I've been holding out on building a desktop because I could go for a while without it but my patience is wearing very thin after waiting months and now having to wait even longer just to get CPUs in stock in the first place.
Intel's advantage is OEMs and sheer output volume, but the hyperscale infrastructure folks are going to be shoring up AMD financially while Intel has problems and maybe in two years or so of this nonsense AMD might be much more of a serious decision, but as of this moment it isn't a slam dunk for AMD at all.
I'm experiencing the opposite. There has been so many deals on 3900X that I have to constantly tell myself I don't need an upgrade.
This doesn't necessarily completely invalidate my point though - distribution by AMD is clearly needing some work when one region is drowning in 3900X processors and a very wealthy metro area has none in retail channels.
This strategy is quite widely used in many other industry as well.
Although given it has only been launched for less than a month and demand is actually through the roof ( I have been seen reviews being so Pro AMD, even in the AMD Athon 64 days ). So I think it is simply supply is a little tight while TSMC are working hard.
0: https://pcpartpicker.com/product/tLCD4D/amd-ryzen-9-3900x-36...
1: https://smile.amazon.com/AMD-Ryzen-3900X-24-Thread-Processor...
I hope this letter finds you in good health. Since I've seen that you are offering AMD 3900X at a discount, I'd like to inform you that I am not like those pleebs and would therefore like you to pay in full MSRP. Please let me know where I can send the goats.
I have the honor to be your obedient customer.
N. Pleeb
B&H Photo is a reputable site, and they are advertising the 3900X at $499. Now whether they will ship anytime soon...
i have one and there is no bios issue. i got the cheapest x570 mobo and everything is great
You're confusing bandwidth and latency. Ryzen 3000 launched a month ago, the 3900x outperformed expectations, so the initial shipments sold out faster than expected. You can't magic up stock out of thin air, so there's an inevitable lag between retailers reporting unusually high demand and AMD being able to deliver sufficient stock.
The bandwidth question is much more important and bodes very poorly for Intel. TSMC's 7nm process is stable, providing excellent yields and has plenty of available capacity; they're already in risk production for 5nm, which is expected to free up substantial capacity at 7nm/7nm+ into 2020. Intel's 10nm has been a complete debacle and (despite the Ice Lake launch) is still blighted with sub-par yields.
Yields in terms of getting lots of operational dies, sure, but one of the underlying problems here is chip quality. They have lots of chiplets but most of those chiplets are not fast enough to hit the clocks advertised for the 3900X.
In fact, even a lot of the chiplets sold as 3900X are not fast enough to hit the clocks advertised for 3900X, as well as elsewhere throughout their range. There are a lot of people finding their chips only boost to 50-200 MHz less than the advertised frequency of the chip.
Essentially, the boost algorithm now takes chip quality into account when determining how high it will boost. And most of the chips have silicon quality that is too poor to hit the advertised clocks, even on a single core, even under ideal cooling, etc etc.
Thus, AMD has the somewhat dubious honor of being the first company to make the silicon lottery apply not just to overclocking, but to their stock clocks as well. They really wasted no time before shifting to anti-consumer bullshit of their own; all they had to do was advertise the chips as being 200 MHz lower and everyone would have been happy, but they wanted to advertise clocks the chips couldn't hit.
And again, the underlying problem is chip quality - a lot of these chiplets can't boost to 4.3 or 4.4 GHz let alone 4.7. AMD simply can't yield enough 4.7 GHz chiplets to go around, even if the chiplets are nominally functional. The process may be "stable and providing excellent yields" but it's not stable and well yielding enough to meet AMD's expectations.
That's a major reason they're now introducing 3700 and 3900 non-X variations - that will allow them to reduce clocks and satisfy demand a bit better.
Do you have some sort of source for this claim?
As it stands, this mine has some dead canaries.
> ...but one of the underlying problems here is chip quality
supposed justification:
> ...every forum pretty much
That's hearsay not actual justification. And intel has a reputation for dirty play.
https://youtu.be/WXbCdGENp5I?t=119
A lot of reviewers have noted similar things, but often are working with singular samples and didn't want to make too much of a stink without more data, but the problem is widespread. Out of all of der8auer's CPUs, only one hit its advertised boost clocks, and it was one of the lower-end CPUs with a less ambitious target to hit.
It may be a problem with early AGESA firmware, and silicon quality will definitely go up over time, but at least at this point in time AMD has certainly falsely advertised the clocks these CPUs are capable of achieving.
New architecture, new chipset, bound to have some release issues. Intel is on its second or third refresh of their Skylake architecture from 2015, all ironed out.
More like the fourth, I think.
So to be clear, older AGESA isn't a magic bullet that is letting all chips "easily hit their rated boost clocks".
It could be cleaned up somewhat in future AGESA releases, and silicon quality will definitely go up over time.
It is unclear whether Intel is truly disadvantaged in throughput for any appreciable length of time. We've seen what happened to Intel after the disastrous Prescott release years ago - they worked on the Core architecture and its follow-up Core 2 that put AMD in a pretty serious rut for the past decade. Your point of the 10nm offering launching and _still_ being lackluster is the big, big problem for Intel for short-term competitiveness.
In fact Intel had supply issues with their 9900K at launch too, for at least a month or two they were often out of stock at the major retailers. If getting ahold of a 3900X is still tough by next month then maybe that's cause for concern.
I would agree that Intel is more mature on the BIOS side of things. AMD usually has launch issues that need to be ironed out with UEFI updates. But, if the past few launches are any indication, they've always got things fixed.
Next month, the 3950X will be the one hard to get a hold of.
These chips launched on schedule on 7/7, almost exactly one month ago. If you've been exasperatedly waiting for months it's not AMD's fault.
The "literally no reason" part is okay, what you need to do is adjust "at the moment" to "once we're out of the launch window".
There's no business reason on desktop or server for Intel for sure but there's so much inertia here which AMD needs to counter, it'll take years.
Intel is down on the floor until 2021-2022 when their 7nm (which is a smaller node than TSMC's 7nm) begins to ship because a) there's no reason to believe 10nm actually will ship in quantity b) there's every reason to believe even if it does, it's not going to be great, the first iteration of a process is never so and 14nm is so fine tuned by now, it is better in watt/performance which makes Ice Lake look stupid. 7nm is said to be a totally different, independent development and not a fine tune of the (dead) 10nm.
Intel has 12B cash at hand though so don't expect them to just go out with a whimper. If their profits go down a little for 2-3 years, they will live. The stock price didn't crash, with good reason. AMD had a net loss for seven consecutive quarters before turning a profit in Q2 2016. Intel won't even turn unprofitable for a similar period of time, just it'll have a littles less profit. And, again, they have a decent sized war chest to draw on if necessary.
The chip business is a slow business. In 2012, Intel said they will ship 10m chips in 2015. https://www.crn.com/news/components-peripherals/240007274/in... This is about the same time when AMD re-hired Jim Keller. AMD saw their window in 2015 when Intel 10nm didn't ship, thrown away K12 in a hurry and brought Zen to market in 2016 -- surely they didn't expect they will have a five year run when Intel can't put up a competition.
The fun will start in 2021 when TSMC is expected to have a refined 5nm (they call it 5nm Plus) process which you bet AMD will use vs Intel 7nm.
There's a lot more incentive to explore EPYC than there was a day ago.
And exactly what kind of risk are you taking about?
If switching is as easy as you claim it is, you can still do so next year or the year after.
Also, software is very often the largest cost for these systems. It's not hard to find yourself paying $100k a month for an Oracle license. A one-time expense of $50k for one piece of hardware vs another is barely a blip.
And in fact that hardware is often charged based on spec. So if you have 4x as many cores on Epyc, you will pay more in software costs on a monthly basis as well. That, or the software will simply refuse to use them until you buy an upgrade, meaning those extra cores are sitting there doing nothing.
It's counterintuitive to people whose experience is building a gaming desktop at home, but hardware expenses are not necessarily a big part of total cost of ownership for enterprise operators.
That shouldn't be a problem. They are both fundamentally the same architecture (amd64) and any CPU-specific features are already opportunistically handled by the vast majority of software because otherwise you wouldn't be able to run the same code on different versions of Intel's CPUs.
It works fine if you shut everything down and reboot the system, but that is often undesirable.
The whole point of the feature is that the VM can be migrated around different physical hardware without having to interrupt service. It just suddenly is running on a different host instance. But it has to be the same type of processor... or at least the same feature set. "Close" is not good enough, it needs to be a 1:1 match.
You can manually disable features until you have found the lowest common denominator between the feature sets of the different processors. But obviously the more types of processors you have in your cluster, the more problematic this is. In very few clusters will you find servers of mixed types, you buy 10,000 of the same server and operate them as a "unit". You don't just add in servers after the fact, sometimes you don't even replace failed servers.
And that hardware decision will have been made years ago, very often. The server market is hugely inertial, it's nothing like you putting together a build one evening and then going out and buying parts and putting it together.
I think you can do that on multisocket systems:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.14/core-api/cpu_hotplug.h...
A very long time ago, I worked for a then very large company that sold servers. Plain standard 80486 based servers.
My job was to drive around and drop off these servers for evaluation at prospective customers, who would compare them against 80486 offerings from a different vendor.
Your argument about them all being fundamentally the same would be even stronger: it’s the same CPU.
And yet, customers did not take chances and would go through the eval motions. Because their business relied on it.
Now imagine that at a scale of thousands.
Claiming “they are fundamentally the same” is not wrong, but you don’t care about the fundamentals only. You care about the whole picture and you don’t take chances.
Very conservative corporate customers could wait a short time for good BIOS corrections and sufficient supply for all the parts (not only CPUs) they need before shopping for AMD servers, but they would be buying different hardware from the same established suppliers even if they went with Intel.
That sentence above is a contradiction in terms.
A conservative corporate customers spends many months to do evaluations. There is no such thing as “a short time.”
Warehouse-scale computing has similar budgets and timeframes. You don't decide how to re-build this month's 10k machines based on this month's benchmarks. You made the decision as far back as the supply chain required you to do it, maybe a year or more.
I'm sure that AMD's sales team has been telling their big customers about this generation's performance improvements for a while. But with their history, decision makers are going to discount the story a bit until they can see it in production silicon.
So the next few month's movements in AWS and the like will all depend on the extent that their decision makers were convinced many months ago.
Like it or not, Google's stamp of approval carries a tremendous weight in this industry. And if that's not good enough for you, Microsoft and AWS are stepping up their deployments of EPYC as well.
As a result, a lot of smaller companies will now require a much lower standard of due diligence when approving an EPYC Rome deployment.
The signs are there, Lenovo has called them T480 and A480 last year, T490 and T495 this year, indicating these are very close.
Your comments in this discussion are very small scale, retail oriented.
it's not a huge advantage, but I'm not sure I would go so far as to call it foolish to buy intel at this point. if your only serious workload is gaming, intel seems like the obvious choice to me. you can actually get a decent all-core overclock on the intel parts, which leads to a significant performance lead in esports titles.
To call that a "significant" performance lead is silly.
also the "only at 1080p" meme is not really true for some esports titles. counterstrike is so cpu bound that it really doesn't matter what resolution you play at.
The hilarious gain of this is that this will drive down Intel's chip prices in attempts to compete, improving Mac margins.
My next desktop of will be AMD+Nvidia. Now if only I could avoid the Nvidia tax for deep learning...
The main difference is on Intel you get that magical sounding 5ghz number by overclocking, but it's not actually much higher than stock (4.7ghz on the 9900k is the "all-core turbo")
Even formerly die-hard intel gaming shops (Linus Tech Tips and similar) are recommending AMD for most gaming rigs nowadays.
https://www.newegg.com/core-i9-9th-gen-intel-core-i9-9900k/p...
Ryzen 9 3900x: $499 and sold out
https://www.newegg.com/amd-ryzen-9-3900x/p/N82E16819113103
And here’s gaming performance. Far Cry 5 has a 25fps advantage. And yes, I have an RTX 2080 Ti
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3405567/ryzen-3000-review-am...
So for a large group of people, Intel still makes sense.
And my reply was in response to “literally no reason to buy an Intel“ which is clearly just not true.
On top of which, given the history, those building gaming machines will assume Intel’s next 10nm cpus will still outshine AMDs in gaming for the foreseeable future.
Intel is a juggernaut because even if it's not shipping the best, it's always shipping something on time, every time.
Intel is in their current situation because their 10 nm process is years late, and is still not able to manufacture high-performance parts like server CPUs in any meaningful quantity for a price that the market would bear. They've also had severe shortages over the past year, which has resulted in orders being delayed for weeks or months.
And of course, there's the matter of their products basically being warmed-over refreshes of a nearly 5-year-old architecture (because their new architectures are dependent on 10 nm), which has resulted in comically lopsided performance in AMD's favor, in basically every objective metric that matters.