How about single core performance? Many games are pegged to one or two cores only. I've always found the AMD approach of throwing more cores at the problem not to be optimal.
That hasn't been the case for a looong time. But to answer your question, they are much faster than anything from Intel at comparable pricing:
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-amd-r...
"The results here are immediately interesting. Despite costing less than every other CPU represented, the 3100 manages to tie the Core i5 9600K in single-core performance and outperform the Ryzen 2600 and 2700X by around 12 per cent. The 3300X is even more impressive, with a single-core score that exceeds the Core i7 9700K and only falls behind the Ryzen 9 3900X and Core i9 9900K."
Given that, I'd prefer they had shell access as a low privilege user than be able to read my ssh keys from RAM...
Obviously if you compile software as your regular linux user account like most users, you're already a sitting duck, so might as well throw in a few more vulnerabilities.
Spectre doesn’t make much difference since its not making syscalls.
If you can somehow keep the CPU fed it becomes obvious there is more oomph behind the Intel device. That said how often are you running hand rolled assembly routines?
As an additional datapoint liblzf is faster on the Ryzen. But its limited by pipeline stalls so doesn’t get to take advantage of the extra resources.
The issues I’m talking about are execution resources for scalar code. Things like how many ALUs and which execution ports are able to execute which instructions.
It took 3 days of tuning to get to a point where Intel started pulling away from my Zen2 chip. No matter what I did the Zen2 would not get faster because it was already at max utilization.
Lemire had a blog [1] talking about this on here a few months ago as well. Most people were surprised because frankly Zen2 is very competitive with Intel for normal compiled code.
https://lemire.me/blog/2019/12/05/instructions-per-cycle-amd...
We know Intel has that problem with AVX-512. You can get a lot of throughput per cycle with those instructions but the cost is they cause the processor to run hot and have to downclock. It's possible (and really expected) that the same thing happens to some extent at unusually high IPC. Getting 15% higher IPC doesn't really buy you anything if the processor has to lower its clock speed by 15% to execute that type of code.
I don't really understand why people think this is controversial. Somehow an Intel cpu on a generation behind process is still competitive with a 7nm CPU with more cache. Intel must have one hell of an architecture to make that possible. AMD did a good job for the most common workloads but they have work to do with Zen3 if they want to maintain that lead when Intel finally figures out its manufacturing.
Probably most games on that list don't use all cores. So yeah not "many" but "most". Thanks for the correction.
Per-thread performance really hasn't improved all that much since the days of, say, a 4.7 GHz 2600K. Core counts have gone up drastically, but that doesn't help your single-threaded game from 2007.
It very definitely takes advantage of far more than 1 or 2 cores, though, with 4 cores having ~2x the FPS compared to 2 cores.
https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2589?vs=2250
That's a $199 Intel 6-core part against a $120 AMD 4-core part. Anandtech hasn't bothered to benchmark a 4-core 9th-generation Intel CPU yet, despite the fact that they hit retail a year ago.