Hacker News Reader

Comment by localhost | Hacker News Reader

"You're getting 24.83% more performance while costing 73.29% less."

This is a terrible performance summary. Let's try to normalize it in terms of Geekbench points / $:

  Intel = 155050 / $52044 =  2.97 / $
  AMD   = 193554 / $13011 = 14.88 / $

AMD has a 5x advantage on the price of the CPU alone, not factoring in the price of the motherboard and other components (this is a 4 socket Intel motherboard vs. a dual socket AMD).

5X. That's incredible.

View on HN

I think it's best to say it the way they did. It's one thing to be faster per dollar but it's another thing for to win on performance as well.

From single core to same number of cores to having more cores the 7742 wins in each case and still comes out on top. That's far more amazing than being 5x cheaper. Everyone has known Intel has charged an outrageous premium for a long time but it was also the best so people dealt with it.

The single core performance is remarkable given that Intel has always been very strong there.

How is Linux compatibility in case of AMD these days? Intel is really good, if we ignore the need for blobs for their wireless cards. Everything just works, and it is energy efficient.

I can only speak for the first gen zen. There's a bug with most motherboards that cause a hard lockup every day or so. Changing the power state fixes the problem with an updated bios but disables boost. Thread: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=196683

> How is Linux compatibility in case of AMD these days?

You install linux on an AMD system and it runs. Its been that way for a decade. If you buy an AMD GPU and choose a wireless card with care then there really isn't anything to think about when using linux except maybe needing a firmware blob. AMD is one of the better vendors for linux compatibility. CPU, GPU, whatever. All has first class open source support.

It isn't fun like the good old days when things went wrong and people had to learn about the internals of the system to make things run, fighting the hardware every step of the way. Kids these days will have no opportunity to learn how all this stuff hangs togther. It could be worse than the time everyone stopped having to learn assembly. We live in an age of moral decay.

> You install linux on an AMD system and it runs.

Ohh I wish. Ready my reply to parent comment.

Amd kept leaping ahead in single core while intel finally got their security mitigations in place. Although intel was ahead against zen+, it was not by as much as you imagine since a lot of the intels where tested with mitigation’s partially off by then (and then of course there is intel insistence on reviews being done with smt off which is cute since amd performs better on it too)

I had to add kernel parameters in the installer and bootloader for the computer to install and boot.

Otherwise it doesn't even boot. Ryzen 5.

An upgrade from kernel 4.x to 5.x only changed the required parameters, it still locks up on boot with no extra parameters.

    acpi=noirq pcie_aspm=off iommu=pt

Exactly, especially since high margins on those is a defining characteristic of intel. They can match on price if they kill their margin. Matching on performance or power usage ? That’s where their problem is.

Meanwhile amd is making sure to be low priced yet ahead for as long as possible / as many processor gen as possible to create themselves a stable market share, not just the people who buy whatever is best each day, but those that like stability and uniformity and wouldn’t go with zen but now that zen+ and zen2 confirmed it they just might be tempted

AMD has always had the problem of having weaker cpu's that were better per dollar. I agree they should have highlighted the 5x advantage, but for a long time people have regarded AMD as the value weaker option; this is what changed this gen and what they are trying to higlight. Finally AMD gets more performance for cheaper and is no longer just a better value in some applications

Well, they weren't better per dollar once you factored in power consumption.

For bulldozer, maybe, but pre core uarch they were faster and more energy efficient.

Phenom, Phenom II, Bulldozer & Piledriver, all had worse performance/power.

Basically all of their CPUs from 2007 until 2014, a full 7 years.

Are you factoring in the Spectre losses?

Yes, as I said, pre Core uArch, which launched in 2006 for laptops and 2007 for desktops.

Prior to that Intel was on the dead-end NetBurst and Athlon 64 and derivatives were the better chip when it came to performance per watt and outright computational power.

Which also got majorly reversed now, intel uses way more power than amd for equivalent performances

Interesting pricing decision by AMD. Given their performance, and no other competition in x86 market besides Intel, surprised they chose to sell at such a steep discount.

Sometimes, such pricing decisions can perpetuate “you are a weaker substitute” perception.

This isn't a lifestyle brand like whiskey or hand bags, CPU performance, power consumption and system price are all fairly easy to quantify.

Our BigCo catalog contains only few high-core 1x/2x Xeons. Our huge C++ project linearly benefits from hardware performance, yet there is no way one can get anything outside of the catalog. The product is also certified to run only on Intel, so our customers are running only Intel.

You are correct that customers that already use both Intel and AMD would likely choose AMD over Intel even with a price difference of 10% if they were deciding on price/performance ratio. However, I think it's likely that AMD is trying to win market share from customers that are currently mostly using Intel. In my humble opinion that strategy is paying off now that more big shops such as Amazon AWS have AMD options.

It's a smart decision in the era of public clouds, for sure. On-prem shops will be more hesitant because with things like VMware you can't hot move VMs between differing CPU architectures. In order to win these customers over you have to have longevity (that you'll still be the price/performance in 5 years when you lifecycle your hardware).

Lisa Su is on record as talking about revenue / market share being a key focus:[1]

“We are always looking to increase our market share. That’s why we put out great products. As it relates to our market share targets, for server what we’ve said is we can achieve double digit market share from 4-6 quarters from the end of 2018.”

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/14579/all-ryzen-qa-with-amd-c...

I wouldn’t be surprised if they want to win back market-shares for a few years before choosing less competitive pricing.

Nobody switches a big contract from one vendor to another because of a 2x ROI disparity. 5x is about the threshold where you start to feel like it’d be irresponsible to your shareholders to not switch, despite the switching costs.

I don't know why your comment was downvoted. This kind of metric is typical for the enterprise (where cap ex is only part of the equation), and Tom's hardware specifically called out relevance to the enterprise:

> The Geekbench 4 benchmark holds little to no relevance in the enterprise world. Nevertheless, it gives us a small taste of how AMD's EPYC 7002-series can provide enterprises with more bang for their buck.

In short this comment is appropriate.

The "'weaker substitute' perception" aspect might happen in consumer goods but unlikely to happen when Google, Amazon and Microsoft consider provisioning a new data center.

I think you are wrong. Consumers use to save money, the masses at least. They won't give a shit about these details, most of them don't even know what it means. They pick the cheaper option, across the board. There might be some Intel fanboys with 5000$ machines, but those are the minority.

With businesses it is quite different. Money comes cheap. You can not get fired for buying IBM... To convince companies like Google & Amazon to build a data-center around a one-off delivery from AMD is pushing the boundaries. Now if they are 5 times cheaper, these companies might be more willing to consider betting on this outlandish horse. If it was 10% cheaper, I don't see how they could risk it, at least not at scale and scale is what AMD is interested in. Once they have some buy in at these dumping prices from large data centers, then they will sure raise the price unless Intel follows the dumping price strategy.

Not to mention that there are also other problems with business, like vendor lock-in. Consumers don't really have that problem either. They will buy what's cheaper, because they didn't sign a 10 billion $ discount from Intel for keep buying Intel in the future.

I don't see how they could risk it

What non existent risk are you talking about?

> To convince companies like Google & Amazon to build a data-center around a one-off delivery from AMD is pushing the boundaries.

AWS offers AMD instances already, and they are advertized specifically as being AMD. I found them 10% cheaper, with about 30% of the performance of the equivalent Intel instance.

Actual result of a test I did: m5.xlarge vs m5a.xlarge. The m5a.xlarge is 10% cheaper, but I found it takes four times the amount of seconds to perform some CPU and RAM heavy calculation than the m5.xlarge instance.

So no, it being cheaper saves me no money, because the performance is not there yet.

Those are first gen 14nm Epyc instances - correct ? This article is discussing the third gen 7nm Epyc.

https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16819113581

When will a product where consumers who don't want to spend $7.5k on a processor but still benefit from 5x-bang-for-buck be released?

The price advantage is less pronounced for desktop CPUs, however if you buy a AMd Ryzen CPU you are already getting more bang for the buck than buying Intel.

And is destroying intel bang for the buck on desktop and high end computer. Way more power and still for a lower cost, with massively lower power usage too.

The only area where intel is not currently being destroyed that way is laptop chips, everything else from the 100$ chip to the 7500$ chip going and means cheaper than intel’s alternative for more performance and less power usage.

And don’t forget power consumption.

Opex: amortised immediately

> AMD has a 5x advantage on the price of the CPU alone

Maybe I missed something in your comment, but how did you come up with 5x?

$52,044 / $13,011 = 4.000000000

If instead, I use the numbers from the article, you get:

Intel: $52,044 AMD: $13,900

Which comes out to 3.74x.

If you normalize for performance, then yeah, you get 4.86x. But that doesn’t match up with your numbers ($13,900 vs $13,011). So was it a typo, or are you doing something different?

What's terrible about it? It says the same as yours.

1.25/0.25 = 5

Reply on news.ycombinator.com