit mitigations we have today. Also AMD is cheaper per performance.
- dannyw 6y agoIntel holds a minuscule lead here, not enough to be worth thinking about; especially against the Zen 2 architecture (Ryzen 3000 series chips). Wanting an Intel over a Zen 1 for single threaded performance? Completely understandable.
- philjohn 6y agoIPC on Zen 2 is arguably slightly ahead of Intel, but they don't overclock or boost to 5Ghz.
- grecy 6y ago> There are still many apps that are not multithreaded Can you give some examples of CPU intensive apps that are not multi threaded in 2020?
- ggcdn 6y agoI’m a structural engineer, running nonlinear analyses of buildings. These take about 3-5 days to run on an i9-9900k. The program runs each earthquake simulation on a single core.
- dvfjsdhgfv 6y agoMan, this is just begging for parallelization.
- ggcdn 6y agoI can make multiple instances to run multiple simulations in parallel, but matrix factorisation within the program itself is single-threaded. The stiffness matrix of these structures needs to be reformulated frequently (every time a structural element yields / gets damaged), so this is the largest time-sink, I think.
- jatone 6y agothats just a shitty program lol
- ggcdn 6y agoI'm not disagreeing with you... Its horrible but that is the industry standard. Honestly my biggest problem right now is that I don't even know if there's anything I can buy/upgrade to speed it up. I don't know how to determine what the bottleneck is, so to speak.
- jcelerier 6y agoAn audio processing chain is necessarily single-threaded. e.g. if you want to simulate a guitar rack you have to first simulate the distortion pedal before the amp, the amp before the cab, the cab before the delay / reverb / whatever 200 other effects you're chaining. And you have to do all that in tight deadlines, e.g. <= 2 milliseconds.
- sedatk 6y agoDocker is a thing now, though.
- daxfohl 6y agoYou could still say AMD has an advantage. Given the cost difference, and the fact that Intel usually changes socket types each release, you could purchase a new AMD SKU every year and always have the latest. For the same price you'd probably have to be working with three or four year old Intel technology at some point. By that time the newer AMD SKU would be putting the old Intel processor to shame. Of course if price is no object then the above doesn't apply.
- bob1029 6y agoI initially felt similar regrets after purchasing my 2950X. Obviously, the advantage with this CPU is being able to go wide on all cores, not necessarily maxing out any particular one. And it does work in a lot of cases. I regularly see 100% CPU when running rebuilds of large .NET Core applications. But, I also recognize that on a single-thread basis, I don't really have any advantage over anyone else (potentially even a small deficit). But, this is a narrow-minded perspective to have. The future cannot possibly be that we magically invent an x86 core that can clock to 8GHz w/ practical power & cooling. One has to push forward in some incremental way. The answer is adding more parallel execution units. Sure, lots of software and techniques used today are not feasible to directly port over, but that doesn't mean it has to stay that way. As a software developer, I feel it is my duty to help push the state of the art forward wherever possible. I have already begun working on projects that are designed around the concept of extremely high core counts becoming the norm. Having 32 logical threads sitting in your local workstation makes it possible to practically experiment with the lower bounds of what would be required in a larger production deployment. There are types of software that we can consider building today that would have sounded absolutely insane just a few years ago. Cloud gaming is now a thing falling within practical reach. How many more x86 cores per instance would we need before we could start thinking about rendering 100% of client views server-side (i.e. eliminate most HTML/CSS/JS) or deprecating the usefulness of discrete GPUs altogether? Pulling everything into a single memory domain could do wonders for breaking down the ages-old GPU/CPU functionality silos. One way to do it all with one instruction set and a single cache-coherent memory architecture...
- rasz 6y agoStop using Python for time critical applications ;-)
- codecamper 6y agoGiven that amd has the lead in power consumption per performance, is it now the cpu of choice in the datacenter?
- ItsTotallyOn 6y agoIt certainly is in terms of power, performance, and cost, but Intel's reputation for rock-solid reliability and a decade of optimization for its architectures, not to mention the established software/support ecosystem, means AMD has a very long haul ahead of it.
- cecja 6y agoSorry, but especially on servers amd has a better track record with reliability. You are right with missing optimizations on some software stacks but that’s not a long haul it’s just that nobody saw the need to do it until now. Don’t forget all the loss of performance from spectre mitigation a lot of datacenters lost up too 25% performance overnight. Everyone is going amd. Google/Facebook/Disney/Pixar...
- qqssccfftt 6y agoFor the record, you're shadowbanned.
- lukevp 6y agoHow can you tell?
- qqssccfftt 6y agoEvery comment is [dead] automatically without being flagged.
- mkl 6y agoTurn on "showdead" in your profile, then look at their comments. Usually it's easy to tell why it's happened, but if there are comments that don't deserve to be dead, you can "vouch" for them individually to help resurrect them (click on comment timestamp, then click "vouch"). That has happened here.
- scurvy 6y agoThe AMD Ryzen platform holds so much promise. There's just one problem: all of their consumer chipset motherboards are terrible. Really, really flakey and bad. If you're used to slapping in name-brand memory to a board and booting it up, LOL good luck with AMD! Your options for current gen Ryzens are: x570 -> Requires active cooling (fans) on the chipset because it throws off too much heat. The proprietray fan will die and your motherboard needs replacing. Congrats! Also, the PCIe lane configurations are weird (x8 x8 x8). x470 -> Don't even look at your memory the wrong way if you want it to boot. Also, you need an older gen Ryzen/Athlon to update the BIOS to something that works with Ryzen 3000. Sure, there are stickers all over the box touting 'Ryzen 3000 compatibility!' but that's only after you update the BIOS. The BIOS the board ships with won't work at all. b450 -> Dicier to run new stuff on such an older platform. The implementations are supposedly power weak for higher core count 3900/3950 CPUs. AMD really dropped the ball on these chipset. They're the things that are leading to terrible user experiences and why folks end up going back to Intel after countless dollars wasted on shipping, RMAs, and swapping gear. No motherboard manufacturer actually designs anything. They just bundle chips together and change logos in the BIOS. Some might have a "flashback" button that works on half the boards, but there's little to differentiate one from the other. If you want something that just works and is fast, stick with Intel because their chipsets are better. I'm writing this on a 3900x, too... EDIT: Since many are doubting what I went through, let me list the permutations of boards, DIMMs, and CPUs. CPUs: 3900x and 220GE DIMMs: Corsair Ballistix, G.Skill FlareX, Samsung ECC (unbuffered) Boards: x470 Taichi and Hero VII I finally got my third Taichi to boot with a 220GE to the point that I could flash a BIOS to something "stable" for the 3900x. I've literally built hundreds of servers and PCs in my lifetime (including AMD Romes). I know what I'm doing. This ecosystem just isn't mature yet!
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y agoWhat are you on? >If you're used to slapping in name-brand memory to a board and booting it up[...] Yeah, I am and that's exactly what I did with a new Ryzen CPU. How is this shit the top comment?
- scurvy 6y agoMobo makers are hiding behind their QVL rather than making a functioning product. "Sorry, we only tested this version of Crucial memory, not that version." Never mind the fact that they use the same in-house Crucial stuff underneath, changes are largely chip packaging, etc. Almost all of the memory on the market comes from one of the last 5 companies actually making DRAM (not counting Shenzen specials). Anything from Crucial, Samsung, Hynix, etc should work. It's JEDEC DDR4 compatible. Period. Hiding a bad product because a DIMM isn't on the QVL is low-class. I'm not even talking about XMP stuff. I'm talking about booting with basic 2400/2666 stuff. "Yeah that's good RAM but not on our QVL. Get bent."
- willtim 6y agoIs AMD now a better choice for Linux, especially given the ongoing stability problems with Intel's Linux graphics drivers?
- Glyptodon 6y agoWhen everything lines up AMD integrated graphics are very very pleasant on Linux. But you will also find random Kernel versions with obnoxious regressions and bugs you have to hunt down and fix or work around.
- jatone 6y agothose are rare, and almost non-existant in LTS kernels.
- m-p-3 6y agoThe drivers are quite good on newer kernel versions, it's been mostly pain-free for me
- mindfulplay 6y agoI am a little out of date on this topic but what effect does Spectre/Meltdown and other mitigations have on newer processors? Is it fundamentally just a software fix going forward? Seems like we are willing to sacrifice in the order of 10% performance at least in the previous generations....
- pstrateman 6y agoFor many workloads the effect was significantly more than 10%. I had to disable mitigations to complete a filesystem checksum, it was on the order of 1000x slower.
- cptskippy 6y agoI really hate these articles, they're click bait intended to sow discourse among fanbois and drive traffic to the site. People who have recently built systems read them and either feel validation or regret. That just spawns comments from people either trying to justify their loser choice or flaunt their lucky choice of the winner. The loyalists crawl out of wood work to make comments like "I still prefer x because y". These articles draw broad conclusions and influence perception across the board, even if they mention performance tiers, that brand X is always superior to brand Y. I've been building systems for almost 30 years and in that time Intel has mostly been the performance champion AND has always screwed you over on price. Sometimes they lead by a lot, sometimes by very little or not at all but their platform is always more expensive. Both Intel and AMD introduce a brand (e.g. Pentium, Ahtlon) as their new flagship and then overtime erode the brand each year with lower spec products. Eventually they stop introducing higher spec products altogether and the brand sinks to the bottom of their product lineup as a new brand takes the top ranks (e.g. i9, Ryzen). Depending on when you get into building PCs you might have brand loyalty because maybe your first system was a Celeron you unlocked and ran at PIII speeds. Or maybe you picked up a first gen Althon that was the performance king for a few quarters, or the Athlon II when Intel was floundering with Netburst. Maybe you started out with Core and in your view Intel has always dominated AMD. Regardless your perceptions are skewed. Identify your workload and your budget, buy the best thing that meets your needs regardless of brand. Intel is historically more stable and less problematic. AMD usually offers significantly more performance per $ on the low end. Then again that all takes too much effort, just buy whatever makes you feel good about yourself on the internet according to these click bait articles.
- neogodless 6y agoCertainly if you think about it in terms of us vs. them, black and white, I don't see value. If you're making purchasing decisions, you should be looking mostly at your specific needs, and the big picture around what you need and how to get good value for your money. If you can afford it, vote your conscious as well, and for a healthy future. I've owned Cyrux, Pentium, Athlon, Core Duo, Phenom, Core i# and Ryzen. I'm partial to AMD as an underdog, and having a personality that always rooted for them. I'm unimpressed with Intel lately, but up until this year I still wouldn't buy an AMD laptop (though I've recommended a few for friends and family if the need and budget fit). This article does try to paint "one answer for all questions" and of course that's silly. For most consumers I think they'll be better off this year with choosing Ryzen. But the Ryzen laptop chips that are impressing everyone seem to be in short supply. So I can't cheer them on just yet. I don't purchase for datacenters or professional rendering so I wouldn't dare weigh in there. To sum up, focus on your needs, and individual options, not brand names!
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