
AMD Ryzen 9 3900x price drop could take the wind out of Intel comet lake sales - kooskoos
https://www.techradar.com/in/news/amd-ryzen-9-3900x-price-drop-could-take-the-wind-out-of-intel-comet-lake-cpu-sales
======
0xy
The rumor on the street is that Zen 3 is a major upgrade with huge IPC
improvements.

If that's true, Intel has basically nothing. All they've got left at this
point is "I want the best gaming performance and literally nothing else
matters". AMD may just win that crown too.

It's never been more exciting to be an enthusiast, and Intel was asleep for a
long time. It's about time someone woke the sleepy giant.

Weren't we all sick of Intel churning out 10% incremental improvements every
year on an entirely new socket every time? They were phoning it in for a long
time.

~~~
fortran77
A _lot_ of people (myself included) buy Intel and only Intel. Maybe there
isn't a good reason by a strict price-performance option, but I like the wider
choice of motherboards and I just trust their compatibility more.

Also, all our desktop systems here are Xeon because we've had bad experience
with ECC support on AMD.

Edit: Honest truthful non-inflammatory comments get you downvoted and mocked.
That's some toxic community you've built here, @dang.

~~~
wincy
So you know I downvoted you because it’s against the rules to complain about
being downvoted, it’s rarely constructive, not because you are using Intel and
only Intel.

~~~
pengaru
I wish the rules also prohibited commenting on downvoting for breaking the
rules. It too makes for boring reading.

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gdubs
Can someone breakdown what the most exciting CPU developments have been
recently? I stopped paying attention a long time ago, but find myself
interested having recently gotten back into 3D animation. I know GPU renderers
are gaining steam, but there are still CPU renderers out there and putting my
toes in the water I’m finding it difficult to parse the advantages of one new
chip vs another.

~~~
Exmoor
High level developments:

* AMD introduced their Ryzen architecture ~3 years ago. This was the first time in years that their chips were competitive with Intel chips.

* AMD's newfound competitiveness forced Intel to increase core counts in their consumer chips. 6 and 8 core chips are now extremely common in the consumer space.

* AMD has released consumer chips with as many as 16 physical cores (32 threads) in their most recent generation. This is a huge improvement for tasks that scale well to multiple cores like (I presume) 3D animation. Intel has 10 core consumer chips out.

* If you're willing to move up to the HEDT chips you can now buy an AMD Threadripper chip with up to 64 cores (128 threads).

* Intel has struggled to make the next step in manufacturing. Their desktop chips have been stuck at 14nm for half a decade now. AMD contracts their manufacturing out and has been able to take advantage of other foundries improved processes. Their current chips are using 7nm process nodes and use significantly less power than their Intel counterparts. Because of this they require less extreme cooling.

* There are some new instruction sets such as AVX and AVX512 that can improve performance in some software. I'm not an expert there and you'd probably want to do some research on sites related to 3D rendering to see which chip would perform best for your needs.

~~~
bhl
Huh, how did AMD manage to catch up to Intel? I would've thought that Intel as
the market leader should've been able to out innovate their competitors based
on price. Has Intel just been complacent for the last 3 years?

~~~
ksec
>out innovate their competitors based on price.

They could, but why should they? Intel is still on full capacity at the moment
with backorders to fill. So despite technically losing to AMD, it isn't doing
much damage ( if at all ) financially.

------
alkonaut
$50 either way doesn’t change much especially since it’s often lost in
motherboards, or if you need to buy a cooler (When B550 motherboards launch
the balance will tilt further towards AMD).

What really does make a difference is thermals/noise. The higher end 9X00 and
10X00 series feel like they have been squeezed very tightly into their thermal
envelopes.

A CPU should come with a cooler and with that cooler the CPU should be quiet
with some headroom. Reviews of 10900 seem to indicate you should opt for one
of the most expensive air coolers or even water cooling, which of course
throws the price comparison off completely.

~~~
DrBazza
> $50 either way doesn’t change much

You'd think so, but it's a well known marketing trick that pricing at $399 and
$449 will absolutely guarantee more sales of the lower priced item than if
priced at $402 and $449.

~~~
alkonaut
True, but for items where you _have to_ buy more things to complete your
purchase (such as a fan, or a motherboard) at least customers will always see
and compare the total.

$50 less but without cooler isn’t really $50 less.

~~~
CivBase
There is no way I would trust an Intel stock cooler with a $400+ CPU. I
_might_ trust an AMD Wraith cooler, but I'd still probably at least drop $40
on a Hyper 212 EVO or NH-L9i/a depending on the case.

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chiph
I've been very happy with my 3900X so far. The only suggestion I would make
would be to upgrade the cooler from the one that comes in the AMD retail box
to something like a Noctua. Since I made that change, it's run much cooler and
likely extended it's life significantly. Just make sure you have room in your
case, as the Noctua is pretty darn big.

My workload with it is general .NET development, transcoding movies, and light
gaming.

~~~
aspenmayer
I can attest to Noctua building large coolers. I recently built a PC with a
NH-D15 which came with two NF-P12 redux-900 140mm fans for the cooler. It was
easily the largest cooler I’ve ever installed, and also the quietest. I only
had it paired with an i7-9700K, but it was amazingly quiet even under max
load. Wasn’t able to get it to thermally throttle with 5Ghz boost enabled and
running prime95 and MSI Kombustor burn-in mode on the RTX 2060 Super
simultaneously to heat up the case. Really happy with how that build turned
out.

~~~
aspenmayer
I was mistaken. They are 2x NF-A15 (140mm).

[https://noctua.at/en/nh-d15](https://noctua.at/en/nh-d15)

The other two fans I mentioned went in the topside of the case.

~~~
chiph
I wasn't able to install the second fan. It hit the top of my ram sticks and
stuck up too far to where the case wouldn't close. Even with just the one,
temperatures are much improved.

~~~
aspenmayer
I had that same issue. I hate using fans in the “pull” orientation rather than
“push,” but with this cooler, I had to. I left the space above the RAM free,
and put one fan in the middle, between the two heatsink stacks, pulling air
from the front toward rear side of case. The second fan was on the rear side
of the case, also pulling from the front toward rear side. My case had a rear
case fan, which I left in place in the push orientation.

Next time I would use low-profile memory or just memory with a shorter
heatsinks, so I can have the fans push. All in all no thermal problems, so
good enough works. It was not a personal build, just a work for hire, and not
meant to break records, just a stable high performance gaming PC.

------
joelfolksy
What would you all recommend for someone who just wants to maximize the
performance of his IDE (.NET in Visual Studio)?

I get that going 3900X will give me the fastest compile times, which is cool.
But I hit the build button relatively infrequently, and anyway I'm usually
switching to reddit if the build is going to take longer than a few seconds,
so I'm actually more interested in minimizing the latency of all the moment-
to-moment operations like Intellisense, refactorings, highlighting, code
folding, etc.

I suspect that some of those operations are mostly single-threaded, but even
if there is some degree of parallelism going on, surely this type of "bursty"
workload is where Intel can still register an advantage?

So, in other words, do these operations more closely resemble Benchmark A:
"Blender render time" or Benchmark B: "Max FPS in Tomb Raider" (and why don't
we talk more about the difficulty of making these sorts of determinations)?

~~~
VHRanger
Visual studio is slow because its an unoptimized piece of software (it misses
CPU cache often and does frequent disk seeks, etc.)

The best way to get performance from such software is:

1) make sure it (and the project) are on a fast SSD. NVME is better but SATA
is good.

2) getting a good CPU for the workload. For pure IDE user experience it won't
make much of a difference as long as it's a recent high end enough CPU (fast
RAM latency, high enough clock frequency, enough cores, ...)

~~~
chiph
Also make sure that the TEMP/TMP folders are on the SSD.

~~~
mrlonglong
Nope, that'll eat precious NAND blocks on that SSD, eke out that endurance by
putting your temp folders in a ramdisk if you can spare the memory.

~~~
chiph
I have come to accept that I will be replacing SSDs periodically. Either
because they're worn out, or because a newer/faster/better technology is
available.

A RAM disk is an interesting alternative for sure. The last time I used one
was when I did OS/2 development using IBM VisualAge IDE. Which sorely needed
it...

Windows doesn't have a driver for one out of the box, but there is a freeware
one named ImDisk that looks widely used.

Thanks for mental nudge.

------
rcarmo
I’ve been looking at Ryzen CPUs for a while, and although I don’t have the
budget for a top-tier box right now, this is excellent news. Drop one of these
and an RTX into a good case and you have a workstation that will blast most
Macs out of the water (if not all).

~~~
threeseed
People that buy a Mac are looking for the fastest computer that will run OSX.

And if you want to do a Hackintosh then it really doesn't work that well with
Ryzen e.g. issues with Creative Suite, Docker etc as well as poorer
performance due to lack of AVX2/AVX-512.

~~~
fibers
i know ryzen has avx2 support but what are some use cases for avx512

------
bjoli
I don't know about that. The i5 6 core chips seem like pretty good value. I
would probably go with an r5 3600, but it isn't really as clear cut anymore.

~~~
gambiting
So I'm just holding out for Zen 3 later this year to upgrade my PC - like you
said, suddenly the 10600K made the choice a lot less clear.

~~~
thejynxed
Not really, the Zen3 APUs for laptops and the consoles coming out later this
year have been showing up in benchmarks online and have been blasting the
Intel desktop offerings, I'm actually kind of excited about what we'll see
from the actual desktop SKUs.

~~~
gambiting
Well my point was that the 10600K made a choice less clear when it comes to
the current offerings from AMD. I want to upgrade my gaming rig and was
basically looking at either the 3600X or 3700X, but it looks like either CPU
is easily beaten in games by the 10600K for a very similar price. If I waited
a little bit for the 10600KF then the price difference shrinks even further.
That's why I'm saying I'm waiting for Zen 3 - I'm sure it will absolutely
dominate on the desktop, so it seems like it's better to wait a little bit
rather than buy now.

------
tyingq
Microcenter has it bundled with a Gigabyte B450M motherboard and a CPU cooler
for $442.98.

That would have been around $575 before.

------
BubRoss
There might be almost no reason to buy an Intel CPU, but interestingly, they
do have the advantage in very small desktops because they have powerful CPUs
with integrated graphics. Cooling without throttling is probably tricky if you
get super small, but AMD's APUs are in need of an update.

~~~
rcarmo
This. The 3400G is now what, two years old? I have held off on building a
small APU-based system because of that.

~~~
makomk
Yeah. There have been increasingly plausible rumours that the 4xxxG range is
coming soon, but right now AMD seem to be focused on the much larger laptop
market (which also benefits a lot more from the really good power efficiency
of their current chips).

~~~
vmlinuz
I bought a 2400G last year, which I've been pretty happy with - but I'm very
much looking forward to dropping a 4xxxG into the same socket later this year!

------
dilandau
I have a ryzen 3900x and it's unreal. Compiles instantly.

~~~
smabie
I was compiling the new and experimental Emacs native package and was warned
that the compilation time took over 7 hours on a "fast computer." I was
pleasantly surprised that it finished in under 20 minutes on my 3900x. That
thing is insane!

~~~
mrlonglong
Chrome still takes 2.5 hours to build on my 1920X.

Everone, what's the fastest time chrome takes to build? And what rig?

------
hartator
Is last AMD Ryzen beat Intel CPU on single core performance or are they still
holding up?

~~~
neogodless
In some cases, AMD beats Intel on single core performance. It depends on
workload.

[https://www.techspot.com/review/2003-amd-
ryzen-4000/](https://www.techspot.com/review/2003-amd-ryzen-4000/)

Here, a 35W AMD laptop chip (3.0/4.3Ghz) scores 492 on single-core Cinebench
R20 against a 90W Intel chip (2.3/4.8Ghz) scoring 449.

[https://www.techradar.com/reviews/amd-
ryzen-7-3700x](https://www.techradar.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-7-3700x)

Here, the Intel desktop chip does edge out the AMD desktop chips.

[https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-
ryzen-9-3950x-revie...](https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-
ryzen-9-3950x-review/4)

In the first graphic, if you click the right arrow, you see single-core
benchmarks. Even a 5.0Ghz desktop chip from Intel is behind the 4.6/4.7Ghz
Ryzen chips.

------
damniatx
Cant wait for the next Pentium M from Intel to beat this Ryzen thing

~~~
silverreads
Yeah, really. If they can pull something amazing out of an old CPU again,
that'd really be something. Perhaps a 128 penryn with modern accelerators
bolted on? :p

