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Comment by jvanderbot | Hacker News Reader

Intel can and does produce phenomenal technical products. Their compilers and HPC toolsets have done enormous good. Their chips are second to none (or perhaps tied for first, depending on who you ask). They are not a shameful company. They are just yesterday's giant, and as such, are due for a Microsoft-like reinvention.

Intel is my daily driver for gaming, due to it's incredible (but sadly cancelled) Extreme Compute Element form factor with its incredible customization.

What they're struggling with is adapting to a changing world and to find new business centers. But this is a hardware/software world built on Intel, even if it changes daily.

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> Their chips are second to none (or perhaps tied for first, depending on who you ask).

No. They're definitely behind AMD. AMD has significantly better power efficiency[1], better performance in gaming for most of the titles[2], and vastly more cores and better multithreaded performance (with Threadrippers[3]).

[1]: https://gamersnexus.net/megacharts/cpu-power

[2]: https://gamersnexus.net/cpus/intels-300w-core-i9-14900k-cpu-...

[3]: https://gamersnexus.net/cpus/best-cpus-2023-intel-vs-amd-gam...

I would argue that AMD is not the reason they are more power efficient, it's TSMC.

Intel bet on a fabrication process that did not succeed. I will bet in the next 2 years Intel will be on par with AMD again.

> I would argue that AMD is not the reason they are more power efficient, it's TSMC.

Why ?

Because the areas where Intel stumbled wasn’t design, it was their manufacturing being behind, something tsmc does for AMD.

But it was also design where Intel failed to innovate for many years.

For example, the chiplet approach that AMD embraced allowed AMD to put together far more powerful CPUs, i.e. with more cores and at a competitive price, than Intel could.

> Based on the numbers we've given you, from our data, and the prices we have today, the decisions for the most part are pretty clear: The best gaming CPU is the 7800X3D (that's an objective fact), the most efficient part is the 7980X, the 5800X3D is the best upgrade path, and Intel makes the strongest showing in the i5-13600K or 14600K (whichever is cheaper) for a balanced build, or the 12100F for an ultra-budget build.

Compare to toms' hardware 2023 listing earlier in the year.

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-cpus,3986.html

    Category | Winner | Alternate
    Overall Best CPU for Gaming: Intel Core i5-13400 (Buy) [More] AMD Ryzen 5 7600 (Buy) | Ryzen 5 5600X3D
    High Performance Value Best CPU for Gaming: AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D (Buy) [More] Intel Core i7-14700K (Buy) | Ryzen 7 5800X3D (Buy)
    Highest Performance Best CPU for Gaming: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D (Buy) [More] Intel Core i9-13900K (Buy)
    Mid-Range Best CPU for Gaming: Intel Core i5-13600K (Buy) [More] AMD Ryzen 5 7600X (Buy)
    Budget Best CPU for Gaming: Intel Core i3-12100F (Buy) [More] AMD Ryzen 5 5600 (Buy)
    Entry-Level Best CPU for Gaming: AMD Ryzen 5 5600G (Buy)

(summarizing: Intel best CPU, Best mid and budget entries, so winner in 3/5 categories. And what does it mean to give AMD "Best high performance" and "Highest performance?").

This is a neck-and-neck race, with AMD a fan favorite, and year over year changes in leadership. No way is Intel out of this as a viable competitor of equal-ish standing. I don't mean to denegrate AMD in my original post, but I do mean to say that Intel is still producing top-tier results.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-and-intel-cpu-market-s... In particular, Intel still has a 5x lead on AMD in server market, which, of course, is a pretty big market.

> This is a neck-and-neck race, with AMD a fan favorite, and year over year changes in leadership.

> (summarizing: Intel best CPU, Best mid and budget entries, so winner in 3/5 categories. And what does it mean to give AMD "Best high performance" and "Highest performance?").

Intel as much more brand recognition than AMD. So calling AMD fan favorite is kinda strange to me. There are only two x86-64 chip designer right now, and from a pure market strategy it doesn't make sense for AMD to offer much more value to customer than what they can get from the only competition in town. If you want to really understand how intel is strugling you have to did into the execution speed of both companies, the profit margin on each SKU etc... etc...

Intel is only neck and neck with AMD if you don't look at things like power efficiency and how much money they are actually making per chip.

> In particular, Intel still has a 5x lead on AMD in server market, which, of course, is a pretty big market.

This a function of market inertia more than anything. From a technical perspective AMD Zen 4 workstation and server offering seem to be much better these days.

Toms has always had a slight bias towards Intel in their assessments, I think. Their picks are pretty reasonable, but the "highest performance for gaming" category with the 7950X3D and 13900k doesn't make a lot of sense to me, when the 7800X3D which won the "High perf" category beats the 13900k significantly in most games benchmarks, while drawing much less power. Intel has some great value offerings, but the 7800X3D is the real champ in gaming right now. The fact they have Intel winning 3/5 of their categories seems like a demonstration of their subtle bias. Other sources like Anandtech have historically done a better job of neutral reporting.

I’ve been on the extreme of maxing out fps in games for a decade.

Gamersnexus is great! But they and the other YouTube benchmarkers don’t tell the whole story. when you are playing games that are bottlenecked by single thread performance single core performance and therefore memory speed becomes important. This is very difficult to benchmark as most of those games where it matters (CoD warzone) don’t have an easy way to benchmark. When I was testing my OC I literally would change the ram frequency in the bios, and drop into a pubg match, and screen record my fps and manually add it to a spreadsheet.

So take those benchmarks and then add some performance gains from memory overclocking that I (and others) been able to get meaningful gains in fps beyond just overclocking the cpu. 5-10% more fps is not amazing, but it’s definitely worth it to me for games like warzone or valorant.

AMD’s support for high end ram has always lagged. Happy to use amd for non-gaming, but if you’re trying to build “the best gaming rig” I’m not sure AMD can take that crown. And until people are willing to benchmark single threaded bottleneck games like warzone with different ram speeds, I doubt this argument will be settled.

This was true until X3D. Only very few titles benefit from fast memory over fitting ~all the memory a typical game accesses in a single frame into screaming fast L3.

Memory speed is much less relevant when you have a giant L3 due to 3D stacked cache. I don't think you're trying to mislead anyone, but I'm pretty skeptical that you're getting 5-10% more than an X3D, even with memory overclocking, given how close the non-3D stacked AMD chips get to Intel here. [0]

The gap between those non-3D cache chips and the newer 3D-cache ones is generally very big for games because they touch huge amounts of data every frame and thrash memory.

[0] https://www.techspot.com/article/2579-cod-warzone-2-benchmar...

Which intel chips are second to none, and by what metric?

Trying to be measured here: Depending on who you ask, you'll find that for gaming, AMD or Intel alternate pretty regularly on technical benchmarks. At the moment, AMD is most power efficient, on average, and can eek out higher overall benchmark performance (as of late 2023). Throughout 2023, AMD and Intel were both listed as "best" on Toms Hardware, PC Mag, etc etc

https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-cpus-for-gaming

For server marketshare, intel vastly dominates (80%?). For gaming marketshare, Intel still has 60-70% the marketshare.

Even if it's a mixed bag, if given an Intel (or AMD) processor, there's no way I would throw it in the trash and if a current-gen chip, you can find things that either are better than the other with.

Both are top-tier accomplishments. AMD has a signifigant fan-following though, which tends to distort the story a little.

> Their chips are second to none (or perhaps tied for first, depending on who you ask).

> For server marketshare, intel vastly dominates (80%?). For gaming marketshare, Intel still has 60-70% the marketshare.

Marketshare is one thing, but saying they are the best but the marketshare is 60-70% is a totally different metric.

Its saying oh Toyota has the best cars because they ship the most... but they cant be as good as a Lambo / Ferrari because they dont ship the most.

In terms of server cpus, if you are looking at raw performance per socket, intel is no where near amd -- https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-xeon-platinum-8592/10 . This is based on Emerald Rapids / Bergamo.

In terms of gaming cpus, they definetly are neck and neck with performance.

But yes you are right, Intels chips arent something you would throw away in the trash. They are good chips. They need to stick around. Its just that you cant say marketshare makes them the best.

I didn't say marketshare makes them the best. I said there were lots of metrics, that on any given metric, AMD and Intel trade first place spots frequently, and marketshare implies there's something special still about Intel.

The only metric I could tease out of that where they are close is single core performance on high wattage enthusiast parts.

That’s exactly where the Unix processors were the year before Intel put them out of business.

(Except the old Unix machines also won by large margins on multithreading and Intel isn’t winning there anymore).

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