AMD Has Scaled Ryzen Faster Than Any Other CPU in the Past 20 Years | Hacker News Reader

AMD Has Scaled Ryzen Faster Than Any Other CPU in the Past 20 Years

extremetech.com

87 pointsilluminated16 comments

It's pretty obvious why AMD is able to scale x86_64 faster than anyone else... they invented it. Intel took it, implemented it in broken ways to win benchmark comparisons and win IT buying managers' hearts and minds, locking everyone into their chipsets. Finally, all those broken implementations were exposed, and AMD finally had the capital to do things right at scale.

RISC or MIPS or any other CPU in that "minimized" class doesn't really have the room to scale as fast.

To be fair, Apple is the only player in the game capable of taking a shot. A trillion dollars buys a lot of experimental 5nm masks, and their walled garden enables them to completely rewrite their entire OS and toolchain... something they've already done twice in the last 20 years for desktop, and a few times for mobile.

Will 3rd parties like adobe or digidesign get on board? Hopefully they already are (in secret)... it would be a massive problem for power user 3rd parties to point out why they can't do something they need to do after the fact.

In the end it's all an equation of core counts, watts per core, and race conditions. Can 1000 RISC cores provide the same responsiveness and stability that 28 x86_64 cores provide? We'll see.

I think we need more languages to help with parallelism. I don't think swift is the answer.

and I think you mistyped - you meant to type 64 x86_64 cores :)

I was talking Apple to Apple comparisons, and their Mac Pro maxes out at 28 cores right now.

I remember in 2006 when Core processors were launched - when AMD was the top leader of desktop processors. There was a huge fanbase rooting for Intel to beat AMD in some sort of a competitive fanboy arena. Conroe architecture and the introduction of tick-tock methodology from Intel was absolutely incredible and totally destroyed the competition.

The tides have turned, so perhaps I should now start preparing to root for Intel :)

Why? Intel has proven when they have the lead they abuse the consumer. Until AMD displays the same behavior, long live the king.

My AMD build has been performing so well I really don’t think I could pick Intel for anything for the foreseeable future. Long live the king indeed!

How is a company selling the same thing for the same price "abusing the consumer". They don't sell essential goods and they had no competition. Where does the expectation come from that they would just cut prices for no reason?

Intel didn't beat AMD back in the day because they had a better processor. Intel relied on anti-competitive practices to lock AMD out of the desktop and server markets. They were successfully sued by AMD but the damage was done. Then Intel sat on it's laurels and quit innovating, slowly doling out incremental improvements through their 'tick-tock' release cycle. Intel dug their own hole and I have no sympathy for Intel while AMD buries them in it.

I don't agree. Anti-competitive practices from Intel were orthogonal to the success of Conroe.

It was a better processor: https://www.anandtech.com/show/1963

I agree that Intel did engage in a lot of horrible anti-competitive things, but that has nothing to do with how incredible Conroe was. I find it kind of funny how this whole AMD vs Intel competition gets people's emotions running as if its their team and turf.

AMD created x86-64, Intel had just caught up by that point.

intel did a bit more than just "catch up"; take a look at the benchmarks in the linked article. they followed it up with solid improvements through sandy/ivy bridge. then they treaded water for eight years or so. even still, after the launch of conroe, amd didn't have a competitive high-end part until zen 2 (excepting a few high core count oddities along the way).

the userspace fixes required to make those intel implementation secure did a bit more than question those "improvements".

You appear to be conflating Intel's 1990s antitrust woes and the success of the Core microarchitecture which launched in 2006.

Despite Intel's well-documented anti-competitive practices, AMD had decisively gained the upper hand in performance by the time of K8 (2003). Intel's microarchitecture at the time, NetBurst, was uncompetitive and relied almost entirely on inertia, and yes, anti-competitive behaviour to retain market share.

Core leap-frogged that and Intel remained ahead for the better part of a decade afterwards. To say that Intel sat on its laurels between the time of the first round of antitrust litigation in the early 90s is quite inaccurate.

Do you remember the bus license thing where they killed off nvidia?

It's about darn time.

GPUs have been giving us so much more bang for the buck than cpus - the latest nvidia gpu is 54 billion transistors @ 826mm2

I know gpus are not the same as cpus, but I think amd's experience there is getting us cpus with comparable transistor counts at comparable economics.

intel doesn't seem to publish numbers, but I think the top $13,000 28-core intel cpu is 8b transistors

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count

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