I never stated that.

Edit: I updated the original comment to clarify that.

> They are losing the desktop wars hard to AMD with Ryzen, and starting to lose ground on the server front.

I never purchased any new Intel's CPUs (or AMD's CPU, for that matter) since Ivy Bridge. If I have to build a new x86 PC today, I'll definitely buy AMD.

I found it's a fairy capable machine for day-to-day uses, even building a relatively large project is not a problem. There is a performance hit after Meltdown/Spectre, especially when you disable hyperthreading.

But yes, I'm actively looking forward to try a non-x86 platform as my desktop, and I'm watching for this PowerPC laptop [0]. Another option is the MNT Reform ARM laptop that offers an interesting, hackable design [1]. For desktops, HoneyComb LX2K is an ARM motherboard that offers workstation-level specs [2]. But the first two projects are still in development. HoneyComb looks good but the 550 USD price tag requires me to consider carefully (the same money may buy me more interesting hardware in the near-future soon).

For POWER, the Raptor Talos II workstation [3] is the first choice comes to mind, but it's POWER, the 3000+ USD price tag is not for the light-hearted. For RISC-V, it costs around 2000+ USD (1000 USD for the CPU board [4], another 1000 USD for the PCI-E board [5]) to build a desktop from the current development system. I'm still waiting for an affordable RISC-V SoC that can be used as a 400-500 USD desktop.

I can pay 2000 USD if I decide it's the One True machine that can be used as my daily driver, but it's obviously not the case for now. So... waiting, waiting, waiting, and decision, decision, decision...

[0] https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/en/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21231031

[2] https://www.solid-run.com/nxp-lx2160a-family/honeycomb-works...

[3] https://www.raptorcs.com/

[4] https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive-unleashed

[5] https://www.crowdsupply.com/microsemi/hifive-unleashed-expan...

[1] https://developer.solid-run.com/knowledge-base/lx2160a-cex7-...

OTOH 2x SFP+ @10GbE is nothing to sneeze at. Regarding the 'Work-Station-level' specs, which GPU would you use in there, assuming you'd want more than a simple frame buffer? I mean one which is fully supported by opensource drivers for that architecture and special platform quirks?

Edit: writing this from some specced out Core i7-640LM docked into assorted cybertrash. Asking because experience taught me i can throw anything at old x86/x64, while that isn't the case with anything else, even if the physical slots/interfaces ARE there. At least not for now. Catch-22.

I've looked at generational numbers and only in the past year or two has it gotten kind of bad. Been itching to upgrade since last November, but held out for a 16c Ryzen, I wanted more Linux stability, but pulled the trigger early as I said my old system was acting up.

In the end, it's quite a jump just to an R5 3600 from the i7-4790K ... I don't know if/when I'll feel the need to upgrade again after next month.

apple doesn't quite have to clout to tell TMSC not to build chips for anyone else.

Clearly this restriction isn’t hurting AMD right now! But process is the topic under discussion.

The truth is that both models work and Intel’s problems are created by their management, not by their operating model.

If these theories had real predictive power, they would allow you to make a killing on the stock market.

Anecdotally, I'm using two Ryzen 3000 systems right now (a 3900X and a 3200U) and both are working just fine.

And i7 is a meaningless brand in laptops, it covers a wide variety of power levels and core counts.

Hopefully the outcome of that work will trickle down to other laptop manufacturers. (BIOS, drivers, etc.)

Note that AMD's mobile "Renoir" chips are expected early next year, which will be based on the up-to-date Zen 2 microarchitecture used in the desktop Ryzen 3000/3000X series. (The 3000G series uses the older Zen+ from Ryzen 2000/2000X, just like the 3000-series laptop chips.)

Also, I've read conflicting information on whether "Renoir" will use Vega or Navi. Various articles and comments from earlier this year seem to think Vega, while I'm seeing more mentions of "Renoir" and Navi together now that we're closer to its release. IS there any solid information on which of the two it will use?

[0] https://wccftech.com/exclusive-next-generation-amd-7nm-mobil...

I seem to remember reading about a January launch (i.e. CES as you say) with shipping laptops expected towards the end of Q1 2020.

Vega vs Navi: IS there any solid information on which of the two it will use?

I don't think there's any solid information; watchers seemed to interpret recently added device IDs in Windows and Linux drivers as belonging to Vega-based APUs with new video engines backported from Navi. Whether that's Renoir or another APU line remains to be seen. There's also rumours that the next batch of APUs might just be a Zen+ die shrink to 7nm rather than a full upgrade to Zen 2.

Given that mobile CPUs and SFF business desktop systems with integrated graphics are where the volume markets are these days, it seems a little odd that AMD lags their APUs behind the standalone desktop and server CPUs so much. The next desktop APUs are only expected mid 2020. I can only assume they are still battling idle power draw issues (especially if Zen 2's PCIe 4.0 is hard to swap out for more the power efficient PCIe 3.0) or that the integration of CPU and GPU via Infinity Fabric is difficult to pull off in practice.

I'm currently eyeing Dell's Precision workstations due to their extensibility, but the XPS 13 Developer Edition also looks quite nice and more portable. And they both offer Ubuntu, which is nice. I think at this point almost anything I get will be better than what I already have.

I'd be basing my decision primarily around which models fulfil my needs - be that in terms of portability, battery life, display quality, performance (CPU and GPU), ergonomics, etc. Right now, there is much less choice of AMD-based laptops, and they currently tend to be on the low end of the scale in terms of everything but performance. After years of integrating and tuning systems with only Intel CPUs, the laptop makers have yet to get the hang of making high-quality AMD-based laptops. I suspect this will change over time (Microsoft's aforementioned Surface Laptop 3 is a good sign in this regard).

If you're keen to support the underdog and can wait a few months, you can certainly wait for Renoir to be launched. I suspect AMD are itching to get a piece of that giant laptop revenue pie, so even if it ends up being Zen+ with Vega, AMD might have spent that time instead fine tuning idle power draw and thermals. Performance of their APUs is already decent, so such fine-tuning might be enough to get some high quality AMD-based thin & light laptops to market.

If you need a powerful (discrete) GPU and would prefer to go with AMD over NVIDIA for that, the upcoming Navi-based Radeon RX 5500M is one to watch, be it paired with an Intel or AMD CPU.

Disclosure: I skew towards AMD for both GPUs (in preference to nVidia) and CPUs (in preference to Intel) when it makes sense. I've got a Ryzen-based desktop system, but there are more Intel-CPU-based systems in my office, to a large extent because I do Mac-based development professionally - I think I bought my last AMD-based laptop in 2005.

Only negative is the Ethernet jack requires a $30 proprietary adapter from Lenovo. Apparently to keep the chassis thin they couldn't fit the full-size RJ-45 port.

3950X is going to be good at productivity but Intel is still faster per-core and the 10980XE packs in 2 more cores. It's also more expensive, of course - there's a place for the 3950X here, just don't expect to see the 3950X handily best a 10980XE despite being short by 2 cores.

The 3950X is just a 3900X with more cores, and we already know Zen2 pretty much just matches Intel in the best case and loses in many other cases. There is not enough architectural lead there to account for a (32,082 / 25,838) x (18/16) = 39.6% per-core performance lead in favor of AMD. Guaranteed.

It's an erroneous test. It happens a lot with pre-release leaks, Zen has had a lot of timer bugs at launch. Or it's an LN2 run on the 3950X and an engineering sample 10980XE, or something like that.

In a more realistic set of tests, with a 50% core deficit and mitigations enabled, Intel's geomean score is 6% lower than AMD's. They're not 40% behind AMD in per-core performance.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=3900x-99...

They might've slashed prices and they are kind of similar, but they target 2 different categories.

I'm simply responding to grandparent comment's claim that a 16C 3950X will beat a 18C 10980XE by 25%, which, no, it won't.

The performance of these products is already known +/- a few percent, they are both just evolutions of existing products.

Real-world, AMD is still losing in per-core performance on average. Close, sometimes tying, sometimes leading, but not leading by 40%.

Again: we already know what Zen2 performance looks like. Cascade Lake-X is basically Skylake-X+, a new stepping with some tweaks and (much) higher clocks. These are not new products when it comes to expected performance.

It's straightforward to see that 40% per-core lead is purely wishful thinking from the AMD set here. Don't get your hopes up, you'll just crash the hype train yet again.

I don't know why the hype train is such a thing for the AMD crowd, this spring it was supposed 5.1 GHz and 6C12T for $99 and that crashed into the brick wall of reality hard too.

Did a reasonable person actually claim this, or are you citing the most extreme of the most extreme AMD fanboys? That group isn't anywhere near representative of normal AMD customers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCdsTBsH-rI

Obviously his reputation is in the toilet ever since (also due to him frankly melting down about how this was really AMD's fault, and that they must have changed the lineup since he published his leak, and if his leak wasn't right they should have told him). But at the time he was extremely revered among the AMD fanbase for breaking a fair few scoops, like the IO Die design for Zen2 server and desktop chips, and he claimed this was a very well-sourced leak that he was confident in.

People also leaned on statements from Kyle at HardOCP, another long-time analyst as well as statements from Der8auer (an overclocker who works at CaseKing) that 5 GHz was quote "very realistic".

There has been a concerted effort to retcon that and pretend that he was just some crazy who nobody ever believed, but this shit completely took over hardware discussion for the month before CES, and had a strong contingent of believers all the way up to the actual launch.

Contemporary discussion:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/a34nnm/ryzen_3000_rade...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/a3kteb/amd_ryzen_3000_...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/ahxxpg/der_8auer_think...

Is the situation still bad with Intel regarding side-channel attacks? The fixes for those used to drop performance for up to 30%, which render them pathetic compared to AMD which doesn't suffer from those issues. This is real performance, not some synthetic benchmarks.

Regardless, Firestrike Physics is not a benchmark that is substantially affected by mitigations. End-user tasks in general are not affected very strongly, generally ~1-3%, up to 5% in some cases.

Phoronix tested across a spectrum of workstation tasks (not gaming) and found a geomean of about 12% performance impact for Intel and 4.5% for AMD. Linked earlier, here again:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=3900x-99...

Generally, server tasks are hit hardest because they involve lots of context switching. Gaming is typically not affected much at all. Workstation tasks fall somewhere in the middle.

Because AMD doesn't deliver constant good results. They just drop a bombshell every 10 years and call it a day.

In any case if I remember correctly AMD was the first using a ~64bit arch in consumer CPUs (which I think is why the arch is called "AMD64") and the same about offering multicore CPUs ( https://www.pcworld.com/article/117654/article.html ), but Intel was then always able to quickly catch up (and, in the end, present better products).

In the case of Zen I read some time ago that the lead architect left AMD and ended up working now for Intel ( from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_(engineer) ):

In August 2012, Jim Keller returned to AMD, where his primary task was to design a new generation microarchitecture called Zen. After years of being unable to compete with Intel in the high-end CPU market, the new generation of Zen processors is hoped to restore AMD's position in the high-end x86-64 processor market. On September 18, 2015, Keller departed from AMD to pursue other opportunities, ending his three-year employment at AMD. In January 2016, Keller joined Tesla, Inc. as Vice President of Autopilot Hardware Engineering. In April 2018, Keller joined Intel

That doesn't give me a good feeling about the future of AMD chips, but on the other hand AMD's CEO (Lisa Su) gives me the impression of being a "no bull*hit"-person, so I do still have hope that they won't mess up things in future revisions of the architecture :)

Honestly, it looks like you're arguing with data at this point. It really does do 40% better per core.

This is already measured in the existing benchmarks. You don't take the benchmarks and then add 60% to them arbitrarily.

Broadly speaking, Zen2 is slightly slower per-core to Coffee Lake (eg 3700X/3800X vs 9900K). Including whatever architectural features you care to name - that's built into the result. Skylake-X is slightly slower per-core than Coffee Lake due to the mesh architecture, let's say 5%, so perhaps roughly on par with Zen2. Nowhere near 40% different

And Fire Strike, specifically, is not one of the things that Intel suffers on (not to mention this architecture has hardware mitigations for most of the vulnerabilities). FireStrike is supposed to resemble physics processing for a game, there is not a lot of context switching (which is what Intel suffers on).

--

> Honestly, it looks like you're arguing with data at this point. It really does do 40% better per core.

Well, I'm not the one arguing that we need to be taking the benchmarks and adding 60% so it matches an anomalous data point ;)

Yes, this is absolutely an outlier or anomaly. No, it's not "arguing with data" to point out when a data point bucks a larger trend in the data as a whole.

We already know the relative per-core performance of Zen2 and Skylake-X, the difference is not 40%.

I'm not saying not to buy it. I'm just saying, this thread is going to look real embarrassing in a month or two when the 3950X doesn't have a magic 40% per-core performance gain over the existing Zen2 chips. 10980XE will be more expensive, and more power hungry... but it will be faster. Marginally.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/297785-amd-sales-are-b...

Consumer purchases are very often influenced by brand and general 'knowledge'. These shifts take time to fully take effect.

So they're losing the domain that matters less (since laptop is where it's at, and that just because of a flash in the pan, AMD wont be able to sustain it, as they historically never were), while the server will also end with more ARM, not more AMD.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/14980/the-intel-core-i9-9990x...

Also, your link is biased because it is well documented that AMD performance significantly improves with faster RAM and they used much faster RAM in the test only for AMD.

That RAM is very expensive so you need to factor that in the total cost if you wanted fo be fair when doing price comparison as well.

Strongly disagree. Zen 2 gave AMD better IPC and comparable clock speeds. Zen 2 is also more power efficient than what Intel offers per unit of compute.

Intel offers a few processors with higher frequencies, but only by having absurdly high power consumption and uncompetitive price.

Source: https://www.anandtech.com/show/14605/the-and-ryzen-3700x-390...

Look at the last chart at the bottom and the summary:

> Normalising the scores for frequency, we see that AMD has achieved something that the company hasn’t been able to claim in over 15 years: It has beat Intel in terms of overall IPC.

The web tests are also very lightly threaded benchmarks:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/14605/the-and-ryzen-3700x-390...

Definitely no “ownage” there from Intel. AMD processors did great. The Intel 9900K generally did worse, and the 9700K only did slightly better for some interesting reasons discussed at the end of the page.

Making claims that AMD’s processors only perform better in highly threaded tasks is either disingenuous or based on significantly outdated information.

Zen 2 brings AMD up to parity with Intel in IPC, and the clock speed difference isn’t substantial in most cases.

AMD also offers substantially more (equally strong) cores and stronger threads at a better price. They also have products that offer substantially more PCIe 4.0 lanes than anything Intel has, among other nice features, especially when comparing server processors.

Intel will dump billions and billions of dollars into becoming competitive again, but right now... Intel’s main advantage is in their low idle power consumption in laptops. No one should be buying Intel processors for anything else.

This was more true in prior generations of AMD. Newer ones aren't as RAM dependent (largely due to increased L3 cache and a more efficient core interconnect topology). Of course any CPU will still perform some amount better with better RAM.

> and they used much faster RAM in the test only for AMD.

This is a bit of Intel's own fault. AMD officially supports 3200 MHz while Intel officially only supports 2666 MHz, anything higher is considered overclocking the memory controllers even though both are perfectly capable of going much higher than that. Also note the Intel has quad channel while the AMD has dual channel. Quad channel has higher bandwidth but is the same RAM is going to have to run at lower speeds that if it were dual channel.

> That RAM is very expensive so you need to factor that in the total cost if you wanted fo be fair when doing price comparison as well.

The link to the bench now shows "not found" so I don't know what the exact RAM used was but you can get 16 GB of well timed 3600 MHz RAM for $80 so whatever difference there is isn't coming close to affecting that $250 price gap.

Intel certainly does still have an edge on single thread performance but the interesting thing is it's an ever shrinking lead at an increasing cost

Go buy whatever you can even if its subpar these days, nobody else cares, but currently most performance is with AMD. Power per dollar in high performance is purely with AMD.

It depends on the pricing tier.

My 3700X costs about 20% less than a 9700K but is a bit faster in single core, and about 30% faster in multi core.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+7+3700X&i...

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-9700K...

Real-world test with mitigations:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=3900x-99...

Or https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-ryzen-7-3700x/22.html

9700K is still solidly faster in per-thread performance. Having SMT gives the 3700X a boost in total performance though. The 9900K beats all the 8C Ryzens (including 3800X) and beats the 3900X in per-thread performance but loses in total performance (of course).

In some games the 9700K seems to have better performance, but in pure CPU benchmarks the 3700X is generally faster.

See these results: https://www.techquila.co.in/amd-ryzen-7-3700x-vs-intel-core-...

In Cinebench the Ryzen has the advantage in both single and multi core.

See this other results for real time audio performance where the Ryzen is 10-15% better in all results: https://www.scanproaudio.info/2019/07/12/amd-ryzen-3600-3700...

Also, in your second link the price-performance-ratio of the 3700X is 27% better...

If your workloads are limited by single thread performance you need better software. It's why vulkan and dx12 are a thing. (The single thread limitation of committing a frame to the GPU has been reduced by an order of magnitude) It's why C++ has the parallel algorithms library baked into the language.

I get it, threading is hard. But it's honestly not that hard. It's only hard when you're maintaining some super old program with single threadedness engineered into its core architecture. (note: this is my day job) Greenfield applications since 2009 should have had threading built in as a core assumption.

AMD is doing the right thing by optimizing for multithread performance over single thread performance. Moore's Law is dead for single cores. It has been for a decade and a half.

However, Amdahl's law means that serial/single-threaded performance remains an important determinant of total performance even in multi-threaded applications. Locking is a great example, even in a heavily multithreaded program you can be limited by lock contention, that specific part of the program is serial.

Gustafson's Law is of course a thing, eventually we will come up with additional work to fill those cores, but single-threaded performance remains a critical factor for CPU performance.

Most of the time we don't get to choose which software we run. Hell, most core components of Windows get stuck in a single core still. I'll take single-core performance over multi-core performance any day. Maybe that will change in 10 years, but I live in the present.

If looking at the geometric mean for these various mitigation-sensitive benchmarks, the default mitigations on the Core i9 9900K amounted to a 28% hit while the Ryzen 7 2700X saw a 5% hit with its default Spectre mitigations and the new Ryzen 7 3700X came in at 6% and the Ryzen 9 3900X at just over 5%.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd-zen2...

Should note:

Keep in mind these benchmarks ran for this article were a good portion of synthetic tests and focused on workloads affected by Spectre/Meltdown/L1TF/Zombieload. Many of these particular tests aren't multi-threaded and that's why you don't see as much of a difference between these HEDT and desktop CPUs as in our more normal benchmarks.

That isn't always true, for instance on some CS:Go benchmarks, the new Ryzens were quicker, and that is dominated by single threaded CPU perf.

Also, gcc compile time benchmarks are faster on the new Ryzens, largely due to large L3 cache sizes on the Ryzens (which is facilitated by their chiplet design)

It would be more accurate to say that intel has a slight single thread performance, most of the time. Rather than to say "owned".

Its all close enough that it depends on lots of details, like cache size and ram speed and timings. (ryzen benefits more from ram speed due to the interaction with infinity fabric). You also have to consider whether mitigations for side channel attacks are on for each chips.

There are dozens of little details like this that can be taken into account when deciding on a benchmark, and there is not always a clear answer as to "what is fair". You just have to be sure you say how those parameters are set, so people know what the comparison is, exactly. You can't be so quick to complain of bias, just because the parameters are not set the way you would have wanted them set.

I thought the RAM cartel backed off the ridiculous prices when the Justice Department started murmuring about antitrust.

What really got them was when China stepped up investments in a number of projects to jumpstart some domestic fabs focused on RAM production. The RAM cartel came to the table and signed some agreements regarding RAM production quotas with the Chinese real quick after that.

https://semiengineering.com/will-china-succeed-in-memory/

https://seekingalpha.com/news/3327772-samsung-headed-china-a...

A huge percentage of China's economy depends on smartphones, laptop, desktop, server manufacturing and they had no interest whatsoever in seeing that drastically slowed down so that Samsung, Hynix, and Micron could enjoy a fatter margin.

Not like a majority or anything, but losing 10-20% off 10% of your economy is a big deal.

I don't know why AMD was ever seen as the underdog. They never released something like the P4 which used that crappy RAM. They also basically owned the console market. Intel certainly didn't. AMD stock price has always been the whipping boy that was easy to predict.

And you admitted bulldozer wasn't as bad as rambus