Intel's main selling point is AVX512 support, which is a niche but it does provide benefits in some workloads. AMD's "more cores" approach is probably superior in most applications however. (It gets complicated: AVX512 uses more power, causing frequency drops. But SIMD-parallelism is innately more power-efficient than more cores... it depends on how much your computer uses AVX512, how sensitive it is to frequency slowdowns... etc. etc)
Well, now this is the case, yes. Wasn't when I bought the iMac Pro. It's a very respectable machine and it has the same drawbacks as the Threadripper -- only 4 channels of memory (with 10c/20t CPU).
> Intel's main selling point is AVX512 support, which is a niche but it does provide benefits in some workloads. AMD's "more cores" approach is probably superior in most applications however. (It gets complicated: AVX512 uses more power, causing frequency drops. But SIMD-parallelism is innately more power-efficient than more cores... it depends on how much your computer uses AVX512, how sensitive it is to frequency slowdowns... etc. etc)
Heard about that, it's quite embarrassing for Intel. As for SIMD itself, it's a sad story. Most, if not 99%, of the compilers out there don't utilise it. Makes me want to contribute to a compiler but I can't seem to find such a job, especially having never done it before.
I had high hopes for RISC-V but I already heard the usual BS about "extensions that vendors may choose to implement or not" and I kind of lost hope. :(
Nobody will consider an alternative platform until it becomes affordable.