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Comment by oliwarner | Hacker News Reader

Getting a bit bored of leaks, press releases and even specs. The proof of a CPU is in how it benchmarks across real workloads.

We're 2-3 weeks away from global release. People buying components NOW are exactly the sort of people AMD should be working their socks off to stop buying Intel parts. But instead of any firm performance figures, we have rumour.

The only reason I can imagine AMD is still keeping the press under cover is because these Zen chips still can't compete where it matters and if AMD lets that be known, everybody will go back to Plan A and buy an i7 6900K.

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"People buying components NOW are exactly the sort of people AMD should be working their socks off to stop buying Intel parts."

Err, for the people that matter, they probably are. I'm not sure why you would think otherwise.

Certainly you realize their large purchasers vastly dwarf people frequenting tech sites.

They 100% have done benchmarking/testing with, say, their top N chip purchasers, well before now, and already either have firm commitments to buy, or firm commitments to pass.

Nitpick: I'd like to point out that there's significant overlap between the two groups. To wit, I read hardware sites (from the realworldtech forum to anandtech and friends) and I've made 8 digit server hardware investment choices for work. This being said, the actual product focus between a typical core i7...K review and the mid range Xeons we've been purchasing are obviously not the same despite the similarity in architecture. We do get to do our own benchmarking, though. ;)

"Nitpick: I'd like to point out that there's significant overlap between the two groups."

Maybe. Maybe not. But in any case, none of the 8 digit purchasers i know care about when the review shows up on anandtech :)

They're the people they should have been taking to months before release. And in all likelihood, they were.

We're at the pointy end, now.

an i7 6900k costs more than 1000 dollars. The top spec AMD chip which is supposed to be within spitting distance, also 8/16, is less than half that price. It's going to take a real benchmark letdown for these AMD chips not to fly out the door. The floating point (AVX-256) will not be competitive, but the rest of the chip will have a tough time NOT being a success at the leaked prices, even if it proves to be 20% or so slower. Recall that for one of the huge markets, gaming, the Vulkan and DX12 APIs make much better use of multithreaded code so core counts suddenly matter much more.

Anyway I think the Internet is already primed for Intel still to have the edge on single core perf. Not a single AMD-controlled benchmark has not been amply caveated as such by the coverage so far, with good doses of scepticism, just like your post. Nobody's expecting parity IMO, they're just expecting something competitive, at the right price. And the price is half.

Sorry, I confused myself with all these benchmarks. I meant i7 7700K @ £340. That's the mainstream performance option at the moment that's what they have to compete against at that end of the market.

The Intel's -E line CPUs are in a world of their own.

Either which way, that's not neccessarily the point, it's that we shouldn't still be guessing how these CPUs are actually going to perform at this point.

This much hype won't end well if this isn't the second coming.

7700k is a 4 core / 8 thread. AMD appears to be pricing its 8 core / 16 thread chip at 480 USD which is about 390 GBP. So if the leaked pricing is anywhere near reality (and I'll admit that's contentious), then it's a no brainer in favour of AMD.

On the leaked pricing, some are expressing cynicism, but remember that AMD pays big penalty fees to Global Foundries if it doesn't meet long term contractual volume requirements. So it is perfectly feasible that it might favour volume over margins, since the end-result P&L to the company might be similar, but with the former strategy it gets market share for "free".

I'll give you that hype is at fever pitch though.

If the pricing leak is true, then I think we can expect a price drop on Intel processors on the release date. We'll have to wait for a true price/performance comparison until after then.

I would chose superior performance with 4 core, because I expect my workload to be mostly single-core, so 4 more cores won't make me that happy. But for those, who can load those 8 cores, it's awesome deal.

I think the issue might more be related to yields and distribution. Even when AMD were outpacing Intel (many years back) they struggled to meet demand and manufacture enough chips.

There was a great article back then too about why Apple and Dell weren't going all in on AMD chips and whilst sweeteners from Intel is part of it, a lot of it had to do with Dell or Apple's typical volume far outpacing what AMD could reliably manufacture.

> they struggled to meet demand and manufacture enough chips.

I would think, and hope, that the situation is better now. Back then, AMD was manufacturing their chips in house, now they're manufactured by GlobalFoundries and TSMC.

GlobalFoundries was spin off from the AMD fabrication units so I don't think they got an immediate advantage with them.

Regardless of that AMD is a much smaller company than Intel (~9k employees vs ~100k employees) so it is quite a remarkable feat that they have managed to stay in the competition for so long.

I speculate that they could have been extinguished years ago by intel, if it weren't for their fears of anti-competition and monopoly.

Either way, I predict both will slowly be eaten by GPU-driven processing and ARM desktops. It's going to be a very tough secular cycle for CISC chip makers in the coming decade.

The situation is better except for the protection money AMD has to pay GloFo:

"This flexibility comes at a cost though. Not unlike past years where AMD has paid GlobalFoundries a penalty under take-or-pay, AMD will be paying the foundry for this new flexibility. GlobalFoundries will be receiving a $100M payment from AMD, spread out over the next 4 quarters. Meanwhile starting in 2017, AMD will also have to pay GlobalFoundries for wafers they buy from third-party foundries. This in particular is a notable change from past agreements, as AMD has never paid a penalty before in this fashion. Ultimately this means AMD could end up paying GlobalFoundries two different types of penalties: one for making a chip at another fab, and a second penalty if AMD doesn’t make their wafer target for the year with GlobalFoundries."

"Along with all of the above, in exchange for the latest agreement AMD is making one more payment in the form of a stock warrant...The warrant will give Mubadala the option to buy up to 75 million AMD shares at a currently below-market price of $5.98/share, so long as they continue to own less than 20% of AMD. AMD is valuing the warrant at $235 million, which will bring the total one-time-costs of the latest agreement to $335M."

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10631/amd-amends-globalfoundri...

So Globalfoundries was behind Intel, Samsung and TSMC on 14nm, and they have chronic yield problems which made it hard for AMD to compete. I understand that most contracts for large orders have lots of stipulations and minimum purchase agreements but this agreement seems unwise. Why tie your entire business to one fab when their fortunes change year by year and being early can be such a competitive advantage? Moving between fabs is a huge amount of work yes, but now they have to do that work to get on TSMC and also pay Glofo for the privilege.

> There was a great article back then too about why Apple and Dell weren't going all in on AMD chips

Because Intel paid them to not use AMD chips.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/184323-intel-stuck-wit...

> We're 2-3 weeks away from global release. People buying components NOW are exactly the sort of people AMD should be working their socks off to stop buying Intel parts. But instead of any firm performance figures, we have rumour.

I think these press releases, rumors, and leaks are doing exactly that. On the one hand, the manufacturing and sales channels are working for a target release date. On the other hand, the marketing team is dribbling out little details to delay customer's purchasing decisions. It seems kinda standard practice to me. The fact that you're sick of waiting (so am I!) is evidence that its working :)

Isn't it typical to lift the NDA's exactly on the launch date? They're rather consistent here IMHO.

If amd reveals the details now, Intel will react with better price/perf before you can but an AMD chip.

About time Intel got some competition again. I got the 6 core 6850k last June, for my personal use (previously a 2600k); its predecessor still clocks and performs better due to poor overclocking headroom of the new one.

I'd be very surprised if Intel doesn't have running Ryzen silicon in their Labs right now.

As I used to work for Intel, I can tell you: absolutely not - this would expose Intel to far too great risks on antitrust level.

However they do pay 3rd parties to run parallel benchmarks on both their silicon and competitors, and get access to detailed reports. And probably they will buy silicon off the market when it's available commercially.

People buying components NOW are exactly the sort of people AMD should be working their socks off to stop buying Intel parts.

What percentage of CPU sales are people buying boxed components for building/upgrading their home computers?

Given what Intel already did with the Pentium G4560 perhaps it would be wise to keep everything under wraps until release rather than give Intel 3 weeks of 'play time' to ruin the launch.

What does i7 6900K have to do with FPGA?

Looks like this thread has the wrong comments or a mod changed the link. Originally this was an article about upcoming AMD CPUs

Thank you this was confusing the hell out of me. FPGA looks like a beast though

"The proof of a CPU is in how it benchmarks across real workloads."

Define 'real workload' here. Are we talking about a workload where the compiler specifically optimizes for Intel, or where the executable chooses unoptimized paths if it finds anything other than intel processors inside?

Because I've found that when it comes to raw x86, no SSE anything or other nonsense; pure, unadulterated original x86, AMD simply owns.

Because I've found that when it comes to raw x86, no SSE anything or other nonsense; pure, unadulterated original x86, AMD simply owns.

Who cares, though? Is that something that matters?

It is something that matters for those of us that are more than competent and capable of programming without needing to use proprietary extensions to the underlying architecture.

"Unadulterated original x86" doesn't really exist, and hasn't mattered for decades at least.

Do you mean the 8086's instruction set? Many of those instructions are now implemented in microcode; sure, you can use them, but they're going to be dog slow. Turns out, nobody uses them.

Do you mean the i586 instruction set? Your system calls are going to be slow, since you have to trigger an interrupt.

Do you just mean 32-bit x86? That covers a large set of incompatible extensions among different vendors, and is of rapidly decreasing relevancy.

Do you just mean scaler instructions? That's really just hamstringing yourself: a lot of performance-sensitive applications involve manipulating vectors, and SIMD is a fairly easy and effective win.

Other nonsense? These additional instruction sets aren't just a gimmick, they exist to do more work faster.

But my definition of two workload really just means a spectrum of different sorts of computation so we can see how various subsystems compare.

"These additional instruction sets aren't just a gimmick, they exist to do more work faster."

They don't really work much faster when the basic stuff in the core architecture is gimped (low-count ADD/MULTIPLY units? In this day and age of cheap silicon? Really?)

You don't trust the presentation demo AMD made a few weeks ago ?

No. I trust independent comparisons a lot more than I would ever trust the company making the product.

I think the benchmarks shown by amd can be trusted. But they are very very cherry picked, example the demonstration they did when they released the rx480

I've found out the hard way that the rx480 is actually a counter example to my earlier point. I'm happy with the performance but was misled about the state of Linux support.

Following that event, a french magazine tried to replicate the bench and said they were similar to AMD's claims. So far no lies have been uncovered.

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