
Intel is losing against AMD – Engadget - rbanffy
https://www.engadget.com/2019/11/28/amd-beating-intel-threadripper-ryzen/
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westinghouse
Will AMD be able to build a war chest to continue to compete after Zen? That
is the question, or is it Athlon all over again?

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heisenbit
It is really bad. Semiconductor technology wise they are falling behind which
will make it hard to recover the investments in at least one generation. Heat
distribution wise the AMD architecture is better. Yield wise the AMD approach
is more effective. Product flexibility and ability to iterate AMD approach is
better.

The biggest threat to Intel is economic. Each generation costs usually more.
One generation funds the one after the next. Loose once and there is trouble,
loose twice and it becomes existential.

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xt00
One thing that is happening now as well is that Contract Manufacturers in
Taiwan and China etc are all now doing AMD designs where previously they had
not in a number of years. So this creates a newly refreshed foundation for AMD
to be an alternative to Intel.

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Angostura
I wonder if/when Apple will be tempted to make the switch.

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flatiron
Apple is priming a switch to ARM. They don’t care about the amd64 game too
much any more. Catalina is step 1 getting that done.

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Angostura
I've been hearing this for about 10 years now. I don't think the Pro tower
will be going ARM any time soon

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rbanffy
If AMD consistently outperforms Intel's high-end gear, I can easily see a
Milan-based MacPro. Everything needed to trounce the current model is already
in the EPYC Rome package.

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xwdv
Intel already lost. It will be years before they can catch up to AMD assuming
AMD does nothing.

Now Intel is in the rear view mirror and AMD has its sights on NVIDIA.

AMD stock is up over 130% this year.

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rafaelvasco
What a come back; AMD was in the red for years and now this. Went with AMD +
Nvidia in my current setup, and could as well go full AMD 5 or so years from
now; My last AMD machine was with AMD K6-2 500mhz way back in 1999;

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ksec
That is the mainstream media narrative, may be AMD are beating Intel in price
/ performance or even in absolute performance, but the reality is Intel isn't
hurt at all. They are still making record revenue and profits.

Intel is doing so well that even with the increased capacity they put in place
they are still catching up to demands. And there was rumours about Intel
outsourcing their CPU, I think that is unlikely but they are looking to
outsource all of their Chipset to either TSMC or Samsung to further free up
Capacity.

The press and response are all in flavours of AMD, but I would argue AMD is
not doing a good enough job capturing more of it, especially in the Server and
HyperScaler Segment. Even the optimistic research estimate AMD (only) to gain
10% Market shipment in the Server market by 2020. I would have expected the
Zen 2 EPYC to be at least in the 10s if not 20s.

Most of the current Mobile Laptop shipment went with AMD merely because Intel
could not supply them with enough chips. Not entirely sure how well this will
play out once their Zen 2 APU arrives and Intel fix ( if they do ) their 10nm.

I just wish AMD could do better, having said that, despite all the dirty
tactics used, I must give credit to Intel's marketing and sales people.

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jolmg
Could someone tell of their experience with AMD on Linux? I've read some old
comments online about how there's some issues with like GCC.

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zlynx
The 1700X and 1800X had some issues with GCC failures under heavy load. Linux
apparently uses more CPU resources faster than Windows does, and caused excess
voltage drop in some scenarios, as I recall reading about it.

I think various sites online called it Performance Marginality.

That was only a problem with some of the first gen Ryzen / Zen 1 chips.

And I think it also involved the motherboard, because my 1700X never did it
when I have my ASUS board set to boost with all-core overclock, but it did act
a bit funny under normal settings.

With the current Zen 2 chips everything seems fine. I did have some weird RAM
corruption errors with my 3900X when I had the RAM set to 3600 and I did 24
thread Rust compiles. However, that didn't happen with the release version
BIOS, it was only after the ABA (I think? The one that fixed RDRAND) Agesa
update that was supposed to fix the excess voltage levels and I think they
went too far. Everything was perfect running the RAM at default 2400 speed.

