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Comment by Nokinside | Hacker News Reader

DIY CPU retail market for processors is extremely tiny market. Very high margin, but insignificant.

AMD's challenge is getting enough processors out in the enterprise market. They need to grow the market share now when they have the technical advantage. Intel can sell their inferior CPU's for higher price because they can deliver large volumes and satisfy demand.

Revenue comparison 2018:

    Intel  $70.8 billion
      AMD   $6.5 billion

AMD is fabless, so they are in competition with other GF and TSMC customers for manufacturing capacity. Apple,Nvidia,Qualcomm and many others.

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Indeed. I'm trying to find a suitable vendor here in Germany (as a small software making business), but all I can find (when I look for Ryzen powered PCs) are small local dealers - with usually very mixed reviews and questionable support. I always got Dell, and while I would not want to rely on their support for any software issues, at least whenever we had trouble with hardware I could get that replaced easily and quickly. Those smaller dealers don't even have any decent bundled support options, and no guarantees similar to what I can get from the "big guys". The reviews accordingly show a lot of variation and randomness (basically, all those who have no issues with their purchase give five stars, but of those needing support, even if it is for issues clearly caused by the vendor, have a good chance of telling a nightmare support story).

So while I still want a Ryzen PC, I also want five years of 24 hour hardware support, and I feel more confident to get that from Dell rather than from some small local dealer for whom any support issue is a big deal for their own bottom line and where employees are under more pressure than those working for a big vendor. The big ones still are "Intel only" - apart from >$2,000 gaming PCs (I usually buy ca. $1,000 PCs with minimal graphics card, videos only (hardware accelerated decoding is nice to have; but too much of a card costs too much energy for no reason, even base energy when not in gaming mode is much higher - GTX 1050Ti using just motherboard energy is perfect, as an example), no gaming ever, but good components and large RAM and SSD, for developers).

PS: Any Germans here who found a solution for needs such as mine?

Depending on how many you need, you should consider building them yourself. I just ordered a new Zen2-based build from alternate.de in parts and I think that's the way to go.

That's far too much detail for me. When I look at the "PC configurator" I feel like I'm drowning in details. I would need a week to research all those components. CPU is easy (Ryzen 5 3600 seems appropriate), but next comes the motherboard - and I'm already lost. Never mind the 100 different cases and the list goes on and on. I'm also not so sure that whatever components I select really work flawlessly together.

I run a pc recommender that is basically made for you. Parts that fit together with some optimizing algorithm selecting an optimal configuration for your price point. I changed this configuration a bit manually given your statements: https://www.pc-kombo.com/share/mX6w2675

This will fit together and is stronger than with a GTX 1050 Ti. If you really want a gpu powered only by the motherboard step down to a GTX 1050, or look at the (rather overpriced) GTX 1650 (though it depends on the model there). Mail is in the profile if you have questions.

Damn... I looked for a PC configurator for several hours two weeks ago and eventually settled for a 3800X. Your site managed to get me a 3900X in my 1200 eur budget (with 64 GB of RAM). Oh well, I will buy another PC in the next six months. Definitely bookmarked!

  Internal Server Error

Maybe you hit it during the upgrade there. Works now, as far as I can see.

I have put together many PCs myself, and honestly many parts aren't that important.

Power supply, motherboard, SSD and Ram will "just work", given you buy a recent product from a known brand. The +/- 5% of whatever will not make a difference to most people.

For mobo, think of features you must have ( built-in wireless?) And that will direct you.

Oh please don't do built-in wifi. It's ok to have the adapter inside, but you should put the antennas outside. Include them in the design, if you wish.

https://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/Der-optimale-PC-2020-4564302...

to clarify, these are vetted parts lists by a leading german computer magazine, complete with optional upgrades, videos to aid with the build process and even detailed BIOS settings.

"AMD is fabless"

Which also means they can jump to whatever the current hot stuff is in the fab world, letting the big fabs (which are few in number, but still >1) compete on technical merits.

Where Intel has a corporate need to use whatever fabs they've invested in, and to be anchored by whatever the limitation of their fabs are. They aren't really limited by that -- they could just get TSMC to make some stuff for them or something --- but they're Intel so they'll just make 10+++++++

Don't you mean 14++++++? They still can barely get 10nm working in laptops, much less desktop or servers. By the time they do, AMD will be far ahead of them process-wise.

They don't jump. Usually make long term deals for each process and design their microarchitecture for that process. AMD moved all 7nm CPU, GPU production to TSMC and they are tied to them for the duration of 7nm.

The question is if they can get all the capacity they need for price they can afford. It seems like high margin customers like Apple and Nvidia are always served first because they can pay more.

Intel, Samsung and TSMC are the only three companies that are committed to EUV. Intel is out, which leaves Samsung and TSMC. So I guess the >1 = 2.

The I/O die is rumored to be GlobalFoundries.

AMD's Ryzen 9 3900x and 3950x is a chiplet design: there are 2x TSMC 7nm dies tied to a 1x GloFo 14nm I/O die. See the picture: https://images.anandtech.com/doci/14605/Ryzen9_3800X_Hand_57...

In effect, AMD spends very little money and die-area on expensive 7nm process, while leveraging their GloFo 14nm contracts to cheaply make I/O and memory controllers.

----------

The 7nm chiplet is a single design: mass produced for EPYC, Threadripper, and Ryzen. The 14nm I/O die is what differentiates between EPYC, Threadripper, and Ryzen.

The I/O die can have 2x memory controllers (Ryzen), 4x memory controllers (Threadripper), or 8x memory controllers (EPYC)... supporting 2x dies, 4x dies, or 8x dies as appropriate.

> The I/O die is rumored to be GlobalFoundries

It's not really "rumored" to be so much as it is actually. The I/O dies are built at GlobalFoundries. The Epyc's larger I/O die is on GF's 14nm, and the consumer Ryzen I/O dies are GF's 12nm. https://www.anandtech.com/show/14525/amd-zen-2-microarchitec...

> AMD is fabless, so they are in competition with other GF and TSMC customers for manufacturing capacity.

That also means that they don't have all the fab expenses that Intel does.

The fact that Intel sells inferior product at higher price means that AMD has supply bottleneck.

I'm almost certain that in AMD takes every sale from Intel when they can deliver. They have superior product but not enough capacity to reap all the benefits from their success.

> The fact that Intel sells inferior product at higher price means that AMD has supply bottleneck.

Only if Intel is also _perceived_ as the inferior product. Remember that the value to the customer goes beyond raw benchmarking specs; it also includes brand reputation and marketing.

At the level of truly huge purposes, "value" also encompasses a real bilateral relationship between the company and vendor. A cloud provider might be tempted to stay with Intel now over AMD if by doing so they preserve guaranteed access/preferential pricing over the next set of server chips. To crack that hypothetical relationship, AMD would have to both dominate now and be perceived to dominate for the medium-term future.

It's only the retail market that can be so fickle as to consider a CPU a one-off purchase.

Enterprise customers don't care about brands. Retail customers are insignificant.

> Enterprise customers don't care about brands.

Sure they do. That's where the saying "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" comes from. If anything enterprise is more brand sensitive and less price sensitive than retail customers.

Not to mention there is the entire surrounding ecosystem from the CPU parts themselves. The chipsets, boards, laptop availabiilty. Not to mention things like vendor lock in to the particular out of band management technology. Getting better benchmark scores and saving a few hundred per CPU is only part of a much larger matrix for making a purchasing decision.

Enterprise customers may care about brands at the level of Dell or Apple.

Data center customers care about specs and prices only. They study the products they buy.

Due to the needs to reduce complexity and have less vendors to deal with most companies use a limited amount of suppliers for datacenter equipment as well like Dell or HPE or whatever.

Data center customers care about support, vendor relationships, keeping complexity down, politics, reliability (= aversion to new products), lots of things. If anything the custom PC market is more focused around specs and prices solely.

Yes they absolutely do and AMD vs Intel is more than a matter of branding. It's fundamentally switching vendors. If something goes wrong it's on the head of the person who pushed for the change. There's also some things you can't do seamlessly between two servers that don't have a processor from the same brand.

Enterprise if anything has more inertia than say the custom PC market which will turn on a dime to chase the best deals.

> The fact that Intel sells inferior product at higher price means that AMD has supply bottleneck

Except they don't? There's a reason Intel's flagship HEDT part, the i9-10980XE, is half the price of the part its replacing despite almost nothing changing about the chip itself. And at the same time AMD is raising the price of its HEDT parts.

And it's not just the HEDT parts, but Intel also cut the prices on a bunch of Xeon chips a month or two ago as well, as well as their consumer stack.

> The fact that Intel sells inferior product at higher price means that AMD has supply bottleneck.

...or that Intel controls supply to retail vendors by other means. If a vendor is bound to keep putting Intel products on their stores to comply with supply agreements made in the past, for example.

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