[hddherman]

Depends on how you look at it, with pure horsepower they have passed Intel in performance already, seeing how they can just put 64 cores on a CPU. The single thread gap has also been closing rapidly, and with Zen 3 on the horizon they could pass Intel in this segment, too, especially since Intel has been delaying 10nm forever.

[pjmlp]

Except most devs don't have any idea of what to do with them, and they end up mostly managing OS processes, containers, GC and JIT background processing, VM instances.

[pedrocr]

Maybe for 64 that's true but for mainstream usage getting 8 cores in a laptop instead of 4 is a massive gain. That's effectively what has happened in the current laptop lines with AMD having twice the cores with the same power usage and single-thread performance. Here's the comparison of the top-spec AMD and Intel CPUs available in the just released T14s:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i7-10610U-vs-AMD-...

If your workload is running a single-app that may be underused but particularly in home-office mode I'm constantly doing VCs, having 4 or 5 browser tabs that are heavy, Office for documents, etc. It doesn't matter if all those are a single thread, I'd be filling up the 8 cores and probably taking advantage of the 16 threads from SMT as well.

[pjmlp]

Except mainstream usage is mostly about Core i3 and i5 laptops, yes even for coding.

Those are the typical units that externs get from customers' IT, when it isn't some kind of cloud based VM.

And regular consumers don't even know what they own, rather what the guy at the store or some relative has given as advice.

[pedrocr]

All Intel options on the T14s are 4 core. The only other AMD option is still 6 core. The slower AMD part is still twice as fast as the fastest Intel chip:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i7-10610U-vs-AMD-...

AMD wins on price as well. That people don't usually make good buying choices is not an argument about CPU performance.

[pjmlp]

It is because at the end of the day that dictates what stays on the market and what goes home.

I thought we have learned by now that it isn't the best tech that wins.

[pedrocr]

Your contention was that the extra performance provided by AMD was not usable, not that it wouldn't win in the market. So we were indeed discussing who had the best tech, even if that's not all that matters for commercial success.

[eikenberry]

What do you mean? Those are all great uses for the increased core count. Run more things easier and faster is the general goal.

[pjmlp]

Kind of, watch how much they spend idle because there isn't enough work to keep them really busy.