
AMD vs. Intel 2020: Who Makes the Best CPUs? - ItsTotallyOn
https://www.tomshardware.com/features/amd-vs-intel-cpus
======
cptskippy
I really hate these articles, they're click bait intended to sow discourse
among fanbois and drive traffic to the site. People who have recently built
systems read them and either feel validation or regret. That just spawns
comments from people either trying to justify their loser choice or flaunt
their lucky choice of the winner. The loyalists crawl out of wood work to make
comments like "I still prefer x because y". These articles draw broad
conclusions and influence perception across the board, even if they mention
performance tiers, that brand X is always superior to brand Y.

I've been building systems for almost 30 years and in that time Intel has
mostly been the performance champion AND has always screwed you over on price.
Sometimes they lead by a lot, sometimes by very little or not at all but their
platform is always more expensive.

Both Intel and AMD introduce a brand (e.g. Pentium, Ahtlon) as their new
flagship and then overtime erode the brand each year with lower spec products.
Eventually they stop introducing higher spec products altogether and the brand
sinks to the bottom of their product lineup as a new brand takes the top ranks
(e.g. i9, Ryzen).

Depending on when you get into building PCs you might have brand loyalty
because maybe your first system was a Celeron you unlocked and ran at PIII
speeds. Or maybe you picked up a first gen Althon that was the performance
king for a few quarters, or the Athlon II when Intel was floundering with
Netburst. Maybe you started out with Core and in your view Intel has always
dominated AMD. Regardless your perceptions are skewed.

Identify your workload and your budget, buy the best thing that meets your
needs regardless of brand. Intel is historically more stable and less
problematic. AMD usually offers significantly more performance per $ on the
low end. Then again that all takes too much effort, just buy whatever makes
you feel good about yourself on the internet according to these click bait
articles.

~~~
partingshots
You’re a bit out of date here.

AMD has largely taken the performance crown thanks to their Zen CPU platform
and move to using TSMC for their process as Intel has lagged behind, with
major problems deriving from their inability to get 10nm working.

If it helps to give you some perspective on how such a drastic change could
occur, Intel’s 10nm process was originally meant to be ready for release in
2014!, and yet they still haven’t managed to scale out production after six
years of debugging and failure.

It’s a combination of AMD simultaneously doing extremely well and Intel
severely stagnating that has allowed this to happen.

~~~
cptskippy
> You’re a bit out of date here.

I have no idea what you're talking about with your vague remark AND I think
your attempt at pedantry has only helped to solidify the point I was making.

~~~
partingshots
Did you read the rest of my comment at all? I can appreciate disagreement, but
that means taking the time to consider and look at what the other person has
to say as well.

~~~
cptskippy
I did read your comment in it's entirety. It was unclear what specifically you
were referring to because it was poorly written.

You remarked "You’re a bit out of date here" without any clarification. Given
that I spoke historically and in generalities, it's unclear what you were
referring to.

As far as I could tell you were dismissing everything I said AND then you went
on to state technical facts surrounding recent events that in no way
conflicted or invalidated anything I said.

Now you're asserting that it was a failure on my part to read your comment in
full and comprehend what you said, allowing you to dismiss anything I say in
response.

Basically you're trying to say I'm either misinformed or stupid, when in
reality you're just not taking the time to write a coherent argument.

------
scurvy
The AMD Ryzen platform holds so much promise. There's just one problem: all of
their consumer chipset motherboards are terrible. Really, really flakey and
bad. If you're used to slapping in name-brand memory to a board and booting it
up, LOL good luck with AMD! Your options for current gen Ryzens are:

x570 -> Requires active cooling (fans) on the chipset because it throws off
too much heat. The proprietray fan will die and your motherboard needs
replacing. Congrats! Also, the PCIe lane configurations are weird (x8 x8 x8).

x470 -> Don't even look at your memory the wrong way if you want it to boot.
Also, you need an older gen Ryzen/Athlon to update the BIOS to something that
works with Ryzen 3000. Sure, there are stickers all over the box touting
'Ryzen 3000 compatibility!' but that's only after you update the BIOS. The
BIOS the board ships with won't work at all.

b450 -> Dicier to run new stuff on such an older platform. The implementations
are supposedly power weak for higher core count 3900/3950 CPUs.

AMD really dropped the ball on these chipset. They're the things that are
leading to terrible user experiences and why folks end up going back to Intel
after countless dollars wasted on shipping, RMAs, and swapping gear. No
motherboard manufacturer actually designs anything. They just bundle chips
together and change logos in the BIOS. Some might have a "flashback" button
that works on half the boards, but there's little to differentiate one from
the other.

If you want something that just works and is fast, stick with Intel because
their chipsets are better. I'm writing this on a 3900x, too...

EDIT: Since many are doubting what I went through, let me list the
permutations of boards, DIMMs, and CPUs.

CPUs: 3900x and 220GE DIMMs: Corsair Ballistix, G.Skill FlareX, Samsung ECC
(unbuffered) Boards: x470 Taichi and Hero VII

I finally got my third Taichi to boot with a 220GE to the point that I could
flash a BIOS to something "stable" for the 3900x.

I've literally built hundreds of servers and PCs in my lifetime (including AMD
Romes). I know what I'm doing. This ecosystem just isn't mature yet!

~~~
Exmoor
This is all pretty much FUD.

> x570 -> Requires active cooling (fans) on the chipset because it throws off
> too much heat. The proprietray fan will die and your motherboard needs
> replacing.

AMD does require fans on the chipsets for X570 boards, but different board
makers have treated this differently. My understanding is that some boards
don't spin it up unless you're putting some serious PCIE 4.0 bandwidth in.
Either way, "The fan will die and needs replacing" may be true someday (as it
would be with any fan), but is not a guarantee.

>x470 -> Don't even look at your memory the wrong way if you want it to boot.
Also, you need an older gen Ryzen/Athlon to update the BIOS to something that
works with Ryzen 3000. Sure, there are stickers all over the box touting
'Ryzen 3000 compatibility!' but that's only after you update the BIOS. The
BIOS the board ships with won't work at all.

First gen Ryzen (1000 series chips) had some memory compatibility issues, but
2000 and 3000 chips haven't had many issues. It's true that you needed to do a
BIOS upgrade on x470/B450 boards when 3000 series chips were released, but
those stickers indicate that the board maker installed a newer BIOS and they
should work out of the box. Unless you manage to find an X470 board that's
been sitting on the shelf since before last July any x470 board you buy today
is extremely likely to be compatible with all currently released Ryzen chips
out of the box.

> b450 -> Dicier to run new stuff on such an older platform. The
> implementations are supposedly power weak for higher core count 3900/3950
> CPUs.

3000 series chips use a smaller process and are more power efficient per-core
than 2000 and 1000 series chips, so you should have no issue running an 8 core
chip in a B450 board. 12-core and 16-core chips _might_ have some issues, but
who buys a $79 motherboard and sticks a $500/$900 CPU in it?

~~~
scurvy
>First gen Ryzen (1000 series chips) had some memory compatibility issues, but
2000 and 3000 chips haven't had many issues. It's true that you needed to do a
BIOS upgrade on x470/B450 boards when 3000 series chips were released, but
those stickers indicate that the board maker installed a newer BIOS and they
should work out of the box. Unless you manage to find an X470 board that's
been sitting on the shelf since before last July any x470 board you buy today
is extremely likely to be compatible with all currently released Ryzen chips
out of the box.<

I went through a pair of x470 Taichi's from Amazon last month. Both had non-
compatible BIOS that wouldn't work with 3000-series. One so old that Dr Debug
wouldn't even do anything. Just blank.

It's not just me. Read the negative product reviews of almost any x470 boards,
and you'll see memory and non-POST issues very recently (followed by the
response macro from mfg'er saying everything is fine just use 1 DIMM, etc).
It's very much a crapshoot with AMD chipsets. You get a good one and
everything's great. You get a few bad ones and you're stuck in swap/return/RMA
hell.

Also, how can it be FUD when it's exactly what I went through?

Edit: The "Ryzen 3000 compatible" stickers do NOT mean it will work out of the
box. It means that it CAN work...after you update the BIOS with an old CPU.

AMD will offer you a CPU "boot kit" to get it going, but you're risking on
missing out on many 30 day return windows with shipping, covid19, processing,
etc. Avoid it all and just get an Intel until the next refresh.

~~~
cturner
Interesting on your x470 experience. I bought a X470 Taichi U from Scan UK in
early February, and the 3600 chip worked.

I was wary of the issue you raise, but lucked out, and figured the issues you
talk of had washed through. Maybe the warehouse staff who boxed it looked at
the order and gave me a recent unit.

What action could AMD take to improve the situation? I wanted to go to AMD
because I expect to get strong upgrade options from it - certainly to a 3950x,
and possibly further. But - a complication of that is that older motherboards
need BIOS updates.

I am surprised at how slap-dash the motherboard is. It supports ECC ram -
great. But BIOS configuration is a confused mess.

~~~
m-p-3
Some motherboards supports flashing BIOS through a USB thumbdrive without a
CPU, IMO this kinda of problem would be a non-issue if all of them did this.

~~~
scurvy
To some degree, yes. However, that assumes a functioning BIOS release is
available and works...many incremental releases are no functioning despite
release notes saying otherwise. Many times, you can't downgrade the BIOS
either. So you're stuck with a bad board waiting for a beta BIOS...fun times!

The workstation/server platforms ARE better. Having a BMC to flash/recover
things is much more reliable.

------
mindfulplay
I am a little out of date on this topic but what effect does Spectre/Meltdown
and other mitigations have on newer processors? Is it fundamentally just a
software fix going forward? Seems like we are willing to sacrifice in the
order of 10% performance at least in the previous generations....

~~~
pstrateman
For many workloads the effect was significantly more than 10%.

I had to disable mitigations to complete a filesystem checksum, it was on the
order of 1000x slower.

------
codecamper
Given that amd has the lead in power consumption per performance, is it now
the cpu of choice in the datacenter?

~~~
madengr
Some engineering software I use, uses Intel MPI libraries, and I suspect the
math kernel also. The software runs 30% faster on an i7 versus a Ryzen 7, both
with equivalent clock rate and number of cores.

Given the forthcoming i9 will hit 5.3 GHz, I’m choosing Intel for my next
build. Until AMD comes out with libraries and compilers targeting scientific
computing, Intel may still have the lead.

~~~
jrockway
Do Intel consumer chips support ECC memory now? Without ECC, I'm not sure I'd
be comfortable doing any scientific computing or production serving. (I would
consider using them for things like CI, though, because the price sure is
good.)

~~~
madengr
No, and only 64 GB max of non-ECC at that. I typically don’t run simulation of
more than 1 hour though, and I’ll know when the results are wrong. My use case
is CAD/real-time design for RF and EM; multiple smaller simulations of
parametric sweeps, Monte Carlo, and optimization.

Ryzen does support ECC, and > 64 GB, so that is a plus.

~~~
jrockway
I don't care too much about the results of my own programs, but I do worry
very much about OS-level data structures. If some bit gets flipped in memory
while you're extracting an update, that program will just randomly be weird
forever. If some bit gets flipped in your filesystem, your data randomly
disappears. Given how frequent both auto-updates and bit flips are in
practice, no doubt something on my computer is corrupted somewhere. Or maybe
only my backup is corrupted. Maybe it will never cause a problem, or maybe my
computer will just one day become unusable. I have spent so much time
debugging random failures that I see ECC memory as at least avoiding one set
of possibilities, reducing the inevitable system integration time that
building your own computer requires.

------
willtim
Is AMD now a better choice for Linux, especially given the ongoing stability
problems with Intel's Linux graphics drivers?

~~~
Glyptodon
When everything lines up AMD integrated graphics are very very pleasant on
Linux. But you will also find random Kernel versions with obnoxious
regressions and bugs you have to hunt down and fix or work around.

~~~
jatone
those are rare, and almost non-existant in LTS kernels.

------
celeritascelery
For me the single biggest factor is still single threaded performance. There
are still many apps that are not multithreaded so all those extra cores are
useless. Single thread performance will benefit any application. Intel still
holds the lead in this category.

~~~
hddherman
I don't like this argument for three reasons:

1\. The single thread performance gap is very small (5-10% depending on
application) or even non-existent in some cases.

2\. Your computer runs more than one process at any given moment. The more
cores, the more processes you can run without an impact on performance

3\. That single core performance comes at the cost of efficiency and general
power usage. Intel has had to clock their 14nm process very high to achieve
that small lead in single thread performance.

~~~
Theodores
The key words in the parent post are 'for me'.

Imagine you have a single core compilation process that takes two minutes that
you must run 50 times a day. This can happen. Ten percent brings 12 seconds
per compile or ten minutes a day. This might not sound great but it means you
can get an extra five compiles done. You can also get increased likelihood
that you can remember what you were working on. Therefore the marginal gain in
single thread performance is well worth having in this use case. The expense
of genuine Intel becomes worth it even if you don't have so many cores.

~~~
throwaway_pdp09
I have a dual core dev machine. Using _-j 2_ builds twice as fast (approx 35
mins -> 17 mins). Are current compiles really obligatory single thread?
Because I sure would like to prop up intel with my wallet.

~~~
chitza
Most web development toolchains depend on Node.js, which compiles on a single
core.

~~~
kohtatsu
Node takes advantage of multiple cores.

The code is all async by default and that is easy to load onto green threads.

This used to be implemented with callback hell, now it's Promises which is
actually really cosy (and what Rust is adopting).

Random article I found on it: [https://medium.com/better-programming/is-node-
js-really-sing...](https://medium.com/better-programming/is-node-js-really-
single-threaded-7ea59bcc8d64)

