3 ms·

Don’t we need far more information before going off like this? Off the top of my head I’d want to know how many workstations and typical workload. Many office

Don’t we need far more information before going off like this? Off the top of my head I’d want to know how many workstations and typical workload. Many offices are hundreds of workstations, mostly idling, and simply navigating multiple different SaaS Web Apps. In that case the primary metrics would seem to be price/performance (don’t need much performance) and idle power consumption. I love the new AMD processors and they’re fantastic for heavy workloads. I’m thinking Intel is still well in the equation though when it comes to a typical workstation in an office.

jiggawatts 5y ago
> I’d want to know how many workstations and typical workload. That sounds like: "Sure, we make a loss on every unit sold, but we'll make up for that with volume!" If one workstation is better, a hundred workstations is a hundred times better. > I’m thinking Intel is still well in the equation though when it comes to a typical workstation in an office. Are they though? My "typical office applications" experience is that thanks to Electron they've become absolutely glacial, and better CPUs make a very noticeable difference even to ordinary staff. People rant and rave about how good the Apple M1 chips are for typical "productivity apps", which is directly comparable to the advantage AMD has over Intel. As a random example of this, our virtual desktops in Azure are Intel-based. They're frustratingly slow. Switching them over to a largely identical AMD instance makes them instantly snappier and very usable. PS: I had the opposite experience a decade ago with Citrix XenApp terminal servers. At the time, a few of our customers tried to save money by using inferior-but-cheaper AMD CPUs. Those servers were glacially slow, and there was nothing we could do to fix it.

3 ms·

Don’t we need far more information before going off like this? Off the top of my head I’d want to know how many workstations and typical workload. Many office

by bronco21016 5y ago

jiggawatts 5y ago
> I’d want to know how many workstations and typical workload. That sounds like: "Sure, we make a loss on every unit sold, but we'll make up for that with volume!" If one workstation is better, a hundred workstations is a hundred times better. > I’m thinking Intel is still well in the equation though when it comes to a typical workstation in an office. Are they though? My "typical office applications" experience is that thanks to Electron they've become absolutely glacial, and better CPUs make a very noticeable difference even to ordinary staff. People rant and rave about how good the Apple M1 chips are for typical "productivity apps", which is directly comparable to the advantage AMD has over Intel. As a random example of this, our virtual desktops in Azure are Intel-based. They're frustratingly slow. Switching them over to a largely identical AMD instance makes them instantly snappier and very usable. PS: I had the opposite experience a decade ago with Citrix XenApp terminal servers. At the time, a few of our customers tried to save money by using inferior-but-cheaper AMD CPUs. Those servers were glacially slow, and there was nothing we could do to fix it.