this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2024
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Amazing what happens when your primary competitor spends 18 months stepping on every rake they can find.
And, then, having run out of rakes, they then deeply invest in a rake factory so they can keep right on stepping on them.
This'll probably be a lot more interesting a year from now, given that the product lines for the next ~9 months or so are out and uh, well.....
18 months? Lol.
Intel has been stagnating since the 4th gen Core uarch in 2014 with little competition. They knew they were top dog and they sat on their hands until their hands went numb. There's a reason "14nm++++++++++" was a running joke. This is a decade of monopolistic market behavior finally coming home to roost.
So you're telling me that milking my 4770k until this year when I built a new rig with AMD was in fact a genius move?
Perfect market timing.
Basically yeah. Up until Zen 2 intel didn't do much innovating and only around the zen 2 era did those 4th/6th gen chips start to really struggle in modern workloads.
TBH the only thing that caused me grief with that old beast of an i7 (other that the fact it would have bottlenecked my new GPU) was playing Stellaris.
That's a wee revisionist: Zen/Zen+/Zen2 were not especially performant and Intel still ran circles around them with Coffee Lake chips, though in fairness that was probably because Zen forced them to stuff more cores on them.
Zen3 and newer, though, yeah, Intel has been firmly in 2nd place or 1st place with asterisks.
But the last 18 months has them fucking up in such a way that if you told me that they were doing it on purpose, I wouldn't really doubt it.
It's not so much failing to execute well-conceived plans as it was shipping meltingly hot, sub-par performing chips that turned out to self-immolate, combined with also giving up on being their own fab, and THEN torching the relationship with TSMC before you launched your first products they're fabbing.
You could write the story as a malicious evil CEO wanting to destroy the company and it'd read much the same as what's actually happening (not that I think Patty G is doing that, mind you) right now.
early zen werent performant in lower core count loads, but were extremely competitive in multi core workloads, especially when performamce per dollar was added into the equation. even if one revisits heavy multi core workload benchmarks, they faired fairly well in it. its just at a consumer level, they werent up to snuff yet because in gaming, they were still stuck with developers optimizing for an 8 thread console, and for laptops amds presence was near non existant.
Not only that, but it was vastly more power efficient, and didn't have the glaring security vulnerabilities that Intel had. All while being on a worse Global Foundries manufacturing process.
Unless you were a PC gamer who also didn't care about $/perf, Zen1 was the better architecture.
Single core workloads Intel still had the lead. But multi core (or just multi tasking) Zen 1 was a beast. By zen 2 there was hardly a reason to get Intel even for gaming, and especially at normal setups (nobody is using a top of the line GPU at 1080p). Even when you’re “just” playing a game you still have stuff running in the background, and those extra cores helped a lot.
Plus newer games are much more multi threaded than when zen first came out so those chips aged better as well.
Its chronic underinvestment in engineering to "maximize shareholder value" for a decade before AMD launched Zen. Then Intel got 5 years behind on engineering, and have only managed to get 2 of those 3 caught up. The newest tile based architecture only just matches the performance of AMD's 3 year old AM4 architecture.
There's also a little tidbit that I think gets overlooked: the Arrow Lake CPUs are on a better TSMC node than AMD's Ryzen 9000 series. You wouldn't know it from any of the charts.
Which puts into perspective any Intel fanbois saying this is their Zen 1 moment. They're on a better node but still doing worse. There are no signs of life here, which was not the case for Zen 1.
Zen1 was slower in gaming and most 1-2 core workloads, but it was immediately far faster in server, faster in highly-threaded tasks, was hugely cheaper to manufacture, didn't have the huge security flaws Intel chips had, and was way more power efficient.
They achieved that while still being on an inferior Global Foundries manufacturing process.
Zen1 was overall better than Coffee Lake. Just not to PC gamers, the loudest online PC hardware demographic.
Also, PC gamers are loud, but they make up a pretty small portion of the market. There was a time when Intel's server division made more revenue than all of AMD. Even now, AMD as a whole is only a little above that. That's not even considering the OEM market, which is far, far larger than PC gamers.
I got really annoyed with /r/buildapc. Everyone is a gamer and thinks they're the center of the universe. They haven't the faintest conception that someone would do a build for anything other than gaming and how that changes the choices.
Zen 2 was only a little slower for gaming, but it cooked the 8 core Intel 9900K in multicore performance. You could stick a 16 core 3950x into a normal mobo. The chiplet was a revolution
Huuuuuh
All of my computers had been Intel for many many years and here about a year and a half ago I got my first AMD computer because I had seen other people's machines with AMD processors but I had never owned one for myself and so now I do I have one with an AMD Ryzen 5