The difference is quite stark, in both directions [1]: AMD destroys Intel in anything that benefits from multiple cores at the same product tier (Ryzen 9 3900x vs i9 10900k), in some workloads as high as 50%. But, Intel wins when gaming; usually by around 5-10%.
The more measured position is: If you're just looking for the best value brand right now, AMD is the way to go, even if you are gaming. The 10900k is better than the 3900x for gaming, but its also a ~$120 up-sell: At similar pricing tiers, the single-thread performance difference is likely quite similar. But if you just want the best at any price, that's still Intel: More cores won't save every workload.
[1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/3543993/intel-10th-gen-revie...
It's measurable but is it significant ? True cpu bottleneck is a thing of the past for 99.9% of the games and 99.9% of people. By the time you're cpu limited you're in triple digits fps territory in 1440p. Even 5 years old cpus aren't that far from today's best: https://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/amd_ryzen_7_3700x_ryze...
Is it correct to think that compared by work-done-by-watt AMD is currently better than Intel? (in this example Intel's 10900k uses 250-300W [1], AMD's 3900x uses 140-170W [2]?)
In my case I use often many threads/processes (generated by databases and/or my Python programs that usually spawn as many subprocesses as possible without overloading the CPU) and as my PC/server is next to my desk then if the performance difference is not too great my priority is usually for a CPU that gets less hot/is more efficient (because the fans have to work less therefore the box is less noisy, additionally the room heats up less which makes me suffer less during summer).
[1]: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-core-i9-10900k-cp...
[2]: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ryzen-9-3900x-7-3700x-r...
Thx
If you're after minimal power usage in order to optimize for electricity cost, while still keeping good performance, actually: mobile Intel CPUs tend to be the best pick. AMD has some strong mobile CPU options, but they're essentially impossible to build into a desktop PC, whereas mobile Intel CPUs are available in products like the Ghost Canyon NUCs (ok, well, "available" may not be the right word, because they're freakin' impossible to find right now, but Officially, anyone can buy them).
If you're after lowering heat output for the purposes of reducing noise or increasing overclocking performance, generally its better to solve this via better cooling. Noise is more of a function of bad cooling, rather than super-high heat output from the processor. Many people view liquid cooling as "super high overclocking performance", but actually: The biggest benefit to liquid cooling is that it reduces "air churn" inside the case by removing the typical CPU radiator fan just sitting in the middle of the case spilling air in every direction. Instead, you've got dedicated intake/output fans on defined sides of the case, resulting in clear air paths, which increases fan efficiency, reducing the number of fans you need or reducing the amount of work they need to do.
But: the laws of thermodynamics state that heat can't just disappear. If you're optimizing for actual heat reduction for the sheer purpose of heat reduction, then an Intel mobile CPU or Ryzen desktop CPU is better (with Intel mobile CPUs being better by far).
Check out the Ghost Canyon NUCs. If you can find one, they're more expensive than just DIY, but would likely be a great option for you.
10% more CPU performance is going to provide overall gains that are difficult to measure. That's even more true for games, which nowadays are seldom CPU-bound.
Of course, that "more performance" often means "Running at 300fps instead of 270 fps", and it really doesn't matter. And, the higher the resolution, the more GPU stress you'll see, so at 4K-class resolutions its far closer to trading between CPU-bound and GPU-bound.
But, then, DLSS2 complicates things further by amplifying what the GPU is capable of at even very high resolutions, and the RTX 3080 Ti is releasing in a couple weeks.
So its only possible to speak in generalities about facts which are true in most situations. In the past decade, there has not been any competitively positioned products which would make an Intel/Nvidia PC not the generally-best option for PC gaming. AMD deserves a ton of credit for what they've done with Ryzen, and outside of gaming, BUY RYZEN. But, within gaming, it's a far more complex equation which depends on how much you're spending, what you're using the PC for other than gaming, if you're streaming, etc: In short, its such a complex equation that its better to just not think about it and flip a coin.
The current guidance for "good" gaming CPUs is in the AMD Ryzen 5 3600 and Intel i5 10600 range (+/- "X" or "K"). The 3900X and 10900K mentioned above will outperform these two, but it is unlikely to be a significant limiting factor for most gamers. At this level, Intel still beats AMD for gaming performance.
Finally, if you're looking to go for a more budget build, the AMD Ryzen 3 3300X is a very solid entry-level gaming CPU. Based on my observations, most guidance suggests this CPU for lower-cost builds than can support an i5 or Ryzen 5.
If you're looking to make some educated decisions between CPUs, always look for benchmarks. Gamers Nexus [0] does very good CPU reviews, with a mix of gaming and productivity workloads. If you're leaning more production workloads, Phoronix [1] has one of the most comprehensive test suites out there.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/user/GamersNexus
[1]: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=category&item=Process...
AMD is a better value given the price. If Intel wants, they can just cut and match the prices.
Why is there so much callous fanboyism around/against a goddamn CPU supplier like they’re a statement of their lifestyle or such?
Its ok to do due diligence before purchasing but relentless obsession over my red team is better than your blue team screams of immaturity.
Same with the people that endlessly pixel peep and read MTF charts for days in photography. They spend more time talking about how great their camera and lens setup is than actually going out and taking pictures with it.
As a retail business owner, I find 80% of our consumers sound and reasonable. The 20% - we never want their business. We keep our best to not anger them and most of our energy goes into maintaining the public image of our company.
There are some real asshole customers that do things you never want to hear - stuff that makes me lose hope in humanity.
The irritation comes from a mismatch of expectations around the end goal between those who are fanboys and those who just want to get stuff done.
Yes, Intel will often cite performance characteristics without the patches applied, and shame on them for that. And, Yes, it would be interesting to know how much of Intel's performance lead pre-Ryzen was due to this bad speculative execution microcode; it seems likely that AMD wasn't as far behind as everyone thought, but the past is the past.
But the debt is now paid, and Intel still leads in single-core performance. Really, they've never not led in single-core performance (maybe going back to the late-90s Athlon days they were trailing). That's something an Intel shill would tell you, but it's also something anyone can find out just by looking at the benchmarks or doing their own testing. Marketing is mostly lies, but those lies stop when I hold the silicon in my hands.
From what I've heard, Intel likes to run their benchmarks with many (most?) mitigations disabled... but Windows ships with all of them enabled.
Meanwhile, we can compare the security track record of SEV vs SGX to see some real meat. SEV has been cracked completely and repeatedly by simple C or cryptography programming errors like buffer overflows or not checking for points being on the curve. SGX has had no such errors, every single attack on it has been an exotic statistical side channel attack. The last round weren't even practical. Researchers studied it for a year and couldn't actually make it work against real enclaves, but Intel issued CVEs and mitigations for it anyway, just in case. And the root level of SGX was never cracked, which is why it's always been software patchable/renewable without needing new silicon. AMD SEV has needed new silicon more than once.
SGX has held up pretty well given it was born just before the discovery of an entire class of CPU design vulnerabilities.
Can you point at recent information on this?
Most games these days have multi-thread heavy workloads. Gaming hasn't been single-thread dominant for AAA titles for a while.
As someone who's really enthusiastic about CPUs, but not at all about gaming (we have things called "workstation" and "playstation" for a reason) I'm really pending towards AMD in the x86 space, because they have some really interesting parts in their EPYC line (and some pretty amazing deals in their APUs). Having said that, if x86 compatibility is not my goal, POWER9 also looks pretty cool too, as do all the ARM-based server chips that popped up recently. I also find the LinuxONE Community Cloud machines to be very interesting (I just wish I could have a zSeries of my own in a 19" server tower chassis). It's really sad the desktop or deskside workstation market these days is mostly x86. It's boring.
Unfortunately for my home datacenter, everything my Xeon deskside, my i5 Mac and my i3 Dell can't do, I can easily enough spin up a cloud instance and do there. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That means those extra cores won't really help day to day performance.
Workloads, where more cores really help out, are:
* re-encoding video files to save disk space (it's amazing what speeds I can reach with my Ryzen 5 2600X here!)
* IntelliJ (startup, indexing)
* running tests (can be configured to be very parallel)
* running JS heavy sites, like Jira (you would be surprised at how resource intensive websites can be nowadays)
* running more than one Electron based app (Spotify, Slack are surprisingly CPU intensive, especially if you have poor/no GPU acceleration support)
EDIT: that said I wonder if you notice a difference between 4 and 8 cores in normal life
Even though I'd say benchmarking fp16 GFLOPS against fp64 ones is cheating.
perf list perf top -e [...]Yes, that can trigger an emotional response in people.
I always laugh at that take. Imagine working for Intel today and hear people complain you're not even trying.
Whatever the logic, humans do not like the feeling of being taken advantage of, and when your counterparty is obviously maximizing how much they extract from you, it feels bad.
The funny part is lots of people like to make themselves feel better by condescendingly "educating" people who feel that way. It is poor emotional regulation all the way down.
Some people are just too petty to see the "enthusiast" market also drives the low-end.
Do they though? From how most companies operate that I've seen from the inside, I would assume that such a market response would shift their focus towards high-end models, and low-end models will be neglected.
Sure, there is somewhat of a technology trickle down towards lower-end models over time, but that seems to be driven on an industry/supplier/competition level and mostly disconnected from luxury consumers. Especially "_financing_ the lower-end models" seems unlikely, as no manufacturer would lower the prices on the lower-end models, just because they make "enough" on the high-end ones. The only way this would apply would be through shared overhead, which given that we are talking about different product lines often tends to be minimal.
My understanding is that in the CPU case, the lower product tiers are literally just higher tier chips that had faults in some cores/areas and had those features disabled.
this is very much not minimal in the CPU business though. intel's entire line of (consumer) desktop parts is different bins of the same chip. they wouldn't be able to offer an i3 for $120 if they weren't also selling i9s for $500. and they probably couldn't sell consumer parts for <$1000 at all if they couldn't sell xeon parts with the same architecture for thousands of dollars.
Is that true? Intel's 14nm yields are high enough that it wouldnt really make sense for the dirt cheap quad core processors to secretly be 8 core processors with half the cores (and cache) disabled.
In our market at least many companies gunning for the enthusiasts are completely screwing the normal users, not helping them in any way.
1. MTG fans been complaining a for years that some cards have not been reprinted and are literally essential to the game, new players need those cards. The manufacturer reaction was launch a product that does have those cards but in a sky high price point, when players complained they literally replies that the product wasn't for them, it was aimed at the luxury market. How that helps the low end? Not only just the possible buyers, but current players that can't have new play partners because new play partners can't afford to hunt on secondary market for basically mandatory game pieces.
2. Ana Android F2P game I play decided to go full pay to win while denying it, they launched a new piece of armor that makes your character drastically better on ranked matches, and then proceeded to make it cost a currency that the free players can get only half of the price of the piece of armor, to get the rest of the currency needed you need to pay some 200 USD.
When players complained the main dev wrote a extremely rude answer on the forums that also made clear all he cares about is getting money from big spenders, the currency to get the item in question is not available to even the vast majority of paying players, not even subscription players can get it, you need to buy that separate expensive pack. As for why people care about the ranking? Well, the reward for doing well is permanent character buffs, that there is no way to get in other manner, thus reinforcing the pay to win aspect.
3. There is a certain game publisher that found out profits can be made with DLC, now they launch then at breakneck speed AND lock essential features behind them. Whenever they update the game alongside DLC they balance the game in a way that it is not fun without the DLC, making them mandatory. I found out even UI buttons get shut down (example: one patch fixed AI notorious stupidity by letting players ask allies to follow them instead of wandering around in stupid manner. But the button that you click to do so, is part of the DLC. Or in other case sometimes you have a huge list of things to decide, you need to click on each item one by one, or but the DLC that adds a button on the interface to do the same action to the entire list). Another case with same publisher: updates literally removed features of the game, added new mechanics to compensate, but those are DLC.
That's not a fair comparison, considering that price per core usually goes up the more cores there are. Also, if you check pcpartpicker you'll see all the i9s with greater than 12 cores are either sold out, or well above their MRSP.
I ended up going with a Ryzen 9 though & it's been flawless so far. Great performance. Wouldn't look at an Intel anytime in the near future for a CPU.
1. Really bad VM support. No Hypervisor framwork, which means problems with Docker (apparently some workarounds for Docker specifically, but not 100% stable). Things like Parallels Desktop, Android VMs, etc won't work.
2. Problems with Adobe suite apps crashing on boot. Some patches exist but last I checked there was nothing for Lightroom (which I use a lot).
3. Things like iMessage, Facetime, Siri, etc won't work
4. Uses a custom kernel and there can be hassles related to power management.
etc.
My use case would have lots of problems, but it's definitely a great option for people who don't need VMs or Adobe.
I think the most notable is part is that Tiger Lake will be a minimal CPU improvement (Sunny Cove ~ Willow Cove cores), and the main selling point will be the Xe graphics and support for Thunderbolt 4, LPDDR5, etc. Superfin seems to be marketing hype but will see when benchmarks come out.
The main question is, will Tiger Lake will enough for next year? AMD's Renoir follow up is reportedly retaining the Vega graphics but will further improve the CPU microarchitecture from Zen2 to Zen3. Techspot just published an apples-to-apples comparison that shows, if all things equal except the CPU, the AMD 4800H is 10-60% faster than the i7 10750H...that's a huge chasm. https://www.techspot.com/review/2075-same-laptop-different-c...
Point taken, mine is that SuperFin isn't some node improvement so TBD on what performance gains it accounts for.
Literally there were people born that can legally drink now. Intel is the grey goose of chips. Amd gets the job done
For a non-enthusiast, AMD has been a great choice almost for my whole life.
Lenovo IdeaPad S540-13: https://next.lab501.ro/notebook/english-lenovo-ideapad-s540-...
Lenovo ThinkPad 14s: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-T14s-Review-Bu...
XMG Gaming Laptop comparison: https://www.techspot.com/review/2075-same-laptop-different-c...
TLDR: AMD significantly outperforms Intel in absolute performance and performance per watt; battery life is about equal - depends on implementation and how its measured (Intel is still a little better on idle, video playback, but much worse under load), temps usually limited by laptop's thermal solution, but under high TDP, favors AMD.
The Tiger Lake U chips should be pretty competitive with Renoir at 15W, especially as there are almost no AMD options paired with 16:10 or HiDPI displays - we'll have to see when they come out. Tiger Lake H isn't expected until Q1 2021 and will have to compete with Cezanne (Zen 3 core, which is expected to have some pretty big IPC gains).
Given their history of significant delays in the current roadmap, how does this compare to their competition who is quickly advancing on 10nm?
Also what is this internal naming schema?
> The 14nm process node has been Intel’s most profitable manufacturing node to date, and continuous intranode enhancements over the years (14+, 14++, 14+++, 14++++*)
This reads like a satire article.