Desktop CPU Sales Lowest in 30 Years, AMD Gains Market Share Anyway | Hacker News Reader

Desktop CPU Sales Lowest in 30 Years, AMD Gains Market Share Anyway

tomshardware.com

19 pointsItsTotallyOn15 comments

Everyone’s waiting for the AM5 switch. No point in buying a soon obsolete platform unless you really have to.

For laptops, maybe. I just built a desktop with a 5900X and a 6900XT, expecting to not be able to get my hands on an MSRP 7000-series CPU or GPU for a long while after their release. Not to mention the shortage of DDR5.

Plus, with the affordable gaming PC market being behind by about 2 years now thanks to lockdowns, video game developers are probably expecting to release their games with lower spec requirements than they otherwise would have if everything continued on pace as usual.

The last generation of CPUs and GPUs was released in a very hot market, all signs seem to point to the opposite for this generation.

At least where I live AMD notebooks are a much better deal because they always have either more storage, more RAM, a better dedicated GPU, or a better display for the same price. While everyone is still looking for an Intel Core i5, i7 or i9, an AMD Ryzen 5000 at least now feels less of a compromise.

Even if it has an igpu its probably leagues better than intels integrated graphics offerings, no?

It depends, the 5000 series of laptop CPUs has a very old GPU design while the 6000 series uses the newest RDNA 2 which is good enough for moderate gaming. Both series are currently being sold in laptops.

The vega cores on the desktop cpus weren’t too much of a slouch, were they for laptops? I mean, before the phoenix apus come out, no ones expecting 1080p high from these solutions except for maybe the most optimized or older games?

Laptops have been eating desktops for a long time. There also haven’t been any exciting CPU releases in awhile. How long ago was the 5950x? That’s still a market leader.

Can we get certified ECC RAM on anything at consumer prices yet?

Some Ryzen boards support ECC RAM, though the support is somewhat unofficial. I'm using 64 GB of ECC on an ASRock X570 Pro4 and it works fine. It's not the cheapest motherboard or the cheapest memory, but I'd say prices for both are in the consumer range rather than the clearly-for-business-only range.

Thanks, have you run any tests to confirm it is working? I’d be more comfortable with a guarantee from the manufacturer but confirmation an ok second choice.

Yes. I originally bought this board with a 3800X and 64 GB of inexpensive non-ECC RAM. That configuration worked fine. I later upgraded to a 5950X CPU, when I needed more CPU power and cores for some software I was writing. After upgrading, I occasionally got memory errors under very heavy load, with the same memory that had been fine with the slower CPU. I upgraded to ECC memory, and it fixed all the memory errors. The memory tested correctly as ECC in all the tools I tried, and also solved an actual stability problem I was having, so I trust it.

I decked out a home workstation 64GB ECC for $400 last year (paired with an AMD 5000 series CPU and Asus Pro WS X570-ACE motherboard which are both compatible). The motherboard specifically stated ECC compatibility.

Looks nice, checked it out on newegg. Unfortunately this looks problematic:

Each motherboard includes centralized management software with support for out-of-band management, so they're also an efficient and cost-effective option for IT administrators.

Maybe it is easily disabled. Probably more board than I need though. Integrated graphics is enough for me; I edit text files for a living.

It is a fancy board with an annoyingly high idle power consumption. But it meant official ECC support so I went with it.

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