It's official: Intel lost the single-threaded desktop performance crown to AMD | Hacker News Reader

It's official: Intel lost the single-threaded desktop performance crown to AMD

arstechnica.com

72 pointsvanburen18 comments

Has anyone tried these for audio work? Sounds like they would be amazing. Just curious, as I'd like to build a new audio workstation soon. For those who don't know, the norm in high performance audio work is to have one thread per core do your heavy processing (the DSP), and sharing across cores is actually still really tricky and sub-optimal.

3900X was equivalent or quite below Intel on various benches, e.g. for Kontakt: http://www.scanproaudio.info/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Dawb...

Full article: http://www.scanproaudio.info/2019/07/12/amd-ryzen-3600-3700x...

so I wouldn't hold my breath, but still on the lookout for a good surprise

I though Intel 9xxx is high end and AMD 3xxx is low end ? In that case how could this bench mean anything ?

The 3900X was one of the highest-end consumer Zen2 CPUs. If I'm remembering correctly only the 3950X was above it without jumping up to the Threadripper line of CPUs.

The first number signifies the generation. What you mean is intel with its i3/i5/i7/i9 marketing Names to segment features behind arbitrary performance classes. AMD3XXX goes from 4 Cores on 3100 to 3995 with 64 cores.

Right, forgot about that marketing trick. My bad.

Ryzen 3xxx would be the 3rd generation of Zen CPUs. For example, an Ryzen 3200U (U means it has an embedded GPU, basically an APU) would be low-end, Ryzen 3500 would be middle-end, and Ryzen 3700/3900 would be high-end.

I would expect 5950x to be equal 9900k for single core. Not ideal for audio but there is nothing better and with 16 cores you should get twice as much tracks running in realtime.

Wait what? Aren't the benchmarks we're seeing pop up all over today saying that the 5950X is about 18% better than the 10900K in single core workloads? How do you figure that it would be equivalent to the LAST gen from Intel?

I am talking about 9900k at 5.1-5.2 GHz.

My understanding is that most audio work is mac, so wouldn't that be an issue? I know AMD hackintoshes exist, though can be a bit tricky to set up in a stable fashion. It might take some time for support, too.

Macs are severly behind in terms of audio work. If you get something like UAD then Mac is viable, but when you start using better quality plugins like from Acustica Audio, then Mac no longer makes sense as it is too slow.

Exciting times. Maybe AMD will lose its crown to Apple next week?

In single core performance, for general workloads? Apple's chips are good, particularly when you factor in power efficiency, but c'mon.

Probably. But unfortunately Apple computers are moving away from being computing devices.

Intel has been moving to a server chip first strategy. I’m not sure this was a good idea.

I don't know if what Intel has been doing are so much strategies as whatever can be done to hold market share. They could claim single-thread performance or smaller process nodes having lost throughput or power efficiency. Then added the rarely beneficial AVX512 as a differentiator.

If it was a strategy, it's not necessarily such a crazy one.

They would have known earlier than most that Apple was moving to ARM. Microsoft and others (Samsung at least) have been selling lower-end consumer computers with ARM chips - and they don't look like they're going to abandon this market any time soon.

As long as Apple's transition isn't a complete disaster, the "good enough" volume sales computer gets closer and closer to being ARM every year, leaving x86 on the desktop a smaller and smaller niche.

Or not. I am not even remotely close to being an expert!

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