Not really....

Core i9-9900K 8/16 Cores 3.6-.5.0 GHz - $488

Core i7-9700K 8/8 Cores 3.6-.4.9 GHz - $374

Ryzen 7 2700X 8/16 cores 4.3 GHz - $320

Easy pick for me, Intel isn't even a consideration.

You should see the prices here in the UK, we can get a Ryzen 2700X 8C/16T for £300 or an Intel 9900k 8C/16T for £600.

The Intel is probably faster... but enough to justify literally double the money? I seriously doubt it.

>The Intel is probably faster...

Only in specific IPC heavy workflows.

The amd probably can be built with ECC ram while the intel cannot, as well. I hope that’s a hat trick amd pushes them to release on the i7s.

When was the last time your computer crashed because of a cosmic ray?

The problem isn't a crash, the problem is silent data corruption. I have a system with 128 gigs of ECC and it catches a soft bit flip or two about every 6 months.

Most people don't have that amount of RAM. What are the chances that a soft bit flip will cause silent data corruption that matters for a user with, say, 8 GB of RAM?

The answer to the question you've asked depends heavily on the particular user and their work, of course. If the user is just playing games, who cares? But maybe they're doing financial calculations or compiling software that lots of users run or maybe they're doing aircraft structural analysis.

In any case, bit flips are much more common than were suspected: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2009/10/dram-...

I believe strongly that ECC should be standard, because you can't safely assume that your users are doing worthless work. Apple got this right on (non-Mini) desktops a long time ago. Not yet on laptops, unfortunately.

If you’ve got files you care about then care about bit rot. I want ECC so my ZFS volumes don’t silently corrupt.

That study is faulty. The intern who did that study didn't know that Google would buy DRAM chips that failed manufacturers QA, but them on DIMMs themselves, and retest them at lower frequencies and with ECC turned on. When they already have to be tolerant of any node failing because of their scale, they can start playing fast and loose with this sort of thing if it makes financial sense.

EDIT: At -3 so far, does anyone want to explain the downvotes? I saw the google slides first hand, and there are comments from 2009 in that article saying the same thing.

Didn't down it either, but: "The intern" is a well-respected CS professor; the paper had two Google authors whom one would expect to have knowledge of Google's oddities. https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub35162

Your comment provided no substantiation of your claim, merely hand-waving, while casting aspersions on someone else's work.

All ram should be ecc. No one would accept this incorrectness BS if the precedent hadn’t been set by the monopolist.

It's really the memory manufacturers who are enforcing and profiting from the ECC shakedown though, AFAICS.

Intel probably gets more from selling a Xeon.

I didn't downvote, but I'd guess that they (a) want an authoritative reference to the story you're sharing, or (b) figure the point is moot because these errors still happen, even if less often than depicted by the study, and that ought to be enough to justify using ECC.

Like I said though, just a guess.

If you think bit flipping is rare, check out this write-up: http://dinaburg.org/bitsquatting.html

Bitsquatting: DNS Hijacking without exploitation

When bit-errors occur they can change memory content. Computer memory content has semantic meaning. Sometimes, that meaning will be a domain name. And applications utilizing that memory will use the wrong domain name.

Nice point. As with all things that follow a distribution and given the large number of machines this error will occur.

Run a filesystem that checksums data (e.g. ZFS) on a system without ECC RAM for a few weeks and then come back to us... I've done it, the results were surprising, and I replaced the RAM with ECC.

> Most people don't have that amount of RAM.

Most people don't buy desktops with 16 or 32 or 64-thread processors designed to maximize throughput.

Those who do tend to want to max out how much RAM they can shove in their box.

As a counter example, my desktop has had 128 gb of ram since two years ago. I've never needed that much, 64GB would have been enough for the number of vms and containers that I run. But I couldn't pass up a good deal. I got the ram for $600.

Real statement of the times that I had a tough time finding 128 gig ram sets (on a short search - this should be easy).

Bit flip in the dirty cache that gets written to disk? Depends on what data structure was corrupt...

most bit flips won't cause a full-on crash, but may corrupt data in funny ways, or affect unused memory. I think people underestimate how common they are[1]

[1]https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub35162

You computer? Not sure. Computers in general? A noticeable fraction of Firefox crash reports are due to single-bit memory flips.

Huh, this is really interesting. Can you go more into this? How do you know the cause of the error? What kinda numbers are we talking here?

Also, are cosmic rays really the main source of single bit flips as apposed to just bad ram maybe?

Firefox crash reports include the contents of registers and a few instructions around the instruction pointer. If the crash is in compiled code, not JIT code, you also know where in the binary you were and can get symbols from a symbol server, then compare what the instructions should be to what they actually were.

Some of the time the instructions don't match up, indicating corruption _somewhere_.

For the specific case of crashes in JIT-generated code, the contents of registers and the instructions can be related in various ways (e.g. if you have a jmp instruction the register better contain your code location). And if you know where your code locations might be (because you're a JIT, and are generating the code and aligning it in memory yourself) and the register with the code location looks like the sort of address you would end up with but with one extra low bit set, say...

I am having trouble right now finding the bug report where some of the JIT engineers were analyzing crashes in jitcode, but about 1/3 of those were due to bitflips if I recall correctly. What that means in terms of absolute numbers (or numbers per user-hour, which would be even more useful), I don't know.

Note, by the way, single-bit flips can be a consequence of a bad memory chip, not just of cosmic rays.

Thanks! Incredibly interesting.

As AMD shareholder I am glad you see it that way :)

Full disclosure: I am also an AMD shareholder :)

I am not fanboying AMD here either. The facts for me are clear, AMD is going to continue to eat Intel for breakfast for the next 2 years at least. Intel isn't going to be competitive until they release a modular designed chip, which although they haven't announced they ware working on, I am 100% certain they are. Why am I certain, first they now have Jim Keller, who designed the Ryzen chip. Second, they acquired NetSpeed, which has IP around modular CPU design (likely a play to ensure they don't get sued by AMD when they release a modular chip). I know a lot of people are looking at Intel right now, thinking it is a bargain prices and a good time to buy. I think they have a long way more to fall. When the chips that Jim Keller is working on are about to hit the market, that is when it will be time to buy Intel. Until then I have no interest in anything Intel has to offer.

Would be really interested if you could provide a source or explanation on modular chips. Couldn't find anything with a couple of searches

Sure I would be happy to.

The tech is called "infinity fabric", you can look it up there is lots out there about it. It basically allows AMD to make several smaller dies and have them function together as one CPU. Here is an excellent video that explains it all (and also goes into why this is such a huge advantage that allows AMD to have significantly better yields with their wafers)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucMQermB9wQ

Not easy pick for me. Intel has 16% performance advantage. Pricing is bad, but they charge because they can. If I wanted to buy best CPU, I probably would have spend 1.5x more. If I wanted to save money, it's another story.

The upper-end of Intel's offerings start to get into AMD's Threadripper price range.

AMD is offering a 16-core / 32-thread 4.4GHz monster for $899, and a 32-core / 64-thread for $1799.

If you wanted the best under $5000 (total cost of a computer), it seems like AMD Threadripper is the best. If you wanted the best below $1000, it seems like AMD Ryzen is the best.

Only if you are single-thread bound (5GHz clocks!!), AVX2 or AVX512 bound, or PEXT / PDEP bound (Stockfish 9) should you consider Intel. But otherwise, AMD is offering more performance at all price points up to the EPYC 7601 (~$3000 CPU: 32-core/64 threads / 8-memory controllers / 64 PCIe lanes direct to CPU, support for dual-socket).

--------

With that being said, I'm definitely interested in Intel's Xeon Silver platform. If Intel pushed dual-socket out better, then they would be cheaper AND faster. IMO, its a bit weird that Intel isn't taking advantage of their dual-socket solutions to counter AMD Threadripper (I mean... Threadripper really is just a dual-socket or quad-socket NUMA chip combined into a single socket).

As it is, Xeon Silver is hard to find and seems to be ticking up in price unfortunately. But their nominal prices are actually quite good, although their clocks are kinda low. But Xeon Silver really seems like Intel's price/performance champ (even if its still a bit more expensive than Threadripper or EPYC).

Really depends on what you're doing. If you're doing a lot of builds or running virtual machines, AMD is the clear winner here. No contest.

If you're only doing primarily single threaded things (i.e. gaming) then the intel chips will give you better performance.

Gaming has not been single-threaded for a while, even on mobile.

Gaming has multiple threads, but often is single-threaded bound due to Ahmdal's law.

Lets say you can split up your threads to AI, Physics, Rendering, Networking, etc. etc. But lets say Physics dominates: then your game is still single-threaded bound. You only get faster if you make your physics faster.

You can split your game up into work-queues, thread pools, and such. Except not everyone is up-to-date with the latest techniques yet. Furthermore, thread-pools aren't always cache friendly and may hamper your performance. (If Core1 works on something, then Core4 completes the work, you have to transfer all the data out of your L1 and L2 cache to continue working on it on Core4).

So its not exactly an easy thing to program.

newer AAA games/3d drivers lead to a pretty nice workload split over multiple cores really. Battlegrounds was coded in a rush and inexpertly so but it still lights up 4 cores pretty well. Probably in part due to drivers and unreal engine helping out even if the game programmers aren't explicitly working at it.

Oh yeah, SOME games are certainly multithreaded well. Doom, Battlegrounds, and more. DX12 apparently helped a lot with that.

But many games are still single-thread bound (despite being multithreaded). As such, Gamers should still prefer single-thread performance.

I would say not just SOME but MOST, if you look at recent releases. As of PS4/XB1 single threading isn't really viable for an AAA title. PC ports are generally seeing the benefits of that.

People have been saying that for 5 years (which is, in fact, how long XB1/PS4 have been on the market). Single-threaded performance is still the dominant factor in gaming performance.

Games make use of up to 6 threads, but single-threaded performance still determines overall framerate to a large extent. Games are not exempt from Amdahl's law: as long as you've got enough threads to offload work, it comes down to the single-threaded portion of the workload. The faster you can run the main game loop the faster the game runs.

Games that are single thread bound are not maximising their potential on the common multi-core CPUs. Not many games strictly dictate sequential computations of the numerous things a game has to calculate.

Gamer's who prefer cutting edge performance should prefer multi-thread performance.

In almost all cases, modern processors have enough multi-threaded performance to play optimized (multi-threaded) games acceptably. It's the single-threaded ones that will be challenging to run, and it's those challenging tasks that you should optimize your system around.

Optimizing for MT-heavy games is the gaming equivalent of premature optimization - everybody can run Doom at a million FPS, but Fallout 4 or PUBG shit all over every system and you'll be begging for every frame you can get.

You can "prefer" whatever you want but developers don't care. This site of all places knows that time-to-market is what really matters. If you want to play those titles, you have to deal with it. Either optimize for the shitty titles, accept that you're going to be losing a fairly significant amount of frames (the 2700X is behind as much as 30% in some titles), or don't play those titles.

I'm not talking about getting the same done, different ways. Ie multi vs single threaded.

I mean that if the software is implemented in the correct manner, "more can be done" by utilizing multiple threads.

I'm playing WoW and Factorio and both games are single-core limited. So while it might be true for most games, it depends on user, I'm not really interested in games, I just have few I'm playing for years and I want them to run fast.

It's worth remembering that WoW dates to 2004.

Maybe AAA games can scale beyond 2 or even 4 cores, but historically (and probably still true on the low end) games were heavily depended on 1-2 core perf.

Game engines are multi-threaded, but there is still a critical path. And passed a certain amount of cores (typically 4 in modern games), you won't get any improvement by adding more.

That's because once you are down the critical path, the only way to go faster is by improving single core performance.

There is a reason reason why Core i5 are so popular with gamers. They have just enough cores not to limit a game engine, excellent single-thread performance, and they are affordable.

Same for AMD. Not even a consideration without thunderbolt.

We should see it sooner or later. Thunderbolt is royalty-free.

But what application are you needing more than 10Gbps externally?

> But what application are you needing more than 10Gbps externally?

Laptop docking. Running a 4K monitor over a USB Type-C cable leaves you with only the USB 2.0 lanes available for data. (And 5K is impossible.)

All of the damn external disks and devices I bought for video editing.

Ryzen still stuck at SSE instruction. AVX2 instructions are faked and go at SSE speed.

[EDIT - removed AVX-512 claim that was wrong]

Overall perf is likely a lot better with the i9 for most workloads.

The i9-9900k does not support AVX-512, since it's still based on the Coffee Lake uarch. ARK confirms: https://ark.intel.com/products/186605

It's true that Coffee Lake has a performance edge over Ryzen when running AVX/AVX2 code though.

"SSE speed" is the most meaningful term I've ever seen.

Ryzen doesn't have 256-bit wide units, so 256-bit instructions take 2x as long.

The benefit of that is that Ryzen doesn't throttle the clock speed of the whole chip when executing AVX2 instructions :P

Intel's widening of units has brought a giant downclocking problem: https://blog.cloudflare.com/on-the-dangers-of-intels-frequen...

(least meaningful of course)