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What tangible benefits are you getting from choosing AMD now? Honest question as I'm curious if there's another benefit besides price (which Intel is fighting n

What tangible benefits are you getting from choosing AMD now? Honest question as I'm curious if there's another benefit besides price (which Intel is fighting now).

zamadatix 5y ago
Most stuff eventually turns into cost so I'll ignore "costly" effects like heat/power and performance per dollar and focus on max performance scale for workloads and other unique differences not achievable via just throwing more money at the alternative. Per socket performance scaling is higher for equivalent tier sockets. At hyperscale that goes back into the price benefit (buy and maintain less physical data center) but for an individual server workload or individual user that also turns into a performance benefit, particularly for non NUMA aware workloads on the server side and just plain availability of such core counts for performance on the desktop or workstation side. PCIe wise you get about twice the lanes (128 total on AMD) of even a 40 core 8380 in a the base 8 core model of Epyc or a Threadripper workstation CPU. A place Intel still wins is total NUMA scaling. For a NUMA aware app like SAP HANA Intel can scale to 8 sockets while AMD currently tops out at 2 so you can reach about 2x as many total threads that way.
- gtirloni 5y ago
  Awesome, thanks for the extra details.
- smolder 5y ago
  I had a sister comment which wasn't as thorough as yours so I deleted it. It's worth adding though that for mobile applications, power consumption isn't just a cost factor, since better efficiency means you can have tighter packaging, get more battery life, not roast your lap as much, have quieter cooling, etc.
  - zamadatix 5y ago
    Good point regarding batteries
- b9a2cab5 5y ago
  For non-NUMA aware workloads with high inter-core coordination (for example, a write heavy database workload) Intel will still perform much better because the cross-chiplet latency of EPYC chips is very high. Going through the IO die and to another chip is about as expensive as going to main memory. Hyperscalers are running web servers which is a different story. But if you're running web servers you might be better off with Graviton in perf/$.
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    Though there is the effect that clusters of eight cores on EPYC have faster access to each other than on Intel.
deleted 5y ago
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Const-me 5y ago
They are faster for many practical applications, at every price point. Maybe it's just me but all my performance-sensitive applications are heavily multithreaded. AMD CPUs simply have more cores. The profit from Intel only AVX-512 doesn't quite cut it. Besides, not all apps are actually optimized to leverage AVX-512, C++ compilers aren't.

What tangible benefits are you getting from choosing AMD now? Honest question as I'm curious if there's another benefit besides price (which Intel is fighting now).

zamadatix 5y ago

Most stuff eventually turns into cost so I'll ignore "costly" effects like heat/power and performance per dollar and focus on max performance scale for workloads and other unique differences not achievable via just throwing more money at the alternative. Per socket performance scaling is higher for equivalent tier sockets. At hyperscale that goes back into the price benefit (buy and maintain less physical data center) but for an individual server workload or individual user that also turns into a performance benefit, particularly for non NUMA aware workloads on the server side and just plain availability of such core counts for performance on the desktop or workstation side. PCIe wise you get about twice the lanes (128 total on AMD) of even a 40 core 8380 in a the base 8 core model of Epyc or a Threadripper workstation CPU. A place Intel still wins is total NUMA scaling. For a NUMA aware app like SAP HANA Intel can scale to 8 sockets while AMD currently tops out at 2 so you can reach about 2x as many total threads that way.

gtirloni 5y ago
Awesome, thanks for the extra details.
smolder 5y ago
I had a sister comment which wasn't as thorough as yours so I deleted it. It's worth adding though that for mobile applications, power consumption isn't just a cost factor, since better efficiency means you can have tighter packaging, get more battery life, not roast your lap as much, have quieter cooling, etc.
- zamadatix 5y ago
  Good point regarding batteries
b9a2cab5 5y ago
For non-NUMA aware workloads with high inter-core coordination (for example, a write heavy database workload) Intel will still perform much better because the cross-chiplet latency of EPYC chips is very high. Going through the IO die and to another chip is about as expensive as going to main memory. Hyperscalers are running web servers which is a different story. But if you're running web servers you might be better off with Graviton in perf/$.
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  Though there is the effect that clusters of eight cores on EPYC have faster access to each other than on Intel.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Const-me 5y ago

They are faster for many practical applications, at every price point. Maybe it's just me but all my performance-sensitive applications are heavily multithreaded. AMD CPUs simply have more cores. The profit from Intel only AVX-512 doesn't quite cut it. Besides, not all apps are actually optimized to leverage AVX-512, C++ compilers aren't.