[dsr_]

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.

[dman]

Just built a 64 core workstation based on AMD Epyc cpus, seeing how fast my simulation workloads run on it brings a smile to my face.

[effie]

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?

[1] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+EPYC+7501&id=31...

[2] Compare that with performance and price of something like E5-2670 from 2012: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E5-2670+...

[dman]

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.

[effie]

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.

[dman]

Just realised that Passmark does not have a Linux benchmark program, so wont be able to run it.

[effie]

Ah, that's a shame. I'd love to know how much faster the Epyc is than the E5-2670. Could you try to run sysbench to get some numbers? Here are mine:

# sysbench --test=cpu run --max-requests=20000 Test execution summary: total time: 25.9014s total number of events: 20000 total time taken by event execution: 25.8983 per-request statistics: min: 1.27ms avg: 1.29ms max: 3.19ms approx. 95 percentile: 1.29ms

# sysbench --test=cpu run --max-requests=20000 --num-threads=16 Test execution summary: total time: 1.6859s total number of events: 20000 total time taken by event execution: 26.9264 per-request statistics: min: 1.26ms avg: 1.35ms max: 3.59ms approx. 95 percentile: 1.51ms

[wpdev_63]

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.

[ricardobeat]

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.

* it's the second paragraph

[patrickg_zill]

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.

[aseipp]

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. :)