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Comment by fxtentacle | Hacker News Reader

I agree with your market breakdown, but surely not with your assessment.

In the consumer segment, you have regular people trying to make vacation videos with software like Adobe Premiere and Adobe Media Encoder, or Magix. Nvenc quality is bad. AMD is horribly slow. The only fast high quality encode is with Intel's dedicated CPU instructions, which both apps heavily promote to their users.

And the 30% that you mention that run VMs... Wouldn't they be pretty happy if Intel added dedicated CPU instructions to make VMware better?

I agree that for the work that I do, AMD is as good as or better. But people doing highly parallelizable tasks like compiling are the minority.

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I think you might over estimate the prevalence of video editing software like this. Adobe don't appear to sell consumer versions anymore, it's only pro subscriptions now. Magix is sold at a "vacation video friendly" price, but doesn't mention Intel in their marketing material.

I just don't think the market for home devices is thinking about their video encoding time when they buy a laptop, but I do think they'll use an M1 Mac and find it surprisingly fast, or hear from a friend or family member that they are really good.

Intel just haven't been optimising for the main user experience seen by these people, or those writing "normal" server software either. They've been pushing AVX512 instead, which looks good for video or things like that, but not for regular use-cases.

Another good example is how fast the M1 chips (and the A chips in iPhones) perform at Javascript benchmarks. Those benchmarks look a lot more like what most people are doing most of the time than video encoding benchmarks.

> but I do think they'll use an M1 Mac and find it surprisingly fast, or hear from a friend or family member that they are really good.

That only happens in California.

MAGIX heavily mentions Intel in their marketing.

"4K Ultra HD video editing with Intel and MAGIX"

"Enjoy HD Video editing with Magix Movie Editor Pro and Intel Iris Graphics"

"Edit in 4K Ultra HD" + Intel Logo

"Finish and Share videos quickly with Intel Iris Graphics"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eT9KOtN7KFM

Plus, as a user of the software, I can tell you that if you tick the "Hardware Acceleration" checkbox on AMD, a popup will tell you to buy a supported Intel CPU and then turn the checkbox off again.

BTW I'm picking Magix here because in the local electronics store, that's the video software that you can buy as a box and that is featured in bundles with Intel laptops. So if someone clueless walks in there and says they need video editing, this is most likely what they will end up with.

It's not just marketing but also uses Intel QSV. AMD RADEON has similar feature VCE but its quality is relatively bad and its adoption isn't well, compared to QSV/NVEnc.

> AMD is horribly slow

Not sure where you're getting that these days? Absolutely in the days of Bulldozer, but AMD's Zen 3 architecture has taken even the single core lead from Intel, not to mention the multi core lead they've held for several years now.

The encoder?

AMDs GPU encoder still lags a way behind Nvidia for example

> AMD is horribly slow. The only fast high quality encode is with Intel's dedicated CPU instructions,

You might need a source for that.

Intel Core i7 6700K is double the FPS of AMD Ryzen 5 1600X https://www.magix.info/de/forum/ein-performancetest-zwischen...

Seems like the clock, RAM, and GPU differences there may have had an effect? Comparing between systems that different seems unusual.

this is article from 2017 which compares 5 generation old cpu vs other 5 generation old CPU

Uh, those numbers are more than three/five years old at this point. Beyond comments on the test bench not being properly set up, Ryzen has improved significantly since then.

AMD's latest consumer-level chips significantly outperform Intel's chips in both price and performance. When talking about prosumer video editing performance, the Ryzen 9 5900x, the second most expensive "new" chip from AMD is a 3.4% performance improvement over Intel's most expensive "new" chip 10980XE. Additionally, the 5900x retails for $549 USD while the 10980XE retails for about $1,000 USD.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Adobe-Premiere-Pr...

On first generation Ryzen AVX2 instructions were executed as 2 AVX instructions as the AVX pipeline was 128 bits wide. This was fixed in Zen 2 and nowadays we are at Zen 3.

>if Intel added dedicated CPU instructions to make VMware better

They (and AMD) did years ago. Intel VT.

> And the 30% that you mention that run VMs... Wouldn't they be pretty happy if Intel added dedicated CPU instructions to make VMware better?

They have this today. What would make them happier is cutting power utilization by half or more, which is looking quite possible with non-Intel Silicon.

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