AMD says Intel's 'horrible product' is causing Ryzen 7 9800X3D shortages | Hacker News Reader

AMD says Intel's 'horrible product' is causing Ryzen 7 9800X3D shortages

tomshardware.com

50 pointsdoener14 comments

I'm grateful I was able to pick up one of these, it's a speedy chip indeed. This round of AMD vs Intel kind of reminds me of the battles for top performance in the 90s, each side trading blows with another 100MHz and a bit more cache every few months. It was an exciting time and it's great to see AMD pulling ahead again.

> "Our goal is that leadership product in every segment, and I'm not going to talk about unannounced products," replied Intel's Jim Johnson, Corporate VP and GM of Client Engineering.

I wonder if Intel actually has something new in the pipeline. I was holding out for their new chips before starting a new build and the new "Core Ultra" line didn't impress me, but it's also clearly a new chiplet design that will be around for a while and should have room for improvements now that the big shift to chiplet is underway.

>in the 90s, each side trading blows with another 100MHz and a bit more cache every few months

AMD was uncompetitive during whole nineties, their very best and most expensive K5/K6/-2/-3 chips were losing to Pentiums/Celerons in everything but simple word processing (Winstone). Only the very last AMD CPU of 1999, $799 Athlon 750 $799 was finally competitive against $803 Pentium III 750. You must be thinking of 2000-2006 when AMD beat Intel to 1GHz, 64bit and dual core.

Thanks, rasz! I was still a kid during that time so unfortunately I don't have first hand experience. I will happily defer to your experience!

My comment came from a couple of post-era experiences:

* The Am486-DX4-100 benches nearly (or just a bit below) the Intel DX4-100 in my own testing. I thought it was less expensive at the time, but I haven't checked prices

* The K6-3 was able to match early Pentium II performance for a lower cost, at least in my personal testing. I have a modded K6-3+ at 600MHz and it exceeds some P2 CPUs in Phil's benchmark tests, though naturally it's not a part many people had around back then

* AMD 386-DX40 was also apparently a high performing part and I'm happy to have acquired one recently, though I'm unfamiliar with prices and I have little to compare with. Just received some new parts (external battery & 128MB CF cards) to help me get into testing this platform

Those other landmarks you describe are definitely very interesting and noteworthy, though! It was quite cool to see AMD first to 1GHz, 64-bit, and dual core. One of my favorite retro rigs is a maxed out AMD K7 system, the last of their 32-bit platform and in my opinion the end of the 32-bit era, though Intel kept pushing 32-bit parts for a while.

I've been an Intel fan for most of my life, but as I get older I'm finding a lot of appreciation for AMD and my main PC is AMD for the first time ever as of the 9800X3D release. :)

AMD Am486-DX4-100 released in 1995 while 1994 $516 Intel DX4-100 was already a weird product considering 3Q94 prices:

Pentiums 100 MHz $964

Pentiums 90 MHz $707

Pentiums 66 MHz $525

Intel DX4-100 $516

Pentiums 60 MHz $418

Intel DX2-66 ~$200

and was highly discouraged https://books.google.pl/books?id=PITtFPwTaWwC&lpg=PP1&hl=en&...

By 1995 when Am486 DX4 shipped it went straight to low end systems together with Cyrix selling their own $60 DX4-100, TI $66 DX2-66 $70 486DX4-100. Mainstream 1995 was all about socket 5.

First retail K6-3 in the wild showed up in Japan in March 1999 listed at $295 https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/990313/p_cpu.ht... Thats full Pentium II 400MHz price or over four Celerons 300A. By January 2000 it was down to ~$85 https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/20000108/p_cpu.... while Celeron 300A ~$57.

It wasnt some local Japanese price glitch. Poland September 1999:

Pentium III 450MHz 1260 $308

Pentium II 400MHz 943 $231

Celeron 366MHz 348 $85 (300A missing from the list, but was still available and selling cheaper)

K6-III/450 1108 $271 lol

K6-III/400 877 $215

K6-2/400 397 $97

K6-2/350 230 $56

I dont know what AMD was doing with K6 prices, had to be some financing scheme with huge under the table discounts for OEMs. Compaq, Hewlett Packard, Packard Bell, IBM and Time Computers all pumped out very cheap low end AMD K6 systems. At least with introduction of new socket AMD finally stopped smoking crack. June 17 2000 https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/20000617/p_cpu....

Celeron 533A 10,570 $100

Duron 600MHz 9,990 $95

K6-III/450 24,800 $236 !??!!?

K6-III/400 14,800 $140

K6-2/550 7,949 $76

K6-2/533 5,970 $57

K6-2/500 5,350 $50

K6-III+ released in 2000. In games K6-III+ overclocked to 600 MHz matches two year old Celeron 300A overclocked to 450 MHz.

While filling in the low end segment is great for less wealthy consumers, its not what I would call being competitive :) K7 finally put AMD on even footing.

I thought that this was going to be about AMD depending on some horrible Intel part, not that Intel made a crappy processor, so more people are going for AMD.

I think it indirectly is (in the form of TSMC) as Intel have started to use TSMC fabs for some of their processor lines and I think this is eating into AMD (and other TSMC customers) production.

They had the same problem with apple and the 4nm fabs, but couldn't exactly say anything as smearish.

It ooks like you're right. A quick check shows Intel outsourced Arrow Lake (or parts of it) to TSMC.

As a side note, I wish Intel would move to a different non-lake naming scheme.

Coffee Lake was cute; but at least it made more sense than a lake made of arrows.

The codenames are supposedly from real places because you can't trademark geographic names.

At the end of 2023, Intel shipped Meteor Lake, where all but one chiplet were made by TSMC. Arrow Lake updates that chiplet (the one with the CPU cores) to also be made at TSMC, though on the older N3B process rather than the better N3E process that AMD is using.

Intel's current low-power laptop processor (Lunar Lake) is also all TSMC. The only thing Intel is making for their current-generation consumer products is the passive silicon interposer all these chiplets are mounted on.

Arrow Lake-U is an updated Meteor Lake on Intel 3.

"The Intel Core Ultra 200U series processors utilize the Redwood Cove (P-core) architecture, which originally debuted in Intel Core Ultra Series 1 processors and Crestmont (E-core) architecture that is found throughout the Intel Core Ultra Series 2 family of processors,” an Intel spokesman said in an email. “However, the Intel Core Ultra 200U series is built on the Intel 3 process node, rather than the Intel 4 process used for Intel Core Ultra Series 1 processors, which helps improve performance of the processor overall."[0]

[0] https://www.pcworld.com/article/2568168/intel-debuts-arrow-l...

Ah, interesting. Intel likes to do weird things with the smallest mobile chips.

This reminds me of a popular saying attributed to Napoleon "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."

Would AMD be happier if inventory was piling up?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com