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Comment by 0xy | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Biggest issue I see with this latest breed of Intel chips are their thermals... looks like you'll need a motherboard that can push quite a few watts to the CPU and you'll need a cooling solution (liquid cooling or a high-end aircooler) to remove the heat.

If you need to drop $$$ on a high-end motherboard and cooler to actually hit top performance it can obscure the true cost of the CPU, because you can easily drop an extra $100 trying to cope with its power and thermal requirements.

thats not just an intel problem

It’s an Intel problem in this case because they’ve made most of their performance improvements with 10th gen by adding cores and increasing frequencies. They haven’t made efficiency improvements in architecture or process node. Their TDP has gone up as a result. Intel managed to keep 10th gen from turning a computer case into a kiln by playing with the heat spreader, but it’s a hot part that needs good/expensive cooling.

So while AMD has made big efficiency improvements in the last couple generations, Intel has been losing efficiency.

Intel is suffering from the heat problem more than AMD because Comet Lake is still on 14nm.

It doesn't look that way. The i9-10900k (10 cores) at full load uses 254W, but the 3950x (16 cores) only uses 144W. There are AMD processors that top the i9-10900k in terms of power consumption, but they're 24/32 cores, consuming 280W/286W respectively.

https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph15785/116012.png9-3...

Fixed link, there was something appended to it.

https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph15785/116012.png

Allegedly they shrank the thickness of the die and increased the thickness of the IHS and push roughly the same thermals under load as the 9th gen chips. And decent coolers aren't that expensive in the grand scheme of things.

But yea, the motherboard situation is way worse. 250W sustained consumption in a relatively small surface area is not going to be great for the substrate layers of the board.

> 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.

Sort of yes (although, they often did two generations per socket in recent times), but then they started just rehashing Skylake every year, and we long for the time of predictable incremental improvement. On the server side, the predictable incremental improvement also came with more cores each time too, so that was nice.

I have the fastest HEDT Intel processor (10980xe) and have benchmarked it extensively against AMD's equivalents (3950x and 3960x).

If you are willing to OC then Intel has a significantly better price/performance ratio than AMD for general use. If you doing anything that benefits from AVX then Intel will pull away significantly. And if you are doing deep learning than DLBoost is seriously under-appreciated. However if you're not in these three camps then AMD is the better option.

Also the x299 LGA1151 socket has been around for 3 years so Intel doesn't always just change sockets for no reason.

Does price/performance include power draw, mainboard, and PSU? The 10980xe requires 250W while boosting afaik.

3950x is not a HEDT. It has only 2 memory channels for instance.

maybe not in the official product stack, but it's a 16-core processor that costs $700. it performs the same as or slightly worse than the 3900x in any workload that isn't massively parallel. imo, when you get to the point in the product stack where $300 dollars yields the same or worse single-thread performance, you have entered HEDT land.

>it performs the same as or slightly worse than the 3900x

This is getting nowhere, 3900x is 12core version of 3950x, both are commodity grade hardware with 'cheaper' motherboards and two memory channels. 3950x tends to have the higher quality silicone, it boosts higher on its right own.

HEDT has more memory channels and more PCIe lanes - this is "the land".

If you are willing to OC then Intel has a significantly better price/performance ratio than AMD for general use

You're engaged in some serious attempts at rationalization.

The 3950X trounces the 10980XE in virtually every metric (including measures where the 10980XE gets to use AVX-512). It costs 1/3rd less. Unless you're significantly overclocking, with expensive cooling hardware, you aren't making that up. And in the real world the headroom for overclocking is pretty tiny.

Intel is behind, and even after price cuts they're still seriously overpriced. Trying to rationalize that they're "significantly better price/performance" if you just do A,B, C (which are of course completely unverifiable, moving target meaningless steps) is nonsense.

I have provided benchmarks here: https://browser.geekbench.com/user/threeseed

By all means do the comparison against the 3950x.

And my cooler is a standard 360mm AIO which is hardly expensive.

"By all means do the comparison against the 3950x."

Just to be clear, here, your overclocking was so extreme, and so extremely atypical, that you're on the "world record" list-

https://hwbot.org/benchmark/geekbench4_-_multi_core/halloffa...

And you're seriously positing this as just a typical thing to do?

Your processor costs 33%+ more than the 3950X. Your cooler, even your "hardly expensive" cooler, costs another $200-$300+. No, you didn't hit anywhere close to a high in price/performance -- even if we assume that you aren't blasting through 300W to the processor alone, and suffering a cascade of faults if you tried to pretend this was normal operations, you still haven't come close to breaking even on that ratio.

And all of that is going by Geekbench which already has an oddly synthetic slant towards Intel. In actual benchmarks of real world activities -- compiling, running blender, most games, etc -- the 3950X absolutely shoots in the lead (despite having just two RAM channels, where in memory access it barely lags the 4 channel 10980XE)

I don't have any dog in this race. This laptop has an i7. My MBP has an i7. My "gaming" PC has an older Zen. But you have to seriously stretch and twist reality to try to make a case for Intel, much less a value proposition.

My overlocking is hardly extreme, it's 4.8GHz. And my cooler costs $119.

Also I run this configuration as my daily driver with zero faults and in my real world use cases e.g. machine learning it is 2-5x faster than then 3950x. AVX512 is still a killer feature for Intel.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/on-the-dangers-of-intels-frequen...

It turns out AVX512 doesn't give you the kind of performance speedouts you think. On those benchmarks, AVX512 is only around 8% faster than AVX2.

The reality is that AMD is killing Intel at every price point. My 3950x scores 12444 (no OC) and only costs around $400. Looking up on Newegg, your 10980XE costs... wait for it.. $3000.

Even with your crazy overclocking, that intel cpu is only 35% faster and 650% more expensive. How can you seriously claim that Intel is at all competitive with AMD?

And speaking of ML, it's rare to find a ML workload that is expensive that doesn't involve neural networks. And for neural networks, you should be running on a GPU anyways so I'm not sure how useful this DL Boost tech is.

Edit: I mean 3900x, not 3950x.

Aren't Threadrippers the HEDT offerings from AMD?

Well Intel has Jim Keller now so given a bit of time they will come out with something nice too :)

It was discussed previously on HN that Zen platform engineering lead wasn't him.

Did I claim he was ?

Jim Keller needs competitive technology node to work on.

All they've got left at this point is "I want the best gaming performance and literally nothing else matters". For the average person maybe that's all they've got left. But technically their are still ahead in some interesting ways when we look at x86 extensions: By decreasing order of impact: AVX 512 TSX SGX

Their next architecture could bring bfloat16 too but I wonder how useful that would be on a CPU instead of on a GPU.

AVX512 and TSX can give Intel a BIG performance advantage in some niche (but foundational) applications

By that metric alone you could also wait/hope/wish for Via Centaur Cha Ncore which i commented about @ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22716893 in another context.

I use some engineering software that uses Intel Math Kernel Libraries. It is 30% faster on an Intel CPU, versus AMD with equivalent speed/cores.

Is it a 30% perf/$ advantage though? In most comparisons I've seen Intel lost horrendously even with AVX-512 code compared to EPYC 2 when price was factored in. Doubly so if the cost of electricity and cooling is included, because the watts/core for AMD is much lower than anything Intel has.

You can see my 10980xe Geekbench 4/5 results here: https://browser.geekbench.com/user/threeseed

Compare against 3950x and 3960x and you will see it's closer to the 3960x for quite a bit cheaper and with 6 less cores. And that's not entirely AVX-512 code.

Also power consumption is a little overblown since all CPUs scale their frequencies so even though mine runs at 5GHz it will spend most of the day below 2GHz or so.

Are you aware of the workaround for the mkl to not fall back to SSE on AMD?

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/f2pbvz/dis...

No, thank you! I am going to try this.

that is because intel won’t fix a bug that doesn’t let the amd cpus use avx

It's not a bug, there's a well documented history of Intel artificially crippling performance on non-Intel chips.

They've done this with their compiler (and got sued for it), libraries, and they've even introduced code into glibc to do that.

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.

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.

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

Intel's hardware quality seems to have been a bit iffy these last few years, like they've got complacent. Their latest screw-up is that their 2.5G Ethernet chipset that's meant to be included on higher-end Comet Lake motherboards isn't actually spec-compliant: https://wccftech.com/intel-400-series-chipsets-z490-i225-v-n... Apparently 2.5G Ethernet allows the next packet to be sent 5 byte times after the end of the previous ones, but they incorrectly followed the gigabit spec and required 8 byte times, causing massive packet loss when receiving data from other hardware that follows the spec strictly. A new, non-broken revision is meant to be shipping sometime, but the workaround for customers stuck with the old one is dropping to gigabit speeds.

> That's some toxic community you've built here, @dang.

HN is one of the better, and better moderated, communities. Thanks dang.

I'm with you. I've simply had so many problems with AMD products (CPU and GPU). They seem attractive because of their price points but they are always a purchase I end up regretting for a very diverse variety of reasons. Never again.

Exactly what do you expect Dang to do about it? You want him you him to somehow punish your downvoters?

I read a lot of good comments from you, especially on software-related topics. But it would serve you well to grow a thicker skin. Who knows why some posts get inexplicable downvotes. But who cares?

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