Intel Announces Skylake-X: Bringing 18-Core HCC Silicon to Consumers
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I can't imagine it being more than one per core. For context Knights Landing has two per core but that's a HPC focused product.
> We expect it to be enabled on day one, although I have a suspicion there may be a BIOS flag that needs enabling in order to use it.
This seems odd.
> With the support of AVX-512, Intel is calling the Core i9-7980X ‘the first TeraFLOP CPU’. I’ve asked details as to how this figure is calculated (software, or theoretical)
So lets work backwards here the Core i9-7980XE has 18 cores but as of yet the clock speed is not specified.
A couple of assumptions:
- We're talking double precision FLOPs
- We can theoretically do 16 double precision FLOPs per cycle
FLOPs per cycle * Cycles per second (frequency) * number of cores =~ 1TF
So we can guesstimate the clock frequency being ~3.47Ghz.
Edit: In review such a clock speed seems rather high for an 18 core part. I'm not sure if consumer parts will do 32DP FLOPs?
Knight's Landing has two per core, but they are pretty weak in IPC, so even if Skylake also had two they'd still maintain differentiation.
So there still would be benefit even if it's just one unit.
>This seems odd.
When AES support was first introduced it was incredibly difficult to find a motherboard that would support it from the box, it almost universally required a BIOS update.
[1] (* (/ 512 64) 2 2 18 2 1000 1000 1000) = 1152000000000 FLOPS (512 unit over 64 bits double) times 2 for FMA times two units, over 18 cores at 2 GHz)
edit: the 10 core part has a base clock of 3.3GHz. The 18 core part will probably be in the 2.5 range at best (the best 18 core Broadwell I can find runs at 2.3, but it is a dual socket part). Running in full AVX512 mode will probably downclock the cpu further.
Indeed, the 2.2-2.3/2.7-2.8 GHz (base/boost) of the >18C E5-269X v4 CPUs is the non-AVX instruction clock. With AVX the throttling these drop by 300-400 MHz [1] and I expect the skylake chips to behave very similarly. In fact I would not be surprised if on average 512-bit AVX2 required more throttling than 256-bit.
[1] https://www.microway.com/knowledge-center-articles/detailed-...
> A couple of assumptions: > - We're talking double precision FLOPs
Double precision is not what is typically used to measure FLOPs.
> - We can theoretically do 16 double precision FLOPs per cycle
One AVX-512 lane would be able to work with 16 FLOPS or 32 if you count FMA (which I think is silly, but that's what Intel will do). Two AVX-512 lanes would double that, but one thing to remember is that Intel's chips don't run at their full clock speed when using their SIMD lanes to their fullest.
All of this is to say that I would guess the base clock speed could be lower, but it is likely to be much lower while filling the SIMD units.
If you didn't count that operation as two different floating point operations you suddenly lose the ability to compare FMA chips to non-FMA chips. It's much simpler to just count it as two.
If an FMA can be done in one cycle, then we have 18 x 32 = 576 flops, so if it's clocked at e.g. 2.0 ghz, peak performance would be ~1.1 Tflops.
Edit: I see someone wrote exactly 8 hours before..
What also shows that they seem to be confident is that they're further segmenting the market based on the PCIE lane count to push everyone wanting >32 lanes into the >$1k regime.
All in all, the cool thing is not the i9s and high core counts which you could get even before by plugging a Xeon chip into a consumer X99 mobo (though you'd have to pay some $$$), but the new cache hierarchy which will give serious improvements in well-implemented, cache friendly codes!
Still, it gets you GPU style performance on vector workloads without needing separate hardware and software stack.
even chips with AVX2 on all cores slow down
when it's fully used
I've also seen reliable increases in performance up through AVX2 but when I tried to run same code on a Xeon Phi, it fell short of the plain Xeon.
Putting aside the "scaled almost linearly" statement, I'm not surprised that AVX-512 did not give the expected benefits ootb, you suddenly need double the amount of data loaded into the registers for every 512-bit instruction. You'd also quite like want to make sure masking is used effectively. [2]
[1] http://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~kubitron/cs258/lectures/lec... [2] https://software.intel.com/en-us/node/523777
[1] - https://computing.llnl.gov/tutorials/linux_clusters/intelAVX...
That's not the main reason. The main reason is perf/W for highly parallel workloads.
> The downclocking for AVX started with Knights Landing.
You're mixing things up here and that statement is incorrect too. AVX throttling started with Haswell-EP [1,3] (Intel kept it quite hush-hush avoiding mentioning it in products specs and such). Secondly, Xeon Phi is the HPC product family and KNL is the codename of the 2nd generation of these arch [2]
> My Boardwell-EP Xeon stays at 3.0Ghz even when I (ab)use AVX2.
In that case you're most likely either not using more than 1-2 cores or you're overclocking (or perhaps monitoring incorrectly), see [1,3].
[1] http://images.anandtech.com/doci/8423/AVXTurboHaswEP.png [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi [3] https://www.microway.com/knowledge-center-articles/detailed-...
I'm also curious what that means for the thermals. Intels 4 core parts have much better thermals when delided to change the bad TIM.
[0] https://www.overclock3d.net/news/cpu_mainboard/intel_s_skyla...
Sure, an external dedicated GPU is nice to have, but being able to buy a decent processor (ie. Pentium G4560) with an integrated GPU for 50 dollars is really awesome, if you're on a tight budget.
PS: I'm writing this on a laptop that has the very first Intel HD Graphics (1st gen i7). I don't have any problem with it, except gaming and a two monitor limit.
Seems like genuine efforts to mitigate.
I am currently typing this from a bus on a Dell Alienware 13 r3 which has both an integrated Iris and a discrete Nvidia. TBH, I run my Ubuntu environment through the integrated graphics chip for the watt savings and because 90% of the stuff I do under Linux performs flawlessly on the integrated GPU.
Of course I can switch to the Nvidia GPU using `prime-select` but besides running games or playing with CUDA I don't need the GTX 1060 day-to-day.
those of us complaining are using them for gaming, or serious compute jobs.
$ sudo prime-select nvidia
$ sudo logout
Then... don't do that? Seriously, they're not intended for this. Are you also upset that your $50 Ryobi drill doesn't have enough torque to bolt together a 747?
It worked a little like Wine does, you'd just wrap your program invocation with `optirun <game>` and it would set everything up for you. IIRC it was also possible to combine this with wine, `optirun wine <game>`. The first year after I got the laptop (this was maybe 5-6 years back) support was kind of flaky, but things got smoothed out pretty quickly.
Eventually I would just launch Steam with optirun and any programs started by Steam would inherit the dedicated GPU settings.
I haven't used a setup like that for a few years now, I'm sure it's only gotten better since. The Arch wiki has a good rundown.
$ sudo prime-select [nvidia|intel]
For me, I don't mind the logout for swap so I just use the "prime-select" tool.
Edit: Here is the ppa:
https://launchpad.net/~graphics-drivers/+archive/ubuntu/ppa
It looks like there is a bumblebee something in there.
Here is a news blurb about it:
Sounds like the prime-select tool is what I needed. Oh well, glad I went from cutting edge SGI Infinite Reality 3D to integrated graphics over the years.
Damn, and that's one of the ones I would consider pretty bad. They started getting decent around Sandy Bridge / HD 3000. Before then, most 3d applications would just fail to open from my experience.
And if they dont intend it for gaming or any GPU usage ( Which is perfectly fine ), how about stop wasting silicon on GPU? After all the majority cost of developing GPU isn't even in the hardware, but the software and support of drivers.
The worst part is that Intel has coerced OEMs into buying their integrated GPUs even if they buy a dedicated GPU for their laptop.
Imagine if ARM said that if you wanted its Cortex-A CPU, you had to use a Mali GPU, even if you also bought a PowerVR GPU to put in your device...That would be crazy, right? Then so is this.
Intel has done quite a few anti-competitive things since it was last sued (and lost) in the EU for such behavior, almost a decade ago. I wonder why no government body seems willing to take on it anymore. Everyone's tired of doing the whole antitrust dance with Intel again?
Limits of physics and engineering.
Will a reasonably powerful gaming card eventually draw the equivalent power of an integrated chip (when not gaming)? Probably. It seems like we're not there yet.
Most PC makers would do the same. The integrated GPUs are fine for most notebook tasks, even for power users, and they get much, much better battery life, which is one of the key things a notebook needs to do well. I'm on a rMBP and only my integrated GPU is in use right now because I'm not doing anything that needs the bigger, more power hungry GPU.
Good battery life on my laptop, good Linux support on my desktop. What's not to like?
As for integrated graphics being a good or bad idea, I'd guess that power consumption vs. performance is the real differentiator there.
I have no need for high performance and Iris should be good enough, but the stability still leaves a lot to be desired.
What I don't like is Intel spending so much area for the iGPU[1]. Why should an iGPU be consuming nearly the same area as 4 cores? An area optimised iGPU that can only do a few GFLOPS is good enough, and where it isn't (gaming, deep learning), a discrete GPU with wide memory will be needed anyway.
[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/10968/the-intel-core-i7-7700k-...
Really? You think a few months ago Intel read some Rizen reviews and completely threw out their product roadmap and developed new processors overnight?
It is also strong proof that without competition Intel is not going to release anything to move the market forward.
Given the churn rate of technology? Probably close to none. It's not like you can wait on CPU technology and have it still be relevant when you finally release it.
Except if you mean "potential projects" that still need years, and tons of work and R&D to be finished.
And for what reason? I do understand the dilemma that ad funded sites are in. I'm not using an ad blocker. But I simply don't get what purpose this sort of abusive website design is supposed to have.
I will never visit Anandtech again. I've seen it many times. It's never long after advertising gets irrational that content quality suffers as well and the entire site goes down the drain.
No problem with cpu usage here though, but I do have uBlock origin installed. AnandTech can be a nice site to visit every now and then!
Where will this end? I believe it will end in all content moving to closed technology platforms that lock out ad blockers, i.e apps.
The reason why I have posted a meta comment, which is always a questionable thing to do, is that there may be people here on Hacker News who can fix this absurd logic that is killing the open web.
Safari has much better defaults when it comes to such behaviour by ad networks: It blocks 165 requests and shows no further activity after loading 5MB: "Blocked a frame with origin "http://www.anandtech.com" from accessing a frame with origin "http://pixel.mathtag.com". Protocols, domains, and ports must match."
So it did take AMD and Ryzen to make Intel push it's game from it's 5-6 year long hiatus with the i7 eh?
Competition is clearly good :)
AMD have been compared favorably to nearly-top-tier i7s. Suddenly, by rebranding the top-tier to i9, Intel put a lot of gap between the i7 and Ryzen in the mind of the punter.
I presume that this free licensing extends to AMD and vendors of the AMD platform, which could entice them to adopt it too.
https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/envision-world-thunder...
Something was obviously very wrong before when Microsoft left out Thunderbolt on high-end machines for "non-technical reasons".
Both actions are simply Intel reacting to AMD and Apple.
Why is ECC that much of a big deal for you? Maybe I'm lucky but I manage quite a few computers (at work and at home) and I haven't had a faulty RAM module in at least a year. And even if I do I run memtest to isolate the issue and then order a new module. An inconvenience of course, but pretty minor one IMO.
Do you also use redundant power supplies? I think in the past years I've had more issues with broken power supplies than RAM modules.
Silicon degrades over time under use.
That you know about.
See, that's where ECC comes in.
More seriously though, in my experience faulty RAM is generally pretty easy to diagnose and leads to general system instability. I guess the worst case scenario is generating corrupt data before the issue is diagnosed but again while I would be very wary of that on an database server or something similar, I've never found it to be a massive issue on a workstation (at least if you have decent backups that is).
But maybe I've just been lucky so far. But given that the vast majority of consumer-grade computers don't come with ECC and yet RAM issues are still relatively rare I guess I'm not the only lucky one.
No, bugs are - these days - considered to be mostly software issues, undetected hardware faults are not bugs in that sense but could lead to data corruption or at a much higher level wrong output.
If you don't care at all about the output of your computer (game playing, other recreational use) then not having ECC is fine, but if you do care about your results and you have multiple 10's or even 100's of GB of RAM in your machine then to have the option of ECC is useful.
Intel is just using the ECC thing as a way to justify the price difference between their Xeon product line and the consumer stuff.
If you ever have to deal with a filesystem that slowly got corrupted because of an undetected memory issue you'll be overnight transformed into an ECC advocate.
Keep in mind that those 'decent backups' were made by the machine you do not trust.
And god help you if your backups were incremental.
I guess it makes sense to have ECC RAM on the machine building your releases (I actually don't even have that at the moment but I wouldn't advocate that...) but for your dev machine does it really matter?
I mean, at this point it's really about a rather subjective perception of risk and particular use cases. In my situation I find that memory issues are very low on my list of "things that can go catastrophically wrong". Really the only thing I can think about is building a corrupt release on my non-ECC build server. But from experience I'm not exactly in the minority to do that either and yet I don't observe many such issues in the wild.
As for: "I guess it makes sense to have ECC RAM on the machine building your releases"
That's a very narrow use case, there are many more usecases than that one and for a lot of those it makes good sense to have ECC: inputs to long running processes, computations that have some kind of real world value (bookkeeping, your thesis, experimental data subject to later verification, legal documents and so on).
> but for your dev machine does it really matter?
Maybe not to you.
> I mean, at this point it's really about a rather subjective perception of risk and particular use cases.
No, it's about a thing that if adopted widely would allow us to check off one possible source of errors that would not meaningfully increase the cost of your average machine and would still be an option, nobody would be forced to use anything.
> In my situation I find that memory issues are very low on my list of "things that can go catastrophically wrong".
Good for you.
> Really the only thing I can think about is building a corrupt release on my non-ECC build server.
You are still thinking about just your own use-cases.
> But from experience I'm not exactly in the minority to do that either and yet I don't observe many such issues in the wild.
Likely you also have somewhere between 8 and 32 GB of RAM in your machine.
If I look at my servers which have been operating for years on end they do tend to accumulate corrected ECC errors. The only reason I know about it is because there is ECC in there to begin with. If those machines would be running without ECC I'd likely not even be aware of any issues. But maybe the machines or some application on them would have crashed (best possible option), or maybe some innocent bits of data would have been corrupted (second best). And at the far end of the spectrum, maybe we'd have to re-install a machine from a backup (not so good, downtime, extra work) or maybe it would have led to silent data corruption (worst case).
Now, servers are not workstations, but my workstation has exactly as much RAM as my servers and no ECC, which is highly annoying but single threaded performance of the various Intel CPUs is much better on the consumer systems than it is on the Xeons unless you want to be subject to highway robbery prices.
So for me having the ECC option on consumer hardware would be quite nice, and I suspect anybody else doing real work on their PCs would love that option too.
Going on a tangent this discussion made me wonder if ECC memory was common on GPUs (after all, with GPGPU becoming more and more mainstream what good is it having ECC system RAM if your VRAM isn't?)
Unsurprisingly it turns out that consumer-grade GPUs don't have ECC. However I stumbled upon this 2014 paper: "An investigation of the effects of hard and soft errors on graphics processing unit-accelerated molecular dynamics simulations"[0].
Now obviously it's a rather specific use case but I thought their conclusions were interesting:
>The size of the system that may be simulated by GPU-accelerated AMBER is limited by the amount of available GPU memory. As such, enabling ECC reduces the size of systems that may be simulated by approximately 10%. Enabling ECC also reduces simulation speed, resulting in greater opportunity for other sources of error such as disk failures in large filesystems, power glitches, and unexplained node failures to occur during the timeframe of a calculation.
>Finally, ECC events in RAM are exceedingly rare, requiring over 1000 testing hours to observe [7, 8]. The GPU-corrected error rate has not been successfully quantified by any study—previous attempts conducted over 10,000 h of testing without seeing a single ECC error event. Testing of GPUs for any form of soft error found that the error rate was primarily determined by the memory controller in the GPU and that the newer cards based on the GT200 chipset had a mean error rate of zero. However, the baseline value for the rate of ECC events in GPUs is unknown.
[0]http://www.rosswalker.co.uk/papers/2014_03_ECC_AMBER_Paper_1...
ECC isn't for physically broken RAM, it's for the prevention of data corruption caused by environmental bit-errors (e.g. cosmic-ray bitflips).
Memory density increases with RAM capacity - which means a higher potential for noise (and cosmic-rays...) to make one-off changes here-and-there.
I understand this now happens quite regularly, even on today's desktops ( https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2580933/cosmic-rays-what... ) - I guess we just don't observe it much because probably most RAM is occupied by non-executable data or otherwise-free memory - and if it's a desktop or laptop then you're probably rebooting it regularly so any corruption in system memory would be corrected too.
I wish my phone fared that well, but I'm not sure RAM would be the first suspect for my general Android stability issues...
Because they rarely spread wide.
If you edit images or videos, maybe you detect small corruption in the image. If you use databases or do data analysis, there may be one number that is wrong, or some string has one byte of garbage. Sometimes, application may crash.
All this is very rare. It only matters if you need data integrity and do work where data has value.
I've seen photo and other binary files become corrupted that were sitting on RAID drives. The RAID swears they're fine, the filesystem swears they're fine, both are checksummed so I believe them. The only possibility that I can see is that they were corrupted while being modified or transferred on non-ECC desktops connected to the RAID.
I'm not afraid of my computer crashing. I'm afraid of data I take great pains to preserve being silently, indeed undetectably, corrupted while in flight or in use. So that's why ECC is worth it to me.
In the past I've had a flimsy RAM module in a macbook Pro and it was a real pain. Everything appeared to work just fine, but on stressing the RAM with a lot of virtual machines the host would crash. That was not the main issue, but took some time to diagnose as I was also running beta virtualisation software and was tempted to blame the change instead of the hardware.
Copying virtual machines from one disk to another did end up corrupting the data. That was painful to find out.
People always talk about cosmic rays as what ECC is guarding against - not at all! It's shitty RAM, especially in laptops. When it's under stress.. for example buffering files in a large copy.. and you find out months later when it's too late to fix it. Not "theoretical" at all.
I guess the answer boils down to how much non-recoverable but essential-for-reconstruction metadata there is in these file formats.
I'd been reading so much about it over the past year or so I got to wondering just how many times cosmic rays affect our brains and what kind of protections we're running up in our skulls.
https://lcamtuf.blogspot.com/2014/11/pulling-jpegs-out-of-th...
Here's a "funny" consequence of bit flips: bit squatting.
It's about exploiting a bit flip before a DNS query: you register the proper DNS domain and you wait for machines to wrongly contact you because they got the name wrong.
http://dinaburg.org/bitsquatting.html http://dinaburg.org/data/DC19_Dinaburg_Presentation.pdf http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZ8s1JwtNas
Just saw this was already posted below...
You write, " I haven't had a faulty RAM module in at least a year." - How do you know this without ECC?
Plus, with tens of GB of RAM, you likely won't even notice, as the majority of that RAM is being used as disk cache, or application data. The best case (but likely the lowest probability) is that the bit flip happens in an executable page on an instruction that gets executed (vs the large number which won't get executed) and the application crashes.
If that happens you will never figure out why your application crashes, but if it happens enough, you will start looking for problems.
Ironically, I had this happen. In particular Overwatch would crash constantly on my gaming rig starting around June, I reinstalled Windows, reverted to Windows 7, tried various video driver revisions and NOTHING MADE SENSE.
Eventually started pulling parts out of my system, lo and behold a single 4GB stick of RAM was bad and causing all my grief. If I had ECC memory I would have known what the problem was right away, and replaced it without pulling my hair out first.
This depends to some extent on how many parts of that stick were affected. But best case the system would have simply recovered.
Here's one example: looking at Firefox crash data, a fairly large percentage of crashes are caused by bitflips that corrupt data structures (e.g. making a null pointer which is null-checked into a non-null one that points off into memory that can't be read).
So what I really want is for everyone to default to ECC RAM. It would prevent issues like that to a large degree.
Not the op, but I twice spent weeks debugging random software crashes under high load that turned out to be triggered by faulty memory. Because it was while working on a locking infrastructure I really had to figure out why it was crashing on my workstation and couldn't just be content that I couldn't reproduce or elsewhere.
Intel being Intel also means that they remove features for cheap (i.e. <1000 $) parts, such as memory channels or PCIe lanes.
That's like saying, "I've got a double cheeseburger with curly fries for $1.99. Thanks Intel, but no."
Before AMD announced Threadripper Intel had only a 12 core chip on the roadmap for the x299 platform, and charged around 1700$ for their 10 core chip. Now they will be charging 2000$ for 18 cores.
Competition is such a nice thing. Glad that AMD is back in the CPU game. Can only be good for us customers.
(Yes, I know that "normal people" don't even buy laptops anymore, let alone desktops. Please excuse my fantasy-world in which people buy desktop computers and even upgrade the amplifiers of their at least 7-piece stereo sound system)
IMO the Ryzen R7's have been a huge "mid-end" win for anyone doing any sort of multicore/CPU intensive work. Without competition, Intel's been gouging the market for the past few years.
Well, I think the current mid-range Ryzen's offer significant value and I imagine OEMs will start including them into their popular models sooner than later.
6 cores at 3.6ghz with a 4.0ghz boost for $239.
https://www.amazon.com/AMD-Ryzen-1600X-Processor-YD160XBCAEW...
More than likely we won't see any kind of price war. Instead we'll see minor price fighting on a per category basis. Intel's mid vs AMD's mid, etc. There's no drive down to the bottom with a duopoly.
EDIT: I was getting excited by the i7-7820X until I saw it has only 28 pcie lanes. Talk about being pushed towards the way more expensive 7900x! My relatively cheaper 6850k has 40 lanes, wonder what the thinking behind this is?
NVMe SSD drives also use some lanes (typicaly 4), and you might want two of them in RAID.
That could also change over the next few years.
For users like myself constrained by memory bandwidth I would prefer that they publicly started selling their Skylake-SP Purley platform. In some configurations they even include a 100Gbit/s photonic interconnect and an FPGA for Deep Learning acceleration.
I would gladly pay $2500-3500 for an 18-24 core Intel CPU with hexa-channel DDR4 and PCIe 4.0 (or simply more than 44 lanes of 3.0).
I'd suppose the feeling of exclusivity isn't much of a sales point to processor buyers.
I supply is constrained, seems like demand could be similarly constrained by a price hike.
Do they get better feedback from these select customers? Better acceptance of eventual defects without bad PR?
To justify extreme price differences so the 'select customers' can credibly claim this expensive stuff gives them an edge their competitors will not be able to easily match.
In an arms race arms that are supply constrained will fetch premium prices.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-threadripper-vega-pcie-...
Other sites also report that it will support 2 TByte of RAM like the single socket Naples/Epyc, but LRDIMM and official/validated ECC support was not mentioned in the stream.
I guess since I'm used to new high end GPUs being scarce for months after launch, I wasn't expecting availability to be so good. Additionally, I didn't expect the small aftermarket AM4 cooling selection.
Now able to reach 3333MHz on 2x16GB RAM which is specced to do 3200. Couldn't hit 2900Mhz before, it wouldn't even boot.
I would really like to understand why intel tries so hard to not make a desktop part for people willing to spend a little more to get something that isn't basically an i5 (limited memory channels, limited PCIe, smaller caches, etc).
Also, Ryzen seems to struggle on Linux vs Intel a bit. I have seen people complaining about it's unwillingness to use the Turbo frequency and its unixbench numbers are unimpressive, particularly execl throughput.
Intel has a monopoly in microprocessors today the same way that Microsoft Windows is an OS monopoly today: it sort-of is, but it isn't holding anyone back either.
Further, Intel's market share directly links to their R&D advantage and process advantage. AMD can keep them honest every few years, but they can't keep up without a lot more market share and Intel has an insane war chest which they use to maintain that market share.
The internet's winner-take-all effect has both benefits and drawbacks for us consumers.
Interested in using BMI2 for bit twiddling because you'd like to efficiently manipulate bit matrices? PDEP has a reciprocal throughput of 1 on Skylake, or 18 on Ryzen. Guess it's time to make the tough choice between the top end Threadripper and a Core i3 6320.
Intel has positioned these well if the Ryzen price tag rumors are correct. If you're building a workstation with 16 cores, $1k for Ryzen or $1.7k for Skylake is not a straight forward decision.
If Ryzen is more than that, I don't see it taking a big bite out of the market. Which isn't surprising, as Intel did just halve the margins on their enthusiast parts...
Either it is more than that, and it will take huge chunk of the market, or Intel simply reduced margins out of the goodness of their heart.
If the top end SKU is more than $1k then I don't see it taking much of the market, due to the factors in my original post, factoring in the total cost of a machine and inertia greatly favoring Intel.
As for the rest of your post, it depends. HEDT is diverse. I was looking for a new CPU for my hobby project, 8 - 16 cores, still undecided. I have literally 0 FPU needs, but will take any integer power there is.
I also pay for electricity, so, 65W AMD vs 140W (at least for 6 core) Intel makes my decision very easy.
You also have to consider that AMD HEDT is announced and arriving. Intel response is all marketing slides right now, full with TBDs. They are also misleading people that the chunk of cache they moved from L3 to L2 will magically be all IPC gains.
I own right now more Intel than amd machines, but moving forward my TOC says AMD is the clear winner.
I do hope Intel will come back, but realistically, they are still overclocking sandy bridge. It may take them several years for a new architecture.
Personally, I would choose Ryzen.