> wipes the floor with anything Intel has to offer
* in synthetic benchmarks that uses down to the last core
edit: my bad I mistook this for a technical audience
* in synthetic benchmarks that uses down to the last core
edit: my bad I mistook this for a technical audience
But also Zen 2 core at 4.5 GHz is faster than Skylake core at 4.5GHz (about the peak boost in Intel HEDT) also in single threaded tasks.
Milticore performance gets more and more important with time.
no? above 2-4 core it's just marketing hype like it was ten years ago already and today if you need parallel processing you have vastly powerful resources to tap.
sure this amd cpu might be faster in 3d rendering or video encoding or other task that use 4+ cores and that might be useful if you truly can't move them onto a gpu but truth is at the top end many-cores architectures are getting squeezed out by streaming processors and the workloads that have a hard dependency on many core single node general processor are rarer by the day.
It's not only about 3D. We're talking everyday programmer productivity, partially achieved by less waiting around when compiling your projects.
> the Linux kernel build process
For what it's worth, I migrated from a consumer-grade i7 CPU to a workstation-grade Xeon and the differences in compile speeds in my everyday projects (less than 400 files) are still significant and very noticeably in favour of the Xeon.
Linux kernel compilation is just a benchmark that multiplies such differences between CPUs. Thus the buyers can -- hopefully -- make a more informed decision.
It also has tooling for "watching" test directories and auto re-running tests when certain files are changed -- which utilises incremental compilation under the hood and there indeed there is no visible compilation performance difference.
To be fair, Ice Lake/Sunny Cove seems to introduce a significant IPC improvement. It's currently stuck in low-power dual core CPUs due to Intel's 10nm yield woes. (allegedly quad cores have launched too, but I haven't seen any reviews of devices based on those?) But presumably it will eventually percolate up the product stack and give desktop processors a solid boost too.
So that particular fight doesn't look anywhere near over just yet. (Zen+ to Zen2 was also a decent IPC bump, so no reason to believe AMD have hit a wall in that regard either - I'm sure they're scrambling to make another leap in Zen3/4 that compares favourably with the Skylake->Sunny Cove one to preempt Intel retaking the crown.)