Is there really still such a market for Intel CPUs?
I do not understand that
AMDs Zen is so much better and is the superior technology since almost a decade now.
Intel is in the precarious position of being the largest surviving American owned semiconductor manufacturer, with the competition either existing abroad (TSMC, Samsung, ASML) or as a partner/subsidiary of a foreign national firm (NVidia simply procures its chips from TSMC, GlobalFoundries was bought up by the UAE sovereign wealth fund, etc).
Consequently, whenever the US dumps a giant bucket of money into the domestic semiconductor industry, Intel is there to clean up whether or not their technology actually works.
Small correction: only surviving that makes desktop/server class chips. Companies like Texas Instruments and Microchip still have US foundries for microcontrollers.
The argument was that while AMD is better on paper in most things, Intel would give you rock solid stability. That argument has now taken an Iowa-class broadside to the face.
I don’t watch LTT anymore, but a few years back they had a video where they were really pushing the limits of PCIe lanes on an Epyc chip by stuffing it full of NVMe drives and running them with software RAID (which Epyc’s sick number of cores should be able to handle). Long story short, they ran into a bunch of problems. After talking to Wendel of Level1Techs, he mentioned that sometimes, AMD just doesn’t work the way it seems it should based on paper specs. Intel usually does. (Might be getting a few details wrong about this, but the general gist should be right.)
This argument was almost the only thing stopping AMD from taking over the server market. The other thing was AMD simply being able to manufacture enough chips in a short time period. The server market is huge; Intel had $16B revenue in “Data Center and AI” in 2023, while AMD’s total revenue was $23B. Now manufacturing ramp up might be all that’s stopping AMD from owning it.
Intels have been working in my Linux server better than AMD. The AMDs kept causing server crashes due to C-state nonsense that no amount of BIOS tweaking would fix. AMD is great for performance and efficiency (and cost/value) in my gaming PC but wreaking havoc with my server which I need to be reliably functional without power restarts.
The new AMD generation kinda tossed all the good out the window. Now they are the more expensive option and even with this Intel fuckup they are likely still going to be the go to for people that have more sense then money.
Funny that the good old zen 3 stuff is still swinging above its weight class.
AMD keeps some older generations in production as their budget options - and as they had excellent CPUs for multiple generations now you also get pretty good computers out of that. Even better - with some planning you’ll be able to upgrade to another CPU later when checking chipset lifecycle.
AMD has established by now that they deliver what they promise - and intel couldn’t compete with them for a few generations over pretty much the complete product line - so they can afford now to have the bleeding edge hardware at higher prices. It’s still far away from what intel was charging when they were dominant 10 years ago - and if you need that performance for work well worth the money. For most private systems I’d always recommend getting last gen, though.
They have a small part of the market, they very much can not afford to have an entire generation of chips that have memory channel problems, have less performance then the gen before for the first 6 months and costs more then their competitor.
If they keep making zen 3 until this phase of insanity passes then good, but this chasing pointless gains at the cost of everything needs to end.
Intel’s iGPU is still the by far the best option for applications such as media transcoding. It’s a shame that AMD haven’t focussed more on this but understandable, it’s relatively niche.
Links a list where the three top spots substantiate the claim, followed by a comparatively large 8% drop.
To add a bit of nuance: There are definitely exceptions to the claim. But if I had to make a blanket statement, it would absolutely be in favor of AMD.
The point of the chart is that it alternates over a wide performance range, there isn’t a blanket winner between the company that can’t figure out security and the company that can’t figure out thermals.
On what workloads? AMD is king for most games, and for less price. It’s also king for heavily multicore workloads, but not on the same CPU as for games.
In other words, they don’t have a CPU that is king for both at the same time. That’s the one thing Intel was good at, provided you could cool the damn thing.
Is there really still such a market for Intel CPUs? I do not understand that AMDs Zen is so much better and is the superior technology since almost a decade now.
Prebuilts and laptops
Intel is in the precarious position of being the largest surviving American owned semiconductor manufacturer, with the competition either existing abroad (TSMC, Samsung, ASML) or as a partner/subsidiary of a foreign national firm (NVidia simply procures its chips from TSMC, GlobalFoundries was bought up by the UAE sovereign wealth fund, etc).
Consequently, whenever the US dumps a giant bucket of money into the domestic semiconductor industry, Intel is there to clean up whether or not their technology actually works.
Small correction: only surviving that makes desktop/server class chips. Companies like Texas Instruments and Microchip still have US foundries for microcontrollers.
The argument was that while AMD is better on paper in most things, Intel would give you rock solid stability. That argument has now taken an Iowa-class broadside to the face.
I don’t watch LTT anymore, but a few years back they had a video where they were really pushing the limits of PCIe lanes on an Epyc chip by stuffing it full of NVMe drives and running them with software RAID (which Epyc’s sick number of cores should be able to handle). Long story short, they ran into a bunch of problems. After talking to Wendel of Level1Techs, he mentioned that sometimes, AMD just doesn’t work the way it seems it should based on paper specs. Intel usually does. (Might be getting a few details wrong about this, but the general gist should be right.)
This argument was almost the only thing stopping AMD from taking over the server market. The other thing was AMD simply being able to manufacture enough chips in a short time period. The server market is huge; Intel had $16B revenue in “Data Center and AI” in 2023, while AMD’s total revenue was $23B. Now manufacturing ramp up might be all that’s stopping AMD from owning it.
Should be this vid: https://youtu.be/uY_jeaxVgIE
Intels have been working in my Linux server better than AMD. The AMDs kept causing server crashes due to C-state nonsense that no amount of BIOS tweaking would fix. AMD is great for performance and efficiency (and cost/value) in my gaming PC but wreaking havoc with my server which I need to be reliably functional without power restarts.
So I have both.
The new AMD generation kinda tossed all the good out the window. Now they are the more expensive option and even with this Intel fuckup they are likely still going to be the go to for people that have more sense then money.
Funny that the good old zen 3 stuff is still swinging above its weight class.
AMD keeps some older generations in production as their budget options - and as they had excellent CPUs for multiple generations now you also get pretty good computers out of that. Even better - with some planning you’ll be able to upgrade to another CPU later when checking chipset lifecycle.
AMD has established by now that they deliver what they promise - and intel couldn’t compete with them for a few generations over pretty much the complete product line - so they can afford now to have the bleeding edge hardware at higher prices. It’s still far away from what intel was charging when they were dominant 10 years ago - and if you need that performance for work well worth the money. For most private systems I’d always recommend getting last gen, though.
They have a small part of the market, they very much can not afford to have an entire generation of chips that have memory channel problems, have less performance then the gen before for the first 6 months and costs more then their competitor.
If they keep making zen 3 until this phase of insanity passes then good, but this chasing pointless gains at the cost of everything needs to end.
Intel’s iGPU is still the by far the best option for applications such as media transcoding. It’s a shame that AMD haven’t focussed more on this but understandable, it’s relatively niche.
Its the only chip that runs on open source bios and you can completely disable the Intel ME after boot up.
AMD’s PSP is 100% proprietary spyware that can’t be disabled or manipulated into not running.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_available.html#xy_scatter_graph Don’t see data backing up your claim across a wide range of perf
Links a list where the three top spots substantiate the claim, followed by a comparatively large 8% drop.
To add a bit of nuance: There are definitely exceptions to the claim. But if I had to make a blanket statement, it would absolutely be in favor of AMD.
The point of the chart is that it alternates over a wide performance range, there isn’t a blanket winner between the company that can’t figure out security and the company that can’t figure out thermals.
Naw. Zen was a leap ahead when it came out but AMD didn’t keep that pace long and Intel CPUs quickly caught up.
I just almost bought a Ryzen 9 7900x but a i7-13700k ended up being cheaper and outperforms the AMD chip.
13th gen, i7-13700k. (!)
On what workloads? AMD is king for most games, and for less price. It’s also king for heavily multicore workloads, but not on the same CPU as for games.
In other words, they don’t have a CPU that is king for both at the same time. That’s the one thing Intel was good at, provided you could cool the damn thing.