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Comment by BadHumans | Hacker News Reader

We are coming up on 7 years since the first Ryzen chip. In 7 years AMD went from very behind to a little behind then on-par and finally now market leader. The fact Intel let this happen in such a short time frame is a bit mind boggling.

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AMD and Intel have always been racing each other closely. Remember when the Athlons outperformed Netburst P4s while Intel was trying to get the latter to higher clock speeds? Then the Core series put Intel in the lead again, and now they're losing to AMD once more. Here's some 15-year-old benchmarks for your amusement:

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/athlon-64-power,2259-9....

AMD is not the market leader in any segment, by any approximation: https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/10/amd_gains_on_intel/

My phrasing is confusing and I apologize for that. I do not mean market leader in that there are more AMD CPUs than Intel CPU. I'm speaking about hardware performance.

You are right for multi-core performance, but Intel has still a slight edge in single-core performance, and in idle power usage, which is important to many. Intel also has a stronger offering in the now-popular mini PC segment.

If we are mentioning mini PCs then I think it is only fair to mention that every single console went to AMD for chips.

Didn't they lose the single core lead recently, despite running their chips so aggressively clocked that they're burning out at stock settings?

The APU systems from AMD work really well as mini-pc systems, though I'm unfamiliar with Intel products there. Perhaps they're better.

The X3D chips typically edge out Intel for single core performance and Intel chips also need to be run hard to match them. Idle power consumption is pretty bad on AMD desktop chips, but under load AMD is typically far more efficient. Regardless, on the desktop any of Intel's advantages at the high end are somewhat moot considering that all of those chips ship with and are currently running microcode that is overvolting and degrading the silicon, causing permanent damage. There's plans for a fix, but there's a good chance that fix will come with lower performance. The N100 is a bargain, but as soon as you want passable graphics AMD becomes the only option.

Intel are facing credible competition from both AMD and ARM in most market segments amidst a quality control catastrophe, cultural problems, R&D problems. Their future outlook doesn't look very good.

In server CPUs, Intel still has a larger market share than AMD, but judging for the published financial results, where most of the loss is in server CPUs, Intel has succeeded to keep that diminishing market share only by accepting a great loss caused by huge discounts, which has determined the action price fall, so perhaps trying so hard to retain the market share has not been an optimal decision.

So AMD definitely leads over Intel from the POV of the profits obtained in the server CPU market segment.

There are also various small markets where AMD leads comfortably over Intel by volume, e.g. Amazon currently sells much more AMD CPUs than Intel CPUs.

Market leader in what? Intel's Q2 revenue is over double that of AMD's. Intel still controls well over 60% of the x86 space. Intel and AMD's most performant x86 offerings are fairly close to each other.

Performance. Intel still manages to squeak out some wins against AMD when it comes to single-threaded CPU task but in every other metric, they are chasing AMD.

Not only in performance, but also in profits, as shown by the Intel vs. AMD financial results. Especially in the server CPU market segment, where Intel has a diminishing market share and losses of billions, while AMD has an increasing market share and profits.

The new Zen 5 has much better single-thread performance than any Intel CPU (e.g. the slower 5.5 GHz Zen 5 launched this week matches a 6.0 GHz Raptor Lake), so for a couple of months, until Intel launches Arrow Lake S, AMD will have much better single-thread performance. After that, Intel and AMD will be again at parity, with negligible differences in ST speed.

Power too. I think we're still in the happy place where buying epyc is cheaper than being given xeons for free after you look at the electricity bill over the life of the machine.

Is this actually true? At 200w power draw 24/365 you're talking 1800kwh. at 0.2$/kwh that's 360$.

These server processors seem to be charged out at multiple thousands of dollars. Is the difference in efficiency in server actually as large as claimed? Surely a sufficient discount on the capital cost of a processor can more than make up for extra power usage.

I guess it all depends on the comparative price/power consumption, it just feels like the difference would have to be rather large to me.

You're not considering the core count difference. Amd has 128cores 256 threads at 2.2ghz at 360w tdp while Intel has 144c/144t, @ 2.2ghz @ 330w Tdp. Cloud providers care about density and power usage. More cores per server = less power = more servers per rack = more capacity = more opportunities for sales of products.

I'm not really in the space - I was curious. I think people tend to overstate the importance of power consumption relative to the price of the products they buy and the value of their time (eg. if it's a workstation part, higher performance is worth a significant tradeoff in power if it gets jobs like compilation done 10% faster based on the employee time it can save)

For servers, I'm always curious because even though they run 24/365 (so power consumption is v.important), the capital cost of new server chips is incredibly high - eg. those 144c chips I presume you're referring to cost 10k+, so even over a 5y service life that's probably only 20% of the chip only, and relative to the AMD chip the additional inefficiency could easily by compensated by an appropriate discount.

Obviously all of this is why intel still exists in the DC, they just can't charge the same prices as AMD can is all.

With great power comes great heat output. Lower power = lower heat output = lower bill for cooling. or the same bill at more capacity = more margin = more profit for the cloud providers :) Or the other thing to consider is, less power usage on a global scale = less co2 output.

It looks like the gap has narrowed, though TDP might not mean what it once did. The comparison I remember is a 64 core Rome chip against two 28 core xeons where the Rome one was significantly faster and something like 1/3 the power consumption of the dual. I've got one of those 64C chips and haven't followed the market as closely since.

Is that true?

At least for consumer desktop CPUs AMD is significantly ahead for gaming (with X3D) while for MT/productivity workloads Intel and AMD seem to be pretty even (if we ignore power usage and the whole melting CPU thing..). Which makes since Intel generally offers more cores per $ these days.

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