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?
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.
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.
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.
> For productivity you can check Phoronix or even the GeekBench details in the compiler section
I guess the reason people prefer something like cpubenchmark, is because it seems way easier to get an overview / see data in aggregate. GeekBench (https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/multicore) for example just puts a list of all benchmarks, even when the CPU is the same. Not exactly conductive for finding the right CPU.
it does feel like, when you click the, "pay 400$ more for a 30$ hardware upgrade" button, that tim apple himself is laughing at me knowing their siren song has already worked and I am at their mercy, wallet open...
Just buy an old one. Unless you are doing some sort of cutting edge work, an old one works fine. It's crazy how cheap they are. I assume because Apple users always like to churn to the newest thing.
You’re not missing out on a lot. Coming from someone who has used their products for many years now. Their products have more compromises and trade-offs now than they did during Apple’s Intel era.
What you will tangibly miss is low noise, low power draw hardware and very, very specific workloads being faster than the cutting edge AMD/Nvidia stack people are using today.
- 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
I got a 265kf and motherboard for 350. Plenty fast and saves money for the real issue which is GPU costs. Thankfully B580 is actually a pretty good deal as well at 250 compared to green or red options. Team blue has some good deals out there really if you aren't tied to a team color.
When i read "here's how i choose..." At no point did i engage with it under anything other than "this is what some random dude does once every 5 years" Let him pick his cpu how he does it. Youre overreacting, and frankly over emphasizing things that dont matter like needing vcache or avx512 or misapprehending his own price points
> $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. So if there’s a $430 AMD CPU that’s 20% faster you’re going to forego that better price per performance value just because it’s slightly above your price target.
My choice of CPU currently has the best value / performance on this benchmark aside from two very old AMD processors which are very slow and just happen to be extremely cheap. No new AMD processors are even remotely close.
It's also currently $285 no top tier performers are even close except SKUs which are slight variations of the same CPU.
> 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.
Happy to be convinced that there's a better benchmark out there, but if you're trying to tell me it's better but in a way that can't be measured, I don't believe you because that's just "bro science".
> If you’re looking for integrated graphics, you’re pretty much always better off with AMD over Intel
I never have been looking for integrated graphics, sometimes I have bought the CPU with it just because it was a little cheaper.
> 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)
I've always bought a new motherboard with a CPU and either repurposed, sold, or given away the old CPU/motherboard combination which seems like a much better use of money. The last one went to somebody's little brother. The one before that is my NAS. There's not a meaningful difference to comparable motherboards to me, particularly when the competing AMD CPUs are nearly double the cost or more.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Damn I love the strix halo. the framework desktop idles at 10W and has modern standby consuming less than 1W, but fully connected so an xbox controller can wake it over bluetooth etc.
My 3080 sffpc eats 70W idle and 400W under load.
Game performance is roughly the same from a normie point of view.
The Intel video encoding pipeline alone is worth going Intel on the low end. Those low-power devices simply need better transcoding support than AMD can currently provide.
Updating this post. Found the review I was looking for!
Newest RDNA4 fixes a pretty weak encoder performance for game streaming, is competitive. Unfortunately (at release at least) av1 is still pretty weak.
https://youtu.be/kkf7q4L5xl8
One thing noted is AMD seems to have really good output at lower bandwidth (~4min mark). Would be nice to have even deeper dives into this. And also whether or not the quality changes over time with driver updates would be curious to know. One of the comments details how already a bunch of the asks in this video (split frame encoding, improved av1) landed 1mo after the video. Hopefully progress continues for rdna4!
https://youtube.com/watch?v=kkf7q4L5xl8&lc=UgzYN-iSC7N097XZi...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> For productivity you can check Phoronix or even the GeekBench details in the compiler section
I guess the reason people prefer something like cpubenchmark, is because it seems way easier to get an overview / see data in aggregate. GeekBench (https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/multicore) for example just puts a list of all benchmarks, even when the CPU is the same. Not exactly conductive for finding the right CPU.
Why would anyone use such an arbitrary method when you could have a 9800x3D for $40 more?
A 9800X3D is $479, my present choice of intel processor is $275.
Is it that much better? Show me.
I seriously want a Mac, but I hate Apple's pricing and stinginess with RAM/Storage sizes.
it does feel like, when you click the, "pay 400$ more for a 30$ hardware upgrade" button, that tim apple himself is laughing at me knowing their siren song has already worked and I am at their mercy, wallet open...
Just buy an old one. Unless you are doing some sort of cutting edge work, an old one works fine. It's crazy how cheap they are. I assume because Apple users always like to churn to the newest thing.
You’re not missing out on a lot. Coming from someone who has used their products for many years now. Their products have more compromises and trade-offs now than they did during Apple’s Intel era.
What you will tangibly miss is low noise, low power draw hardware and very, very specific workloads being faster than the cutting edge AMD/Nvidia stack people are using today.
Genuine question: what compromises are you referring to here?
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
I got a 265kf and motherboard for 350. Plenty fast and saves money for the real issue which is GPU costs. Thankfully B580 is actually a pretty good deal as well at 250 compared to green or red options. Team blue has some good deals out there really if you aren't tied to a team color.
‘Stupid’ is more than a bit strong. Your points are good and the tone undermines them.
Modified to “flawed”
I made the mistake of going with intel because of SR-IOV, which they still haven't mainlined to the linux kernel
>For example, Intel has no answer to the X3D V-cache architecture that makes AMD chips better for gaming.
So, it should be visible in gaming benchmarks, right?
>- If you’re looking for integrated graphics, you’re pretty much always better off with AMD over Intel
What? Lunar Lake CPU has strong iGPU
When i read "here's how i choose..." At no point did i engage with it under anything other than "this is what some random dude does once every 5 years" Let him pick his cpu how he does it. Youre overreacting, and frankly over emphasizing things that dont matter like needing vcache or avx512 or misapprehending his own price points
How many people who buy desktop DIY systems don’t care about gaming performance?
That market is like 90% gamers at least.
3D v-cache is a key feature for that audience. It makes gaming performance significantly better.
> $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. So if there’s a $430 AMD CPU that’s 20% faster you’re going to forego that better price per performance value just because it’s slightly above your price target.
My choice of CPU currently has the best value / performance on this benchmark aside from two very old AMD processors which are very slow and just happen to be extremely cheap. No new AMD processors are even remotely close.
It's also currently $285 no top tier performers are even close except SKUs which are slight variations of the same CPU.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_available.html
> 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.
Happy to be convinced that there's a better benchmark out there, but if you're trying to tell me it's better but in a way that can't be measured, I don't believe you because that's just "bro science".
> If you’re looking for integrated graphics, you’re pretty much always better off with AMD over Intel
I never have been looking for integrated graphics, sometimes I have bought the CPU with it just because it was a little cheaper.
> 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)
I've always bought a new motherboard with a CPU and either repurposed, sold, or given away the old CPU/motherboard combination which seems like a much better use of money. The last one went to somebody's little brother. The one before that is my NAS. There's not a meaningful difference to comparable motherboards to me, particularly when the competing AMD CPUs are nearly double the cost or more.
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.
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…
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.
This could swing so hard with sudden geopolitical triggers. I also see Intel positioning itself very strongly for its next generation chips.
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.
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...
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.
TSMC in Arizona has been at full scale production of 4nm chips for a while now.
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.
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 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?
(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.
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.
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.
Damn I love the strix halo. the framework desktop idles at 10W and has modern standby consuming less than 1W, but fully connected so an xbox controller can wake it over bluetooth etc.
My 3080 sffpc eats 70W idle and 400W under load.
Game performance is roughly the same from a normie point of view.
How did you get Bluetooth wake working?!
That's the true magic of "modern standby".
The OS can just leave BT on and still get interrupt and service it.
I have a 7840u framework and it idles around 7-8w with not much happening.
The Intel video encoding pipeline alone is worth going Intel on the low end. Those low-power devices simply need better transcoding support than AMD can currently provide.
Updating this post. Found the review I was looking for!
Newest RDNA4 fixes a pretty weak encoder performance for game streaming, is competitive. Unfortunately (at release at least) av1 is still pretty weak. https://youtu.be/kkf7q4L5xl8
One thing noted is AMD seems to have really good output at lower bandwidth (~4min mark). Would be nice to have even deeper dives into this. And also whether or not the quality changes over time with driver updates would be curious to know. One of the comments details how already a bunch of the asks in this video (split frame encoding, improved av1) landed 1mo after the video. Hopefully progress continues for rdna4! https://youtube.com/watch?v=kkf7q4L5xl8&lc=UgzYN-iSC7N097XZi...
No, also laptops. The article had a chart for that too. It's all systems.
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.
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?
I have seen speculation that mobile app architecture compatibility was part of it
I see. But aren't they emulating x86_64 on ARM64 there anyway? Can't they emulate ARM64 on x86_64 the same way?
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.
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.