7 ms·
Intel 28-core fantasy vs. AMD 32-core reality
- solomatov 8y agoAMD did a great job with Threadripper, making high end CPUs much more affordable. It's interesting that Intel doesn't lower their prices. What's the logic behind it?
- dboreham 8y agoRetail sales must be a very small percentage of the market. Perhaps they don't expect to sell any units anyway so the price doesn't matter.
- wmf 8y agoIntel was selling 18-core chips for >$2,400 then when Threadripper came out Intel released the 18-core i9 for "only" $2,000, so that is something of a price drop. Also, Intel's $350 8700K was cheaper at launch than AMD's $450 1800X even though the 8700K is faster in gaming.
- solomatov 8y agoThe top core i9 costs 2k$ on amazon. The top ryzen cost $799. So, they are cheaper than Xeon, but not cheaper than equivalent AMD's processor.
- glandium 8y agoYou should compare the top i9 with threadripper 1950X, which is more expensive, but still less expensive than an i9.
- examancer 8y agoThat's literally what the OP did. A 1950X is only $799 now, so less than half a top end i9.
- loeg 8y agoThat's extremely recent. It was more like $900 a day or two ago: https://camelcamelcamel.com/AMD-Threadripper-32-thread-Processor-YD195XA8AEWOF/product/B074CBH3R4?context=search https://camelcamelcamel.com/AMD-Threadripper-32-thread-Proce... And it is still $960 on Newegg: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113447 https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1681911...
- sosuke 8y agoEh its just a matter of patience I guess. I got mine for $799 in December.
- dragontamer 8y agoI got my 1950x for $699 a few months ago. Its been $699 for a while at Microcenter. The "price-competitive" i9-7900x is 10-cores for $799, and seems to be the best price-competitive comparison. Better single-thread, better at AVX512 tasks, but weaker in general purpose multithreading due to having fewer cores.
- yellowapple 8y ago"And it is still $960 on Newegg" As of 2018-06-11 18:27 PDT (when I clicked on that link) the current Newegg price is $799.99.
- loeg 8y agoThe grandparent comment is not claiming that $2k is under $800, but instead that Intel would be able to charge a higher price for the i9 if the TR was not on the market.
- zaarn 8y agoKeep in mind that AMD has an inherent advantage: the Zen architecture and Glue. When AMD fabs a TR2 they have to find 4 good Ryzen dies which are fairly small and they make a lot of them since they are part of the entire lineup. Once they have 4 good dies, they get glued together. If they wanted 64 cores they'd just have to look for 8 good Ryzen dies, halving their yield compared to 32. On the Intel side they have to increase the silicon area and then hope that all 64 cores are capable of full core speed in the current setup. Glueing CPUs together makes it cheap to scale at little cost.
- smueller1234 8y agoErr, that's only partially true at best. If you have many dies, the cost (in money, in chip real estate and in performance drop) of the interconnect skyrockets.
- undersuit 8y agoThe interconnect cost also skyrockets on the cores themselves. Intel's moved to a mesh network on their newest cores: https://www.anandtech.com/show/11550/the-intel-skylakex-review-core-i9-7900x-i7-7820x-and-i7-7800x-tested/5 https://www.anandtech.com/show/11550/the-intel-skylakex-revi... AMD's advantage of picking and choosing smaller parts still reigns supreme. If a Infinity Fabric component on the AMD die is defective enough to necessitate it is turned off the die is no longer able to participate in some of the more complex multi-die couplings. If the mesh component on an Intel die is defective the core(two actually because SKUs) has to be fused off and the part automatically bins as a lower SKU. As the mesh increases in complexity more and more of the design can be compromised.
- glandium 8y agoIt's a bummer that perf counters are not accurate on TR/ryzen, blocking rr from working on it. https://github.com/mozilla/rr/issues/2034#issuecomment-304445368 https://github.com/mozilla/rr/issues/2034#issuecomment-30444... Edit: typo
- loeg 8y agoIntel did lower prices on several chips in response.
- lsiq 8y agoThey spent such a long time making the "best" that now they get to ride that goodwill for a while with consumers, regardless of where they are presently with respect to competition. Toyota and Honda enjoy the same luxury, they outsell the competition today more because of what they did in 90s than what they did in 2016-17.
- jpalomaki 8y agoIs there some maintained "bang for buck" chart available that would show how many units of certain performance metric one $ buys with different CPUs?
- throwawaymath 8y agoYes, you're looking for the Passmark "Best Value" ranking: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_available.html https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_available.html It's also helpfully represented as a scatter plot: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_available.html#multicpu_xy_scatter_graph https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_available.html#multic.... Unsurprisingly, older generation models tend to dominate that list. Keep in mind that the thermal efficiency for Xeon v2 and v3 models is lower than v4; Passmark does not include power draw in this ranking. If you can afford the extra power usage and don't mind DDR3 RAM, high clockspeed + high core CPUs can be had relatively cheaply by going with V2.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- undersuit 8y agoI'm of the mind that AMD's smaller cores working together is the secret sauce to their price advantage. Intel has done an amazing done stuffing 28 cores into one piece of silicon and extracting as much performance as possible all for the low price of $10k. AMD took their 8 core part that they are selling essentially up and down their product line... and slapped 4 of them together.
- dingo_bat 8y agoIt's awesome that TR2 will be a drop in replacement on existing motherboards! Props to AMD for delivering real value to consumers.
- havemylife 8y agoI recall reading that the thread ripper 2 is supposed to use more power so early motherboards with that socket my not be able to handle it. Just something to keep in mind. Regardless damn good on AMD.
- 42656e 8y ago2nd Gen TR will draw ~250W. X399 boards have at least 1x 4-Pin and 1x 8-Pin ATX-12V connector, so at least 225W. The rest is supplied by the ATX 24 pin connection. Some X399 boards use 2x 8-Pin ATX-12V connectors, that works out to 300W, which should be more than enough for Threadripper 2.
- havemylife 8y agoI'm just relaying what I read when they announced the TR2. Which seems to be copy-pasted to amongst the tech news sites. Unfortunately they just state "... some first-generation X399 motherboards may not be able to deliver enough power..." And not specifically which. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/06/amd-unveils-threadripper-2-up-to-32-cores-64-threads-for-an-enthusiast-chip/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/06/amd-unveils-threadri... If their statement is false then that's on them.
- loeg 8y agoMost/all early TR boards were "gaming" branded/targetted, and those typically have power headroom for overclocking. It's certainly possible some of the early boards won't be able to support TR2 at full spec speeds, but I would anticipate most being able to.
- sigkrieger 8y agoThat’s only the 32core And perhaps 24core TR. the 8-16 will probably be lower than current due to node shrink.
- jopython 8y agoI believe Intel's designs are based on a single die compared to AMD threadripper which are multichip.
- bluedino 8y agoCould Intel stick more than one on a single chip?
- CarVac 8y agoTheir first dual-core processors were multiple chip modules.
- zeusk 8y agoThey however did not have a proper on-die interconnect and instead communicated over the FSB which made them quite bad at scaling.
- tadfisher 8y agoYes, but so far they have not, instead investing in on-die mesh interconnects for scaling up core count. Here's an opinion piece on the subject: https://www.anandtech.com/show/12814/a-thought-on-silicon-design-intels-lcc-on-hedt-is-dead https://www.anandtech.com/show/12814/a-thought-on-silicon-de...
- MBCook 8y agoYou’re right, but obviously the advantage that used to give them isn’t working out anymore. AMD’s interconnect seems fast enough, and they don’t have the yield/cost problems from massive single die chips.
- sliken 8y agoMore importantly that they can target desktops, high end desktops, and servers with the same exact silicon. So they can amortize their R&D across more units, and of course the supply line is much simpler. So AMD doesn't have to guess ahead of time what mix of ryzen, threadripper, and epyc chips they will sell.
- hyperrail 8y agoI think of AMD's current approach - a microarchitecture with slower cores, but more cores, than Intel - as very similar to what Sun/Oracle tried to do from 2005 to 2010 with the Niagara family (UltraSPARC T1-T3). Each core in those chips was seriously underclocked compared to a Xeon of similar vintage and price point (1-1.67 GHz; compared to 1.6 GHz to 3 or more), and lacked features like out-of-order execution and big caches that are almost minimum requirements for a modern server CPU. Sun hoped to make up for the slow cores in server applications with having more cores and having multiple threads per core (though with a simpler technology than SMT/hyper-threading). However, Oracle eventually decided to focus on single-threaded performance with its more recent chips - it turns out that no OoO and < 2 GHz nominal speeds look pretty bad for many server applications. My suspicion is that even though the CPU-bound parts of games are becoming more multi-threaded, AMD will be forced to fix its slower architecture or lose out to Intel again in the server AND high-end desktop markets in a few years.
- kankroc 8y agoThis is a gross overestimate of how far behind AMD is in single core performance. We're talking a few lost frames per second in games not some crazy sun vs oracle stuff.
- wmf 8y agoIt's not similar at all. AMD's cores are 10-20% slower while Niagara was 80-90% slower. And AMD isn't intentionally slower; they designed the Zen core for maximum single-thread performance but they just didn't do as good a job as Intel because their budget is vastly smaller.
- dmichulke 8y agoA slightly OT question: Wasn't that 10-20% before meltdown? Or is there still some similar disadvantage in clock speed per Watt or IPC?
- loeg 8y agoAMD still takes the hit for Spectre mitigations, even if it does not need Meltdown mitigation. And I'm not sure it's possible to fairly discount Intel's performance with meltdown mitigations applied. I think the impact will vary depending on workload.
- yomritoyj 8y agoAs an outsider to 'enterprise-grade' computing, I'm curious about situations where a high number of cores in a single processor would be superior to multiple processors with the same total energy draw sitting on a single motherboard? I can understand HPC applications where the high-speed interconnect on the chip would make a big difference. But in business applications where the cores are dedicated to running independent VMs, or are handling independent client requests, what is really gained? There would still be some benefits from a shared cache, but how large quantitatively would that be?
- downrightmike 8y agoWhen VMware charges per socket and not per core.
- NickNameNick 8y agoBig ditto for Oracle. probably others.
- downrightmike 8y agoRealistically, it is easy to count cores. Some companies still count MAC addresses.
- haikuginger 8y agoThe way Oracle and VMWare bill is not bound by a technical limitation.
- wmantly 8y agoIt has to do with memory. In server grade computers, each socket has memory local slots that it can read and write to very fast. Read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-uniform_memory_access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-uniform_memory_access
- 8y ago
- rocky1138 8y agoWhich one of these companies does at better job with free/libre software? I've always had a soft spot for AMD because it's the underdog, but I want to make sure that they are free, too.
- robin_reala 8y agoAre you talking about contributions to OSS in general, or specifically around processors?
- rocky1138 8y agoIn general, as a company.
- dragontamer 8y agoBoth AMD and Intel seem highly supportive of OSS. Intel's iGPUs had the best Linux drivers for the longest time, while AMD just managed to mainline their GPU drivers into the 4.15 kernel. I think AMD is "worse" at it but for understandable reasons. They're a smaller company, so it takes a bit longer for AMD to release low-level manuals. (Ex: still waiting on those Zen architecture instruction timings AMD!!). Even then, AMD releases "draft" manuals which allow the OSS world to move. So the important stuff is still out there, even as AMD is a bit slow on the documentation front. Basically, Intel is a bigger company and handles the details a bit better than AMD. But both are highly supportive of OSS in great degrees.
- Senderman 8y agoIf the answer turned out to be Intel, would you overlook the misleading 28-core demo the article discusses?
- bayindirh 8y agoIntel provides a lot of patches for Linux Kernel, for their hardware, performance counters, and their graphics drivers are open source under mainline. I'm not mentioning their wired Ethernet and other various drivers. Being one of the top contributors in Linux/OSS/FLOSS doesn't allow them to come clean from their 28-core, inadvertently but conveniently miscommunicated demo.
- chrisper 8y agoI just recently replaced my old i7 920 in the homeserver with an AMD Ryzen 5 2600. Really like it so far. Price / performance is great. This is my first AMD since probably ever.... The two things I don't like is that their CPUs are pin based. It seemed kind of old fashioned after Intel CPUs. But this is really a minor thing. The other issue is memory compatibility is a bit finicky. Maybe it has to do with the CPU being so new. Not sure.
- AndrewDavis 8y ago> don't like is that their CPUs are pin based To me that's a win. If a CPU pin is bent it's typically fairly easy to straighten it. Fixing a bent pin a socket is a massive pain. But it's much easier to protect socket pins with the cover. So there are pros and cons either way.
- dpedu 8y agoTrue, though it is much easier to damage a pin-based CPU in the first place.
- zaarn 8y agoUsually, I'm very careful with the CPU, more than the motherboard, so I think that balances out.
- frankharv 8y agoMassive pain is an undestatement. Fixing a socket pin with a that small of a package size and 1151 pins is nearly impossible. Good luck. You better have a loop or magnifier. I buy Intel Mobile CPU boards for exactly this reason. Pins. I have not bent a single one in years. The Notebook CPU's are so thermally efficient it is a real selling point to me.
- CoolGuySteve 8y agoRyzen chips scale in performance more than Intel when you overclock the RAM. Some part of the chip cache is more tightly coupled to the RAM latency, and my rampant speculation is that Intel doesn’t really care about memory bandwidth as much on the desktop anyways.
- jejones3141 8y agoFor a long time I saved a copy of a publication by Motorola about how Intel played fast and loose with benchmarks in comparisons of the 80386 with the 68020. (I lost it in a move, alas.) Can't say I was surprised to read about the 28-core fiasco.
- NullPrefix 8y agolink?
- manual 8y agoNot specific to the Motorola but there have been a number of allegations of Intel doing this over the years: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2842647/intel-will-pay-you-15-to-settle-claims-it-fudged-pentium-4-benchmarks.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/2842647/intel-will-pay-you-1... http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49 http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49
- nikanj 8y agoThis is a game all CPU manufacturers play. I still remember the days of Apple claiming their G4 processors were faster than Intel ones. Then they swapped platforms, and all of those claims evaporated without a trace.
- Phylter 8y agoThis article repeats itself many times. Are they trying to hit a word count quota? Is this high school again?
- vbezhenar 8y agoIn the end Intel got bad PR and AMD got good PR. Is it a major PR failure from Intel?
- lbill 8y agoI get that Intel feels threatened by AMD. They are trying to impress the consumers... but bullshitting a demo is a very bad move! When a consumer decides to build a new PC, the characteristics of the product matter, but so does the reputation of the company that manufactures it. Right now Intel is putting too much effort into sketchy marketing practices: it undermines the actual work being done on their processors by some very talented people. Presenting it as an extreme overclocking demo would have been a much wiser option.
- xxs 8y agoThat would be akin to i7 8086k on 7.2GHz... just add LN2. What they presented was an extreme overclocking area with insulation (due to subambient condensation), a one HP chiller that runs on a banned gas and a 4 second benchmark (seriously aside CB being free is not a true testament of overclocking prowess). Such a demo is as pointless as it is almost as practical as daily LN2 use. I can imagine few cases where first-to-right-the-bell performance on a single core determines if you get a specific quote in HFT but that's that.
- zeusk 8y ago> I can imagine few cases where first-to-right-the-bell performance on a single core determines if you get a specific quote in HFT but that's that. That is actually the case from what I've heard, A lot of them buy consumer chips then disable all but one core and overclock it to the max. Here is a guy from optiver talking about their process at CppCon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH1Tta7purM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH1Tta7purM
- softawre 8y agoWhat a great talk, thanks for sharing!
- jacob019 8y agoUnfortunately it might work. With today's news cycles, an average consumer may have noticed the headline about Intel's 5GHz 28-core monster, and that's it. Follow up articles aren't as interesting.
- hardwaresofton 8y agoI'm excited for what this will do to the cost of dedicated servers in ~1 year. Also, as a person who used to work at Intel, I don't know whose idea this was, but that person should probably have a long hard look at themselves -- hardware people are exactly the people that this kind of shit wouldn't fly with, because they'll almost always ask for details and can spot a hack from a mile away. On the one hand I can sympathize with Intel -- seeing how tough it was to stay on the market year over year, trying to predict and start developing the next trend in hardware. But on the other hand... Why in the world would you do this -- Intel basically dominates the high end market right now, just take your time and make a properly better thing.
- dragontamer 8y ago> I'm excited for what this will do to the cost of dedicated servers in ~1 year. This is the opposite though? The dedicated servers are turning into HEDTs. AMD 32-core EPYC has been available since last year, and Intel's 28-core Skylake (although $10,000) has been also available for a year. So dedicated servers got this tech first, then HEDT got it a bit later. I guess Threadripper is Zen+ so its technically HEDT gets the 12nm tech first, but the 32-core infrastructure was in EPYC first.
- x0f1a 8y agoThe problem IMO is that Intel HEDTs don't support ECC (as far as I know), so not very good idea when you are working with workloads that need 64GB - 128GB of RAM (video editing, etc)
- hardwaresofton 8y agoAhh I deal with bare metal cloud companies that sell dedicated HEDTs so I was thinking that I'd be able to find even more HEDTs with great specs in a year's time as Threadrippers make their way through the market. People (including me) pay a premium for faster Intel cores and I'm excited to make the switch to slower, more plentiful AMD cores when I can, because I've invested in learning languages that do their best to handle parallelism well. In practice the only difference between the dedicated servers of yesteryear and HEDTs of today is becoming perception (well and some very specific features), and considering computational load of most things hasn't actually gotten that much bigger, in addition to a proliferation of langauges that can adequately use multiple cores, feels like everything is looking to get cheaper yet better -- that's what excites me.
- ben509 8y agoThere was an interview with an Intel engineer on this, it was quite revealing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozcEel1rNKM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozcEel1rNKM
- orev 8y agoThis is a short term loss for Intel, but could end up being a long term win as an attack on AMD. Making this announcement forced AMD to advance their plans for the 32-core, possibly faster than they really wanted to right now. That depletes their product pipeline faster, making it more difficult to keep pace with future advances. Edit: initial reports said that AMD was only planning to announce the 24-core CPU, and may have advanced the announcement of the 32-core chip due to Intel’a stunt. TFA doesn’t mention that, so possibly the initial reports were not accurate.
- BlackMonday 8y agoThey maxed out the number of cores they can ship in a single CPU for now but that doesn't seem like a problem. AMD will already launch their 7nm EPYC processor based on Zen 2 in 2019 (skipping Zen+ used by the new Threadripper and Ryzen 2xxx) which is expected to have 48 cores (some rumors even suggest 64 cores but that seems more likely for 7nm EUV instead of the first 7nm processes). So they will have no problem releasing more cores with Threadripper 3 next year (if they keep the yearly releases). On top of that, in my layman eyes AMDs aproach of using infinity fabric to connect dies seems better suited to react to changes compared to Intels monolithic design.
- glonq 8y agoIt appears that Intel wanted to trump AMD. ...and also wanted to Trump AMD.