
High End CPUs – Intel vs. AMD - bhouston
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html
======
axaxs
I don't mean to diminish the efforts of anyone involved, but I truly feel one
man more or less moves the direction of the CPU industry: Jim Keller.

He, among others, invented x86_64 at AMD during its previous glory days. AMD
dominated the competition. He led the Apple chips at A4, and Apple chips then
and now dominate the mobile competition.

He came back to AMD and helped create Zen, to obvious results. Apparently he
now works for Tesla.

In any event, this guy seems to have the Midas touch wrt CPUs, it's a shame
there isn't more written about him or more importantly, by him.

~~~
slackingoff2017
Truly brilliant for sure. Reminds me of Anders Hejlsberg who designed
Typescript, Delphi, and C#.

Or Linus Torvalds with Linux, and just to prove he wasn't a one hit wonder
designing Git.

I've concluded that what people fail to grasp about technology is that
Einstein types still exist. There are rare engineers worth hundreds of times
more than average, only this time they're well paid by their corporate
masters. More like Picasso's really. Technology is a fusion of art and
science, free from the normal restrictions of physics it's an engineering
discipline that embraces art and elegance to a degree not seen in harder,
realer disciplines.

~~~
alamiftekharx
Let's not get ahead of ourselves there on git. _Have you tried using
submodules?_ :P

~~~
FatalBaboon
I actually like submodules, maybe it suffers from the awkward-at-first
perception people have about git in general.

------
xmichael99
Wow! Hard to believe I would ever, ever, ever see AMD on the top of that list!
Amazing! Forget about the price, just amazing to see AMD at the top, now
factor in the price and wow Intel is screwed. Not because of this one release,
but because they are getting pounded from all angles.

Intel's strategy of limiting the PCI throughput to hold GPU manufactures back
is over, and these AMD cpu's are going to be paired super well with GPU
makers, mostly Nvidia but of course their own ATI, which is really going to
making Intel look sad soon. Boat loads of major players have been irked by
Intel holding back PCI throughput, AMD let it rip, and "thread ripped" too!

~~~
thethirdone
> Intel's strategy of limiting the PCI throughput to hold GPU manufactures
> back is over, and these AMD cpu's are going to be paired super well with
> AMD, which is really making Intel look sad soon. Boat loads of major players
> have been irked by Intel holding back PCI throughput, AMD let it rip, and
> "thread ripped" too!

In what way does the increase in PCI lanes stop holding gpu manufacturers
back? To the best of my knowledge a single GPU doesn't use more than 16 lanes.

Only multi-gpu systems are held back by the PCI lanes. So I can see
threadripper being great for supercomputers, but I don't see how it affects
Nvidia or AMDs GPU section.

~~~
MattSteelblade
The vast majority of Intel's lineup--at least for the last few years--is only
16 lanes.

~~~
thethirdone
I get that, but given that GPUs currently can't use (for physical connector) /
don't benefit from more than 16 lanes. Unless you are using multiple GPUs or
another PCI device, you would not benefit from more than 16 lanes. How does
that hold GPU manufacturers back?

~~~
kbenson
That sounds suspiciously like a chicken and egg problem. If the dominant CPU
could only use 16 lanes, it makes sense to not put too much effort into
supporting more if they can't be used effectively (other than being able to
point at Intel as the problem and thus piss Intel off).

~~~
thethirdone
I don't think it is a chicken and egg problem. There are several of CPUs that
support > 16 lanes, so a high-end GPU (paired with a high end CPU) could use
more lanes if it needed it.

Currently it seems 8 lanes of PCIe 3.0 is not quite enough, but 16 lanes is
plenty. So we'll need a few years to get up to utilizing 16 lanes completely.

At which point 4.0 may be ready.

------
rgbrenner
1 user reported the score:
[https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+Threadrip...](https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+Threadripper+1950X&id=3058)

Edit: just noticed the title was changed. Originally it said something about
Ryzen beating Intel's processors.

~~~
sjsotelo
This article also favors AMD

[http://www.techradar.com/news/ryzen-threadripper-16-core-
pro...](http://www.techradar.com/news/ryzen-threadripper-16-core-processor-
impresses-with-a-beefy-overclock-to-41ghz)

~~~
baobrain
Techradar's reporting...has had some issues. Initially the graphs on their
threadripper review were misleading (link to imgur album [0]) and later
changed. Anandtech[1] (prior discussion[2]) and Gamers Nexus[3] are much more
reputable and go further in depth.

[0] [https://imgur.com/a/SuzY9](https://imgur.com/a/SuzY9)

[1] [http://www.anandtech.com/show/11697/the-amd-ryzen-
threadripp...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/11697/the-amd-ryzen-
threadripper-1950x-and-1920x-review)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14979151](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14979151)

[3] [http://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/3015-amd-
threadripper-1...](http://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/3015-amd-
threadripper-1950x-1920x-review)

Edit: clarification

------
fulafel
What makes PassMark a representative CPU benchmark? These one-company CPU
benchmarks tend to be quite problematic (cf. GeekBench).

SPEC just came out with CPU2017. In SPEC there's at least a bunch of peer
review, transparency and attention from academics.

Here are Anandtech's AMD vs Intel CPU2006 numbers:
[http://www.anandtech.com/show/11544/intel-skylake-ep-vs-
amd-...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/11544/intel-skylake-ep-vs-amd-
epyc-7000-cpu-battle-of-the-decade/14)
[http://www.anandtech.com/show/11544/intel-skylake-ep-vs-
amd-...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/11544/intel-skylake-ep-vs-amd-
epyc-7000-cpu-battle-of-the-decade/15)

~~~
onli
> _What makes PassMark a representative CPU benchmark?_

Sadly nothing. PassMark is infamous for being not representative, and you can
easily check that by looking at the position of the FX processors, which are
rated way too high.

I run a pc hardware builder with a recommender function at its core, which
means that the real core is the meta benchmark powering the recommender. It
works by taking professional reviews of real life workloads, and I think it is
a lot more realistic, though absolute ordering is of course not that easy. I
recently made the benchmark results visible, there is one for games:
[https://www.pc-kombo.com/benchmark/games/cpu](https://www.pc-
kombo.com/benchmark/games/cpu) and one for applications: [https://www.pc-
kombo.com/benchmark/apps/cpu](https://www.pc-kombo.com/benchmark/apps/cpu) .
Threadripper is in there and the big model leads the app benchmark, but I
still need to add more benchmarks with the threadripper processors to make the
result more certain.

At the beginning I even started with the passmark results, but had to move to
better data when user complained the results were not good. They were right.

------
0xbear
In case someone from AMD is reading this: guys, you need to fix stability
issues on Linux, or your Epyc is DOA. People are having some serious lock-up
trouble with Ryzen, even with the latest AGESA updates and kernels. This is
the only issue preventing me from recommending to purchase threadripper
workstations at work. We do need that pcie bandwidth for GPU, but we
absolutely can't tolerate instability.

~~~
foepys
Epyc has another stepping than Ryzen and, as far as I know, nobody could
reproduce the "kill-ryzen" SEGFAULT on Epyc or Threadripper.

~~~
0xbear
I sure hope so, but given the epic fail of Ryzen, I'm going to wait for others
to beta test it for me, and/or for some sort of explanation and fix from AMD.

~~~
letsgetphysITal
Well then you likely won't get the information you need as quickly as you need
it.

Buy one, test it in your environment, file bug reports if you come across any.
You don't need to replace your entire fleet in one go; Plan a phased rollout,
starting with one workstation running the most aggressive of your workloads.

------
cosmolev
Single Thread Performance
[https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html](https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html)

------
convery
So, based on that performance test then AMD should have the same performance
as my two E5-2660v2 at half the price. That's pretty impressive.

------
rocky1138
The top CPU is almost 4 times faster than my CPU (i5 6600K). Is it just down
to the GHz and number of cores?

Besides those two elements, what makes this processor so much faster?

~~~
meanonme
Pipeline depth, cache sizes and types, number of execution units, memory links
and bandwidth and on and on.

Absent are measurements for enterprise CPUs like the Xeon Platinum 8180M
(street price about $13,000 USD) which trounces the fastest offering from AMD
before even getting out of bed. [0]

Note 0: For multi-threaded uses. For single-threaded use-cases, the Xeon Gold
6144 has the potential to be faster:

\- Gold 6144 vs. Platinum 8180M

\- Cores: 8 vs. 28

\- Turbo: 4.2 GHz vs. 3.8 GHz

\- L2: 8x1 MiB vs. 28x1 MiB

\- L3: 24.75 MiB vs. 38.5 MiB

It's really a shame that AMD isn't as comprehensively competitive as it could
be in enterprise, because Intel could get somewhat lazier/pricier in some
areas without effective competition.

~~~
nrki
\- Are you really comparing a $1000 CPU to a $13,000 CPU?

\- Threadripper is not Enterprise. Are you not aware of Epyc?

~~~
icc97
From what I can tell he's disappointed that AMD don't offer a $13,000 CPU that
competes with Intel.

Epyc falls short of the Xeon Platinum 8180 [0]

[0]:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/intel/comments/6ip3oi/xeon_platinum...](https://www.reddit.com/r/intel/comments/6ip3oi/xeon_platinum_beats_amds_epyc_by_20_in_cinebench/)

------
rbanffy
I'd love to see how POWER8/9, SPARC64 XII and SPARC M7 stack up.

If someone could throw in some z14 PU benchmarks, I'd be more than happy. Are
AMD's server-grade EPYC parts available?

(edit: I get it. These are mostly desktop processors with some low-end server
parts thrown in. It's not a comprehensive high-end CPU benchmark, as it misses
the whole E7 family)

------
akerro
I would like to point out that even in some benchmarks AMD is not on the top,
it doesn't mean it's no the best buy product. There are other factors like
heat production and power consumption, which Ryzen has even 3 times lower than
equivalent Intel CPU.

------
arca_vorago
One thing I think is that AMD has even more room to shine as software gets
better at parallelization. I saw this trend back during my days managing
250gb+ data generation/day at a genetics company, and eventually got to build
a 4 cpu, 64 core AMD Opteron system for physics computation. I am super-
excited about the new server line of CPU's, because the Opteron line wasn't
perfect and I expect they learned a lot from it. Also, I only need to get 2
cpu's to get that 64 core count again! I dream about supermicro or someone
doing a 4 cpu board for the new line... 128 cores... (hey, I can dream!)

------
hbogert
Amazed by the little difference between the following two Ryzens and their
scores:

\- Ryzen 5 1600x - Passmark: 13130; single: 1942

\- Ryzen 7 1700 - Passmark: 13819; single: 1760

Why would you go for octa-core which is only marginally faster in multi-core
workloads, but considerably slower in single-threaded workloads. On top of
that, it's 25% more expensive.

------
eatbitseveryday
Why aren't Intel Xeon E7 processors considered in these benchmarks? Clearly
they are "high-end" and carry a $5k+ price tag to show for it.

~~~
cmrx64
they are user-contributed.

------
sp332
Why is the "AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 1700X" testing significantly higher than the
1800X?

And why don't any of the AMD chips have clock speeds listed?

------
jrs95
Single core performance on the i9 is still going to be significantly higher
though, so it depends on your use case. Testing I've seen so far has had the
i9 getting about 20% higher framerates in games, for example.

~~~
jrs95
There are also more i9 chips coming out this month and next. The $1200 12 core
7920X will probably have roughly the same multicore performance as the TR
1950X, but while maintaining significantly better single core performance. So,
in my opinion, if you're looking for an affordable badass workstation chip,
but you also want top of the line game performance, wait until the end of
August and get an i9 7920X.

------
lostmsu
What this review does not mention in its price tag - is the cost of the
cooling system. AMD claims liquid cooling is required for Threadripper.

------
O5vYtytb
Wonder what Epyc will look like.

------
cafxx
That explains the name. They ripped Intel a new one.

