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AMD Intel Hardware

Motley Fool: AMD 'Isn't Done Hammering Intel Yet' (fool.com) 42

The Motley Fool writes: AMD held just under 18% of the CPU market at the end of 2016 before Ryzen arrived. The latest third-party estimates suggest that the chipmaker now controls close to 37% of the market. Other reliable estimates from the likes of video gaming platform Steam also suggest that AMD has been consistently chipping away at Intel's CPU dominance. And AMD isn't done hammering Intel in CPUs just yet — especially since the arrival of its latest Ryzen 5000 CPUs...

According to AMD's own claims, a high-end Ryzen 5000 processor can deliver a 26% jump in gaming performance over the previous-generation chip. AMD also claims that the chip is 7% faster in gaming performance than the competing Intel chip...

Rumors suggest that Intel may not launch its 12th-generation 10nm Alder Lake processors until the second half of 2021 to compete with AMD's 7nm process. So AMD is likely to continue enjoying a technology lead over Intel, especially considering that it could make the move to a 5nm manufacturing process with the Zen 4 microarchitecture by the end of 2021, according to rumors. As such, don't be surprised to see AMD continuing to eat Intel's market share, and remaining a top growth stock in the future thanks to a combination of improved CPU sales and stronger pricing power.

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Motley Fool: AMD 'Isn't Done Hammering Intel Yet'

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  • by crow ( 16139 ) on Saturday October 17, 2020 @08:44PM (#60620426) Homepage Journal

    I'm not surprised to hear that Steam is seeing a lot more AMD systems. Steam is the gaming market, and gamers look for any technological edge when buying their systems. That's one market where there is far less brand loyalty, and technical specs really matter. In the business market, however, the opposite is true. Companies know they've been fine with Intel in the past, and they're willing to pay a little more and get a little less to stick with what they know. They want reliability, and Intel has at least the perception of being reliable. It's the good-enough and safe choice. Companies generally aren't interested in switching to something new to get something slightly better now, only to switch back next year, and then have a mix of equipment to support, having to deal with the issues of both. They only want to switch if AMD provides a compelling story--long term superiority or technology now that the business really needs.

    • by MrNaz ( 730548 ) on Saturday October 17, 2020 @09:07PM (#60620452) Homepage

      Many hosting providers are moving their VM hosts to AMD. I'm with Binary Lane here in Australia and they have AMD hosts now along with their Xeon ones.

      Speaking to them, they prefer them. The cost per client facing VPS instance is far lower.

    • The average gamer has a fixed budget. Money saved on the processor/mobo means a better graphics card/storage now, which gets generally gets you better framerates/loading times than the difference between the processors themselves. It's only at the top of the pile that Intel was clearly the better choice.

      • yeah, gamers are typically more focused on the price to performance ratio.

        But the real damage to intel lies in the fact that the way hardware has stagnated in terms of specs needed for new games; a guy upgrading now isn't likely to do another upgrade for another 5+ years. So if intel is blown out of the water now, they aren't likely to get many 'enthusiast' customers for quite some time. which leads game studios to optimize for amd, further cementing AMD's lead for gamers.

        obviously not enough to damage in

      • This is true, however, most business users will be well-served by Zen 2 APU.

        Even their entry-level closeout Zen 1 has fairly competitive performance with skylake processors that actually stick to their 65w TDP. (read: your average Dell//HP sff business system) .

        Zen 3 will also eventually appear in APU-form, but it crossing the undeniable Intel performance barrier demands a higher launch price.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 17, 2020 @09:19PM (#60620470)

      In the late 80s Intel tried to sue AMD (twice, and lost both times) to prevent them from producing their own 80386 CPUs. I said Fuck Intel and never went back. Prior to Ryzen, AMD was "good enough" and significantly cheaper. Now, AMD is just as good, or better, and still cheaper. Fuck Intel.

      • Same here. Intel and nVidia compete for the most sleazy marketing company in the hardware business. They release buggy and expensive products, fuck'em. Intel is truly fucked now, the company's internal climate is poison, it's rotting from the inside. It would take great manages and complete transformation of the company to be competitive again. But that is nearly impossible with giant companies, like Intel, so... if you own stock, sell.
      • No, Intel was not suing AMD for manufacturing "their own" 386. Intel was suing AMD for manufacturing 1:1 copy of Intel 386 :). AMD argued it had rights to whole design due to technology-sharing agreements and dual source licensing. Intel argued AMD didnt bother to fulfill their end of the licensing contract by not designing any original chips of their own to share. There were multiple suits between AMD and Intel.

        - 287 microcode: Initially Intel won by committing perjury, verdict reversed and AMD granted rig

    • I'm not a "Gamer" but I just upgraded my PC (today) and I went for a Ryzen 5 3600X.

    • amd servers are better then intel and cost less!

      with more pci-e lanes at 4.0 (128 with 1 cpu)

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Intel may currently dominate but AMD is killing them in the server market too. My team recently went through the next gen server upgrade and that was thousands of servers that were all moved over to epyc chips. We arent alone either, many other top data center users are switching to AMD just because of the giant performance and price difference. AMD's server chips cost half as much with much much better performance, especially in the IO area compared to intel

    • by EvilSS ( 557649 ) on Saturday October 17, 2020 @11:50PM (#60620698)
      They are making in-roads into server rooms with their high core count CPUs. VMWare put a wrench in this a bit with their latest license changes though. "We aren't going to a per-core license, but if your CPU has more than this many cores, you need another socket license for it" bullshit. Too many places replacing dual CPU servers with single CPU, super high core AMD Epyc machines, and cutting their license cost in half.

      Also let's not forget that back in 2006-2008 AMD made serious inroads into the datacenter with their multicore Opteron CPUs, and really kickstarted x86/x64 virtualization. Intel then came back and murdered them with Core/Nehalem, and AMD slid back to being seen as a budget brand CPU. I'm glad to see them giving it to Intel but they need to be able to keep it up for the long haul if they really want to do serious damage to them.
    • by r1348 ( 2567295 ) on Sunday October 18, 2020 @01:36AM (#60620770)

      Uuhh no.

      The security issues that plagued Intel chips (AMD too, but to a much smaller degree) really broke the credibility of Intel among their bigger customers, especially those operating cloud platforms. AWS offers AMD instances now, which never did before.
      On the enterprise laptop market, the lackluster performance of Intel chips is also creating space for AMD APUs, for the first time even the *really big* corporation I work for is offering AMD laptops alongside Intel ones for their employees (HP Elitebooks).

      • by 1s44c ( 552956 )

        AWS offers AMD instances now, which never did before.

        And they are slightly slower but significantly cheaper. I use them.

        It's great to see AMD coming out on top after all the anti-competitive stuff Intel has pulled on them.

    • Steam is the gaming market, and gamers look for any technological edge when buying their systems. That's one market where there is far less brand loyalty, and technical specs really matter.

      It's just worth remembering price in that equation. AMD is absolutely a technical edge when funds are limited, but ultimately up until now the top gaming systems have remained Intel due to AMD's inability boost as high (IPC parity doesn't matter if that C isn't as high), and many games unfortunately still aren't optimised to run many parallel threads.

    • Also gamers are less dependent on developer support. ML and AI engineers are going to stick with Intel and Nvidia. You will understand why when you try running TensorFlow on AMD and on Nvidia. ROCm is a joke compared to CUDA. CPUs are less relevant for ML and AI, but they are relevant to scientific computing, but Intel still supports their products much better than AMD. To be successful AMD needs to spend more time doing Application Engineering and developing APIs.

    • by davecb ( 6526 ) <davecb@spamcop.net> on Sunday October 18, 2020 @12:49PM (#60621964) Homepage Journal

      If you have an embarrassingly parallel problem, you worry about a combination of clock speed and number of cores, then about TCO.

      Right now, the clock speeds aren't different enough, which takes me to how many threads I can get in a 1u package, and what it costs me over three years.
      * AMD offers me an Epyc 7742 with 64 cores (128 hype-threads (;-)) for $6,950 list
      * Intel offers me a Xeon Platinum 8280 with 28 real cores for just over $10,000 list

      My power and cooling costs are a bit better with the AMD, the TCO is a bit better, and 64 versus 28 cores gives me a 2.3 to one improvement in the amount of work I get done per dollar.
      As you might imagine, I've recommended a formal financial review of the new AMDs to my employer.

      --dave
      Numbers courtesy of https://www.extremetech.com/co... [extremetech.com]

      • by Briareos ( 21163 )

        Shouldn't "the amount of work I get done per dollar" take the price difference ($6950 vs. $10000) into account as well, which would make the value even higher? (More like 3.3 to one if I calculated correctly...)

        • by davecb ( 6526 )
          I'm doing the "make a decision" math: three to one is huge, and seriously important to the business.
          3.2 vs 3.3 to one is merely interesting. By the time I amortise it over three years, the decimal points will change, anyway.
    • In the cloud, both Intel and AMD are starting to be in real danger from ARM. As more and more workloads don't care what platform they are running on, and containers make migration of services so much simpler, there is increasingly less reason to pay an x86 premium. Amazon is moving a lot of their stuff to Arm.

  • Uncle!

  • AMD needs to beter support developers. ROCm is still not up to par with CUDA. TF still doesn't run easily on AMD cards. On the CPU front AMD needs to support better OEMs. Without that they will never take Intel's place.

  • I still can't see a reference to this AMD produce line and not think "chocolate"

Marvelous! The super-user's going to boot me! What a finely tuned response to the situation!

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