AMD Ryzen 9 3900x price drop could take the wind out of Intel comet lake sales
techradar.com
techradar.com
If that's true, Intel has basically nothing. All they've got left at this point is "I want the best gaming performance and literally nothing else matters". AMD may just win that crown too.
It's never been more exciting to be an enthusiast, and Intel was asleep for a long time. It's about time someone woke the sleepy giant.
Weren't we all sick of Intel churning out 10% incremental improvements every year on an entirely new socket every time? They were phoning it in for a long time.
If you need to drop $$$ on a high-end motherboard and cooler to actually hit top performance it can obscure the true cost of the CPU, because you can easily drop an extra $100 trying to cope with its power and thermal requirements.
But yea, the motherboard situation is way worse. 250W sustained consumption in a relatively small surface area is not going to be great for the substrate layers of the board.
So while AMD has made big efficiency improvements in the last couple generations, Intel has been losing efficiency.
https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph15785/116012.png9-3...
Sort of yes (although, they often did two generations per socket in recent times), but then they started just rehashing Skylake every year, and we long for the time of predictable incremental improvement. On the server side, the predictable incremental improvement also came with more cores each time too, so that was nice.
If you are willing to OC then Intel has a significantly better price/performance ratio than AMD for general use. If you doing anything that benefits from AVX then Intel will pull away significantly. And if you are doing deep learning than DLBoost is seriously under-appreciated. However if you're not in these three camps then AMD is the better option.
Also the x299 LGA1151 socket has been around for 3 years so Intel doesn't always just change sockets for no reason.
You're engaged in some serious attempts at rationalization.
The 3950X trounces the 10980XE in virtually every metric (including measures where the 10980XE gets to use AVX-512). It costs 1/3rd less. Unless you're significantly overclocking, with expensive cooling hardware, you aren't making that up. And in the real world the headroom for overclocking is pretty tiny.
Intel is behind, and even after price cuts they're still seriously overpriced. Trying to rationalize that they're "significantly better price/performance" if you just do A,B, C (which are of course completely unverifiable, moving target meaningless steps) is nonsense.
By all means do the comparison against the 3950x.
And my cooler is a standard 360mm AIO which is hardly expensive.
Just to be clear, here, your overclocking was so extreme, and so extremely atypical, that you're on the "world record" list-
https://hwbot.org/benchmark/geekbench4_-_multi_core/halloffa...
And you're seriously positing this as just a typical thing to do?
Your processor costs 33%+ more than the 3950X. Your cooler, even your "hardly expensive" cooler, costs another $200-$300+. No, you didn't hit anywhere close to a high in price/performance -- even if we assume that you aren't blasting through 300W to the processor alone, and suffering a cascade of faults if you tried to pretend this was normal operations, you still haven't come close to breaking even on that ratio.
And all of that is going by Geekbench which already has an oddly synthetic slant towards Intel. In actual benchmarks of real world activities -- compiling, running blender, most games, etc -- the 3950X absolutely shoots in the lead (despite having just two RAM channels, where in memory access it barely lags the 4 channel 10980XE)
I don't have any dog in this race. This laptop has an i7. My MBP has an i7. My "gaming" PC has an older Zen. But you have to seriously stretch and twist reality to try to make a case for Intel, much less a value proposition.
Also I run this configuration as my daily driver with zero faults and in my real world use cases e.g. machine learning it is 2-5x faster than then 3950x. AVX512 is still a killer feature for Intel.
It turns out AVX512 doesn't give you the kind of performance speedouts you think. On those benchmarks, AVX512 is only around 8% faster than AVX2.
The reality is that AMD is killing Intel at every price point. My 3950x scores 12444 (no OC) and only costs around $400. Looking up on Newegg, your 10980XE costs... wait for it.. $3000.
Even with your crazy overclocking, that intel cpu is only 35% faster and 650% more expensive. How can you seriously claim that Intel is at all competitive with AMD?
And speaking of ML, it's rare to find a ML workload that is expensive that doesn't involve neural networks. And for neural networks, you should be running on a GPU anyways so I'm not sure how useful this DL Boost tech is.
This is getting nowhere, 3900x is 12core version of 3950x, both are commodity grade hardware with 'cheaper' motherboards and two memory channels. 3950x tends to have the higher quality silicone, it boosts higher on its right own.
HEDT has more memory channels and more PCIe lanes - this is "the land".
Their next architecture could bring bfloat16 too but I wonder how useful that would be on a CPU instead of on a GPU.
AVX512 and TSX can give Intel a BIG performance advantage in some niche (but foundational) applications
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/f2pbvz/dis...
They've done this with their compiler (and got sued for it), libraries, and they've even introduced code into glibc to do that.
Compare against 3950x and 3960x and you will see it's closer to the 3960x for quite a bit cheaper and with 6 less cores. And that's not entirely AVX-512 code.
Also power consumption is a little overblown since all CPUs scale their frequencies so even though mine runs at 5GHz it will spend most of the day below 2GHz or so.
Also, all our desktop systems here are Xeon because we've had bad experience with ECC support on AMD.
Edit: Honest truthful non-inflammatory comments get you downvoted and mocked. That's some toxic community you've built here, @dang.
HN is one of the better, and better moderated, communities. Thanks dang.
I read a lot of good comments from you, especially on software-related topics. But it would serve you well to grow a thicker skin. Who knows why some posts get inexplicable downvotes. But who cares?
* AMD introduced their Ryzen architecture ~3 years ago. This was the first time in years that their chips were competitive with Intel chips.
* AMD's newfound competitiveness forced Intel to increase core counts in their consumer chips. 6 and 8 core chips are now extremely common in the consumer space.
* AMD has released consumer chips with as many as 16 physical cores (32 threads) in their most recent generation. This is a huge improvement for tasks that scale well to multiple cores like (I presume) 3D animation. Intel has 10 core consumer chips out.
* If you're willing to move up to the HEDT chips you can now buy an AMD Threadripper chip with up to 64 cores (128 threads).
* Intel has struggled to make the next step in manufacturing. Their desktop chips have been stuck at 14nm for half a decade now. AMD contracts their manufacturing out and has been able to take advantage of other foundries improved processes. Their current chips are using 7nm process nodes and use significantly less power than their Intel counterparts. Because of this they require less extreme cooling.
* There are some new instruction sets such as AVX and AVX512 that can improve performance in some software. I'm not an expert there and you'd probably want to do some research on sites related to 3D rendering to see which chip would perform best for your needs.
They could, but why should they? Intel is still on full capacity at the moment with backorders to fill. So despite technically losing to AMD, it isn't doing much damage ( if at all ) financially.
If you're really interested in buying hardware, you can follow a rough process. Web search for the software that peaks on an X/Y axis of "how much time I spend using it" and "how long things take because of CPU processing" and add in keywords like "benchmark" and "CPU." Read those articles carefully - maybe three different sites/authors to get different biases ironed out.
I've been an AMD fan since the Athlon XP (though I skipped over the FX / Bulldozer mess and upgraded a Phenom to a Ryzen 2700X) so I can't pretend I'm unbiased. My opinion, though, is that Intel lost their way. They were tick-tocking really well, where they'd improve architecture and then process, and they were dominating AMD. When the Zen cores were released, first as Ryzen desktop chips (up to 1800X), the clouds began to part, because they were starting to look pretty competitive. The clocks are still not as high, and in specific gaming scenarios (specifically 1080p where high frame rates are critical), the Intel chips still showed a clear lead. The follow up Zen+ (up to 2700X) was a clear evolutionary improvement. (Along the way, Threadripper and Epyc chips were also released on the Zen/Zen+ architecture, and for workstation/server loads, they were competitive.)
Zen 2 was released last year with a move to chiplets, 7nm processes and another 15% increase in IPC. This really moved the needle. In many cases, The Ryzen 3xxx, Threadripper and Epyc chips are clearly better than the Intel counterparts. We also see Intel cutting the price of their HEDT chips in half overnight, so that gives you some insight. Most recently, the first Zen 2 laptop chips were released as Ryzen 4xxx with U, H and HS to indicate low power, high power and special high power chips that perform about on par with HS but using less power. They seem to be a huge upgrade to Ryzen mobile, and are much more power efficient, and battery life is finally reasonable (and in some cases impressive.)
On the Intel front, they've really struggled to break the cycle of tweaking their (5?) year old 14nm process, and they tweak the architecture, but they haven't had a major overhaul in quite some time. Meanwhile, the performance of Intel chips has been affected (arguably) more than AMD by having to implement fixes for various security flaws. And this old process/architecture is requiring Intel to continue to increase the power requirements so they can boost the clocks over 5Ghz, but of course this results in lots of heat, as well as a reputation for laptops throttling down in response to that heat.
There are still cases where it makes sense to buy Intel, but each person has to know their workload well enough to do the research to make that decision. If it's anything but mission critical (every second is worth real money), I don't think you can go wrong by just buying the best AMD chip you can afford. I don't think there are any real bad apples in the bunch, and in most cases you'll get a solidly adequate cooling solution for free and pretty good motherboard options. (Though I find the X570 market pretty unpleasant at the moment.)
What really does make a difference is thermals/noise. The higher end 9X00 and 10X00 series feel like they have been squeezed very tightly into their thermal envelopes.
A CPU should come with a cooler and with that cooler the CPU should be quiet with some headroom. Reviews of 10900 seem to indicate you should opt for one of the most expensive air coolers or even water cooling, which of course throws the price comparison off completely.
You'd think so, but it's a well known marketing trick that pricing at $399 and $449 will absolutely guarantee more sales of the lower priced item than if priced at $402 and $449.
$50 less but without cooler isn’t really $50 less.
Resellers have very low margins on core parts like CPU, GPU, memory, mainboards. They make money elsewhere. That's why you don't really see bullshit pricing like 199.99 when you buy a CPU. For instance the last CPU I bought was 193.42.
My workload with it is general .NET development, transcoding movies, and light gaming.
The other two fans I mentioned went in the topside of the case.
Next time I would use low-profile memory or just memory with a shorter heatsinks, so I can have the fans push. All in all no thermal problems, so good enough works. It was not a personal build, just a work for hire, and not meant to break records, just a stable high performance gaming PC.
I get that going 3900X will give me the fastest compile times, which is cool. But I hit the build button relatively infrequently, and anyway I'm usually switching to reddit if the build is going to take longer than a few seconds, so I'm actually more interested in minimizing the latency of all the moment-to-moment operations like Intellisense, refactorings, highlighting, code folding, etc.
I suspect that some of those operations are mostly single-threaded, but even if there is some degree of parallelism going on, surely this type of "bursty" workload is where Intel can still register an advantage?
So, in other words, do these operations more closely resemble Benchmark A: "Blender render time" or Benchmark B: "Max FPS in Tomb Raider" (and why don't we talk more about the difficulty of making these sorts of determinations)?
The best way to get performance from such software is:
1) make sure it (and the project) are on a fast SSD. NVME is better but SATA is good.
2) getting a good CPU for the workload. For pure IDE user experience it won't make much of a difference as long as it's a recent high end enough CPU (fast RAM latency, high enough clock frequency, enough cores, ...)
A RAM disk is an interesting alternative for sure. The last time I used one was when I did OS/2 development using IBM VisualAge IDE. Which sorely needed it...
Windows doesn't have a driver for one out of the box, but there is a freeware one named ImDisk that looks widely used.
Thanks for mental nudge.
For these type of workloads, I personally find that the synthetic tests (like Geekbench) are pretty good. In addition Linus tech tips does a good job of covering “productivity” workloads - which AMD usually massacres the intel workloads. Finally if you use VMS or docker, the added CPU count is critical.
And if you want to do a Hackintosh then it really doesn't work that well with Ryzen e.g. issues with Creative Suite, Docker etc as well as poorer performance due to lack of AVX2/AVX-512.
It also holds nicely my occasional gaming sessions :)
That being said, it seems like, with the exception of some advantages in low resolution gaming, the less expensive Ryzen 5 3600 is still a better option than the (so far) unavailable Core i5 10600K.
That would have been around $575 before.
They aren't Zen 2, more than 4 cores or 7nm, all of which would make a huge difference. Putting the APU on the same chip makes them more difficult to cool, especially since they don't have quite as high quality packaging as the better CPUs. Getting smooth 4k realistically means messing with bios settings to get them to throttle less and run hotter.
So whenI buy an AMD CPU I also have to buy a GPU?
Everone, what's the fastest time chrome takes to build? And what rig?
https://www.techspot.com/review/2003-amd-ryzen-4000/
Here, a 35W AMD laptop chip (3.0/4.3Ghz) scores 492 on single-core Cinebench R20 against a 90W Intel chip (2.3/4.8Ghz) scoring 449.
https://www.techradar.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-7-3700x
Here, the Intel desktop chip does edge out the AMD desktop chips.
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-9-3950x-revie...
In the first graphic, if you click the right arrow, you see single-core benchmarks. Even a 5.0Ghz desktop chip from Intel is behind the 4.6/4.7Ghz Ryzen chips.