Completely agree. The lack of clarity around all this is hardly confidence inspiring. Definitely seems like a good time to be considering AMD or Qualcomm.
I've been using AMD since 2004. My first AMD processor was the Athlon 64 3000+, I was a kid I wasn't really allowed anything too expensive. We had dominately used Intel upt that point but when 64bit CPUs hit it was a revolutionary thing.
The roughest era of AMD CPUs was the FX era. While it was comprable to its mid-range competition it was alos a sure fast way to burn down your house with its power draw.
Ryzen was a huge step forward in CPU design and architecture.
I see this era as Intel's FX era, if they have the right leadership in place they can turn the boat around and innovate.
>Ryzen was a huge step forward in CPU design and architecture.
First gen Ryzen was kinda mediocre. Second gen(correction: meaning Zen 2 not Ryzen 2000 which was still Zen 1) was where the performance came.
Also let's not ignore how they screwed consumers like me by dropping SW support for Vega in 2023 while still selling laptops with Vega powered APUs on the shelves all the way till present day in 2024, or having a naming scheme that's intentionally confusing to mislead consumers where you don't know if that Ryzen 7000 laptop APU has Zen2, Zen3, Zen3+ or Zen4 CPU cores, if it's 4nm, 5nm, 6nm or 7nm or if it's running RDNA2, RDNA3 or the now obsolete Vega in a modern system.[1] Maddening.
Despite that I'm a returning AMD customer to avoid Intel, but I'm having my own issues now with their iGPU drivers making me regret not going Intel this time around. The grass isn't always greener across the fence, just different issues.
I get it, you're an AMD fan, but let's be objective and not ignore their stinkers and anti-consumer practices which they had plenty of and only played nice for a while to get sympathy because they were the struggling underdog, but didn't hesitate to milk and deceive consumers the moment they got back on top like any other for profit company with a moment of market dominance.
My point being, don't get attached or loyal to any large company, since you're just a dollar sign for all of them. Be an informed consumer and make purchasing decisions on objective current factors, not blind brand loyalty from the distant past.
>AMD FX is a series of high-end AMD microprocessors for personal computers which debuted in 2011, claimed as AMD's first native 8-core desktop processor.[1] The line was introduced with the Bulldozer microarchitecture at launch (codenamed "Zambezi"), and was then succeeded by its derivative Piledriver in 2012 (codenamed "Vishera").
Toms Hardware posted retraction over a year later admitting motherboard was at fault and test was proposed and designed by Intel (including picking motherboard vendors) as part of their Pentium 4 promotion drive.
Same as Pentium 3 of same era, thermal throttling on socket A was supposed to be implemented by Motherboard vendors using chip integrated thermal diode. Pentium 3 would burn same way if put on a motherboard with non working thermal cutout.
>AMD FX is a series of high-end AMD microprocessors for personal computers which debuted in 2011
Ha, well that's wrong. This is the first time I find a mistake or more accurately, a contradiction in Wikipedia.
AMD's first FX CPU (the FX-51) came out in 2003 as a premium Athlon 64 that was an expensive power hungry beast, which is the one I assume the GP was talking about. Here, also from Wikipedia:
"The Athlon 64 FX is positioned as a hardware enthusiast product, marketed by AMD especially toward gamers. Unlike the standard Athlon 64, all of the Athlon 64 FX processors have their multipliers completely unlocked."
It's not contradictory. The "FX" you're talking about is used as "Athlon FX"[1], whereas the "FX" in the article is "AMD FX"[2]. The branding might be a bit confusing, but the article isn't wrong.
> First gen Ryzen was mediocre. Second gen was where the performance came.
Are you sure? I just looked at Ryzen 5 1600 vs 2600 benchmarks and the difference is around 5%. And I also remember the hype when the first generation was released. I think Ryzen gen 1 was by far the largest step.
I've used both the Ryzen 3 1200 and 7 1700 and all of them seemed fine for their time and price.
Honestly, I had the 1700 in my main PC up until last year, it was still very much okay for most things I might want to actually do, except no ReBAR support pushed me towards a Ryzen 5 4500 (got it for a low price, otherwise slightly better than the 1700 in performance, still good for my needs; runs noticeably hotter though, even without a big OC).
I guess things are quite different for enthusiasts and power users, but their needs probably don't affect what would be considered bad/mediocre/good for the general population.
Im sure you will be happy to hear this is purely artificial limitation introduced by AMD for product segmentation purposes. Very first Ryzen Zen generation does fully support ReBAR in hardware, but its locked by AMD bios.
Given that I got an Intel Arc A580 for myself, this was pretty important! Quite bad that it wasn't officially supported if there are no hardware issues and I would have liked to just keep using the 1700 for a few more years, but opted for just buying a new CPU so my old one would be a reasonable backup, path of least resistance in this case.
Would also like to try out the recent Intel CPUs (though surely not the variety that seems to have stability issues), but that's not in the cards for now because most of my PCs and homelab all use AM4, on which I'll stay for the foreseeable future.
I actually like both companies. Intel isn't bad, right now isn't great for them though.
We are better for Intel and AMD to coexist. But my gamble is on AMD because I've always liked the compatibility of the hardware with variety of technology. You can easily get server grade interfacing on consumer grade parts. For the longest time that wasn't true for Intel. When AMD pulls an Intel I'll be full Intel. There are huge wins for Intel getting new fabs built in the states, because it means a lot for security and development.
I remember that I received a ridiculously high RPM fan with my FX-8350 CPU (in the box), which sounded like a vacuum when it ran. Took me less than a week to upgrade to a proper fan that managed to cool that damn thing at 600RPM or so, and life was quiet again!
"Evil Inside(tm)" software made sure many of the libraries and compilers had much slower performance on AMD chips for years.
We had to use intel cpu/gpu + CUDA gpu simply because of compatibility requirements (heavy media codecs and ML workloads.)
Lets be honest, AMD technically has had a better product for decades if you exclude the power consumption metric. ARM64 v8 is also good, if and only if you don't need advanced gpu features.
The Ryzen chips definitely are respectable in passmarks benchmark value stats rankings. =)
The 3700x and 5700x are 65W parts specifically made for quiet/cool boxes (they’re also 8 core). I have both since I enjoy my sanity and dont care about 10% extra performance. They are the pick of the litter in my mind. Also have a laptop with 5850h. Same with their Navi chips, not blazing hot but good enough, and my boxes and nice and quiet.
I think we've been in the "good-enough" computing age for awhile, and only the CUDA-gpu/codec-asic primarily feature in most desktop upgrade decisions.
Quiet machines are great, especially when you have to sit next to one for 9 hours a day. =3
> AMD technically has had a better product for decades if you exclude the power consumption metric
And single core performance.
And some other stuff which obviously didn’t matter during the period in question but suddenly became very important when AMD surpassed Intel in that regard…
I've picked AMD over Intel too, but I've had so many issues with it that I partly regret it. Memory stability issues, extremely long boot times, too high voltage, iGPU driver timeouts. Most of the issues have been fixed, but not all. After months of dealing with an annoying memory leak, I've just recently been able to confirm that it is caused by a Zen 4 iGPU driver.
I would never buy an AMD machine again after my last Ryzen 3600X. So many issues. It had to be power cycled 2-3 times to get it to boot. Memory corruption issues and stability issues galore. Not overclocked. Stock configuration. Decent quality board and power supply. Just hell.
Swapped board out assuming it was that. Same problem. Turned out to be the CPU which was a pain in the ass getting a warranty replacement for.
Ended up buying a new open box Intel 12400 Lenovo lump off eBay and using that.
I had similar issues with Zen of a few different generations, and with various boards. As a result, I built a new machine around an Intel 12400 as well. I did have to buy a thermaltake socket reinforcement bracket to mitigate the bending issue.
Oddly, this Intel build somewhat restored my faith in humans to build hardware and software as the thing seems to work quite well.
An issue with these parts was that the OOB config wasn’t very good - even if you knew to turn on the XMP profiles it still threw a ridiculous amount of voltage at the chip in pursuit of a few percent performance increase.
The B550 series is a power reduced cost cutting version of the x570 boards. They are only meant for the 6 core version of chips, and the 65W versions. You need to pick your components carefully.
I built an Intel workstation for the first time in two decades when the 13700K was released. It hasn't been a bed of roses, starting with thermal throttling from the LGA1700 socket bending the IHS so badly that the heatsink only contacted it in a strip down the middle, needing to physically reseat the onboard HDMI for the display signal to resume after the monitor is disconnected, a generally boiling TDP, DDR5 quirks like 5-minute training times (no blame here, just didn't expect my servers to boot faster), and generally having goofier names for UEFI options designed around overclocking. I still don't know how to use XTU.
Couple that with the underwhelming software support for AI/ML on their own hardware for about a year after CPU and GPU launch, and I wish I'd just stuck to AMD.
I don't think either are perfect, but it's the devil you know, and I've grown to trust that even when AMD cocks something up, they'll listen to customers, coordinate engineering efforts with OEMs, and handle it. Intel are either too high and mighty or don't empower their engineers to treat partners like partners without layers of management getting involved to be able to do something similar.
> Couple that with the underwhelming software support for AI/ML on their own hardware for about a year after CPU and GPU launch, and I wish I'd just stuck to AMD.
Seems like a strange way to express that point? Why mention underwhelming support for AI/ML if it’s the same on both? (if we’re talking about desktop chips I don’t even understand what’s that supposed to mean).
Sounds like bad ram (clean contacts, re-seat, and test) or temperature issues (the main reason we still use mobile i7-12700H was cheap ddr4 64GB ram stick kit, Iris media gpu drivers, and rtx CUDA gpu.)
Intel has its own issues, Gigabyte told me to pound sand when asking to unlock the bios on my own equipment to disable IME.
There is no greener grass on the fence line... just a different set of issues =3
>Sounds like bad ram (clean contacts, re-seat, and test)
Since he's taking about iGPU issues, he most likely has a laptop APU, so no RAM to reseat. I'm also having similar issues on my Ryzen 7000 laptop. Kinda regret upgrading from the Ryzen 5000 laptop which AMD obsoleted just 2 years after I bought it, as at least that had no issues. Hopefully new drivers in the future will fix stability but you never know.
What I do know, is that this will most likely be my last AMD machine if Intel shows improvement to match AMD, since their Linux driver support is just top notch.
Increasing the VRAM size (UMA size) to 4 GB fixed the frequent driver timeouts for me.
Reverting to older driver (driver cleaner -> driver v23.11.1) fixed the memory leak. This memory leak is weird since PoolMon doesn't show anything unusual. Nothing shows as using too much memory anywhere, except committed memory size grows to over 100GB after few days of uptime and RamMap shows a large amount of unused-active memory.
GPUs have the most complex drivers in the whole system, we're talking tens of millions LOCs, so it is absolutely not surprising that you're having issues like that given how recent AMD's investment into APUs is. I wouldn't use them for a few more years; get a cheap discrete GPU from nvidia or maybe even from Intel.
Depends on the failure mode, as it is common for specs to drift around under load (also, temperature cycling stresses PCB, and can shear BGA connections.)
I'd try a slower cheap set of lower-bandwidth/higher-latency ram sticks to see if it stops glitching up. If you are using low latency sticks (iGPU means this is usually recommended), than dropping the performance a bit may stabilize your specific equipment.
I've been staunchly an Intel stan since Pentium 4s were cool and this year will be my first AMD build. Have already been using their server hardware at the office and not disappointed at all.
No particular straw broke the camel's back, they just haven't managed to justify their price premium in a very long time.
> It's even worse with their p vs e cores that creates issues in many games.
Didn’t AMD also have issues with different cache types/sizes on dual CCD chips? Meaning that it basically didn’t make any sense to buy anything more expensive than the 7800x3d if you only care about gaming.
Did you use AM5? It was hardly without issues, with users experiencing 30+ second POST times. I'm not even sure that's fixed yet with most motherboards OOTB.
The long POST times are a consequence of DDR5 link training. It's not entirely an AMD-specific problem. Most motherboards for either Intel or AMD now have a feature to skip most of the link training if it doesn't look like there's been a hardware change or since the last boot, but it's unavoidable on the first boot.
30 seconds would be a blessed relief. Link training takes upwards of 3 minutes for my 4x 32GiB DDR5 machine whenever I update its firmware, and then 3 minutes all over again when I load the XMP profile instead of running at the new firmware's safe stock 4000 MT/s.
Just last week I bought a new desktop for a family member. I was considering an Intel CPU, but at the last minute found a better and cheaper option with an AMD processor. Am I glad I dodged that bullet.
