If everything goes right for ARM, next year's CPU line should be single-core competitive against Intel's laptop line; the year after, ARM could be ahead.
Meanwhile, AMD's CPUs are winning on price/performance and pure performance for multi-core in the server market, and it looks like they're going to be competitive with Intel on basically every desktop area.
Intel has a marketing advantage. That's pretty much it.
I can appreciate the fun to be had with so many core cpu, but did you actually measure the performance? According to Passmark, both single and multithread performance of EPYC is very poor [1][2]. Passmark database is years in building and very informative, but I think for EPYC that is an erroneous result. Could you run Passmark benchmark on your rig to get another data point public?
Will give that a try tonight. Have to warn you that right now 1 of my DIMM was bad, so the system is running with only 15 DIMMS (which is an unsupported config) so the results might be suboptimal until I receive a new DIMM from the seller.
That's great, looking forward to the results. But, there's no rush. If you'd like to measure today anyway, please just make sure the result doesn't get reported to Passmark database so as not to spoil the small dataset with a biased result. Good luck with the replacement, hope it will stay solid from now on.
intel is still single thread performance king and will be for the foreseeable future. It's the most important performance metric when considering a desktop processor for most workloads.
While arm is catching up, there is no gaurentee that it will actually be competitive one day, not to mention beat it. Intel is still a beast and spends more in R&D than what amd took in last year. It would be foolhardy to write intel off.
You seem to have missed the part of the article* where the Cortex-A76 matches a core i5-7300 in performance, with much lower TDP. That is planned to come... oh wait, it's already available.
My info may be out of date, but I think Intel also has a production advantage. AMD doesn't have the capacity to, for example, own 45% of the market and leave Intel with 55%, as I understand it.
Desktop/laptop is a shrinking market, and HEDT/Workstations have always been extremely tiny -- it's nowhere close to where Intel makes most of their money. Consumer Ryzen 7 uptake numbers or ARM laptops are basically meaningless as far as predictions about "The death of Intel" go. It's nothing. Datacenters are what matter.
This is a good move for ARM perhaps, since their licensees have (repeatedly, at least _for now_) failed to move into the server market where x86 reigns supreme, so if they can take a shrinking market off Intel's hands and make some inroads there, hey, whatever works. People actually don't care about processors, because for consumers, price is king. So if they can deliver cheaper Chromebooks or whatever, people are happy. And ARM already dominates the lower end market. But large players don't work that way.
EPYC has better pricing per-core (I say this as a very happy 1950X owner) but you're kidding yourself if large scale vendors who buy thousands of SKUs per year/quarter do anything but buy in bulk, on multi-year contracts, with extensive sales negotiations. They are far ahead as far as vendor validation/stability goes (my 1950X motherboard still has BIOS/IOMMU glitches that I'm waiting on updates for, this stuff just takes time). For the biggest customers, Intel customizes their SKUs directly to their requirements. That's a significant amount of integration with their partners that AMD is not going to match overnight. And even if they take away some of Intel's total-monopoly status in the DC, say 25%, which is a metric shitload, they've still got a hell of a lot of technology (in their foundries) to back themselves up, as well as a massive warchest. I wouldn't be surprised if Xeon margins were above 50%. You really think they can't drop some of that off and immediately tilt that ratio back around, while having tens of billions on hand for R&D anyway?
You live in a castle of sand if you think they're actually going anywhere anytime in like, the next 5-7 years. And I have many bridges to sell you, if you think "marketing" is their only advantage in this fight -- as opposed to their foundries, deep integration, near-total monopoly status in the only market that matters, their massive warchest, and huge R&D setup.
I honestly wonder if Intel actually wants people think that ARM Chromebooks are a threat to them or whatever. It means they can keep deluding themselves while Xeon sales and margins continue to skyrocket for cloud providers while everyone else chases pennies (except AMD, who are actually trying, and are absolutely not guaranteed to dominate by that alone)...
(I do hope they start feeling the pressure, of course. I'd love cheaper Xeons, personally. :)
You can't really look at power and performance in isolation, given that you can trade one for the other by modifying their clock speeds. It would be better to say that from the milliwatt range to 20W socket draw or so ARM is more performance and current x86 designs are more performant above 20W.
Does "Intel Inside" sound familiar? That's because it worked amazingly well, and people chose Intel over AMD back in the day just because they "felt" better about it. Some even chose it because they didn't want to get AMD shamed ("Aw poor person; they could only a afford an AMD.").
Not saying Intel CPU lineup wasn't better than AMD's product, (especially at the height of the marketing program when laptops used to have "Intel Inside" stickers), but a lot of people didn't even bother comparing. They just chose Intel-based computers.
And that's the story of how so many people I know ended up buying a PC with a crappy Celeron* (I know, I know, the new ones are better).
Sure, CPUs are harder than iPods to market to consumers. Most haven't a clue what ARM Cortex-A7 is. But, that could be the issue. They need to step up their brand identity. They also should probably tell people that ARM doesn't actually make hardware for consumers. They just design the architecture and license that design to silicon manufactures.
Most people knew they were buying an Intel. Most people don't know they bought an ARM. They could do better.
*: I assume some bought them because the salesman at Best Buy said "dude, Intel's are what you want. AMDs are slow."
I'm not sure that type of marketing will happen again though. Since then, computers have gone further down the path of being an appliance. What's inside matters less than what it can do. If Apple releases a MacBook with 1-5 days of battery life, no one will care what's inside.
Meanwhile, AMD's CPUs are winning on price/performance and pure performance for multi-core in the server market, and it looks like they're going to be competitive with Intel on basically every desktop area.
Intel has a marketing advantage. That's pretty much it.