AMD is dominating Intel in Amazon's best-selling CPUs list | Hacker News Reader

AMD is dominating Intel in Amazon's best-selling CPUs list

techspot.com

203 pointsekoutanov91 comments

Better performance [2] with less cores, much better pricing, and the kicker for me is PCI Express 4.0 [1]. Intel doesn't even support the newest generation of NVMe storage. So yeah, AMD is dominating for a good reason- for now anyways.

[1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/3400176/pcie-40-everything-y...

[2] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

The "bang for your buck" value statistics are quite stark. 17 of the top 20 are held by AMD. Intel's i9s in particular look very expensive for the performance

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_available.html

I think you mean "with more cores", not less.

AMD has more cores available, but also AMD's cheaper 16-core beats Intel's 18-core in many tests.

There's this really fascinating paper about how AMD has made Intel to innovate more and that AMD itself has found cheaper ways to stay on the CPU quality frontier:

https://www.its.caltech.edu/~mshum/gradio/papers/GoettlerGor...

I have to correct myself: with the presence of AMD, Intel has been innovating less than it would if the market were a monopoly.

Plus ECC support

Any motherboards with LRDIMM/RDIMM support?

Epyc is there; you don't even have to wait to buy it. I know a lot of people are expecting Epyc features at Threadripper pricing but they also expected Threadripper to be much cheaper than it is.

Epyc has much slower boost clocks. It's far less flexible.

And people should expect features like memory support to be the same across the chips.

Is there a reason nobody will take common 3600MHz chips and put 9 on a board instead of 8? Why is all the unbuffered non-ECC memory 50% faster than the unbuffered ECC memory?

I have a hunch it might be partially due to vendors being willing to fudge their numbers for the sake of marketing.

Selling into the gaming market, label it 3600 and if it crashes, they'll just tweak the clock and keep going. Selling into the server market, customers have a different expectation.

Also many DDR-3600 modules can only run that way if they're the only DIMM on the bus. Populate two and you're down to 3333 or slower. Nobody runs a server with one DIMM, so again, the faster number simply doesn't apply to the ECC market, even if it's the very same chips.

(Get more than two on the same channel, and you need to add buffers to drive the trace capacitance, which adds latency.)

This suggests, perhaps, that you might be able to get some ECC DIMMs and overclock them all to hell and gone, if you're only running a single one per channel.

Threadripper is a workstation-class part currently capped at just 8GB per core (or 4GB per hw thread). That's not terrible, but it's also not great.

Unfortunately not. That is the hard part. Rumored for the 64core and it's chipset next year.

You can get 32GB ECC at 2666mhz Dimms that work. Giving you a max of 128gb ecc on an am4

Not everyone has use for those advantages. To me they are meaningless (I have no need for "better" performance, I have no use for PCI 4.0, etc). I buy Intel CPUs because lower heat dissipation and power consumption at the performance level I need. I have avoided buying the relatively cheaper but power hungry Intel CPUs for many years.

By all means, please buy AMD. The more people do that, the better deal I get for Intel models I want to buy.

There is likely some degree of humor in your message but I'm not sure. Why are you interested in lower power consumption? To save money on the electricity bill? Or for environmental reasons?

You mention you bought more expensive CPUs to get lower power consumption... Which points to the environmental reason. But you call others to buy AMD to get cheaper Intels, which would in turn rise the global power consumption.

I guess that last sentence is to be read as a joke but as a result I'm really confused by your comment :(

They’re also making headway into the data center space. AWS has recently announced that compute dense instances will have an AMD powered version. They already have AMD offerings for GP and RAM dense instances.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-new-amd-powere...

GCP and Azure are offering AMD Epyc Rome based instances as well. Intel is losing their death grip on the data center space quickly.

https://cloudblog.withgoogle.com/products/compute/amd-epyc-p...

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-new-amd-ep...

Hetzner also have some well priced offers with AMD cpus

If I look at the AMD stock price it seems like when Lisa Su took over AMD in 2014 she brought it back from the dead (and made a 10x valuation in 5 years).

Here's a relatively fresh iterview with her if others are interested as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amBe2bofVas

I'd give far more credit to Jim Keller, who returned in 2012 and designed Zen. AMD also benefited from Intel stumbling on 10nm and TSMC leapfrogging them. Zen 2 wouldn't be nearly as compelling if it was stuck on Global Foundries 14/12nm process (which is actually licensed from Samsung).

To AMD's credit though, they've executed very well - Jim left in 2015 with more than several Zen generations designed, but there has obviously been significant effort by far more people than just the project lead.

I'd love to get career advice from him. He's famous for all the right reasons!

Sadly rare nowadays.

And to all the people around in the Ati merger and APU era because they wanted to try new things. It didn't work but they were already innovating and they kept going even when struggling.

Zen was not designed by Keller. He had his hand on Zen 2, and in a role more of a project manager/team lead than a chief architect

Are you certain? https://www.anandtech.com/show/9643/jim-keller-leaves-amd and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOTFE7sJY-Q (along with everything else I've seen) indicate otherwise.

I'm no expert but the 200x P/E ratio seems risky in terms of investing.

It's a bet they can take dramatic share from Intel. Intel earned $21bln last year, if they had AMD's market cap it would be a P/E of 2.07.

If you don't believe AMD can take significant share away from Intel then the valuation doesn't make sense.

AMD stock has been one of the most speculative stocks over the past ten years

10 years? Try 20+. The last time AMD had this valuation was circa 2000, the first and last time I ever bought AMD stock. Not just AMD; I swore off technology stocks altogether after that, at least for speculation.

What AMD taught me early on is that a good product is only a small element of success; a superior product doesn't give much of an advantage, if any at all. And knowing too much about a technology or industry can be dangerous, which is why I swore off technology stocks.

Most people probably don't want to hold individual stocks anyway as it's too risky an investment. Mathematical models suggest that the optimal investing strategy for any investor is holding a "well-diversified" portfolio in which firm-specific risks cancel themselves out and you are left with the minimum possible amount of risk.

AMD has consistently been a winner of a stock to buy and sell for the last 15 years with basically no risk.

The article ought to have acknowledged the numbers for whole PC sales, which paint a different picture:

8/10 of Amazon's best selling laptops are Intel: https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/pc/565108/

9/10 for desktop PCs: https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Electronics-Desktop-Comp...

It's really fascinating to watch them capture market share as you see where Intel is still entrenched for all kinds of reasons which are not price/perf wise.

For example, we can't use AWS t3a instances with EPYC Cores as our Management Provider has all their images only compiled for, optimized and tested on Intel based VMs.

The difference is still not large enough to bother to look into it, but next generation I expect the difference will be so large they can't ignore it.

Another couple of differences: No support for rr because of some lack of performance counters[1]. I also found that lm-sensors can barely see my AMD Ryzen at all, missing all core temp information. I'm hoping that both of these will be fixed since it doesn't seem that AMD is missing anything intrinsicly.

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/rr/issues/2034

> I also found that lm-sensors can barely see my AMD Ryzen at all, missing all core temp information.

This is fixed in Kernel 5.4, and some distros backported the fix to 5.3.

I'm using Debian stable, with a kernel from buster-backports, and I can see the temperature for my CPU (Ryzen 7) and the GPU (Radeon RX 580).

And no support for Processor Trace or Coresight or some equivalent, which are amazing debug techs. Once you have them it's hard to live without...

Intel owns their own manufacturing process so they can crank out more volume than TSMC can on the smaller process nodes. TSMC Has a roadmap to 3nm by 2023, Intel is looking at 7nm by 2021.

Unless Intel manufactures on TSMC's line, AMD will have a clear, near double to triple performance advantage for the next 2 generations. You're going to see Intel become the value brand for awhile and they're trying to avoid that because they are used to a cash cow.

> near double to triple performance advantage

Not even remotely close. Really, where do you get some notion of AMD having "double" the performance of Intel? Pass the dutch, bro.

Please keep in mind that the process names have become meaningless marketing terms. Intel is currently a bit behind due to their 10nm fiasco, but it is entirely possible that Intel's 7nm will beat TSMC 3nm process. AMD can have 10-15% advantage for the next couple years, but 2x-3x? That's never gonna happen.

Interesting for sure, but the market for people that buy a CPU chip as a standalone item probably doesn't relate much to the overall market.

I am rooting for AMD though. Competition was sorely needed.

> Interesting for sure, but the market for people that buy a CPU chip as a standalone item probably doesn't relate much to the overall market.

The question then becomes how much the 'overall market' relates to profits. These manufacturers have consistently marketed to the enthusiast/home builder end of the market for decades now; they've never seriously neglected it. I suspect these sales are highly lucrative despite the relatively small volume. It astonishes me that one can mail order a 4096 pin device (sTRX4) and install it by hand in the kitchen, yet here we are, and it's been that way for a rather long time now. If it wasn't profitable the manufacturers would have stop feeding this market long ago.

Eh, gamers buy CPUs directly, and that's a growing market. That's smaller than the enterprise market, but many gamers are also tech professionals that make decisions about what hardware they buy.

Hopefully that's enough to counteract the deals Intel has made in the past. Enterprises should run on the best products, not the best contract.

But this market influences purchase decisions at an enterprise level. You get the enthusiasts on your side and they'll recommend you over others when the CIO needs to find a new vendor.

Meanwhile Intel is still the only good option for laptops and I haven't used a desktop for 5+ years. Not saying this to bring down Intel success just wondering how much volume is in desktop vs laptop and hoping AMD can transition here as well.

I’m waiting for January where they release their mobile offerings. Hopefully they’ll be able to impress a little more this time around.

> Meanwhile Intel is still the only good option for laptops

The new Thinkpad E595 replaces an Intel CPU with Ryzen (5/7 3x00U), and some reviews[1] seems to claim it’s a better laptop for it.

[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-E595-laptop-re...

Nah Zen isn't perfect for laptop but I've seen them in action and they are good options. Of course, Zen 2 APUs will help things there.

laptops are hard for amd due to oem backroom deals with intel, but with the popularity of zen2 that should start to crack i think. once zen2 mobile cpus hit the market we will start to see more amd laptops i think

Some supermarket ads in the mail last month showed 3 laptops, 1 very low end atom x5 "skype machine" and 2 amd zen based medium class.

I think zen will make a lot of sense for the majority of people. price/perf will reign over intel potential hedt products. If you give a 4 core + good gpu to the average joe for half the price of an intel he'll probably never look back.

AMD has always been better at price/performance but in the laptop space the number 1 through 10 most important features are efficiency. Intel CPUs use less power and make less heat, which has always been the limiting factor.

I don't think that is true anymore. AMD has a process advantage and measures their heat by the max clock rate, while Intel calls their max clock rate 'core boost' and measures their TDP with lower clocks. You can see benchmarks of the newest CPUs have Intel's high end chip that was just released ending up consuming about 100 more watts under heavy CPU loads.

Confused because amd apu often struggled a tad more than Intel machines. Ipc wad weak and igpu was under utilized iirc

My notebook (2018 Thinkpad E485) has a Ryzen 5 2500U APU and I'm happy with it. The only bad thing about that notebook is lack of Thunderbolt.

I know AMD's resurgence is old news by now, but it's still impressive to look at Amazon's CPU best sellers and see them holding the entire top 10. The first Intel product is the i7-9700K at #12.

https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Computers-Accessories-Co...

AMD is blowing Intel out of the water with the latest benchmarks. Intel's lone remaining advantage is its MKL performance in single-threaded performance (and they've done some shady handicapping of AMD CPUs to get there), but in multiprocessing and most ML workflows AMD is the clear winner. The ThreadRipper series is an amazing product.

I would say that AMD should make their own mkl if they want to compete. It's fine that it runs on AMD, but it is, after all, a closed-source library made by Intel.

At some point amd needs to take the software side seriously. Same goes for GPU.

What about OpenBLAS?

Openblas is significantly slower than mkl for most things, and doesn't have all the same features (only the blas part). It's also not developed by AMD. I think they need to take their software more seriously in general, since the best hardware doesn't matter with poor libraries.

FWIW: AMD offers this: https://developer.amd.com/amd-aocl/blas-library/

The source code is available on GitHub.

I think AMD needs to take a page from Nvidia and really get their software together. The CPU and GPU libraries are a mess. There are multiple versions of libraries where in some cases both are maintained and it's not clear which to use, and in others, one is dead but may perform better than the new one. Intel and Nvidia let you download a single package for all scientific computing.

The 3950x Threadripper numbers make Intel look like a chump. The only areas where Intel still has an edge is single core performance. In anything multicore, AMD's numbers are downright outrageous

3950X isn't a Threadripper. Which is just even more impressive.

Sorry, I meant 3960x

That's a last generation processor...their current generation is much more impressive. Twice as powerful than anything Intel has to offer at the SAME price as Intel.

Can anything beat the price/performance of the 2700x for $160 though?

from a developer point of view, AMD does not support record/replay debugging execution

Changing that is a work in progress: https://github.com/mozilla/rr/issues/2034

Is it? Based on the comments, the situation looks like "it doesn't work and nobody has figured out how to make it work."

Yeah, no one is clearly saying "we won't work on this and if you do, we won't accept a pull request" but instead "we currently don't know how to do it", meaning that if they figure out a way to do it, it'll happen at one point, either from 3rd party or themselves.

With rr maybe but visual studio’s or windbg’s time travel debugging works just fine afaik.

Is it worth buying a Macbook Pro 16", or is Intel going to react with far better CPUs in the forthcoming months, including for laptops?

Not a surprise. AMD offers better CPUs at better prices.

My TR3960X came in today, the TR3990X is on order :-). Since my current chassis isn't configured for liquid cooling I went with an air cooling solution and it is freakishly large, seriously.

> My TR3960X came in today

From where?!? All I can find is B&H Photo with a pre-order estimating a month wait.

A shop in the Bay Area called "Central Computers." Once ASUS announced their TR40 motherboard I told him I wanted that, 64GB of RAM, and a 3960 or 3970 when they came in. He called me Friday morning and said, "ok we have it". Since by that time the 3990 had been announced as well I told him to put me down for one of those when they got them as well to replace the 3960.

Huh, lucky. Apparently no one's got them online yet.

Just hoping I don't have to wait as long as I did for my last CPU - an i7-6700k. It was quite a few weeks after "release" before I could actually buy one.

I'll probably stick with 32GB of RAM for now - I don't run a lot of VM's or anything - but I'm going to try an Intel Optane as a main SSD drive this time. Thinking about the Aorus Master sTRX40 since I'm a bit partial to Gigabyte for motherboards. These TRX40 boards are not cheap.

Pics!

https://twitter.com/ChuckMcManis/status/1200587968341110786/...

Now I want all these AMD CPU innovations to apply to Laptop processors too. Most computers sold nowadays are laptops.

I am writing this from a Ryzen 5 laptop that's not really faster than the i5 laptop it replaced. If any, it is a bit slower, even with double the cores.

The Radeon GPU on the other hand is way ahead of the previous integrated Intel GPU.

Got me curious. What laptop model?

I'm in the market for a new laptop.

Mine is a Dell Inspiron 13 7375 2-in-1, and it has a Ryzen 2500U APU. It is a year old this month.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3817116

I wish apple started providing an amd macbook.

Right now AMD mobile chips are still less power efficient than Intel's.

A little, but it's not that bad, especially since AMD's iGPU is way better. The 7nm mobile CPUs that are likely coming next year should fix that.

That being said, I specifically sought out an AMD laptop because I want 4 cores and a better GPU without a dedicated GPU (battery and simplicity under Linux). I get enough battery life for now (~5 hours I think) on my ThinkPad E495, and if I need more, I'll get a USB power bank.

I wonder how much of this is due to brain drain due to political immigration policies.

This is great news for competition, same goes for GPU where Nvidia is still a monopoly

When we consider deep learning practitioners and others relying on CUDA then yes, nvidia still has monopoly. But for gamers AMD's Radeon GPU is a compelling alternative.

For anyone on Linux it's also a better choice with Radeon, since they're actually cooperating with writing a FOSS driver for their cards. With nVidia you're stuck with a less than stellar third party FOSS driver or using nVidia's own proprietary driver.

I think it's important that we support hardware vendors that cooperate with free software development, by buying their products - and punish those who don't, by not buying their products. Otherwise we can't complain.

Yep, voting with your wallet is the only direct action you can take in this world that will actually have an effect on corporations.

As a mid-range option, maybe, but RTX absolutely dominates the high-end gaming this year.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com