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AMD Ryzen 9 3900x price drop could take the wind out of Intel comet lake sales
- bjoli 6y agoI don't know about that. The i5 6 core chips seem like pretty good value. I would probably go with an r5 3600, but it isn't really as clear cut anymore.
- gambiting 6y agoSo I'm just holding out for Zen 3 later this year to upgrade my PC - like you said, suddenly the 10600K made the choice a lot less clear.
- thejynxed 6y agoNot really, the Zen3 APUs for laptops and the consoles coming out later this year have been showing up in benchmarks online and have been blasting the Intel desktop offerings, I'm actually kind of excited about what we'll see from the actual desktop SKUs.
- gambiting 6y agoWell my point was that the 10600K made a choice less clear when it comes to the current offerings from AMD. I want to upgrade my gaming rig and was basically looking at either the 3600X or 3700X, but it looks like either CPU is easily beaten in games by the 10600K for a very similar price. If I waited a little bit for the 10600KF then the price difference shrinks even further. That's why I'm saying I'm waiting for Zen 3 - I'm sure it will absolutely dominate on the desktop, so it seems like it's better to wait a little bit rather than buy now.
- mgraupner 6y agoI just wish they would have made it for the LGA1151 socket and not for a new socket again which will only support one or two generations of CPUs.
- ben-schaaf 6y agoChecking local prices the 3600x is 90aud cheaper than the 10600k. Factor in a ~60aud cooler for the 10600k and the 6 core is competing with the 3700x on price, not the 3600x. In terms of value it still seems pretty clear-cut to me.
- delfinom 6y agoRyzen 5 3300x and 3100 are launching soon to add further lower tier price points.
- neogodless 6y agoThe article is comparing the upcoming Intel Core i9-10900K and Core i7-10700K chips, and how their price and performance compares to the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X. That being said, it seems like, with the exception of some advantages in low resolution gaming, the less expensive Ryzen 5 3600 is still a better option than the (so far) unavailable Core i5 10600K. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCcfgcjMFNk#t=962 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCcfgcjMFNk#t=962
- 0xy 6y agoThe rumor on the street is that Zen 3 is a major upgrade with huge IPC improvements. If that's true, Intel has basically nothing. All they've got left at this point is "I want the best gaming performance and literally nothing else matters". AMD may just win that crown too. It's never been more exciting to be an enthusiast, and Intel was asleep for a long time. It's about time someone woke the sleepy giant. Weren't we all sick of Intel churning out 10% incremental improvements every year on an entirely new socket every time? They were phoning it in for a long time.
- The_rationalist 6y agoAll they've got left at this point is "I want the best gaming performance and literally nothing else matters". For the average person maybe that's all they've got left. But technically their are still ahead in some interesting ways when we look at x86 extensions: By decreasing order of impact: AVX 512 TSX SGX Their next architecture could bring bfloat16 too but I wonder how useful that would be on a CPU instead of on a GPU. AVX512 and TSX can give Intel a BIG performance advantage in some niche (but foundational) applications
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y agoBy that metric alone you could also wait/hope/wish for Via Centaur Cha Ncore which i commented about @ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22716893 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22716893 in another context.
- madengr 6y agoI use some engineering software that uses Intel Math Kernel Libraries. It is 30% faster on an Intel CPU, versus AMD with equivalent speed/cores.
- jiggawatts 6y agoIs it a 30% perf/$ advantage though? In most comparisons I've seen Intel lost horrendously even with AVX-512 code compared to EPYC 2 when price was factored in. Doubly so if the cost of electricity and cooling is included, because the watts/core for AMD is much lower than anything Intel has.
- damniatx 6y agoCant wait for the next Pentium M from Intel to beat this Ryzen thing
- silverreads 6y agoYeah, really. If they can pull something amazing out of an old CPU again, that'd really be something. Perhaps a 128 penryn with modern accelerators bolted on? :p
- BubRoss 6y agoThere might be almost no reason to buy an Intel CPU, but interestingly, they do have the advantage in very small desktops because they have powerful CPUs with integrated graphics. Cooling without throttling is probably tricky if you get super small, but AMD's APUs are in need of an update.
- rcarmo 6y agoThis. The 3400G is now what, two years old? I have held off on building a small APU-based system because of that.
- makomk 6y agoYeah. There have been increasingly plausible rumours that the 4xxxG range is coming soon, but right now AMD seem to be focused on the much larger laptop market (which also benefits a lot more from the really good power efficiency of their current chips).
- vmlinuz 6y agoI bought a 2400G last year, which I've been pretty happy with - but I'm very much looking forward to dropping a 4xxxG into the same socket later this year!
- agilebyte 6y agoLaunch date 7/7/2019, Vega 11 graphics, 4 cores (8 threads).
- moonbas3 6y agoZen 2 based APUs are coming out really soon. Up to 8c/16t, 65W.
- jhoechtl 6y agoDoesn't have AMD integrated graphics too? Wasn't there a buy-in some years of a graphics company I have forgotten it's name? So whenI buy an AMD CPU I also have to buy a GPU?
- rcarmo 6y agoI’ve been looking at Ryzen CPUs for a while, and although I don’t have the budget for a top-tier box right now, this is excellent news. Drop one of these and an RTX into a good case and you have a workstation that will blast most Macs out of the water (if not all).
- threeseed 6y agoPeople that buy a Mac are looking for the fastest computer that will run OSX. And if you want to do a Hackintosh then it really doesn't work that well with Ryzen e.g. issues with Creative Suite, Docker etc as well as poorer performance due to lack of AVX2/AVX-512.
- gameswithgo 6y agoryzen has avx2 now
- fibers 6y agoi know ryzen has avx2 support but what are some use cases for avx512
- xondono 6y agoI went with a 3700X and a 5700xt and can’t be happier. Compilation times have dropped significantly from my old box, that suffered heavily in performance from the meltdown/specter mitigations. It also holds nicely my occasional gaming sessions :)
- alkonaut 6y ago$50 either way doesn’t change much especially since it’s often lost in motherboards, or if you need to buy a cooler (When B550 motherboards launch the balance will tilt further towards AMD). What really does make a difference is thermals/noise. The higher end 9X00 and 10X00 series feel like they have been squeezed very tightly into their thermal envelopes. A CPU should come with a cooler and with that cooler the CPU should be quiet with some headroom. Reviews of 10900 seem to indicate you should opt for one of the most expensive air coolers or even water cooling, which of course throws the price comparison off completely.
- DrBazza 6y ago> $50 either way doesn’t change much You'd think so, but it's a well known marketing trick that pricing at $399 and $449 will absolutely guarantee more sales of the lower priced item than if priced at $402 and $449.
- hocuspocus 6y agoWe're talking about CPUs. Profit margins on such hardware parts are typically single digit; selling a CPU $402 rather than $399 happens all the time.
- colejohnson66 6y agoI’m interested now: why?
- hocuspocus 6y agoI'm not sure to understand what you're asking. Resellers have very low margins on core parts like CPU, GPU, memory, mainboards. They make money elsewhere. That's why you don't really see bullshit pricing like 199.99 when you buy a CPU. For instance the last CPU I bought was 193.42.
- smabie 6y ago
- hartator 6y agoIs last AMD Ryzen beat Intel CPU on single core performance or are they still holding up?
- neogodless 6y agoIn some cases, AMD beats Intel on single core performance. It depends on workload. https://www.techspot.com/review/2003-amd-ryzen-4000/ https://www.techspot.com/review/2003-amd-ryzen-4000/ Here, a 35W AMD laptop chip (3.0/4.3Ghz) scores 492 on single-core Cinebench R20 against a 90W Intel chip (2.3/4.8Ghz) scoring 449. https://www.techradar.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-7-3700x https://www.techradar.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-7-3700x Here, the Intel desktop chip does edge out the AMD desktop chips. https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-9-3950x-review/4 https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-9-3950x-revie... In the first graphic, if you click the right arrow, you see single-core benchmarks. Even a 5.0Ghz desktop chip from Intel is behind the 4.6/4.7Ghz Ryzen chips.
- gdubs 6y agoCan someone breakdown what the most exciting CPU developments have been recently? I stopped paying attention a long time ago, but find myself interested having recently gotten back into 3D animation. I know GPU renderers are gaining steam, but there are still CPU renderers out there and putting my toes in the water I’m finding it difficult to parse the advantages of one new chip vs another.
- Exmoor 6y agoHigh level developments: * AMD introduced their Ryzen architecture ~3 years ago. This was the first time in years that their chips were competitive with Intel chips. * AMD's newfound competitiveness forced Intel to increase core counts in their consumer chips. 6 and 8 core chips are now extremely common in the consumer space. * AMD has released consumer chips with as many as 16 physical cores (32 threads) in their most recent generation. This is a huge improvement for tasks that scale well to multiple cores like (I presume) 3D animation. Intel has 10 core consumer chips out. * If you're willing to move up to the HEDT chips you can now buy an AMD Threadripper chip with up to 64 cores (128 threads). * Intel has struggled to make the next step in manufacturing. Their desktop chips have been stuck at 14nm for half a decade now. AMD contracts their manufacturing out and has been able to take advantage of other foundries improved processes. Their current chips are using 7nm process nodes and use significantly less power than their Intel counterparts. Because of this they require less extreme cooling. * There are some new instruction sets such as AVX and AVX512 that can improve performance in some software. I'm not an expert there and you'd probably want to do some research on sites related to 3D rendering to see which chip would perform best for your needs.
- bhl 6y agoHuh, how did AMD manage to catch up to Intel? I would've thought that Intel as the market leader should've been able to out innovate their competitors based on price. Has Intel just been complacent for the last 3 years?
- 0x6c6f6c 6y agoMore than 3 years. They've been they sat around since Bulldozer because the gap was so large, and have failed to maintain their dominance.
- dilandau 6y agoI have a ryzen 3900x and it's unreal. Compiles instantly.
- smabie 6y agoI was compiling the new and experimental Emacs native package and was warned that the compilation time took over 7 hours on a "fast computer." I was pleasantly surprised that it finished in under 20 minutes on my 3900x. That thing is insane!
- mrlonglong 6y agoChrome still takes 2.5 hours to build on my 1920X. Everone, what's the fastest time chrome takes to build? And what rig?
- tyingq 6y agoMicrocenter has it bundled with a Gigabyte B450M motherboard and a CPU cooler for $442.98. That would have been around $575 before.
- joelfolksy 6y agoWhat would you all recommend for someone who just wants to maximize the performance of his IDE (.NET in Visual Studio)? I get that going 3900X will give me the fastest compile times, which is cool. But I hit the build button relatively infrequently, and anyway I'm usually switching to reddit if the build is going to take longer than a few seconds, so I'm actually more interested in minimizing the latency of all the moment-to-moment operations like Intellisense, refactorings, highlighting, code folding, etc. I suspect that some of those operations are mostly single-threaded, but even if there is some degree of parallelism going on, surely this type of "bursty" workload is where Intel can still register an advantage? So, in other words, do these operations more closely resemble Benchmark A: "Blender render time" or Benchmark B: "Max FPS in Tomb Raider" (and why don't we talk more about the difficulty of making these sorts of determinations)?
- InTheArena 6y agoFor compute workloads, I highly recommend the AMD CPUs. In this case, doing multiple tasks at once - like switching betweeen reddit and a built qualifies :-) For these type of workloads, I personally find that the synthetic tests (like Geekbench) are pretty good. In addition Linus tech tips does a good job of covering “productivity” workloads - which AMD usually massacres the intel workloads. Finally if you use VMS or docker, the added CPU count is critical.
- BubRoss 6y agoCPU choice isn't going to matter here. Visual studio's settings will matter far more, possibly a fast SSD.
- VHRanger 6y agoVisual studio is slow because its an unoptimized piece of software (it misses CPU cache often and does frequent disk seeks, etc.) The best way to get performance from such software is: 1) make sure it (and the project) are on a fast SSD. NVME is better but SATA is good. 2) getting a good CPU for the workload. For pure IDE user experience it won't make much of a difference as long as it's a recent high end enough CPU (fast RAM latency, high enough clock frequency, enough cores, ...)
- chiph 6y agoI've been very happy with my 3900X so far. The only suggestion I would make would be to upgrade the cooler from the one that comes in the AMD retail box to something like a Noctua. Since I made that change, it's run much cooler and likely extended it's life significantly. Just make sure you have room in your case, as the Noctua is pretty darn big. My workload with it is general .NET development, transcoding movies, and light gaming.
- aspenmayer 6y agoI can attest to Noctua building large coolers. I recently built a PC with a NH-D15 which came with two NF-P12 redux-900 140mm fans for the cooler. It was easily the largest cooler I’ve ever installed, and also the quietest. I only had it paired with an i7-9700K, but it was amazingly quiet even under max load. Wasn’t able to get it to thermally throttle with 5Ghz boost enabled and running prime95 and MSI Kombustor burn-in mode on the RTX 2060 Super simultaneously to heat up the case. Really happy with how that build turned out.
- aspenmayer 6y agoI was mistaken. They are 2x NF-A15 (140mm). https://noctua.at/en/nh-d15 https://noctua.at/en/nh-d15 The other two fans I mentioned went in the topside of the case.
- chiph 6y agoI wasn't able to install the second fan. It hit the top of my ram sticks and stuck up too far to where the case wouldn't close. Even with just the one, temperatures are much improved.
- aspenmayer 6y agoI had that same issue. I hate using fans in the “pull” orientation rather than “push,” but with this cooler, I had to. I left the space above the RAM free, and put one fan in the middle, between the two heatsink stacks, pulling air from the front toward rear side of case. The second fan was on the rear side of the case, also pulling from the front toward rear side. My case had a rear case fan, which I left in place in the push orientation. Next time I would use low-profile memory or just memory with a shorter heatsinks, so I can have the fans push. All in all no thermal problems, so good enough works. It was not a personal build, just a work for hire, and not meant to break records, just a stable high performance gaming PC.