Hacker News Reader

The original Zen architecture released in 2017 was not the best performing CPU on the market by any metric. It wasn't until Zen 2 and Zen 3 that AMD fully caught up.

View on HN

If $/perf on multithreaded workloads is your metric then it did beat Intel from what I remember.

I believe it took until Zen 2 for the AMD high end to beat the Intel high end in multithreaded perf, and until Zen 3 for AMD to take the single threaded perf crown across the board too.

It occurs to me now that AMD probably would have taken the multithreaded crown from Intel with Zen 1 if Intel hadn't upped their (consumer socket) high end from 4 to 6 cores in the same year.

Although it's hard to say whether that was a direct response to the threat from AMD or not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com