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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I wouldn't buy a Ryzen, but I'm glad competition is forcing Intel to put the work in again. They sat on their laurels for a really long time.

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Dunno... this looks like the bare minimum Intel thought they could get away with. Sure, they added a couple cores but you give up HT on many models, no Spectre/Meltdown architectural fixes (ok, might still be early to expect that), iGPU stagnant, cutting back on cache size, every variant still significantly more expensive than Ryzen counterpart. Be curious to see how the overall performance comes out. It doesn't look so much like they're trying to compete as they are trying to not compete with their server processors. I'll probably be going Ryzen when I'm next in the market.

Yeah, this looks very underwhelming. I also think you're letting them off too easy with "too early to expect a Spectre/Meltdown fix".

This is a critical security bug that was discovered over a year ago. Intel just ignoring the problem and casually releasing yet another (underwhelming) upgrade that doesn't address it all...

The fact anyone accepts that just goes to show how low our expectations have dipped when it comes to Intel.

Low? How many instances are there of chip bugs being fixed in under a year? It's common across vendors for tape-out to be around a year before they enter the market. This is just the reality of microchip production: the design is set in stone a long time before the enter the market.

Not letting them off, just trying to set realistic expectations. I'm not in chip design, but everything I've seen on the subject suggests that 2-3 years from design to fabrication is the general (minimum) ETA on architectural fixes. The testing needs to be extensive or they risk releasing a worse problem to the world.

They were aware of these bugs for (at least) 16 months. They could delay releasing new chips until they addressed the problem, even if it took them another year. They did not. Instead, they released a chip with a widely known critical vulnerability. That's on them.

It's on you if you buy it.

Metldown is already fixed by software. So their hardware fixes will just improve performance in some workloads and those workloads are typical for servers, I know that on my PC meltdown fixes did not affect performance in any noticeable way.

Spectre was announced 5 months ago. Even if Intel had a fully laid out and tested new design, with new masks and any changes to the production pipeline the instant it was dropped, just fabbing the chips I've been told has over 6 months lead time.

Spectre was indeed "announced" 5 months ago, but it was disclosed to Intel on June 1st 2017. That's over 16 months ago.

See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(security_vulnerabilit... :

> Spectre proper was discovered independently by Jann Horn from Google's Project Zero and Paul Kocher in collaboration with Daniel Genkin, Mike Hamburg, Moritz Lipp and Yuval Yarom. Microsoft Vulnerability Research extended it to browsers' JavaScript JIT engines.[4][20] It was made public in conjunction with another vulnerability, Meltdown, on January 3, 2018, after the affected hardware vendors had already been made aware of the issue on June 1, 2017.

There were also stories they were aware of the problem even before, and basically ignored it. If you check out that history section, there were multiple public presentations about the feasibility of an attack for years before the practical exploit was discovered. The only way Intel didn't at least suspect it is if it was very sloppy, or didn't care at all.

And I bet they'll continue to ignore it until people forget about it.

More damning is that fact that Intel does have a fix in Whiskey Lake. So why aren't these 8-core desktop CPUs using Whiskey Lake? https://www.anandtech.com/show/13301/spectre-and-meltdown-in...

Without taking sides, people tend to forget that Intel chips clock higher and consume less power. For instance, the 9900k is clocking at 4.7 GHz on all 8 cores without AVX and AVX-512 instructions. Single core goes up to 5 GHz (!!!). The Ryzen runs at 3.6 GHz with a single core turbo of 4.0 GHz.

That said, the next gen Ryzen is rumored to be 4.5 GHz chip on turbo. So, definitely the steam is picking up.

If you look at the cost difference, it is pretty dead on placed with ~$130 higher than Ryzen 8 core. People trash around AMD/Intel like its their home town sports team. I find that everywhere including on HN.

Let's wait for the benchmarks, specific load comparisons to see if the price difference makes sense. The 8700k is ridiculously fast and it beats the hell out of Ryzen's 1600X.

Not forgetting any of that but none of that is really new Intel information in this generation. (note that current Ryzen top end is 4.3GHz though which is relevant from the standpoint that AMD is increasing clock faster than Intel... great MHz wars part II) Sure, if anything about the previous generation from Intel put them over the top for you, nothing changes. However, there's not much in this new generation that really seems to stand out as a significant improvement though.

The i7 lost HT but gained 2 real cores, which will be faster in practice.

The i7 has the same amount of cache as its predecessor and the i9 has more.

9-series has hardware fixes for Meltdown variant 3 as well as the L1 terminal fault fix.

If too many people don't buy Ryzen/Threadripper even though the price/performance is very competitive [1] then not much will change, effectively.

I will only buy Intel if I'm forced to by other people (think: employer, laptop). By my own choice, I will buy Ryzen/Threadripper whenever I can. And I will do so gladly, knowing I give my money to the David who's fighting Goliath and giving me a much better bang for the buck at the same time. Win/win.

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd-athl...

Funny, I am the opposite. I wouldn't buy an Intel at this point.

Why wouldn't you buy a Ryzen?

Hackintosh

it seems that there is a community working on that https://amd-osx.com/

AMD Hackintoshes are wonky as hell, since you need a custom kernel. It's far more trouble than it's worth.

Top end video gaming, those crazy 99th percential, 120hz 4k hdr guys.

Workloads limited by a single thread.

Overclockers.

That's about all I see.

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