Intel internal memo highlights competitive challenges AMD poses
A recent post on Intel's employee-only portal titled, "AMD competitive profile: Where we go toe-to-toe, why they are resurgent, which chips of ours beat theirs," has found its way to Reddit and offers a fascinating glimpse into how Intel perceives one of its largest competitors and the challenges it is posing to some of its divisions.
[...] Penned by Walden Kirsch as part of "the latest in a Circuit News series on Intel's major competitors," the piece notes how AMD was the best-performing stock on the S&P 500 last year and enjoyed its second straight year of greater than 20 percent annual revenue growth in 2018. One of the reasons for AMD's resurgence, Kirsch surmises, is its strategic re-focus on high-performance products in the desktop, datacenter and server markets.
Specifically, Kirsch highlighted AMD's use of TSMC's 7nm manufacturing process, victories in public cloud offerings and its next-gen Zen-core products as factors that will "amplify the near-term competitive challenge from AMD."
[...] The company believes its 9th Gen Core processors will beat AMD's Ryzen-based products in lightly threaded productivity benchmarks as well as in gaming benchmarks. With regard to multi-threaded workloads, Intel said AMD's Matisse "is expected to lead."
Soon to be discontinued internal news series.
See also: Platform Storage Face-Off: AMD Upsets Intel
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AMD Ryzen 7 3800X Benchmarks Leaked, Crushes Intel's i9 9900K in Multi-threaded Performance
Related: Intel's Processors Lose More Performance From Vulnerability Mitigations Than AMD's
AMD and Intel at Computex 2019: First Ryzen 3000-Series CPUs and Navi GPU Announced
HP Boss: Intel Shortages are Steering Our Suited Customers to Buy AMD
AMD Details Three Navi GPUs and First Mainstream 16-Core CPU
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Intel Loses 5X More Average Performance Than AMD From Mitigations: Report
Intel has published its own set of benchmark results for the mitigations to the latest round of vulnerabilities, but Phoronix, a publication that focuses on Linux-related news and reviews, has conducted its own testing and found a significant impact. Phoronix's recent testing of all mitigations in Linux found the fixes reduce Intel's performance by 16% (on average) with Hyper-Threading enabled, while AMD only suffers a 3% average loss. Phoronix derived these percentages from the geometric mean of test results from its entire test suite.
From a performance perspective, the overhead of the mitigations narrow the gap between Intel and AMD's processors. Intel's chips can suffer even more with Hyper-Threading (HT) disabled, a measure that some companies (such as Apple and Google) say is the only way to make Intel processors completely safe from the latest vulnerabilities. In some of Phoronix's testing, disabling HT reduced performance almost 50%. The difference was not that great in many cases, but the gap did widen in almost every test by at least a few points.
To be clear, this is not just testing with mitigations for MDS (also known as Fallout, Zombieload, and RIDL), but also patches for previous exploits like Spectre and Meltdown. Because of this, AMD also has lost some performance with mitigations enabled (because AMD is vulnerable to some Spectre variants), but only 3%.
Have you disabled hyperthreading?
At Computex 2019 in Taipei, AMD CEO Lisa Su gave a keynote presentation announcing the first "7nm" Navi GPU and Ryzen 3000-series CPUs. All of the products will support PCI Express 4.0.
Contrary to recent reports, AMD says that the Navi microarchitecture is not based on Graphics Core Next (GCN), but rather a new "RDNA" macroarchitecture ('R' for Radeon), although the extent of the difference is not clear. There is also no conflict with Nvidia's naming scheme; the 5000-series naming is a reference to the company's 50th anniversary.
AMD claims that Navi GPUs will have 25% better performance/clock and 50% better performance/Watt vs. Vega GPUs. AMD Radeon RX 5700 is the first "7nm" Navi GPU to be announced. It was compared with Nvidia's GeForce RTX 2070, with the RX 5700 outperforming the RTX 2070 by 10% in the AMD-favorable game Strange Brigade. Pricing and other launch details will be revealed on June 10.
AMD also announced the first five Ryzen 3000-series CPUs, all of which will be released on July 7:
| CPU | Cores / Threads | Frequency | TDP | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ryzen 9 3900X | 12 / 24 | 3.8 - 4.6 GHz | 105 W | $499 |
| Ryzen 7 3800X | 8 / 16 | 3.9 - 4.5 GHz | 105 W | $399 |
| Ryzen 7 3700X | 8 / 16 | 3.6 - 4.4 GHz | 65 W | $329 |
| Ryzen 5 3600X | 6 / 12 | 3.8 - 4.4 GHz | 95 W | $249 |
| Ryzen 5 3600 | 6 / 12 | 3.6 - 4.2 GHz | 65 W | $199 |
The Ryzen 9 3900X is the only CPU in the list using two core chiplets, each with 6 of 8 cores enabled. AMD has held back on releasing a 16-core monster for now. AMD compared the Ryzen 9 3900X to the $1,189 Intel Core i9-9920X, the Ryzen 7 3800X to the $499 Intel Core i9-9900K, and the Ryzen 7 3700X to the Intel Core i7-9700K, with the AMD chips outperforming the Intel chips in certain single and multi-threaded benchmarks (wait for the reviews before drawing any definitive conclusions). All five of the processors will come with a bundled cooler, as seen in this list.
Submitted via IRC for Bytram
HP boss: Intel shortages are steering our suited customers to buy AMD
With the Windows 7 refresh cycles forecast to run and run, Intel's protracted CPU shortage is sending conservative corporate enterprise buyers into the arms of AMD – or so says HP Inc's CEO.
Dion Weisler took to the stage late last week at Wall Street financial analyst Bernstein's annual conference to discuss HP and the wider industry.
He told Bernstein IT Hardware researcher Toni Sacconaghi that HP was was having some success promoting AMD to suited customers – you know the types, those who historically never got fired for buying IBM.
"It's hard to change commercial behaviour because for the longest time Intel has done an incredible job in the commercial space of selling the value proposition of Intel. And in many cases, it may be a superior product," Weisler said.
"Commercial customers have made a decision. In times of extended shortage, a customer then has to choose between 'Do I have nothing or do I give this a try?' And when they give it a try and that's a good experience, barriers have been broken."
[...] Mikako Kitigawa, senior principal analyst at Gartner, said she had also heard that CPU shortages had been "impacting refresh cycles of corporate customers".
"We have also heard that corporations started considering AMD-based PCs," he told The Reg. "Even if these companies are not impacted by the shortage this time, some of them started preparing for plan B for future events like this because it is too risky to rely on a single vendor."
Weisler said he expects the Windows 7 refresh buying pattern to continue well into next year. He estimated that about a fifth of the installed based has yet to replace ageing stocks.
See also: AMD Zen-based Hygon chips start putting the squeeze on Intel in China
At AMD's keynote at the 2019 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), AMD CEO Lisa Su announced three new "7nm" Navi GPUs and a new CPU.
The AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT will have 2560 stream processors (40 compute units) capable of 9.75 TFLOPs of FP32 performance, with 8 GB of 14 Gbps GDDR6 VRAM. The price is $449. The AMD RX 5700 cuts that down to 2304 SPs (36 CUs), 7.9 TFLOPs, at $379. There is a higher clocked "50th anniversary" version of the 5700 XT that offers up to 10.14 teraflops for $499. A teraflop on one of these new cards supposedly means better graphics performance than older Polaris-based GPUs:
Looking at these clockspeed values then, in terms of raw throughput the new card is expected to get between 9 TFLOPs and 9.75 TFLOPs of FP32 compute/shading throughput. This is a decent jump over the Polaris cards, but on the surface it doesn't look like a huge, generational jump, and this is where AMD's RDNA architecture comes in. AMD has made numerous optimizations to improve their GPU utilization – that is, how well they put those FLOPs to good use – so a teraflop on a 5700 card means more than it does on preceding AMD cards. Overall, AMD says that they're getting around 25% more work done per clock on the whole in gaming workloads. So raw specs can be deceiving.
The GPUs do not include real-time raytracing or variable rate pixel shading support. These may appear on a future generation of GPUs. Instead, AMD talked about support for DisplayPort 1.4 with Display Stream Compression, a contrast-enhancing post-processing filter, AMD Radeon Image Sharpening, and a Radeon Anti-lag feature to reduce input lag.
Towards the end of the presentation, AMD revealed the 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X, the company's fully-fledged Ryzen CPU with two 8-core "7nm" Zen 2 chiplets. Compared to the 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X CPU, the 3950X has a slightly higher boost clock and L2 cache, with the same 105 Watt TDP, for $749. This is the full lineup so far:
| CPU | Cores / Threads | Frequency | TDP | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ryzen 9 3950X | 16 / 32 | 3.5 - 4.7 GHz | 105 W | $749 |
| Ryzen 9 3900X | 12 / 24 | 3.8 - 4.6 GHz | 105 W | $499 |
| Ryzen 7 3800X | 8 / 16 | 3.9 - 4.5 GHz | 105 W | $399 |
| Ryzen 7 3700X | 8 / 16 | 3.6 - 4.4 GHz | 65 W | $329 |
| Ryzen 5 3600X | 6 / 12 | 3.8 - 4.4 GHz | 95 W | $249 |
| Ryzen 5 3600 | 6 / 12 | 3.6 - 4.2 GHz | 65 W | $199 |
Previously: AMD and Intel at Computex 2019: First Ryzen 3000-Series CPUs and Navi GPU Announced
(Score: 5, Interesting) by c0lo on Thursday June 27 2019, @05:30AM (9 children)
They had me by the "out-of-box experience", but to top that with "supplier sustained consistency, and more" is simply irresistible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Funny) by bob_super on Thursday June 27 2019, @07:59AM (1 child)
My x64 chip with artificial product segmentation is more special than your x64 chip with uniform feature set !
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 27 2019, @02:57PM
Segmentation fault.
Core dumped.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by EEMac on Thursday June 27 2019, @12:18PM
To rephrase Intel's memo: the other option is a better value right now, but we're bigger, and we have bigger partnerships.
It's funny how that works until it doesn't. Just ask DEC in the 1970s, IBM in the 1980s, AOL in the 2000s, or . . .
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 27 2019, @01:08PM
Rather than a chip, they cover al the spectrum, making the customer meltdown in the Intel experience.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday June 27 2019, @01:19PM (4 children)
I quit building my own systems thanks to price. Been a long time since I've been able to buy the components and put it together myself for less than the price of a complete system.
Mostly, upgrading an existing system hasn't ever been feasible. Can't do much more than shove in more RAM and a bigger hard drive or SSD. And that might cost more than just buying a whole new system. Last time I upgraded RAM was on a Pentium II system. Got it with 64M, and 2 years later upped it to 192M when RAM prices had come down some more. Gave the system a couple more years of usefulness, but it proved to be not really worth doing.
Partly, I was trying to avoid the new misfeature Intel had introduced with the Pentium III, the much hated CPU serial number. When I finally upgraded, I leapt from the Pentium II to the Pentium IV. Now we have that abominable Management Engine to deal with. The unique ID seems kind of trivial next to the ME.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday June 27 2019, @04:30PM (3 children)
I can certainly build a much nicer system for myself, cheaper, than I can buy as a package deal. Also, getting into the case, swapping things out, etc. Becomes a much easier task than, with the we used special screws/rivets to screw you out of self-repair, Consumer/Gamer Desktop computers. Sure, you can likely find a specific computer, that you won't be able to build exactly for cheaper, but it's not the case in general.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 27 2019, @07:25PM (1 child)
yeah, store bought PCs are only comparable if you aren't picky or don't mind them wasting your money.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday June 27 2019, @09:52PM
That's if you're fool enough to pay full price. I always wait for a sale. Used to get my PCs from Woot, before Amazon bought them. When I felt I needed a new computer, I'd check every day, until the special of the day was a desktop system. Might take a month, but one would eventually be offered, and I might take it, or wait for the next system.
Also, I always try for the inflection point, the point at which the cost for more capacity, speed, and power starts rising steeply.
Peak Price of a new PC has come down amazingly over the decades. A middling PC system was $2000 in the late 1980s. Most I ever spent on a system was $3000 in 1990 for a nice new higher end 486 based system. Hit $1500 by the mid 1990s, $1200 by the late 1990s, and slid under $1000 in the early 2000s. By the late 2000s, $500 was enough to get a decent system that was a step or two above the bottom end. And today? Low end laptops can be had for under $200.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by toddestan on Friday June 28 2019, @03:45AM
Nice thing about building a system for myself is that I get the system I want, with the components that I picked out. This also helps some if I want something a bit non-standard, like a decent graphics card in something that isn't a ridiculous $2500 gaming PC. Granted, I usually spend a bit more more money than a pre-built system, but often the reason the pre-built system is cheaper is because they skimped somewhere that people don't look. A cheap power supply that can barely power the stock components, slower ram, that kind of thing. Of course, nowadays this doesn't matter as much because the PC will more than likely still be plenty fast for what it's going to be used for.
With that said, the last time I built a PC was in 2012, so if I had to replace this computer (no real reason yet), I'd have to evaluate the options.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 27 2019, @05:51AM
We suxxors
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday June 27 2019, @04:36PM (4 children)
The Intel Inside sticker might soon act as a purchasing deterrent.
The sticker is a signal that bad things are inside. Management Engine. Endless new speculative execution vulnerabilities and attacks. Unique serial numbers.
Intel's buildings should have the Intel Inside sticker
asphyxiatedaffixed to the building.The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by etherscythe on Thursday June 27 2019, @06:38PM
Unique serial numbers.
Think of the "unlicensed replica enterpreneurs"!
"Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 27 2019, @07:27PM
yeah, they need to focus on trustworthy, secure hardware with complete FOSS support. AMD is still not 100% in this regard either so there is an opportunity.
(Score: 4, Informative) by turgid on Thursday June 27 2019, @08:17PM (1 child)
That happened before, in the days of the Pentium IV which was designed for high clock frequency (marketing) over actual performance. AMD was busy with Hammer (Athlon, 32-bit) and SledgeHammer (Opteron, 64-bit) with a much better microarchitecure, meanwhile intel was away sailing the itanic into the iceberg. Then AMD took it's eye off the ball (let go its talent) and intel recovered. AMD got its talent back, got a new generation of chips.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 5, Informative) by DannyB on Thursday June 27 2019, @08:40PM
I remember that. The focus on clock cycles over actual performance. AMD's better chips, for a while. The Itanic. And let's not forget that Intel threw in the towel on the Itanic and we got the AMD 64 instructions. Forever called by that name. Just to rub Intel's nose in it.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.