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Can someone breakdown what the most exciting CPU developments have been recently? I stopped paying attention a long time ago, but find myself interested having

by gdubs 6y ago

Can 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 ago
High 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 ago
  Huh, 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 ago
    More than 3 years. They've been they sat around since Bulldozer because the gap was so large, and have failed to maintain their dominance.
  - ksec 6y ago
    >out innovate their competitors based on price. They could, but why should they? Intel is still on full capacity at the moment with backorders to fill. So despite technically losing to AMD, it isn't doing much damage ( if at all ) financially.
neogodless 6y ago
The CPU developments may or may not be of use to you. If you're really interested in buying hardware, you can follow a rough process. Web search for the software that peaks on an X/Y axis of "how much time I spend using it" and "how long things take because of CPU processing" and add in keywords like "benchmark" and "CPU." Read those articles carefully - maybe three different sites/authors to get different biases ironed out. I've been an AMD fan since the Athlon XP (though I skipped over the FX / Bulldozer mess and upgraded a Phenom to a Ryzen 2700X) so I can't pretend I'm unbiased. My opinion, though, is that Intel lost their way. They were tick-tocking really well, where they'd improve architecture and then process, and they were dominating AMD. When the Zen cores were released, first as Ryzen desktop chips (up to 1800X), the clouds began to part, because they were starting to look pretty competitive. The clocks are still not as high, and in specific gaming scenarios (specifically 1080p where high frame rates are critical), the Intel chips still showed a clear lead. The follow up Zen+ (up to 2700X) was a clear evolutionary improvement. (Along the way, Threadripper and Epyc chips were also released on the Zen/Zen+ architecture, and for workstation/server loads, they were competitive.) Zen 2 was released last year with a move to chiplets, 7nm processes and another 15% increase in IPC. This really moved the needle. In many cases, The Ryzen 3xxx, Threadripper and Epyc chips are clearly better than the Intel counterparts. We also see Intel cutting the price of their HEDT chips in half overnight, so that gives you some insight. Most recently, the first Zen 2 laptop chips were released as Ryzen 4xxx with U, H and HS to indicate low power, high power and special high power chips that perform about on par with HS but using less power. They seem to be a huge upgrade to Ryzen mobile, and are much more power efficient, and battery life is finally reasonable (and in some cases impressive.) On the Intel front, they've really struggled to break the cycle of tweaking their (5?) year old 14nm process, and they tweak the architecture, but they haven't had a major overhaul in quite some time. Meanwhile, the performance of Intel chips has been affected (arguably) more than AMD by having to implement fixes for various security flaws. And this old process/architecture is requiring Intel to continue to increase the power requirements so they can boost the clocks over 5Ghz, but of course this results in lots of heat, as well as a reputation for laptops throttling down in response to that heat. There are still cases where it makes sense to buy Intel, but each person has to know their workload well enough to do the research to make that decision. If it's anything but mission critical (every second is worth real money), I don't think you can go wrong by just buying the best AMD chip you can afford. I don't think there are any real bad apples in the bunch, and in most cases you'll get a solidly adequate cooling solution for free and pretty good motherboard options. (Though I find the X570 market pretty unpleasant at the moment.)

by gdubs 6y ago

Exmoor 6y ago

High 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 ago
Huh, 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 ago
  More than 3 years. They've been they sat around since Bulldozer because the gap was so large, and have failed to maintain their dominance.
- ksec 6y ago
  >out innovate their competitors based on price. They could, but why should they? Intel is still on full capacity at the moment with backorders to fill. So despite technically losing to AMD, it isn't doing much damage ( if at all ) financially.

neogodless 6y ago

The CPU developments may or may not be of use to you. If you're really interested in buying hardware, you can follow a rough process. Web search for the software that peaks on an X/Y axis of "how much time I spend using it" and "how long things take because of CPU processing" and add in keywords like "benchmark" and "CPU." Read those articles carefully - maybe three different sites/authors to get different biases ironed out. I've been an AMD fan since the Athlon XP (though I skipped over the FX / Bulldozer mess and upgraded a Phenom to a Ryzen 2700X) so I can't pretend I'm unbiased. My opinion, though, is that Intel lost their way. They were tick-tocking really well, where they'd improve architecture and then process, and they were dominating AMD. When the Zen cores were released, first as Ryzen desktop chips (up to 1800X), the clouds began to part, because they were starting to look pretty competitive. The clocks are still not as high, and in specific gaming scenarios (specifically 1080p where high frame rates are critical), the Intel chips still showed a clear lead. The follow up Zen+ (up to 2700X) was a clear evolutionary improvement. (Along the way, Threadripper and Epyc chips were also released on the Zen/Zen+ architecture, and for workstation/server loads, they were competitive.) Zen 2 was released last year with a move to chiplets, 7nm processes and another 15% increase in IPC. This really moved the needle. In many cases, The Ryzen 3xxx, Threadripper and Epyc chips are clearly better than the Intel counterparts. We also see Intel cutting the price of their HEDT chips in half overnight, so that gives you some insight. Most recently, the first Zen 2 laptop chips were released as Ryzen 4xxx with U, H and HS to indicate low power, high power and special high power chips that perform about on par with HS but using less power. They seem to be a huge upgrade to Ryzen mobile, and are much more power efficient, and battery life is finally reasonable (and in some cases impressive.) On the Intel front, they've really struggled to break the cycle of tweaking their (5?) year old 14nm process, and they tweak the architecture, but they haven't had a major overhaul in quite some time. Meanwhile, the performance of Intel chips has been affected (arguably) more than AMD by having to implement fixes for various security flaws. And this old process/architecture is requiring Intel to continue to increase the power requirements so they can boost the clocks over 5Ghz, but of course this results in lots of heat, as well as a reputation for laptops throttling down in response to that heat. There are still cases where it makes sense to buy Intel, but each person has to know their workload well enough to do the research to make that decision. If it's anything but mission critical (every second is worth real money), I don't think you can go wrong by just buying the best AMD chip you can afford. I don't think there are any real bad apples in the bunch, and in most cases you'll get a solidly adequate cooling solution for free and pretty good motherboard options. (Though I find the X570 market pretty unpleasant at the moment.)