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Comment by Jonnax | Hacker News Reader

AMD's 64 core 2995WX processor pulls 279.96W peak power in their tests whilst Intel's W-3175X 28 core CPU pulls 290.41 peak.

I'm amazed how Intel has lost their crown. They don't have the best servers, HEDT and consumer desktop cpus. And if they are competitive they consume significantly more electricity

Plus on laptops AMD has more cores and consumes less power whilst Intel touts how their CPUs beats AMD on AI photo upscaling.

Not to mention how Apple is in the process of ditching them

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Worse of all, Intel lost most of their good engineers. By the time they catch up with AMD, ARM desktop CPUs will eat market.

Intel decided to cut costs by not being competitive on salary. Engineers just work there to get Intel on the resume, then move on for better pay.

I wonder if the exec/upper management levels still pay themselves well? (of course they do)

I don't really buy that. Intel are in deep shit but the sheer amount of market share they have at the moment makes me slightly pessimistic about a true changing of the guard in the long term.

Its hard to stress just how useless AMD have been for most of the last decade barring the Zens.

They also have a status on vendor lock on a few fronts.

Companies like VMware moved to per core licensing. And most have established infra in intel. Cycling that out is much easier said than done. Especially with the capex squeezes coming.

AMDs "nice to have"-tooling is almost nonexistent compared to Intel - vTune is a few gigabytes, uProf is about 10MB for example.

"Intel is doomed" stories have been circulating for 45 years, ever since the Zilog Z80 was released, and it's always been the "Intel killers" that have failed. It's pretty hard to bet against Intel.

Intel hadn't lost it's process node advantage in those 45 years until now.

> Plus on laptops AMD has more cores

Some of the AMD chips don't support SMT, so maybe this statement doesn't tell the whole story. I recently looked at the Lenovo ideaPad Flex 5 that was offered in an AMD flavor with Ryzen™ 5 4500U or an Intel flavor with Core™ i5-1135G7. The AMD chip is 6 core / 6 thread, and the Intel chip is 4 core / 8 thread.

I'm supposed to care about the number of threads rather than the number of cores, n'est-ce pas?

Not always. Some workloads would prefer to one thread per core. There are some micro-arch structures which are shared across SMT threads and will bottleneck you if they are critical for workload. Common examples; the TLB or the L1.

I'm certainly not equating one SMT core to two physical cores. But if you're an average laptop user (which you would be at the price point of my example) you're probably running a bunch of browser tabs, maybe Spotify, and some work stuff (Excel, Sublime Text, pick your poison) on the side that you're procrastinating while watching videos of space launches or cats or whatever. Much of the memory (re: your comment about bottlenecked computation structures) is just kind of waiting for later rather than being simultaneously mutated. While I'm writing this I'm running 319 processes with 1673 threads yet I'm loading my CPU 11% according to Activity Monitor on a fairly outdated 22nm Haswell chip. So I think for a consumer laptop you'd look at "more cores" in the context of "more price" and if there's some money to be saved, go with the SMT variant.

In my case it turned out to be a moot point because I couldn't get the AMD version anyway; it was available on Amazon from a third-party retailer but that's always sketchy and it was more expensive. But I think the "AMD laptops have more cores" argument deserves an asterisk because that's not really the whole story. (And to your point, having more cores doesn't necessarily guarantee superior execution if there are other aspects of the computation structure that bottleneck your workload.)

I have the 4500U and have yet to really push it to the limits. It's not for lack of trying!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKzJNIs8Pnw

I'm sure I could find a limit if I tried made-up tasks meant to do that, but it's plenty for all the real-world things I use it for.

I don't understand what's this supposed to prove. Writing a softsynth with lots of voices isn't particularly demanding?

That's Serum. Wavetable synthesizers are famously heavy on CPU. No one would run 113 Serums at once for anything practical, but they might have 113 things going. If it can handle 113 Serum instances with 7 unison voices each sounding at once, it can handle any music production task.

From what I've read, SMT gives about 20-30% more performance. So 4 cores * 1.3 is 5.2, so 6 cores should still be faster.

Zen 3 SMT performance analysis: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16261/investigating-performan...

There are AMD laptop chips with SMT as well, and Intel ones without. The 4600u, for example, is the version with SMT.

Certainly. I just wanted to present a real-life example that crossed my path a couple of weeks ago.

> I'm amazed how Intel has lost their crown.

It happens. One process mistake cascaded and derailed their whole lineup.

AMD doesn't have to bet their future on process and can, if needed, move to a different supplier. If, however, they make an architecture mistake and end up in a dead-end, Intel will be able to catch up in one or two generations.

Intel still has a significant lead in several important segments and these deep supply chains take a long time (and a lot of money) to shift. AMD has been showing a clear leadership in cost/performance for some time now and it's still not easy to fill a rack with AMD boxes.

True, although it's not like there are dozens of other suppliers with top-tier processes. There are just TSMC and Samsung (currently somewhat behind.)

The problem is not higher power usage but lower perf/watt. Both can adjust TDP to maximize performance but setting higher TDP generally worse for perf/watt.

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