Windows 10 EOL is probably helping to churn a lot of aging Intel chips out here. I can't imagine anyone in the know is building a new desktop with an Intel anything in it these days, either.
Unless you need to use AutoCAD, their software have garbage level optimization on amd cpu. It's probably the only software you can see an intel i7 series cpu beat amd r9 by a big margin.
Probably they're using the Intel MKL library for their linear algebra (which is severely gimped on AMD - SIMD is disabled and only the scalar fallback code runs).
If they've wrote SIMD code themselves then the gap between the two shouldn't be big (AMD's are actually better for SIMD nowadays, since the recent models support the AVX-512 instruction set while Intel ended support for that due to the P/E core split fiasco.)
Windows 10 will be the last msft os I ever use. I rebuilt using AMD CPU/GP booted up Fedora 42 and I have never had to run a single shell command to get anything to work. I don't even notice my OS. Work, games, local models (this one still takes some tweaking but is better), all work fine
As a side note, Intel's discrete GPUs are also famous for high-quality video transcoding - it was quite popular for streamers who needed a second helper PC only for OBS streaming.
It has been, for a long time, the latest generation Intel CPU with a 2xxK or 2xxKF model number these used to be "i7" models now there's just a 7, I'm very vaguely annoyed at the branding change.
It would be hard for anybody to convince me that there is a better price|performance optimum. I get it, there was a very disappointing generation or two a few years ago, that hasn't put me off.
The dominance of Apple CPUs might be putting me off both Intel and AMD and consider only buying Apple hardware and maybe even doing something like Linux running on a Mac Mini in addition to my MacOS daily driver.
FYI www.cpubenchmark.com is a running joke for how bad it is. It’s not a good resource.
There are a few variations of these sites like userbenchmark that have been primarily built for SEO spam and capturing Google visitors who don’t know where to go for good buying advice.
Buying a CPU isn’t really that complicated. For gaming it’s easy to find gaming benchmarks or buyers guides. For productivity you can check Phoronix or even the GeekBench details in the compiler section if that’s what you’re doing.
Most people can skip that and just read any buyers guide. There aren’t that many CPU models to choose from on the Pareto front of price and performance.
- generic benchmarks don’t pick up unique CPU features nor they pick up real world application performance. For example, Intel has no answer to the X3D V-cache architecture that makes AMD chips better for gaming.
- You can’t really ignore motherboard cost and the frequency of platform socket changes. AMD has cheaper boards that last longer (as in, they update their sockets less often so you can upgrade chips more and keep your same board)
- $400 is an arbitrary price ceiling and you’re not looking at dollars per performance unit, you’re just cutting off with a maximum price.
- In other words, Intel chips are below $400 because they aren’t fast enough to be worth paying $400+ for.
- If you’re looking for integrated graphics, you’re pretty much always better off with AMD over Intel
How's AMD's engineering support these days? I've heard through the grapevine that many laptops were mostly engineered by intel engineers, creating a natural moat because the laptop brands are used to not having to do much PCB layout or thermals.
AMD, I heard, seemed less capable, or less interested, or couldn't justify at their quantities, to do the same, which meant their engineering support packages were good for atx mainboards only, and maybe the occasional console.
This must have changed a while ago, does anyone have the tea?
And even there, AMD did the GPU for the Wii U, that console was an evolution of the Wii (which was itself an evolution to the Gamecube). AMD had acquired the makers of the Wii/Gamecube graphics chip, and also separately designed the Wii U-specific upgrade GPU used for native Wii U games.
That’s more done by ex. Compal than shrinking Intel, the myth you could trust that was shattered by their insistence up until 4 months before release date that Haswell(?) was going to hit its thermal envelope and perf targets. In 2018, iirc, that was the beginning of the end. Apple had to ship a MacBook generation that struggled with thermals for 3 years and decided to never again be put in that position. Similarly at other important OEMs.
I’m not sure you're going to find anyone here who can personally comment on AMD engineering support, but I can say first hand Asus zephyrus laptops using AMD chips are rock solid.
From the recent experience that I buy AMD mini-pc. (minisforun AI HX370) I don't feel it exist. (Because there is no need to) You just plug it into power socket and than it works. (Which is a good thing)
I find interesting that despite many years of being reminded that DYI market doesn't represent a significant portion of these sales... we are still thinking that individual customers are the one driving the consumption. The one driving this are big OEMs like Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc.
> The one driving this are big OEMs like Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc.
That's why monopoly is a bad thing. It allows manufacturer to pressure the vendor. The reason amd don't sells much in laptop market is extremely simple. Because you can't buy it. These vendors usually have far less version of amd laptop than intel one. And those are usually sells out quickly.
My experiences with trying AMD CPU laptops is that they're not good.
Every time I've tried it in the last 10 years, it's felt like I was teleported into the late 90s PC era - weird bugs in specific drivers that you can find lots of reports of for this specific model and no resolution, heat management that feels like someone in a basement strung things together in 5 minutes and never tested it again, strange failures in "plug and play" support for USB devices that work on every other machine flawlessly with the same cable and device, and don't get me started on Bluetooth. (My favorite ever might be the time that attempting to pair a specific pair of headphones to the laptop shut off every USB port, reproducibly, apparently because the BT adapter was connected over the USB M.2 pins to the root hub, and was crashing in firmware, so both Windows and Linux did the same style of dance of "try to reset it, once that fails, go up a level and turn off the complex to make sure other things keep working"...except up one level was the root.) (Though, to be fair to AMD, that was an Intel BT/wifi chip in an AMD laptop...)
I really want to like and recommend AMD mobile hardware, but every time I've tried it has been a shitshow without fail.
I had to buy two laptops recently, so I got Intel's 9 ultra 285k and Ryzen AI 9. The latter on paper should be slower, but it's a night and day difference. Intel's laptop sounds like a hairdryer when opening a browser tab. Ryzen's fans are far gentler on the ears and trigger less often.
Still both laptops are league below even my old M1.
Just price, I'd say. AMD / Intel are used to a certain margin on their products, and the low barrier to entry to create ARM CPUs, and fierce competition from giants like Broadcom, keeps margins very thin in this market.
The original smart phones like the Nokia Communicator 9110i were x86 based.
AMD previously had very impressive low-power CPUs, like the Geode, running under 1-watt.
Intel took another run at it with Atom, and were able to manage x86 phones (eg: Asus Zenphone) slightly better than contemporary ARM based devices, but the price for their silicon was quite a bit higher than ARM competitors. And Intel had to sink so much money into Atom, in an attempt to dominate the phone/tablet market, that they couldn't be happy just eeking out a small sliver of the market by only being slightly better at a significantly premium price.
I don't think it is price. Intel has had a bigger R&D budget for CPU designs than Apple. If you mean manufacturing price, I also doubt this since AMD and Intel chips are often physically bigger than Apple chips in die size but still slower and less efficient. See M4 Pro vs AMD's Strix Halo as an example where Apple's chip is smaller, faster, more efficient.
Unless they will do something stupid like damaging their 13th and 14th generation of processors by usage and then going great lengths to deny it, until finally being forced to fix it.
Intel is screwed because their foundry is nowhere near up to speed but AMD has zero alternatives to TSMC in Taiwan so they got it worse - at least for now, I don't think TSMC Arizona is ready yet.
Intel has better and more developed virtualization, security features, and other hardware features. AMD seems to make what feels like an MVP that can do the core functionality, but lacks the extra 20% that makes the better product.
I know when AMD had the K8/Opteron, they were obviously doing really well, but their marketshare didn't really change because they were capacity-limited.
I imagine it would be kind of hard to switch away from Intel in the workstation/cluster space.
Like you have to replace OneAPI, which sounds easy because it’s just one thing, but like do you really want to replace BLAS, LAPACK, MPI, ifort/icc… and then you still need to find a sparse matrix solver…
What do you mean by this? I've been using those libraries on mac ARM and AMD processors, are you referring to intel-specific implementations? How about the sparse matrix solver, what do you use?
This is not the first time I criticise AMD haven't been doing enough to steal market share. If Intel is doing so bad right now and has been so for 5 years, and AMD could only take 20 - 30% market share. AMD really needs to think about their execution..
Here's one nice thing about AMD is that there is znver4 and znver5 support baked in from CachyOS, so any Zen 4 laptop (7000, 8000 series) and Zen 5 (Strix Halo AI Max) would get good performance early on. I got a 8745HS laptop for just $400 and I swapped the 1T and 32GB RAM for 2x2T and 64GB RAM, and switched to CachyOS. Except for a weird keyboard issue when resuming from sleep, and some Arch kernel shenanigans, I got no problem so far.
On data center as well. I think AMD rightly decided to focus on larger chips for data center instead of consumer laptops where margins are tiny in comparison and growth has been slow for a few years.
In general AMD seems to not want anything to do with down-market parts.
They still have great laptop & desktop parts, in fact they're essentially the same parts as servers (with less Core Complex Die (CCD) chiplets and simpler IO Die)! Their embedded chips, mobile chips are all the same chiplets too!!
And there's some APU parts that are more consumer focused, which have been quite solid. And now Strix Halo, which were it not for DDR5 prices shooting to the moon, would be incredible prosumer APU.
Where AMD is just totally missing is low end. There's nothing like the Intel N100/N97/N150, which is a super ragingly popular chip for consumer appliances like NAS. I'm hoping their Sound Wave design is real, materializes, offers something a bit more affordable than their usual.
The news at the end of October was that their new low end line up is going to be old Zen2 & Zen3 chips. That's mostly fine, still an amazing chip, just not quite as fast & efficient. But not a lot no small AMD parts. https://wccftech.com/amd-prepares-rebadged-zen-2-ryzen-10-an...
It's crazy how AMD has innovated by building far far less designs than the past. There's not a bunch of different chips designed for different price points, the whole range across all markets (for cpus) is the same core, the same ~3 designs, variously built out.
I do wish AMD would have a better low end story. The Steam Deck is such a killer machine and no one else can make anything with such a clear value, because no one else can buy a bunch of slightly weird old chips for cheap, have to buy much more expensive mainline chips. I really wish there were some smaller interesting APUs available.
I don't get the feeling that they've focused anywhere in particular (and maybe rightly so), they're in everything from low-powered consoles to high powered workstations and data centers, and seemingly everywhere in-between those too.
Goodness I still can't stand his articles. For me, my understanding of the situation was that everything before maybe Ryzen 2-3000 was like "meh, it's good enough". You can actually see a bump in Q1 2017 when Ryzen first came out. I really hoped to see annotated graphs, long term analysis, etc.
Windows 10 EOL is probably helping to churn a lot of aging Intel chips out here. I can't imagine anyone in the know is building a new desktop with an Intel anything in it these days, either.
Unless you need to use AutoCAD, their software have garbage level optimization on amd cpu. It's probably the only software you can see an intel i7 series cpu beat amd r9 by a big margin.
Probably they're using the Intel MKL library for their linear algebra (which is severely gimped on AMD - SIMD is disabled and only the scalar fallback code runs).
If they've wrote SIMD code themselves then the gap between the two shouldn't be big (AMD's are actually better for SIMD nowadays, since the recent models support the AVX-512 instruction set while Intel ended support for that due to the P/E core split fiasco.)
Windows 10 will be the last msft os I ever use. I rebuilt using AMD CPU/GP booted up Fedora 42 and I have never had to run a single shell command to get anything to work. I don't even notice my OS. Work, games, local models (this one still takes some tweaking but is better), all work fine
If you are doing integrated GPU transcoding, Intel is still the best option.
That’s a bit niche though. But for a NAS is great.
As a side note, Intel's discrete GPUs are also famous for high-quality video transcoding - it was quite popular for streamers who needed a second helper PC only for OBS streaming.
How I pick a CPU:
- Visit https://www.cpubenchmark.net/single-thread/ and pick the fastest CPU under $400
- Visit https://www.cpubenchmark.net/multithread/ and verify there are no CPUs at a lower cost with a higher score
It has been, for a long time, the latest generation Intel CPU with a 2xxK or 2xxKF model number these used to be "i7" models now there's just a 7, I'm very vaguely annoyed at the branding change.
It would be hard for anybody to convince me that there is a better price|performance optimum. I get it, there was a very disappointing generation or two a few years ago, that hasn't put me off.
The dominance of Apple CPUs might be putting me off both Intel and AMD and consider only buying Apple hardware and maybe even doing something like Linux running on a Mac Mini in addition to my MacOS daily driver.
> - Visit https://www.cpubenchmark.net/single-thread/ and pick the fastest CPU under $400
FYI www.cpubenchmark.com is a running joke for how bad it is. It’s not a good resource.
There are a few variations of these sites like userbenchmark that have been primarily built for SEO spam and capturing Google visitors who don’t know where to go for good buying advice.
Buying a CPU isn’t really that complicated. For gaming it’s easy to find gaming benchmarks or buyers guides. For productivity you can check Phoronix or even the GeekBench details in the compiler section if that’s what you’re doing.
Most people can skip that and just read any buyers guide. There aren’t that many CPU models to choose from on the Pareto front of price and performance.
4 replies →
Flawed way to pick a CPU if you ask me.
- generic benchmarks don’t pick up unique CPU features nor they pick up real world application performance. For example, Intel has no answer to the X3D V-cache architecture that makes AMD chips better for gaming.
- You can’t really ignore motherboard cost and the frequency of platform socket changes. AMD has cheaper boards that last longer (as in, they update their sockets less often so you can upgrade chips more and keep your same board)
- $400 is an arbitrary price ceiling and you’re not looking at dollars per performance unit, you’re just cutting off with a maximum price.
- In other words, Intel chips are below $400 because they aren’t fast enough to be worth paying $400+ for.
- If you’re looking for integrated graphics, you’re pretty much always better off with AMD over Intel
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I seriously want a Mac, but I hate Apple's pricing and stinginess with RAM/Storage sizes.
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Huh, my method involves the same thing but filtering out all the Intel stuff before selecting the best AMD version.
Why would anyone use such an arbitrary method when you could have a 9800x3D for $40 more?
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That's probably the worst benchmark you could choose.
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How's AMD's engineering support these days? I've heard through the grapevine that many laptops were mostly engineered by intel engineers, creating a natural moat because the laptop brands are used to not having to do much PCB layout or thermals.
AMD, I heard, seemed less capable, or less interested, or couldn't justify at their quantities, to do the same, which meant their engineering support packages were good for atx mainboards only, and maybe the occasional console.
This must have changed a while ago, does anyone have the tea?
> and maybe the occasional console.
To me they seem to be dominating the console scene, doing the CPU and GPU for all consoles from the last two generations, except for Switch and Wii U.
And even there, AMD did the GPU for the Wii U, that console was an evolution of the Wii (which was itself an evolution to the Gamecube). AMD had acquired the makers of the Wii/Gamecube graphics chip, and also separately designed the Wii U-specific upgrade GPU used for native Wii U games.
1 reply →
That’s more done by ex. Compal than shrinking Intel, the myth you could trust that was shattered by their insistence up until 4 months before release date that Haswell(?) was going to hit its thermal envelope and perf targets. In 2018, iirc, that was the beginning of the end. Apple had to ship a MacBook generation that struggled with thermals for 3 years and decided to never again be put in that position. Similarly at other important OEMs.
I’m not sure you're going to find anyone here who can personally comment on AMD engineering support, but I can say first hand Asus zephyrus laptops using AMD chips are rock solid.
> How's AMD's engineering support these days?
From the recent experience that I buy AMD mini-pc. (minisforun AI HX370) I don't feel it exist. (Because there is no need to) You just plug it into power socket and than it works. (Which is a good thing)
I find interesting that despite many years of being reminded that DYI market doesn't represent a significant portion of these sales... we are still thinking that individual customers are the one driving the consumption. The one driving this are big OEMs like Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc.
> The one driving this are big OEMs like Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc.
That's why monopoly is a bad thing. It allows manufacturer to pressure the vendor. The reason amd don't sells much in laptop market is extremely simple. Because you can't buy it. These vendors usually have far less version of amd laptop than intel one. And those are usually sells out quickly.
My experiences with trying AMD CPU laptops is that they're not good.
Every time I've tried it in the last 10 years, it's felt like I was teleported into the late 90s PC era - weird bugs in specific drivers that you can find lots of reports of for this specific model and no resolution, heat management that feels like someone in a basement strung things together in 5 minutes and never tested it again, strange failures in "plug and play" support for USB devices that work on every other machine flawlessly with the same cable and device, and don't get me started on Bluetooth. (My favorite ever might be the time that attempting to pair a specific pair of headphones to the laptop shut off every USB port, reproducibly, apparently because the BT adapter was connected over the USB M.2 pins to the root hub, and was crashing in firmware, so both Windows and Linux did the same style of dance of "try to reset it, once that fails, go up a level and turn off the complex to make sure other things keep working"...except up one level was the root.) (Though, to be fair to AMD, that was an Intel BT/wifi chip in an AMD laptop...)
I really want to like and recommend AMD mobile hardware, but every time I've tried it has been a shitshow without fail.
4 replies →
And who buys from OEMs? We do have a lot of market power as consumers.
I had to buy two laptops recently, so I got Intel's 9 ultra 285k and Ryzen AI 9. The latter on paper should be slower, but it's a night and day difference. Intel's laptop sounds like a hairdryer when opening a browser tab. Ryzen's fans are far gentler on the ears and trigger less often. Still both laptops are league below even my old M1.
Are any of those laptops Linux compatible?
If you want Linux compatible, buy a Lenovo ThinkPad
M1 is
Can anyone explain what prevents AMD from making x86_64 chips competitive with ARM on the lower end like in mobile phones? I doubt it's about ISA.
Just price, I'd say. AMD / Intel are used to a certain margin on their products, and the low barrier to entry to create ARM CPUs, and fierce competition from giants like Broadcom, keeps margins very thin in this market.
The original smart phones like the Nokia Communicator 9110i were x86 based.
AMD previously had very impressive low-power CPUs, like the Geode, running under 1-watt.
Intel took another run at it with Atom, and were able to manage x86 phones (eg: Asus Zenphone) slightly better than contemporary ARM based devices, but the price for their silicon was quite a bit higher than ARM competitors. And Intel had to sink so much money into Atom, in an attempt to dominate the phone/tablet market, that they couldn't be happy just eeking out a small sliver of the market by only being slightly better at a significantly premium price.
I don't think it is price. Intel has had a bigger R&D budget for CPU designs than Apple. If you mean manufacturing price, I also doubt this since AMD and Intel chips are often physically bigger than Apple chips in die size but still slower and less efficient. See M4 Pro vs AMD's Strix Halo as an example where Apple's chip is smaller, faster, more efficient.
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I see, but why others like Qualcomm are doing it then? They are OK with low margins?
7 replies →
Their lowest end chips are probably competitive already. I think x86 support was removed from Android though.
So why did for example Valve decide to use Qualcomm Snapdragon for Steam Frame and not some AMD APU?
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Nova lake looks potentially pretty good, AVX512/APX and very very high core count, so maybe we will see AMD have some competition next year.
This could swing so hard with sudden geopolitical triggers. I also see Intel positioning itself very strongly for its next generation chips.
Unless they will do something stupid like damaging their 13th and 14th generation of processors by usage and then going great lengths to deny it, until finally being forced to fix it.
https://www.digitec.ch/en/page/intel-has-a-big-problem-unsta...
I hear the frustration. I have an intel 13th, and I hope it lasts long enough.
Isn't TSMC Arizona and Japan the hedge for such geopolitical changes?
Their best engineers are probably still going to be in Taiwan, but with the rate at which TSMC is building fabs overseas, it shouldn't matter much.
That fact completely skipped my mind. You're right.
Intel seems vulnerable to Trump tariffs, would seem more likely than TSMC getting into trouble.
Are you saying that Intel is well positioned if Trump let’s China think it can invade Taiwan without consequences?
If so, that’s a hell of a way for Intel to secure its future.
Intel is screwed because their foundry is nowhere near up to speed but AMD has zero alternatives to TSMC in Taiwan so they got it worse - at least for now, I don't think TSMC Arizona is ready yet.
1 reply →
using what fab? lol
Intel has better and more developed virtualization, security features, and other hardware features. AMD seems to make what feels like an MVP that can do the core functionality, but lacks the extra 20% that makes the better product.
And when has anyone ever needed those features?
I'm serious. Doesn't seem like those are useful at anything short of high end server market. And even there the benefits are questionable.
This is actually not true.
https://onidel.com/amd-sev-snp-vs-intel-tdx-vps/
I'd love to see a market share chart going back far far more. At least to the middle of the 90s or so.
I'm very impressed though. I had no idea there were near 1/3 of the desktop market. Good for them.
I know when AMD had the K8/Opteron, they were obviously doing really well, but their marketshare didn't really change because they were capacity-limited.
I imagine it would be kind of hard to switch away from Intel in the workstation/cluster space.
Like you have to replace OneAPI, which sounds easy because it’s just one thing, but like do you really want to replace BLAS, LAPACK, MPI, ifort/icc… and then you still need to find a sparse matrix solver…
What do you mean by this? I've been using those libraries on mac ARM and AMD processors, are you referring to intel-specific implementations? How about the sparse matrix solver, what do you use?
That is really more of a switch from CUDA to HIP; for most HPC applications, cpu speed isn't the question any more.
This is not the first time I criticise AMD haven't been doing enough to steal market share. If Intel is doing so bad right now and has been so for 5 years, and AMD could only take 20 - 30% market share. AMD really needs to think about their execution..
Here's one nice thing about AMD is that there is znver4 and znver5 support baked in from CachyOS, so any Zen 4 laptop (7000, 8000 series) and Zen 5 (Strix Halo AI Max) would get good performance early on. I got a 8745HS laptop for just $400 and I swapped the 1T and 32GB RAM for 2x2T and 64GB RAM, and switched to CachyOS. Except for a weird keyboard issue when resuming from sleep, and some Arch kernel shenanigans, I got no problem so far.
AMD chips are just as fast but with lower thermal output. Why would anyone use Intel at this point?
Possibly lower idle power consumption. Intel chips seem to be doing better there. Anything else, Intel is at best up to par with AMD.
availability
(On desktop systems)
On data center as well. I think AMD rightly decided to focus on larger chips for data center instead of consumer laptops where margins are tiny in comparison and growth has been slow for a few years.
In general AMD seems to not want anything to do with down-market parts.
They still have great laptop & desktop parts, in fact they're essentially the same parts as servers (with less Core Complex Die (CCD) chiplets and simpler IO Die)! Their embedded chips, mobile chips are all the same chiplets too!!
And there's some APU parts that are more consumer focused, which have been quite solid. And now Strix Halo, which were it not for DDR5 prices shooting to the moon, would be incredible prosumer APU.
Where AMD is just totally missing is low end. There's nothing like the Intel N100/N97/N150, which is a super ragingly popular chip for consumer appliances like NAS. I'm hoping their Sound Wave design is real, materializes, offers something a bit more affordable than their usual.
The news at the end of October was that their new low end line up is going to be old Zen2 & Zen3 chips. That's mostly fine, still an amazing chip, just not quite as fast & efficient. But not a lot no small AMD parts. https://wccftech.com/amd-prepares-rebadged-zen-2-ryzen-10-an...
It's crazy how AMD has innovated by building far far less designs than the past. There's not a bunch of different chips designed for different price points, the whole range across all markets (for cpus) is the same core, the same ~3 designs, variously built out.
I do wish AMD would have a better low end story. The Steam Deck is such a killer machine and no one else can make anything with such a clear value, because no one else can buy a bunch of slightly weird old chips for cheap, have to buy much more expensive mainline chips. I really wish there were some smaller interesting APUs available.
9 replies →
I don't get the feeling that they've focused anywhere in particular (and maybe rightly so), they're in everything from low-powered consoles to high powered workstations and data centers, and seemingly everywhere in-between those too.
No, also laptops. The article had a chart for that too. It's all systems.
Goodness I still can't stand his articles. For me, my understanding of the situation was that everything before maybe Ryzen 2-3000 was like "meh, it's good enough". You can actually see a bump in Q1 2017 when Ryzen first came out. I really hoped to see annotated graphs, long term analysis, etc.