AMD having one good generation doesn’t mean anything when Apple signs multi-year deals. They aren’t HP/Dell/Lenovo who will just contract Foxconn to make a bunch of different boards with standard chipsets to satisfy consumer demand, instead focusing on a tightly integrated platform that they won’t throw away willy-nilly.
If AMD can keep it up this time (or Intel keeps flopping) then it may very well happen down the road. Until then, the age old investor relations statement rings true: “past performance is no guarantee of future results.”
Note: I have a Ryzen 5 1600 in my gaming rig and a Ryzen 5 2600 in the wife’s, I love these chips - but I also see the reality of Apple’s ecosystem is all.
As a AMD stock holder I have not forgot. My opinion still stands.
I have not seen a time I can recall where AMD has been competitive in every vertical against INTEL, not only in PRICE, but node, IPC, single core performance/multicore core performance, and manufacture scaling of several core cpus.
"Competitive" does not ever mean "uncontested". It means the trade-offs are reasonable. Choosing Intel after Zen was released meant making trade-offs -- giving up advantages, such as losing a large amount of multithreaded performance and paying a much higher price, as well as having to disperse more heat at maximum load for the chance at that lesser performance.
Just the same as choosing AMD would involve trade-offs in terms of a very slight loss of single threaded performance, or a higher idle power consumption, particularly in laptops.
In either case, you have good options. Neither product is completely devastatingly useless for any task, as was the case with Bulldozer, which had single threaded performance that was nearly half that of Intel's.
With the release of Zen, there was no longer a clear market leader dominating in performance of all classes, or pricing, or whatever other metric you want. That's called "competitive."
Zen 2 looks like it will be "uncontested." It will have the advantage in essentially everything, including single and multithreaded performance, gaming performance, power consumption, and price... if AMD's benchmarks are to be believed. The general sentiment is that AMD's benchmarks were actually conservative.
The benchmark leaked above in this thread is not running at the production boost clock, which would be 9% higher than the benchmark given, making it theoretically uncontested.
Obviously, we will have to wait for extensive third party benchmarking, but Zen has always been competitive, immediately and unequivocally reducing Intel to merely being competitive as well. Zen 2 has the opportunity be more.
No I didn't. I've even been very happy with my 2700x after a decade of using Intel. But this is a very recent development in the grand scheme of things, and AMD isn't really pulling ahead of Intel until Zen 2 launches next month.
They've not had the IPC of Intel for Sometime (I haven't owned an AMD CPU since the Athlon days, even though I was a fan of AMD as they were better value than Intel).
Where AMD does compete is thread-count. A higher number of slower cores did feel a few niches. Except... Many software vendors charge per core (a Windows Server License is limited to 16 cores), so fewer, faster-cores work out better value for most business users. Plus, power usage is a huge issue in data centres, again favouring Intel.
The biggest problem right now is virtual machines can't move (live migrate) from Intel to AMD hardware (and vice versa) without having to be restarted. So AMD is only really a viable option for new clusters, but I would think Intel is still nervous.
Zen+ has about the same IPC as the Intel processors from when it was released, the problem was just lower clockspeeds. The single threaded gap was somewhere around 5%, not the 40%+ of Bulldozer.
Zen 2 raises IPC by 15%, and raises clock speeds by a solid 10% or more. Single threaded Zen 2 performance is not even a slight concern for me.
Add 9% to the benchmark result this entire thread is about, because this engineering sample was not running at the specified boost frequency that the 3950X will have. Intel has nothing to compete against that... it should be uncontested.
On Epyc, their clock speeds were generally comparable to Intel's, and the single threaded performance was already great there, except for a few specialty processors that Intel released for servers that don't care about high core counts. Epyc 2 stands to completely annihilate any advantage Intel had left.
AMD Zen has always used less power than Intel for each unit of work done, which was one of the original surprises, so... power consumption is absolutely not favoring Intel.
I really feel like you're mentally comparing to the old Bulldozer Opteron processors, based on the concerns you listed.
AMD did have a huge amount of catching up to do after Bulldozer. One of the things that has been keeping Intel ahead is their fabrication has been going smoothly, generally ALWAYS ahead of what AMD had available to them. Here's the first article I hit (AMD loses on both idle and load): www.anandtech.com/show/11544/intel-skylake-ep-vs-amd-epyc-7000-cpu-battle-of-the-decade/22
Intel seems to be in a perfect storm, while AMD seems to have all their ducks lined up (architecture, Fabrication Process, clock speeds).
Still, exciting times! Intel has stagnated on quad-core enthusiast CPUs for a decade (Q6600 - 7700k), it's good to finally have some competition again.
