
AMD is dominating Intel in Amazon's best-selling CPUs list - ekoutanov
https://www.techspot.com/news/82962-amd-dominating-intel-amazon-best-selling-cpu-list.html
======
_nickwhite
Better performance [2] with less cores, much better pricing, and the kicker
for me is PCI Express 4.0 [1]. Intel doesn't even support the newest
generation of NVMe storage. So yeah, AMD is dominating for a good reason- for
now anyways.

[1]
[https://www.pcworld.com/article/3400176/pcie-40-everything-y...](https://www.pcworld.com/article/3400176/pcie-40-everything-
you-need-to-know-specs-compatibility.html)

[2]
[https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html](https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html)

~~~
judge2020
I think you mean "with more cores", not less.

~~~
wmf
AMD has more cores available, but also AMD's cheaper 16-core beats Intel's
18-core in many tests.

~~~
behnamoh
There's this really fascinating paper about how AMD has made Intel to innovate
more and that AMD itself has found cheaper ways to stay on the CPU quality
frontier:

[https://www.its.caltech.edu/~mshum/gradio/papers/GoettlerGor...](https://www.its.caltech.edu/~mshum/gradio/papers/GoettlerGordon2011.pdf)

~~~
behnamoh
I have to correct myself: with the presence of AMD, Intel has been innovating
less than it would if the market were a monopoly.

------
nknealk
They’re also making headway into the data center space. AWS has recently
announced that compute dense instances will have an AMD powered version. They
already have AMD offerings for GP and RAM dense instances.

[https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-new-amd-
powere...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-new-amd-powered-
compute-optimized-ec2-instances-c5a-c5ad/)

~~~
gundmc
GCP and Azure are offering AMD Epyc Rome based instances as well. Intel is
losing their death grip on the data center space quickly.

[https://cloudblog.withgoogle.com/products/compute/amd-
epyc-p...](https://cloudblog.withgoogle.com/products/compute/amd-epyc-
processors-come-to-google-and-to-google-cloud/amp/)

[https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-new-amd-
ep...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-new-amd-epyc-based-
azure-virtual-machines/)

------
xiphias2
If I look at the AMD stock price it seems like when Lisa Su took over AMD in
2014 she brought it back from the dead (and made a 10x valuation in 5 years).

Here's a relatively fresh iterview with her if others are interested as well:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amBe2bofVas](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amBe2bofVas)

~~~
ac29
I'd give far more credit to Jim Keller, who returned in 2012 and designed Zen.
AMD also benefited from Intel stumbling on 10nm and TSMC leapfrogging them.
Zen 2 wouldn't be nearly as compelling if it was stuck on Global Foundries
14/12nm process (which is actually licensed from Samsung).

To AMD's credit though, they've executed very well - Jim left in 2015 with
more than several Zen generations designed, but there has obviously been
significant effort by far more people than just the project lead.

~~~
baybal2
Zen was not designed by Keller. He had his hand on Zen 2, and in a role more
of a project manager/team lead than a chief architect

~~~
rrss
Are you certain? [https://www.anandtech.com/show/9643/jim-keller-leaves-
amd](https://www.anandtech.com/show/9643/jim-keller-leaves-amd) and
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOTFE7sJY-Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOTFE7sJY-Q)
(along with everything else I've seen) indicate otherwise.

------
millstone
The article ought to have acknowledged the numbers for whole PC sales, which
paint a different picture:

8/10 of Amazon's best selling laptops are Intel:
[https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/pc/565108/](https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/pc/565108/)

9/10 for desktop PCs: [https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Electronics-
Desktop-Comp...](https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Electronics-Desktop-
Computers/zgbs/electronics/565098/)

------
Roritharr
It's really fascinating to watch them capture market share as you see where
Intel is still entrenched for all kinds of reasons which are not price/perf
wise.

For example, we can't use AWS t3a instances with EPYC Cores as our Management
Provider has all their images only compiled for, optimized and tested on Intel
based VMs.

The difference is still not large enough to bother to look into it, but next
generation I expect the difference will be so large they can't ignore it.

~~~
rwmj
Another couple of differences: No support for rr because of some lack of
performance counters[1]. I also found that lm-sensors can barely see my AMD
Ryzen at all, missing all core temp information. I'm hoping that both of these
will be fixed since it doesn't seem that AMD is missing anything intrinsicly.

[1]
[https://github.com/mozilla/rr/issues/2034](https://github.com/mozilla/rr/issues/2034)

~~~
62747478182
> I also found that lm-sensors can barely see my AMD Ryzen at all, missing all
> core temp information.

This is fixed in Kernel 5.4, and some distros backported the fix to 5.3.

I'm using Debian stable, with a kernel from buster-backports, and I can see
the temperature for my CPU (Ryzen 7) and the GPU (Radeon RX 580).

------
tyingq
Interesting for sure, but the market for people that buy a CPU chip as a
standalone item probably doesn't relate much to the overall market.

I am rooting for AMD though. Competition was sorely needed.

~~~
topspin
> Interesting for sure, but the market for people that buy a CPU chip as a
> standalone item probably doesn't relate much to the overall market.

The question then becomes how much the 'overall market' relates to profits.
These manufacturers have consistently marketed to the enthusiast/home builder
end of the market for decades now; they've never seriously neglected it. I
suspect these sales are highly lucrative despite the relatively small volume.
It astonishes me that one can mail order a 4096 pin device (sTRX4) and install
it by hand in the kitchen, yet here we are, and it's been that way for a
rather long time now. If it wasn't profitable the manufacturers would have
stop feeding this market long ago.

------
rubber_duck
Meanwhile Intel is still the only good option for laptops and I haven't used a
desktop for 5+ years. Not saying this to bring down Intel success just
wondering how much volume is in desktop vs laptop and hoping AMD can
transition here as well.

~~~
agumonkey
Some supermarket ads in the mail last month showed 3 laptops, 1 very low end
atom x5 "skype machine" and 2 amd zen based medium class.

I think zen will make a lot of sense for the majority of people. price/perf
will reign over intel potential hedt products. If you give a 4 core + good gpu
to the average joe for half the price of an intel he'll probably never look
back.

~~~
tsss
AMD has always been better at price/performance but in the laptop space the
number 1 through 10 most important features are efficiency. Intel CPUs use
less power and make less heat, which has always been the limiting factor.

~~~
BubRoss
I don't think that is true anymore. AMD has a process advantage and measures
their heat by the max clock rate, while Intel calls their max clock rate 'core
boost' and measures their TDP with lower clocks. You can see benchmarks of the
newest CPUs have Intel's high end chip that was just released ending up
consuming about 100 more watts under heavy CPU loads.

------
Shakahs
I know AMD's resurgence is old news by now, but it's still impressive to look
at Amazon's CPU best sellers and see them holding the entire top 10. The first
Intel product is the i7-9700K at #12.

[https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Computers-Accessories-
Co...](https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Computers-Accessories-Computer-CPU-
Processors/zgbs/pc/229189)

------
jaredtn
AMD is blowing Intel out of the water with the latest benchmarks. Intel's lone
remaining advantage is its MKL performance in single-threaded performance (and
they've done some shady handicapping of AMD CPUs to get there), but in
multiprocessing and most ML workflows AMD is the clear winner. The
ThreadRipper series is an amazing product.

~~~
shaklee3
I would say that AMD should make their own mkl if they want to compete. It's
fine that it runs on AMD, but it is, after all, a closed-source library made
by Intel.

At some point amd needs to take the software side seriously. Same goes for
GPU.

~~~
stevefan1999
What about OpenBLAS?

~~~
shaklee3
Openblas is significantly slower than mkl for most things, and doesn't have
all the same features (only the blas part). It's also not developed by AMD. I
think they need to take their software more seriously in general, since the
best hardware doesn't matter with poor libraries.

~~~
knweiss
FWIW: AMD offers this: [https://developer.amd.com/amd-aocl/blas-
library/](https://developer.amd.com/amd-aocl/blas-library/)

The source code is available on GitHub.

~~~
shaklee3
I think AMD needs to take a page from Nvidia and really get their software
together. The CPU and GPU libraries are a mess. There are multiple versions of
libraries where in some cases both are maintained and it's not clear which to
use, and in others, one is dead but may perform better than the new one. Intel
and Nvidia let you download a single package for all scientific computing.

------
Bootwizard
That's a last generation processor...their current generation is much more
impressive. Twice as powerful than anything Intel has to offer at the SAME
price as Intel.

~~~
zaroth
Can anything beat the price/performance of the 2700x for $160 though?

------
fnord77
from a developer point of view, AMD does not support record/replay debugging
execution

~~~
xeeeeeeeeeeenu
Changing that is a work in progress:
[https://github.com/mozilla/rr/issues/2034](https://github.com/mozilla/rr/issues/2034)

~~~
clarry
Is it? Based on the comments, the situation looks like "it doesn't work and
nobody has figured out how to make it work."

~~~
capableweb
Yeah, no one is clearly saying "we won't work on this and if you do, we won't
accept a pull request" but instead "we currently don't know how to do it",
meaning that if they figure out a way to do it, it'll happen at one point,
either from 3rd party or themselves.

------
jedisct1
Is it worth buying a Macbook Pro 16", or is Intel going to react with far
better CPUs in the forthcoming months, including for laptops?

------
ComradeUlyanov
Not a surprise. AMD offers better CPUs at better prices.

------
ChuckMcM
My TR3960X came in today, the TR3990X is on order :-). Since my current
chassis isn't configured for liquid cooling I went with an air cooling
solution and it is freakishly large, seriously.

~~~
qes
> My TR3960X came in today

From where?!? All I can find is B&H Photo with a pre-order estimating a month
wait.

~~~
ChuckMcM
A shop in the Bay Area called "Central Computers." Once ASUS announced their
TR40 motherboard I told him I wanted that, 64GB of RAM, and a 3960 or 3970
when they came in. He called me Friday morning and said, "ok we have it".
Since by that time the 3990 had been announced as well I told him to put me
down for one of those when they got them as well to replace the 3960.

~~~
qes
Huh, lucky. Apparently no one's got them online yet.

Just hoping I don't have to wait as long as I did for my last CPU - an
i7-6700k. It was quite a few weeks after "release" before I could actually buy
one.

I'll probably stick with 32GB of RAM for now - I don't run a lot of VM's or
anything - but I'm going to try an Intel Optane as a main SSD drive this time.
Thinking about the Aorus Master sTRX40 since I'm a bit partial to Gigabyte for
motherboards. These TRX40 boards are not cheap.

------
Shorel
Now I want all these AMD CPU innovations to apply to Laptop processors too.
Most computers sold nowadays are laptops.

I am writing this from a Ryzen 5 laptop that's not really faster than the i5
laptop it replaced. If any, it is a bit slower, even with double the cores.

The Radeon GPU on the other hand is way ahead of the previous integrated Intel
GPU.

~~~
hu3
Got me curious. What laptop model?

I'm in the market for a new laptop.

~~~
Shorel
Mine is a Dell Inspiron 13 7375 2-in-1, and it has a Ryzen 2500U APU. It is a
year old this month.

------
MikusR
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3817116](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3817116)

------
eklavya
I wish apple started providing an amd macbook.

~~~
terramex
Right now AMD mobile chips are still less power efficient than Intel's.

~~~
beatgammit
A little, but it's not that bad, especially since AMD's iGPU is way better.
The 7nm mobile CPUs that are likely coming next year should fix that.

That being said, I specifically sought out an AMD laptop because I want 4
cores and a better GPU without a dedicated GPU (battery and simplicity under
Linux). I get enough battery life for now (~5 hours I think) on my ThinkPad
E495, and if I need more, I'll get a USB power bank.

------
mycall
I wonder how much of this is due to brain drain due to political immigration
policies.

------
spicyramen
This is great news for competition, same goes for GPU where Nvidia is still a
monopoly

~~~
jacek
When we consider deep learning practitioners and others relying on CUDA then
yes, nvidia still has monopoly. But for gamers AMD's Radeon GPU is a
compelling alternative.

~~~
kungtotte
For anyone on Linux it's also a better choice with Radeon, since they're
actually cooperating with writing a FOSS driver for their cards. With nVidia
you're stuck with a less than stellar third party FOSS driver or using
nVidia's own proprietary driver.

~~~
lottin
I think it's important that we support hardware vendors that cooperate with
free software development, by buying their products - and punish those who
don't, by not buying their products. Otherwise we can't complain.

~~~
kungtotte
Yep, voting with your wallet is the only direct action you can take in this
world that will actually have an effect on corporations.

