this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2024
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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (4 children)

My thought process:

Desktop: I need cost for performance...

Server: fps for the Jellyfin, transcodes for the transcode god

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I'd drop in an old Nvidia GPU for transcoding, anyway. There's lots of old cards that support nvenc. Don't neglect the Quadro cards, either. Lots of them are cheap on ebay and will transcode just fine without even needing their own cooling fan.

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[–] [email protected] 125 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

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.....

[–] [email protected] 81 points 2 days ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 2 days ago (3 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 days ago

Perfect market timing.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 days ago (6 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago

Sad but true. Intel's performance was poor over the last year. Shuddering thinking about my Mac with Intel CPU, there must be burn victims from this thing. Still, less competition is never a good thing.

[–] [email protected] 61 points 2 days ago (3 children)

If you look at who is manufacturing silicon, the numbers look even worse for Intel. All of these competitors are using TSMC fabs. AMD, Apple, Qualcomm, etc.

TSMC is the real 500lb gorilla in the room.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 days ago

And Intel. Intel has been using TSMC fabs for a while.

They used to get a 40% discount, too, but that stopped recently when Pat Gelsinger said people should stop buying from TSMC because there's a good chance they'll be invaded.

TSMC's CEO didn't like that, and said "ok, no more 40% discount for you. Effective immediately." (TL;DR'd, obviously).

[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 days ago (2 children)

It’s gonna suck so hard for the whole world when they get invaded :(

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 days ago

Pray they don't, but I'm almost certain they will now that the US is appointing complete morons to every portion of the US government. The US won't really be able to help until this rot gets cleaned out. China has four years before we can really help Taiwan again. (Or at least give them air superiority)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Biden just finalized the Arizona TSMC plant.

If that gets invaded, I think semiconductors are the least of our problems.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 days ago (4 children)

But the Arizona plant wouldn't be allowed to manufacture the most cutting edge chips.

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[–] [email protected] 54 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I just built a computer for a friend and she decided to get an AMD when I told her it was about the same performance but used half as much electricity.

This is a person who knows nothing about computers. Intel is losing their "household name" status in a big way judging by that.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 days ago (1 children)

People like long battery life and computers that don’t cook your crotch.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 days ago (2 children)

What are the chances they were building a laptop?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 days ago

Wait you don't straddle your desktop tower?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago

Good point.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

EDIT: Sorry, the article isn't about GPU rather it's about the CPU market where AMD is projected to overtake Intel in the far future.


When the AI Crash wipes out nVidia's demand in the server market they're not gonna have any loyal customers in the desktop market right as the tech boom comes to places formerly reliant on only smartphones. Then they're gonna be like surprised_pikachu.jpg

[–] [email protected] 32 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Not surprised. I switched to AMD CPU and GPU about a year ago. Could not be happier. Ryzen sips power and I run mine in Eco mode (since I'm on an air cooler). Performance is still fantastic.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago

Invested in a water cooler setup back when I had a Bulldozer chip, which was near essential. Now on a Ryzen, and getting it to exceed about 35 degrees is very difficult. Been very good for long-term stability of my desktop - all the niggling hard disk issues seem to just go away when they've not subjected to such thermal cycling any more.

Fantastic chips.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 days ago (1 children)

it's the year of the linux des-

oh wait, wrong thread

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The joke: every year is the year of the Linux desktop

head tap

because Linux is rather awesome.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

get away from me you filthy crocodile

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

I feel like they are dropping the ball in the GPU space though, both on desktop and in servers.

They'renot really leveraging it. They killed the steam deck line of "small core count, GPU heavy APUs" which is why Valve hasn't updated it and competitors seem so power hungry. They all but killed server APUs, making them mega expensive and HPC only. They're finally coming out with a M-Pro like consumer APU, but it took until 2025, and pricing will probably be a joke just like their Radeon Pro GPUs...

And I don't even wanna get into the AI space. They get like 99% there and then go "nah, we don't really care about this market, let Nvidia have their monopoly and screw everyone over." It makes me want to pull my hair out.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

The fact they pulled ROCM support for older cards boggles the mind.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (5 children)

Why does desktops lag behind servers which is at 50%??

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Servers need very high uptime. Also, when something is documented to work a certain way, it had damn well better work as stated.

Intel had a long reputation of solid engineering. Even when they were losing at both performance and performance per watt, they could still fall back on being steady. The 13th/14th gen degradation problems have shot that argument to hell, and server customers are jumping ship.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's taken this long for Intel to lose gamer trust.

Intel also have lower power consumption iirc, which is useful for laptops etc.

AMD have the best server chips: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

You have to remember that most people aren't "choosing a CPU" as much as buying a PC. If the majority of pre-build retail PCs have Intel, then the majority of purchases will be Intel.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I don't think Intel is more efficient if their desktops and this one link is anything to go by

https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu_benchmark-cpu_performance_per_watt

But I'm not up to date on laptop stuff at all so might be wrong

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

That's under load. At Idle (which is where your average home PC will spend most of it's time) I think Intel has the edge still.

It's certainly a consideration for a battery device. Watching a video reading emails or staring at a spreadsheet will likely have better battery life than a similar spec AMD device.

We've reached a point where most everyday computing tasks can be handled by a cheapo N100 mini PC.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

Actually AMDs mobile parts are pretty good at idle power consumption and so are their desktop APUs. Their normal CPUs, which use the chiplet design are rather poor when it comes to idle power consumption. Intel isn't really any better when compared to the monolithic parts at idle and Intel CPUs have horrible power consumption under load. Their newest CPUs are better when it comes to efficiency than 13th and 14th gen CPU, bus still don't match or even exceed AMD.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I would have to ask for a source on that. I can't really find anything comparing many cpus.

However this video compares top end models on otherwise pretty much identical laptops and amd definitely wins in YouTube playback on battery https://youtu.be/X_I8kPlHJ3M

But if you've got anything to better compare I'm all ears

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It may well be the case that they're similar or even swapped now. I can see that the N100 is pretty low power compared to the newest low end AMD chips, but then the AMD chips are better in terms of what they can do.

This one reckons they're pretty similar.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/10evt0z/ryzen_vs_intels_idle_power_consumption_whole/

This one reckons Intel are better.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32809852

I doubt there's much in it either way. Even if AMD are ahead now, laptops don't get replaced right away, normies replace shit when it fails or is too slow to run whatever shit Google shoehorned into Chrome this year, and the most popular laptops are probably the ones with the lowest sticker price.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Note: I’m not from the US, so in a lot of cases going to a manufacturer’s website and purchasing computers is not an option. Resellers are still the ones in charge here.

I work IT and when it time for a hardware refresh the reseller we are in contact with said they don’t stock AMD as there’s no demand. Which in a way creates a chicken and egg problem. I asked them if it would be possible to get laptops with AMD chips and the reseller said yes but we have to wait. So we bought 4 Intel machines for the meantime and placed a custom order for ones with AMD chips. The ThinkPads we are buying are significantly cheaper if they come with AMD chips, I was honestly a bit baffled there was no demand. Regardless, we are happy with the purchase and so are the users who claim the computers are relatively cooler than their Intel 8th gen predecessors. It just goes to show that for the most part, enterprise makes a huge chunk of the desktop market share nowadays (as younger generations tend to simply not use a computer and do everything on their phone) and that market just isn’t ready for the transition yet. They’ve been going strong with Intel for about 30-40 years. Weening of that tit is gonna take some time.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Thank you, that was enlightening

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Businesses make decisions based on money. People make decisions based on vibes.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Except the businesses run by people

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

Not entirely sure but afaik their EPYC cpus are good.

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