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Comment by frou_dh | Hacker News Reader

The articles will keep flowing for months/years and it'll become conventional wisdom that Epyc always pummels Intel. Intel marketing must be on Defcon 1.

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This happened to Intel with Athlon and Opteron back in the early 2000s. Intel came back swinging pretty fast. They might this time too. In any case the consumer wins. Intel needed a swift kick in the butt.

They came back fast by bribing OEMs to only sell Intel and were fined for it by the EU because it was an antitrust violation. It's unlikely they can repeat that.

Intel had seriously better more reliable hardware at that point. You couldn't pay me to buy AMD after all the hardware I lost to thermal issues.

HN likes to believe that AMD is and was always the best if only Intel hadn't used monopoly tactics but the reality is that it's not as simple as that.

That being said, I'm truly happy with what AMD is delivering now and I hope they can sustain it for years to come. My next workstation is probably going to be AMD for sure.

As for Intel swinging back, if they had something ready, I believe they woulnd't have allowed a competitor to get close and surpass them like AMD is doing. Intel has gone through so many boring architecture at this point that I doubt it's just "strategy" on their part. They must be really struggling to deliver something competitive now.

Or maybe if Intel wasn't a monopoly AMD could've solved the heat issues better and faster. It's hard to play fair and win when the other one is cheating.

Like in this 2001 video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSGcnRanYMM

Actually, that's proof that the Athlon will still do the correct thing all the way to its death, whereas the Pentium crashed and thus also saved itself. Also, the P4 has more thermal mass due to its heatspreader, and therefore can sustain non-HSF operation longer.

Motherboards/CPUs in those days didn't really have thermal shutdown failsafes, in fact, we had to rely on the motherboard to report CPU temperatures, there weren't any built into the CPU itself. What we did have was shutdown on CPU-fan fail.

> You couldn't pay me to buy AMD after all the hardware I lost to thermal issues.

Early 2000s? AMD? Which architecture exactly?

Intel OTOH was infamous during this time for "PressHot"...

Can they really? How are they going to beat the cap on Moore’s Law? You can only go so small.

Does conventional wisdom matters in this case, where a bit of google search could tell you what's the best for your needs ?

One who does firing decisions does not have the time to google the details. (A.K.A. Nobody got fired for ...)

The only thing holding up Intel at the moment is their gaming IPC.

Should AMD crack that then it'll be brutal for them (if it isn't already).

According to Linus techtips the 3xxx ryzen series is already neck/neck with Intel at CSGO (which is known to normally heavily favor Intel - as a csgo player this is really impressive), and appears to otherwise be competitive in other games.

Intel should be very scared. Not to mention the way Intel has crippled different models of their line up just to try to push people to use a more expensive CPU - and seems to have otherwise stalled out in general CPU performance.

To save non-PC-gamers a Googling: "CSGO" here refers to "Counter Strike: Global Offensive", a popular multi-player first-person shooter. It's part of the Counter-Strike series, which traces its roots back to the year 2000.

Counter-Strike came out in 1999. Source: I wasted most of 1999 playing Counter-Strike.

Counter-Strike was super fun during the time it took form (the beta versions from 0.5 to 5.2 ish). They tried a lot or different things, like dual wielding machine guns. The community was awesome also.

Beta 0.1 will always have a special place in my heart playing it for hours at the LAN shop down the street from me. Bonus was being able to troll people by flying my dead-player spectator through doors and opening them. People would get really mad - it was awesome.

Why is it being used as a subjective benchmark 19 years later? Haven't gamers moved on a dozen times since then?

CS:GO is still played internationally and there are also professional tournaments. So I would say that it is still a relevant benchmark.

I agree that people still play it. But looking at the system requirements:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/730/CounterStrike_Global_...

I am hard-pressed to say that it looks like a suitable benchmark. It's hard to find a desktop CPU released in the past five years that can't provide good performance for a game like that.

That’s not the only game LTT uses to benchmark with, but they include it because of its popularity and I suspect because it normally runs at such insane frame rates that differences show up more readily—much easier to tell 220 FPS vs 240 FPS than 59.5 vs 60.

Some CS Go players believe (and maybe is true) that having high FPSes live around 300 give them an advantage so they will try to make the FPS number as large as possible. Such a gamer will probably pay a ton more money to get from 2500 FPS to 300 FPS. They would also have monitor and mouse+ keyboards with low latency.

So from my reading this "elite/full time" gamers will still buy an expensive CPU if they get 10 extra frames (but forget that in real life your PC has more programs running in background so reality may not match the benchmarks)

For people wondering why, it has mainly to with the fact that mouse polling rates are tied to FPS meaning that you still have heavy incentive to go above the FPS your monitor could handle.

What? I've never heard this reasoning before.

The real reason is, I only really play csgo and pubg, I have X$ to spend on a CPU. Previously if you looked at them market, tier-to-tier amd vs intel - intel always was the stronger performer at the CSGO. Why spend X$ and get 250fps when you can spend the same and get 300fps?

You have a 300hz screen? Hint: it doesn't exist (for consumers at least) Current max is 270hz I believe, but a few years ago it was sub 250 hz

This video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjWSRTYV8e0) does a really good job explaining frame latency in CSGO and why you can benefit from running at FPS significantly higher than your refresh rate, and why vertical sync doesn't solve it like it should. The game is free now, so I'd highly recommend trying it out if you're doubtful about a smoothness difference between 100 and 250-300 FPS.

People still benchmark CS:GO because it is one of the few games that is CPU bound that still actively being played today. It's one of the few games where a single core performance and memory latency has a big impact on overall performance.

Intel always had a huge lead on CS:GO until Zen 2 where the gap finally closes up, which is why a lot of people is referring to CS:GO benchmark when talking about Zen 2 in context of gaming.

actually a lot of pro players are streamers, so they at least need a good cpu for game+stream. some even have a setup with two computers. actually streaming games (especially new ones) still needs at least the i7's.

If you want to benchmark the CPU, then the CPU has to be the limiting factor performance-wise, meaning you don't want to be GPU bound.

It's usually easier to get to that point on older games. How this benchmark maps to real-world experience is, of course, a different matter.

I'm not sure whether they update the minimum system requirements alongside the game. Keep in mind, CSGO is from 2012 and has received numerous updates, and looks, feels and sounds completely different today.

When I first bought my main laptop in 2017, I could play somewhat smoothly at 1080p, now I have to use 720p.

It's an interesting side-effect, before Steam and other content-platforms, games titles iterated much faster.

EDIT: Then again, when I think about CoD, I'll retract my last sentence.

It's the more recent sequel that's being tested here.

CS:GO was released in 2012. Majors (international competitions sponsored by the developers) have a million dollar prize pool.

I am surprised most people on hackernews don't know but the CSGO engine is optimized for extreme frame rates. When played competitively they go for low resolution and ultra frame rates, thus the bottleneck isnt the GPU it becomes the CPU.

Thanks to the price drop on Zen+ due to the Zen 2 release, I recently built a Ryzen 5 2600 system as my new gaming rig. My old gaming machine had a i5-7400, and in pretty much every game the CPU bottleneck has disappeared, especially newer titles. Even older single-core-heavy games like CSGO have greatly improved with the new CPU. Basically every game in my collection can now run at 1440p60 (my monitor's native res) instead of being limited to 1080p60. Switching from a GeForce 1060 to a RX 580 allowed me to ramp up the quality at that resolution as well (in most games).

Further, now that Zen+ support in Linux and OpenBSD has improved, it is a stable enough platform for those OSes. My new rig is doing double duty as my main workstation now thanks to that support along with switching to an AMD GPU.

I honestly don't think Intel and Nvidia have a place in my home and office anymore. My media server is an ancient Dell PowerEdge T310 and it's still going strong, but it is limited on drive capacity and has issues transcoding more than one 1080p+ stream at a time, so I believe I'll be retiring it soon in favor of a Zen based custom build.

>>My old gaming machine had a i5-7400, and in pretty much every game the CPU bottleneck has disappeared

I'm not being funny - have you ever found any kind of bottleneck with that CPU? I'm still rocking an i7-4970K + 1080Ti and I have never ever seen the CPU being anywhere close to max load in any game, and I'm mostly playing in 1440p@60fps.

It was mostly with single-core-heavy (i.e. older) games. Newer multi-core games did very well on the i5, but better still on the six core Ryzen. I mostly play older games so my experience is likely different from most gamers.

Edit: An example from memory, the very old game Crysis stuttered badly at 1440p with the i5, it was only playable at 1080p (both resolutions with all graphics settings on highest/ultra); this was with the GTX 1060. When I first built the Ryzen system I carried over my GTX 1060, and was able to play that game at 1440p60 smooth as butter. Turning off vsync I was getting close to 100fps, whereas with the i5 and vsync off I was lucky to spike above 70, with average fps somewhere around 30-35. Moving to the RX 580 actually dropped the fps cap slightly with vsync off, but still allowed me to play at 60fps locked for a smoother experience overall.

In general, this was the same experience with all of my older games (Skyrim, Far Cry 2, Mirror's Edge, Rust, etc). With newer multi-core games like Doom 2016 and Far Cry 4 I never had any CPU bottleneck on the i5, and the new system marked an increase in graphic quality without sacrificing smoothness and resolution.

Does anyone know of good articles about parallelism in modern game engines? All I've been able to find is a couple of slides in a deck about Doom 2016.

I went from a i5-7600k to a i7-8700k and noticed decent performance increases with my GTX 1070. (CS is netoriously CPU bound). I've since upgraded to a 1080ti, I don't know how much performance was from the cpu upgrade and how much was due to the extra cores the rest of the system could use without interfering with the game.

Try Total War: Warhammer I/II with that machine. Does your i7-4970K have DDR4 RAM?

No, it's running DDR3 at 2333MHz. I mean I know it's not the latest and greatest but just as an example it plays Control at max settings at 1440p in locked 60fps, that's why I'm curious what kind of game could make it CPU-constrained because I just haven't ran into any yet. But then admittedly I haven't played any Warhammer games either.

Keep in mind too that your i7-4790K is much more powerful than my newer i5-7400 was. It’s almost on par with my Ryzen CPU. If you had a Haswell i5 instead of an i7 you’d likely have bottlenecks like I did.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i7-4790K-vs-Intel...

GP said they're using i7-4970K; it is likely they meant i7-4790K. I'm using the i7-4770K. Which misses a certain virtualization hardware extension this K-series does not have, but the other ones in the series do have. Which pisses me off to not hand. For that fact alone, I won't buy an Intel CPU.

Thank you for the comparison, btw. Very useful.

You're talking about this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3aEv3EzMyQ ?

On CSGO, AMD wins on average FPS, ties on 95%, and loses on 99%.

On Rainbow Six: Seige, AMD wins on average FPS, but loses on 95% and 99%.

On the other 3 games (Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Metro: Exodus, and Battlefield V), Intel wins all 3 categories. So overall, Intel still wins.

i think the current zen2 processors would tie intel on games now if optimization efforts equalized, which they may since the cpus are so popular and the delta is very very small. Get some 3600c16 ram, which speeds up the infinity fabric interconnect on ryzen and the gaming difference is already negligible

Marketing aside: Is the gaming IPC that /practically/ relevant? I mean, I'm gaming on a early-2012 Sandy Bridge CPU (Xeon E3-1235 aka "cheap i7-2600"), and it feels like my late-2013 R9 290 is the limiting factor these days, not the CPU.

And I am actually considering to combine my NAS and workstation/gaming rig into one "big" Ryzen 3xxx or 3rd gen TR machine and banish it into the basement. Bonus: The NAS finally gets ECC, and if I put in my old GPU and a new GPU, I can have two VMs for game streaming (tried parsec this weekend, and it was really nice!). Only drawback I can see is that I'd have to carry the rig upstairs once every blue moon when I play VR games.

I was doubting this for a while but there are finally games now that will bottleneck a 2012 era CPU. I’m planning a Ryzen upgrade for this purpose.

Oh, which games? The part of me who's still a child is looking for a GOOD reason to justify the spending to the part of me who is now a responsible adult (and to my SO).

Not even super new games, but games like Deus Ex Mankind Divided and No Mans Sky have better frame rates on my buddy's Ryzen 2 machine with otherwise identical specs than my i5 3450.

The first game where I saw the difference was Battlefield 1.

I think a lot of cross platform games have been optimised to use lots of CPU cores, since the modern consoles currently have 8. If you're running an older CPU with less cores, even if they're more powerful, you're starting to see performance drags, that was especially the case for BF1.

I'm seeing people's upgrade paths and I feel kinda guilty for holding on to my i5-2400 for that long...

Don't feel that way at all, if anything I should feel guilty for thinking of upgrading!

I'm probably going to survey the market early next summer before Cyberpunk.

I feel with you, but honestly: If that machine is fast enough, why care? ;-)

Read up about 1% and 0.1% slowest frame rates, it's a somewhat unknown metric but makes a big difference in the immersion of a game.

it's not that relevant. There are virtually no plausible gaming setups where you'd be likely to actually notice the differences where intel actually wins. You need a very fast GPU, high fps screen, specific games, large differences (because 100fps vs. 150fps is much, much harder to see than say 40 vs. 60 fps), low resolution+settings, and few enough background programs that you don't cause issues on that side.

It's measurable sure; but it's not relevant practically no (at least, the 9900k vs. 3900x decision isn't; you will perhaps notice a little more easily the upgrade all the way back from sandy bridge... but even that...)

While the average frame rate is the same, you see more stutters as the CPU chokes on feeding the GPU in certain cases. So the max frame time is much longer.

At least that’s what I saw on my 2600k@4.5GHz before upgrading to a 1700X@4GHz with the same 1080 GTX running mostly at 4k.

It seems like while the per-core IPC was mostly similar, maybe 10-20% different, the peak memory bandwidth was bottlenecking me.

The lower bounds is where it makes a big difference for most people who are GPU bound at the top end. The 1% and 0.1% of slowest frames when playing a game show huge differences based on CPU and RAM. For the smoothest gaming you need to remove all the potential bottlenecks of the system thats one of the reasons gaming has always pushed the boundaries on CPU/GPU.

Even as a gamer, intel's strength is overrated.

I'm sorry, I'm just not going to buy a 2080ti and run it at 1080p with less-than-maxed out settings, and if I were that crazy, I wouldn't care much about the perceptually irrelevant difference between 110fps and 120 fps (and to be honest, you may have even less relevant differences), and if I found one or two cases where the difference was possibly meaningful, I wouldn't be likely to run with 0 background programs.

I mean, there are cases where it'll be barely noticable, but they're so vanishingly niche, you're not simply a gamer at that point, you're some really specialized breed.

A perhaps more relevant case is stuff like quicksync and AVX 512 - those kind of features really can make a night+day difference, in case you use them. Perhaps less critically, intel's memory latency is still better, so maybe for some L3-cache-size insensitive but latency sensitive workloads you'll find some stuff?

They are very, very close IMO.

I just bought my first desktop computer in a decade, in part for gaming, and bought all AMD.

CPU was a no-brainer: unless you really really care about top of the line single core performance AMD is much cheaper.

GPU was a bit trickier: again unless you really really care about top of the line GPUs the 5700(XT) are better value. RTX is an interesting sticking point.In the end since we're confident AMD is doing something here (because they are providing the hardware for the next console generation that is going to support RT) and we should know about it in about a year, and first rev tech isn't always a good buy I'm happy to delay getting on the RT train until the specs and support evens out a bit.

tl;dr; unless you want and can afford to overpay for the best of the best AMD is incredibly competitive in gaming

Since you mention gaming IPC (which isn't really a main factor in server CPU lineups), I would say Intel is still way ahead of AMD in terms of mobility lineups.

It's going to be interesting to see the Zen 2 mobile chips.

You are correct - I forgot what a massive market laptops are. I wouldn't personally consider an AMD-based laptop just yet, hopefully that will change soon!

Exciting times.

AMD cpu and gpu are in playstation and xbox, and I guess that won't change next generation. Game devs optimize perf for console first I believe, so it might favours AMD in games too, albeit indirectly.

It probably doesn't matter that much in consumer games unless you meant that as a euphemism for single core performance or you know it will be Intel chips in the next generation of gaming consoles.

You’re thinking zen/zen+. Since zen2 along with all the security limitation intel has had to include in their chips, amd is not running behind at gaming anymore.

And I'll still buy Intel! It's just always the safest, most reliable bet for me. (We only use Xeon systems here with ECC. We value stability and predictability.)

And that is why you’re not bothered by Spectre and Meltdown?

AMD doesn’t limit ecc to select processors.

Ehh, technically they do, the APUs like the 2400G, 220G, and 240GE apparently have a "broken" implementation of ECC on "all" motherboards, but many of those motherboards do advertise working ECC with the 'Ryzen PRO' variants of AMD's APUs.

https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/amd-ama-starts-at-12pm-...

That is NOT AMD's problem, that is the fault of motherboard manufacturers, and always has been.

Thank you. Anyone who says otherwise is a fanboy-zealot. Maybe AMD is find for gamers, but if you're depending on ECC you want a Xeon.

Most of their ryzen cpu support correctly ECC. How did you draw this conclusion?

Unlike Intel, AMD doesn't restrict the use of ECC RAM to a specific range of CPU since Ryzen. As long as you have an AMD motherboard that supports ECC RAM the CPU will take it.

You could technically make a cheap home server with a low-end Ryzen at home that uses ECC RAM if you get a motherboard that can take it.

Part of being in the tech space is recognizing when new, better technology comes along and adapting to it.

Brand loyalty is for fools.

That's more like "nobody has been fire for buying IBM". I wouldn't blame you, but I'll be pushing for AMD at work now that they're competitive again.

What's more stable and predictable about Intel then AMD? I'm genuinely curious. If you are upgrading you will have to buy a new motherboard anyway and thus it's not like Intel has a particular advantage there.

AMD has way better offering for the server market since every chip can handle ECC RAM.

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