AMD's new Zen-based $499 CPU beats Intel's $999 CPU | Hacker News Reader

AMD's new Zen-based $499 CPU beats Intel's $999 CPU

tweaktown.com

59 pointsHugoDaniel36 comments

How does it "beat" Intel, with just frequency and cache size numbers? Seems like marketing material and nothing, yet, to see here.

It will probably beat intel in the performance/price ratio when not considering the cost of electrical power.

That low difference (<10%) between turbo and sustained clock speed is a bit troubling, though. It indicates that these processors are not limited by the TDP but by the transistor speed. Combined with the high TDP, this means that AMD is still much behind intel in their manufacturing process.

We should all hope they come up with something that's competitive. Even 80% of the performance for 50% of the price would be good enough. And this is because the last 3-4 Intel CPU generations have been simply not worth upgrading to. If some real competition from AMD shows up, things will change.

AMD seems to have lost their way back when they merged with ATI and integrated their GPUs into the processors. I remember that in a restructuring they switched from hand-optimizing hotspots in the CPUs to a more abstract approach using design software that worked well in GPUs.

After that decision they fell behind in performance and efficiency. I don't know if that was the root cause but it stayed in my memory as one pivotal point.

It would be interesting to read an insider story on how that decision played out in the meantime.

I don't know if the GPU integration is actually a negative, though - Intel's doing the same thing these days and doing well enough, and they both don't waste die space on integrated GPUs for their server lines.

I think they just needed to have the next major line with enough time to try to respond to the P-M/Core switch to really knock it out of the park...and we got Bulldozer instead, where they bet big on trying to partition resources and a different notion of distinct "cores", and didn't come out ahead.

The GPU integration as such isn't a problem but they threw together two teams who had a vastly different approach. That is an organizational problem. With AMD I think that the influence of the GPU team grew too big.

Now AMD has better GPUs while intel struggles in that area.

Yes, I almost forgot the resulting Bulldozer fiasco. I believe that was a result of applying GPU thinking to CPUs.

And now Zen comes out of forming an entirely new round of people. The amount of money lost from that particular issue, if that was the cause, boggles the mind.

(It's too bad that AMD didn't wind up on top so far in the GPGPU area - if they had, all that GPU influence being a problem probably would be much easier to write off.)

Intel struggles in that area?

AFAIK the only problem Intel struggles with, GPU-wise, is that they appear to loathe the idea of making discrete GPUs, so they're constantly trying to figure out how to make a fast GPU in an acceptable on-package area.

I was under the impression that AMD's on-die GPUs, while (possibly? I haven't tested their on-die GPUs in a few generations) nicer than Intel's, were still not something to write home about.

For a while I saw AMDs APUs recommended quite a bit for cheap HTPCs and light gaming machines.

It depends what you mean by lost their way. But ATI has nothing to do with it. Bulldozer was a failure, it was a perfect storm of Intel's best execution since the Pentium 4 Ghz problem and AMD's worst execution. When Intel took a misstep, it cost them 20% of market shares. When AMD took a misstep, it nearly killed them. You could argue without ATI, AMD would properly be dead by now. And AMD CPU was literally uncompetitive even with price reduction for the past 5 years. And they totally miss the boat with the desktop to laptop transition. While Intel, after hitting the Powerwall with Pentium 4 and fortunate enough to have had a team working on a architecture specially for laptop, the original Pentium M, pick up speed in that direction.

But like others have pointed out, I believe it is a operational, internal struggle, and basically a leadership problem.

> And AMD CPU was literally uncompetitive even with price reduction for the past 5 years.

I don't know about that.

The Intel core are very good processors but the entry price for the smallest one is over $100.

I can remember some cheaper product lines from Intel but they weren't that great. AMD had decent CPU for the cheap laptops and computers. Dunno how much volume and margin there is to be done on that segment.

amd banked on multi core and hsa, both way too ahead of their time when the software is still heavy reliant on fat cores, and apus while better than intel+igpu today are simply regarded as good choice for portable devices or hpcs with good cpu and gpu with low tdp...but i seem to remember that was not the point! the point was to take advantage of the fact that the gpu and cpu are closer...

amd bought ati right before the release of the r600 lineup which totally lost against nvidia 88xx cards and marked nvidia for gpu domination for years to come, so they acquired a company right before their biggest product failure, and after that they released phenom 1 which was a failure in its own right, after these 2 consecutive big lost they had to go fabless because couldn't afford to keep up the pace with technology and because of low demand they were not running full time ...this brought a lot of other complications for amd, because of missed deadlines of pp and in general not competitive to intel...

after having modestly recovered from the phenom fiasco with phenom2, and with r700 gpus, it tanked again with bulldozer after lots of delays...then released a decent version with vishera which was a good enough contender to intel ivy-bridge, except for power/efficiency because they were already behind in the pp, after that to regain margin with intel an entire pp was skipped and amd stalled in the high highpower market focusing only on low power pp with apus, going for zen, thank god GCN was good enough to make them keep a sizable market in the gpus...

Looks like this is just clickbait article. It beats Intel on price alone from what we can see.

Business as usual.

Sandy Bridge-Ivy Bridge > Haswell-Broadwell > Skylake-KabyLake

That is now 5 - 6 years without much performance improvement. You will need to use those newer instructions (AVX2). So basically we have been getting the same CPU performance at a lower power usage, and at a similar price point.

From SandyBridge to Kaby Lake, there is may be maximum 15% IPC difference. So all AMD will need to do, is to catch up to Haswell or Broadwell, i.e Catch up to performance of Intel's CPU 4 years ago, and offer 20%-50% discount price.

The higher end, Server, high margin CPU that intel currently enjoys are exactly where AMD needs to hit. Theoretically, those who need high end CPU for gaming will also need a high end GPU. But knowing AMD it is hard for me to imagine how two unit within the same company could cooperate.

Considering the chip isn't out yet this story should be taken with a grain of salt.

Anyone have a link to the story that doesn't send you to a nag page if you have javascript turned off?

https://archive.fo/xgqlz

You can switch on the Reader View Mode in Firefox to avoid the nag.

Look around for a browser extension that disables meta refresh tags.

Right click, inspect, delete, delete.

Keep in mind the author isn't exactly a hardware engineer:

> Working in IT retail for 10 years gave him great experience with high-end, custom-built PCs.

So treat the article with a slightly smaller grain of salt as you would a salesperson at your local Best Buy pushing AMD chips.

I hope AMD make a comeback. It is all I have ever owned (currently running a Phenom x6), but was contemplating going to Intel.

That being said, it sounds like these are AMD benchmarks so be wary...

My Phenom II X4 940 on the desktop machine is still going strong. I couldn't yet justify replacing it because it just isn't that bad yet. I think I'll put off replacing that rig for another year.

Some desktop AMD processors support ECC memory which would need a Xeon and more expensive mainboards from intel for replacement. This tunes up the price quite a bit when switching. That ECC support was the deciding factor back then.

With rowhammer reality this should actually be a deal breaker for the conscious...

Let me channel the /r/AMD sentiment here:

Wait for benchmarks!

Don't let hype take over.

I remember Amd's K10 series being hyped to high heaven before release (something like 40% faster than Intel's competitors) only to be a major letdown.

What about power consumption ?

I was hoping for $999 cpu but twice as fast as example Intel cpu...

They have 16 and 32 core count processors planned. These should be faster for programs with good concurrency although one detail that has gone under the radar is that Zen has half the SIMD performance of Intel AVX chips (it should take 256 bit SIMD instructions but doesn't execute them all at once). Still, this is unlikely to make a difference in the vast majority of software out there.

They already have > 20 cores for servers (> 40 with HT).

It is pointless for consumers. Well, except for squeezing a few dollars from the enthusiast who only want THE best, a profitable niche.

Why is it pointless? There is never too many cpus

Most user applications cannot fully utilize 40 cores.

But users run many applications at the same time.

Not 40 of them ^^

Well, I just started my laptop and I have 179 processes and 2381 threads running ^^

Which all together hardly use 3% of a single core.

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