What really matters (for people that do the CAPEX and OPEX math on their assets; not gamers) is the performance/power ratio. Without this I don't see AMD eating much of Intel's lunch (35B vs 208B market cap).
It sounds like you're saying performance/power is a benefit for Intel, possibly based upon the history of AMD chips, but that line of thought has been wrong since the Ryzen architecture.
Maybe Intel took that back with their lower clocked 8c/16t chips, dunno, this isn't something that comes up all that much in consumer reviews. But there's at least not a significant gap in either direction, it's pretty much a wash.
On the server side of things Anandtech didn't seem to go much into it but at least with this one: https://www.anandtech.com/show/11544/intel-skylake-ep-vs-amd...
The dual EPYC 7601 used 100w less than the Xeon competition in povray while also being the fastest system by a substantial margin at povray, too. Which would put performance, power, and performance/watt all firmly in the EPYC 7601's domain on that one test. And Intel took it back on MySQL. So 50/50 split.
When limited to its "official" 95W TDP, the 9900K does about 4.3 GHz and has a higher perf/watt than Ryzen (both higher performance and lower power consumption).
So basically you are in a situation where the Ryzen pulls less at stock, has slightly higher efficiency at stock, but has a much lower clock ceiling. While the 9900K ships with much higher clocks and worse efficiency, but has a much lower power floor if you pull the clocks back to 2700X levels.
https://static.techspot.com/articles-info/1744/bench/HandBra...
https://static.techspot.com/articles-info/1744/bench/Power_H...
https://www.techspot.com/review/1744-core-i9-9900k-round-two...
Of note, the 2700X is actually pulling ~130W under AVX loads (33W more than the 95W-limited 9900K).
The Stilt noted that the default power limit AMD ships is 141.75W and the 2700X will run it for an unlimited amount of time (whereas Intel at least claims PL2 obeys a time limit, although in practice all mobo companies violate the spec and boost for an unlimited amount of time as well). So really "TDP" is a joke all around these days. Nobody really respects TDP limits when boosting, and it doesn't directly correspond to base clocks either (both 9900K and 2700X can run above baseclocks at rated TDP). It is just sort of a marketing number.
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/ryzen-strictly-technica...
Epyc is a different matter and once again more cores translates into better efficiency than fewer, higher-clocked cores. But the gotcha there is that Infinity Fabric is not free either, the infinity fabric alone is pulling more than 100W on Epyc chips (literally half of the total power!).
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13124/the-amd-threadripper-29...
Similarly, the 2700X spends 25W on its Infinity Fabric, while an 8700K is only spending 8W. So, Infinity Fabric pulls roughly 3x as much power as Intel is spending on its Ringbus. This really hits the consumer chips a lot harder, mesh on the Skylake-X and Skylake-SP is closer to Infinity Fabric power levels (but still lower).
Plus, GF 14nm wasn't as good a node as Intel 14nm. So Ryzen is starting from a worse node.
Moneyshot, core for core, power efficiency on first-gen Ryzen and Epyc was inferior, but of course Epyc lets you have more cores than Xeon. Ryzen consumer platform's efficiency was strictly worse than Intel though.
And that goes double for laptop chips, which are the one area that Intel still dominates. Raven Ridge and Picasso are terrible for efficiency compared to Intel's mobile lineup. And AMD mobile won't be moving to 7nm until next year.
Because of that whole "nobody obeys TDP and it doesn't correspond to base clocks or any other performance level", we'll just have to wait for reviews and see what Zen2 and Epyc are actually like. I am really interested in the Infinity Fabric power consumption, that's potentially going to be the limitation as we move onto 7nm and core power goes down, while AMD scales chiplet count up further.
Why is this shocking? Zen 2 is 7nm and Intel's latest is at 14nm. It would be a far bigger shock if they didn't beat Intel in performance/watt. Zen 2 vs whatever Intel releases on 10nm in the next ~6-18 months is a much more interesting comparison.
AMD wasn't really a consideration but for budget until they launched the Athlon in the late 90s. The success of Athlon was as much about Intel's fumble with Netburst as it was with Athlon being a solid competitor.
It took Intel almost a decade to roll out Core and in that time AMD failed to capture the market despite making tremendous gains and legitimizing itself.
Ultimately AMD fumbled with the Bulldozer/Excavator lines of CPUs and lost almost everything they had gained.
The reasons AMD couldn't capture the market are complex but the short answer is that Intel influences every aspect of a computer from software, to compilers, to peripherals, to firmware.
And by AMD failed you mean Intel used illegal means to stop them from it, right ?
The US, Japanese and Korean fair trade comission equivalent all either blamed Intel or fined them. The EU was still too young in that area to be in time but in 2009 they gave one of their biggest fine ever at 1.45 billions € to Intel for what they did, along with an approriate "oh and if you do it again we won't be late, and won't be so nice".
Calling it "AMD failed to capture the market" is technically true, but that's one funny point of view.
I've heard this baseless assertion before but so far I've never heard any semblance of support. Why do you believe that AMD "fumbled" with their Bulldozer line?
This article about Zen starts with an overview of why Bulldozer failed to deliver: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/03/amds-moment-of-zen-f...
Or that while it was power efficient at idle, it was exceptionally power hungry under load?
Maybe it was when the CEO admitted it failed to meet expectations, said we'd have to wait 4 years for a successor, and then stepped down?
Idk... I'm probably way off base.
Because Intel played dirty and illegal[0].
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/11/18194190/amds-radeon-vii-...
I'm planning to hold out for next gen when they get ray tracing hardware to be a bit more future proof (my GTX 970's not dead yet), but since I'm thinking of trading my Wintendo out for a Mac + eGPU setup it's nice to see that AMD could actually be a good GPU option now.
Those were just announced this week, so keep an eye out for 3rd party benchmarks soon.
AMD's recent releases have a reputation of releasing at "hot/high-power" stock and then doing much better when undervolted. Navi will get the die shrink, so the results for both power and thermals are likely to be even better, but benchmarking needs to be done before we have a full picture of what's changed.
AMD gives their TDP with enabled turbo (similar to real usage), Intel gives TDP at rest / no turbo enabled.
There is still some variance from both between given and real TDP, but the core of the difference is well assumed, and dates back to almost a dozen CPU generations back when Intel already had to guzzle power like crazy to superclock their chips in the vague hope that they could compete with AMD's products of the time (and then they never reverted it once they took the lead back with the core architecture)
It's kind of similar to the whole "Intel wants comparison dont with SMT off", due to the last 15 years being theirs, the whole thing is biased toward Intel, ... yet they still massively lose those comparison.
As a Small Form Factor enthusiast, I can attest to this with utmost confidence. The chips will run at their expected TDP when configured as specified by the factory, that's just not the default on almost any enthusiast board from known companies. In the case of ASUS it can actually be a bit of a battle to get things to run as intel specifies, both with MCE and automatic overclocking behaviors.
Source: I have one of these.
If that's the case, then also the performance is "massively blown out", since essentially all the benchmarks around are based on popular motherboards.
Anantech did a test some time ago with a real, fixed, 95 W TDP[¹], and it ain't pretty.
It's definitely good for Intel that "every popular motherboard" is, uh, guilty of going out of spec, otherwise, the popular opinion of Intel chips would be significantly lower.
Regardless, I'm also not really convinced that this can be considered "cheating" by the motherboards. According to the official Intel page [²]:
> The processor must be working in the power, temperature, and specification limits of the thermal design power (TDP)
so ultimately, it's the CPU that sets the performance/consumption ceiling.
[¹] https://www.anandtech.com/show/13591/the-intel-core-i9-9900k... [²] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...
The Ryzen processor is 105w vs. the significantly slower intel processor is 165w. Additionally also AMD's TDP numbers are much more accurate in terms of real peak usage than intel. So almost certainly Zen 2 processor will have a much better performance/power ratio than corresponding intel one moving forward. That was definitely not the case for AMD in their last generation.
> In this case, for the new 9th Generation Core processors, Intel has set the PL2 value to 210W. This is essentially the power required to hit the peak turbo on all cores, such as 4.7 GHz on the eight-core Core i9-9900K. So users can completely forget the 95W TDP when it comes to cooling.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13400/intel-9th-gen-core-i9-9...
In other words
1) Intel's advertised "TDP" = true? (they don't use the same original meaning of the "Total Design Power" anymore)
2) Intel's advertised peak performance = true (with caveats such as all the mitigations required for the CPU flaws, which lower performance)
3) Intel's advertised peak performance at advertised TDP = BIG FAT LIE
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-core-i9-9980xe-cp...
There also seem to be some new X570 motherboards that will actually support this level of craziness, too.
Intel is currently getting absolutely destroyed on that front.
Both AMD & Intel list TDP for all cores used at base clock frequencies. The major difference is Intel heavily leverages what they call all-core boost to never actually run at their base clock, allowing them to list rather ridiculously low base clock frequencies. For example the i9-9900K's base frequency is listed at 3.6ghz, but the all-core turbo frequency is a whopping 4.7ghz. That difference is how you end up with a CPU that expects a whopping 210W of sustained power delivery (the 9900K's PL2 spec) even though its TDP is only 95W.
AMD doesn't (didn't?) have an all-core boost concept, so their base clocks are just higher, making their TDP number closer to real-world. But still technically base-clock numbers and not boost numbers, and so you will still see power draw in excess of TDP.