7 ms·

Completely agree. The lack of clarity around all this is hardly confidence inspiring. Definitely seems like a good time to be considering AMD or Qualcomm.

yellowapple 2y ago
It does indeed make me glad I've opted to pick AMD over Intel for my recent computer purchases (at least of the x86-64 variety).
- Sparkyte 2y ago
  I've been using AMD since 2004. My first AMD processor was the Athlon 64 3000+, I was a kid I wasn't really allowed anything too expensive. We had dominately used Intel upt that point but when 64bit CPUs hit it was a revolutionary thing. The roughest era of AMD CPUs was the FX era. While it was comprable to its mid-range competition it was alos a sure fast way to burn down your house with its power draw. Ryzen was a huge step forward in CPU design and architecture. I see this era as Intel's FX era, if they have the right leadership in place they can turn the boat around and innovate.
  - SmellTheGlove 2y ago
    The funny part is that those FX processors were max 125w TDP. No different than today really.
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    >The roughest era of AMD CPUs was the FX era. Ahem. Bulldozer? >Ryzen was a huge step forward in CPU design and architecture. First gen Ryzen was kinda mediocre. Second gen(correction: meaning Zen 2 not Ryzen 2000 which was still Zen 1) was where the performance came. Also let's not ignore how they screwed consumers like me by dropping SW support for Vega in 2023 while still selling laptops with Vega powered APUs on the shelves all the way till present day in 2024, or having a naming scheme that's intentionally confusing to mislead consumers where you don't know if that Ryzen 7000 laptop APU has Zen2, Zen3, Zen3+ or Zen4 CPU cores, if it's 4nm, 5nm, 6nm or 7nm or if it's running RDNA2, RDNA3 or the now obsolete Vega in a modern system.[1] Maddening. Despite that I'm a returning AMD customer to avoid Intel, but I'm having my own issues now with their iGPU drivers making me regret not going Intel this time around. The grass isn't always greener across the fence, just different issues. I get it, you're an AMD fan, but let's be objective and not ignore their stinkers and anti-consumer practices which they had plenty of and only played nice for a while to get sympathy because they were the struggling underdog, but didn't hesitate to milk and deceive consumers the moment they got back on top like any other for profit company with a moment of market dominance. My point being, don't get attached or loyal to any large company, since you're just a dollar sign for all of them. Be an informed consumer and make purchasing decisions on objective current factors, not blind brand loyalty from the distant past. [1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/1445760/amds-mobile-ryzen-naming-scheme-is-stupidly-complex.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/1445760/amds-mobile-ryzen-na... https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/amd-confusing-naming-scheme-for-mobile-cpus/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/amd-confusing-naming...
    - KronisLV 2y ago
      > First gen Ryzen was kinda mediocre. I've used both the Ryzen 3 1200 and 7 1700 and all of them seemed fine for their time and price. Honestly, I had the 1700 in my main PC up until last year, it was still very much okay for most things I might want to actually do, except no ReBAR support pushed me towards a Ryzen 5 4500 (got it for a low price, otherwise slightly better than the 1700 in performance, still good for my needs; runs noticeably hotter though, even without a big OC). I guess things are quite different for enthusiasts and power users, but their needs probably don't affect what would be considered bad/mediocre/good for the general population.
      - rasz 2y ago
        Im sure you will be happy to hear this is purely artificial limitation introduced by AMD for product segmentation purposes. Very first Ryzen Zen generation does fully support ReBAR in hardware, but its locked by AMD bios. https://www.techpowerup.com/276125/asus-enables-resizable-bar-support-on-first-generation-amd-ryzen-cpus https://www.techpowerup.com/276125/asus-enables-resizable-ba...
        KronisLV 2y ago
        Yeah, there were also efforts like this, too https://github.com/xCuri0/ReBarUEFI https://github.com/xCuri0/ReBarUEFI Given that I got an Intel Arc A580 for myself, this was pretty important! Quite bad that it wasn't officially supported if there are no hardware issues and I would have liked to just keep using the 1700 for a few more years, but opted for just buying a new CPU so my old one would be a reasonable backup, path of least resistance in this case. Would also like to try out the recent Intel CPUs (though surely not the variety that seems to have stability issues), but that's not in the cards for now because most of my PCs and homelab all use AM4, on which I'll stay for the foreseeable future.
    - gruez 2y ago
      >>The roughest era of AMD CPUs was the FX era. >Ahem. Bulldozer? Bulldozer is the same as FX. >AMD FX is a series of high-end AMD microprocessors for personal computers which debuted in 2011, claimed as AMD's first native 8-core desktop processor.[1] The line was introduced with the Bulldozer microarchitecture at launch (codenamed "Zambezi"), and was then succeeded by its derivative Piledriver in 2012 (codenamed "Vishera").
  - Joel_Mckay 2y ago
    "Evil Inside(tm)" software made sure many of the libraries and compilers had much slower performance on AMD chips for years. We had to use intel cpu/gpu + CUDA gpu simply because of compatibility requirements (heavy media codecs and ML workloads.) Lets be honest, AMD technically has had a better product for decades if you exclude the power consumption metric. ARM64 v8 is also good, if and only if you don't need advanced gpu features. The Ryzen chips definitely are respectable in passmarks benchmark value stats rankings. =)
    - smallstepforman 2y ago
      The 3700x and 5700x are 65W parts specifically made for quiet/cool boxes (they’re also 8 core). I have both since I enjoy my sanity and dont care about 10% extra performance. They are the pick of the litter in my mind. Also have a laptop with 5850h. Same with their Navi chips, not blazing hot but good enough, and my boxes and nice and quiet.
      - plasticchris 2y ago
        I have a 3700x I keep around 1.05v and it is completely quiet (and p95 stable) under a massive air cooler which basically never spins up the fans.
      - Joel_Mckay 2y ago
        I think we've been in the "good-enough" computing age for awhile, and only the CUDA-gpu/codec-asic primarily feature in most desktop upgrade decisions. Quiet machines are great, especially when you have to sit next to one for 9 hours a day. =3
    - ffgjgf1 2y ago
      > AMD technically has had a better product for decades if you exclude the power consumption metric And single core performance. And some other stuff which obviously didn’t matter during the period in question but suddenly became very important when AMD surpassed Intel in that regard…
  - mhitza 2y ago
    I remember that I received a ridiculously high RPM fan with my FX-8350 CPU (in the box), which sounded like a vacuum when it ran. Took me less than a week to upgrade to a proper fan that managed to cool that damn thing at 600RPM or so, and life was quiet again!
    - BenjiWiebe 2y ago
      I'm still running that fan/CPU combo... I intended to replace it many years ago but have never pulled the trigger yet.
- winrid 2y ago
  Did you use AM5? It was hardly without issues, with users experiencing 30+ second POST times. I'm not even sure that's fixed yet with most motherboards OOTB.
  - schmidtleonard 2y ago
    Wow, I was planning an AM5 build but 30 second POST is yikes. Does it go away with an update?
    - wtallis 2y ago
      The long POST times are a consequence of DDR5 link training. It's not entirely an AMD-specific problem. Most motherboards for either Intel or AMD now have a feature to skip most of the link training if it doesn't look like there's been a hardware change or since the last boot, but it's unavoidable on the first boot.
      - winrid 2y ago
        link training does have an impact, but regardless of link training it looks like many users still report 15+ seconds before ever reaching the bootloader: https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/1815vyr/am5_users_how_long_does_it_take_your_pc_to_boot/ https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/1815vyr/am5_users... It looks like some newer motherboards are finally fixing the issue. Note that AM5 is now 2 years old.
      - aaronmdjones 2y ago
        30 seconds would be a blessed relief. Link training takes upwards of 3 minutes for my 4x 32GiB DDR5 machine whenever I update its firmware, and then 3 minutes all over again when I load the XMP profile instead of running at the new firmware's safe stock 4000 MT/s.
- zigzag312 2y ago
  I've picked AMD over Intel too, but I've had so many issues with it that I partly regret it. Memory stability issues, extremely long boot times, too high voltage, iGPU driver timeouts. Most of the issues have been fixed, but not all. After months of dealing with an annoying memory leak, I've just recently been able to confirm that it is caused by a Zen 4 iGPU driver.
  - Joel_Mckay 2y ago
    Sounds like bad ram (clean contacts, re-seat, and test) or temperature issues (the main reason we still use mobile i7-12700H was cheap ddr4 64GB ram stick kit, Iris media gpu drivers, and rtx CUDA gpu.) Intel has its own issues, Gigabyte told me to pound sand when asking to unlock the bios on my own equipment to disable IME. There is no greener grass on the fence line... just a different set of issues =3
    - Rinzler89 2y ago
      >Sounds like bad ram (clean contacts, re-seat, and test) Since he's taking about iGPU issues, he most likely has a laptop APU, so no RAM to reseat. I'm also having similar issues on my Ryzen 7000 laptop. Kinda regret upgrading from the Ryzen 5000 laptop which AMD obsoleted just 2 years after I bought it, as at least that had no issues. Hopefully new drivers in the future will fix stability but you never know. What I do know, is that this will most likely be my last AMD machine if Intel shows improvement to match AMD, since their Linux driver support is just top notch.
      - Joel_Mckay 2y ago
        Depends on the failure mode, as it is common for specs to drift around under load (also, temperature cycling stresses PCB, and can shear BGA connections.) I'd try a slower cheap set of lower-bandwidth/higher-latency ram sticks to see if it stops glitching up. If you are using low latency sticks (iGPU means this is usually recommended), than dropping the performance a bit may stabilize your specific equipment. Of course, I'm not that smart... so YMMV... =3
- ocdtrekkie 2y ago
  I've been staunchly an Intel stan since Pentium 4s were cool and this year will be my first AMD build. Have already been using their server hardware at the office and not disappointed at all. No particular straw broke the camel's back, they just haven't managed to justify their price premium in a very long time.
- Thaxll 2y ago
  If you play games, Intel has no answer to the X3D series from AMD. It's even worse with their p vs e cores that creates issues in many games.
  - ffgjgf1 2y ago
    > It's even worse with their p vs e cores that creates issues in many games. Didn’t AMD also have issues with different cache types/sizes on dual CCD chips? Meaning that it basically didn’t make any sense to buy anything more expensive than the 7800x3d if you only care about gaming.
forinti 2y ago
Just last week I bought a new desktop for a family member. I was considering an Intel CPU, but at the last minute found a better and cheaper option with an AMD processor. Am I glad I dodged that bullet.

yellowapple 2y ago

It does indeed make me glad I've opted to pick AMD over Intel for my recent computer purchases (at least of the x86-64 variety).

Sparkyte 2y ago
I've been using AMD since 2004. My first AMD processor was the Athlon 64 3000+, I was a kid I wasn't really allowed anything too expensive. We had dominately used Intel upt that point but when 64bit CPUs hit it was a revolutionary thing. The roughest era of AMD CPUs was the FX era. While it was comprable to its mid-range competition it was alos a sure fast way to burn down your house with its power draw. Ryzen was a huge step forward in CPU design and architecture. I see this era as Intel's FX era, if they have the right leadership in place they can turn the boat around and innovate.
- SmellTheGlove 2y ago
  The funny part is that those FX processors were max 125w TDP. No different than today really.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  >The roughest era of AMD CPUs was the FX era. Ahem. Bulldozer? >Ryzen was a huge step forward in CPU design and architecture. First gen Ryzen was kinda mediocre. Second gen(correction: meaning Zen 2 not Ryzen 2000 which was still Zen 1) was where the performance came. Also let's not ignore how they screwed consumers like me by dropping SW support for Vega in 2023 while still selling laptops with Vega powered APUs on the shelves all the way till present day in 2024, or having a naming scheme that's intentionally confusing to mislead consumers where you don't know if that Ryzen 7000 laptop APU has Zen2, Zen3, Zen3+ or Zen4 CPU cores, if it's 4nm, 5nm, 6nm or 7nm or if it's running RDNA2, RDNA3 or the now obsolete Vega in a modern system.[1] Maddening. Despite that I'm a returning AMD customer to avoid Intel, but I'm having my own issues now with their iGPU drivers making me regret not going Intel this time around. The grass isn't always greener across the fence, just different issues. I get it, you're an AMD fan, but let's be objective and not ignore their stinkers and anti-consumer practices which they had plenty of and only played nice for a while to get sympathy because they were the struggling underdog, but didn't hesitate to milk and deceive consumers the moment they got back on top like any other for profit company with a moment of market dominance. My point being, don't get attached or loyal to any large company, since you're just a dollar sign for all of them. Be an informed consumer and make purchasing decisions on objective current factors, not blind brand loyalty from the distant past. [1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/1445760/amds-mobile-ryzen-naming-scheme-is-stupidly-complex.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/1445760/amds-mobile-ryzen-na... https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/amd-confusing-naming-scheme-for-mobile-cpus/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/amd-confusing-naming...
  - KronisLV 2y ago
    > First gen Ryzen was kinda mediocre. I've used both the Ryzen 3 1200 and 7 1700 and all of them seemed fine for their time and price. Honestly, I had the 1700 in my main PC up until last year, it was still very much okay for most things I might want to actually do, except no ReBAR support pushed me towards a Ryzen 5 4500 (got it for a low price, otherwise slightly better than the 1700 in performance, still good for my needs; runs noticeably hotter though, even without a big OC). I guess things are quite different for enthusiasts and power users, but their needs probably don't affect what would be considered bad/mediocre/good for the general population.
    - rasz 2y ago
      Im sure you will be happy to hear this is purely artificial limitation introduced by AMD for product segmentation purposes. Very first Ryzen Zen generation does fully support ReBAR in hardware, but its locked by AMD bios. https://www.techpowerup.com/276125/asus-enables-resizable-bar-support-on-first-generation-amd-ryzen-cpus https://www.techpowerup.com/276125/asus-enables-resizable-ba...
      - KronisLV 2y ago
        Yeah, there were also efforts like this, too https://github.com/xCuri0/ReBarUEFI https://github.com/xCuri0/ReBarUEFI Given that I got an Intel Arc A580 for myself, this was pretty important! Quite bad that it wasn't officially supported if there are no hardware issues and I would have liked to just keep using the 1700 for a few more years, but opted for just buying a new CPU so my old one would be a reasonable backup, path of least resistance in this case. Would also like to try out the recent Intel CPUs (though surely not the variety that seems to have stability issues), but that's not in the cards for now because most of my PCs and homelab all use AM4, on which I'll stay for the foreseeable future.
  - gruez 2y ago
    >>The roughest era of AMD CPUs was the FX era. >Ahem. Bulldozer? Bulldozer is the same as FX. >AMD FX is a series of high-end AMD microprocessors for personal computers which debuted in 2011, claimed as AMD's first native 8-core desktop processor.[1] The line was introduced with the Bulldozer microarchitecture at launch (codenamed "Zambezi"), and was then succeeded by its derivative Piledriver in 2012 (codenamed "Vishera").
- Joel_Mckay 2y ago
  "Evil Inside(tm)" software made sure many of the libraries and compilers had much slower performance on AMD chips for years. We had to use intel cpu/gpu + CUDA gpu simply because of compatibility requirements (heavy media codecs and ML workloads.) Lets be honest, AMD technically has had a better product for decades if you exclude the power consumption metric. ARM64 v8 is also good, if and only if you don't need advanced gpu features. The Ryzen chips definitely are respectable in passmarks benchmark value stats rankings. =)
  - smallstepforman 2y ago
    The 3700x and 5700x are 65W parts specifically made for quiet/cool boxes (they’re also 8 core). I have both since I enjoy my sanity and dont care about 10% extra performance. They are the pick of the litter in my mind. Also have a laptop with 5850h. Same with their Navi chips, not blazing hot but good enough, and my boxes and nice and quiet.
    - plasticchris 2y ago
      I have a 3700x I keep around 1.05v and it is completely quiet (and p95 stable) under a massive air cooler which basically never spins up the fans.
    - Joel_Mckay 2y ago
      I think we've been in the "good-enough" computing age for awhile, and only the CUDA-gpu/codec-asic primarily feature in most desktop upgrade decisions. Quiet machines are great, especially when you have to sit next to one for 9 hours a day. =3
  - ffgjgf1 2y ago
    > AMD technically has had a better product for decades if you exclude the power consumption metric And single core performance. And some other stuff which obviously didn’t matter during the period in question but suddenly became very important when AMD surpassed Intel in that regard…
- mhitza 2y ago
  I remember that I received a ridiculously high RPM fan with my FX-8350 CPU (in the box), which sounded like a vacuum when it ran. Took me less than a week to upgrade to a proper fan that managed to cool that damn thing at 600RPM or so, and life was quiet again!
  - BenjiWiebe 2y ago
    I'm still running that fan/CPU combo... I intended to replace it many years ago but have never pulled the trigger yet.
winrid 2y ago
Did you use AM5? It was hardly without issues, with users experiencing 30+ second POST times. I'm not even sure that's fixed yet with most motherboards OOTB.
- schmidtleonard 2y ago
  Wow, I was planning an AM5 build but 30 second POST is yikes. Does it go away with an update?
  - wtallis 2y ago
    The long POST times are a consequence of DDR5 link training. It's not entirely an AMD-specific problem. Most motherboards for either Intel or AMD now have a feature to skip most of the link training if it doesn't look like there's been a hardware change or since the last boot, but it's unavoidable on the first boot.
    - winrid 2y ago
      link training does have an impact, but regardless of link training it looks like many users still report 15+ seconds before ever reaching the bootloader: https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/1815vyr/am5_users_how_long_does_it_take_your_pc_to_boot/ https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/1815vyr/am5_users... It looks like some newer motherboards are finally fixing the issue. Note that AM5 is now 2 years old.
    - aaronmdjones 2y ago
      30 seconds would be a blessed relief. Link training takes upwards of 3 minutes for my 4x 32GiB DDR5 machine whenever I update its firmware, and then 3 minutes all over again when I load the XMP profile instead of running at the new firmware's safe stock 4000 MT/s.
zigzag312 2y ago
I've picked AMD over Intel too, but I've had so many issues with it that I partly regret it. Memory stability issues, extremely long boot times, too high voltage, iGPU driver timeouts. Most of the issues have been fixed, but not all. After months of dealing with an annoying memory leak, I've just recently been able to confirm that it is caused by a Zen 4 iGPU driver.
- Joel_Mckay 2y ago
  Sounds like bad ram (clean contacts, re-seat, and test) or temperature issues (the main reason we still use mobile i7-12700H was cheap ddr4 64GB ram stick kit, Iris media gpu drivers, and rtx CUDA gpu.) Intel has its own issues, Gigabyte told me to pound sand when asking to unlock the bios on my own equipment to disable IME. There is no greener grass on the fence line... just a different set of issues =3
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    >Sounds like bad ram (clean contacts, re-seat, and test) Since he's taking about iGPU issues, he most likely has a laptop APU, so no RAM to reseat. I'm also having similar issues on my Ryzen 7000 laptop. Kinda regret upgrading from the Ryzen 5000 laptop which AMD obsoleted just 2 years after I bought it, as at least that had no issues. Hopefully new drivers in the future will fix stability but you never know. What I do know, is that this will most likely be my last AMD machine if Intel shows improvement to match AMD, since their Linux driver support is just top notch.
    - Joel_Mckay 2y ago
      Depends on the failure mode, as it is common for specs to drift around under load (also, temperature cycling stresses PCB, and can shear BGA connections.) I'd try a slower cheap set of lower-bandwidth/higher-latency ram sticks to see if it stops glitching up. If you are using low latency sticks (iGPU means this is usually recommended), than dropping the performance a bit may stabilize your specific equipment. Of course, I'm not that smart... so YMMV... =3
ocdtrekkie 2y ago
I've been staunchly an Intel stan since Pentium 4s were cool and this year will be my first AMD build. Have already been using their server hardware at the office and not disappointed at all. No particular straw broke the camel's back, they just haven't managed to justify their price premium in a very long time.
Thaxll 2y ago
If you play games, Intel has no answer to the X3D series from AMD. It's even worse with their p vs e cores that creates issues in many games.
- ffgjgf1 2y ago
  > It's even worse with their p vs e cores that creates issues in many games. Didn’t AMD also have issues with different cache types/sizes on dual CCD chips? Meaning that it basically didn’t make any sense to buy anything more expensive than the 7800x3d if you only care about gaming.

forinti 2y ago

Just last week I bought a new desktop for a family member. I was considering an Intel CPU, but at the last minute found a better and cheaper option with an AMD processor. Am I glad I dodged that bullet.