Shots Fired Again Between CPU Vendors AMD and Intel (tomshardware.com) 146
Highdude702 shares a report from Tom's Hardware: AMD's feud with Intel took an interesting turn today as the company announced that it would swap 40 Core i7-8086K's won from Intel's sweepstakes with a much beefier Threadripper 1950X CPU. At Computex 2018, Intel officially announced it was releasing the Core i7-8086K, a special edition processor that commemorates the 40th anniversary of the 8086, which debuted as the first x86 processor on June 8, 1978. Now AMD is offering to replace 40 of the winners' chips with its own 16-core 32-thread $799 Threadripper processors, thus throwing a marketing wrench into Intel's 40th-anniversary celebration.
AMD has a list of the complete terms and conditions on its site. But it is also noteworthy that "winners" of AMD's competing sweepstakes will have to pony up for a much more expensive X399 motherboard with the TR4 socket, which currently retail for more than $300, instead of Intel's less-expensive 300-series motherboards. Regardless, those who do swap their Intel Core silicon for an AMD Threadripper chip will gain 10 cores and quad-channel memory, not to mention quite a bit of resale value. In response, Slashdot reader Highdude702 said: "AMD is shooting back at Intel like its easy for them, even though 40 out of 8086 is kind of stingy. They are acting like they have the horsepower now. I believe it is going to be an interesting time for consumers and enthusiasts coming soon. Maybe we will even get better prices."
Intel responded via its official verified "Intel Gaming" Twitter account, tweeting: ".@AMDRyzen, if you wanted an Intel Core i7-8086K processor too, you could have just asked us. :) Thanks for helping us celebrate the 8086!"
AMD has a list of the complete terms and conditions on its site. But it is also noteworthy that "winners" of AMD's competing sweepstakes will have to pony up for a much more expensive X399 motherboard with the TR4 socket, which currently retail for more than $300, instead of Intel's less-expensive 300-series motherboards. Regardless, those who do swap their Intel Core silicon for an AMD Threadripper chip will gain 10 cores and quad-channel memory, not to mention quite a bit of resale value. In response, Slashdot reader Highdude702 said: "AMD is shooting back at Intel like its easy for them, even though 40 out of 8086 is kind of stingy. They are acting like they have the horsepower now. I believe it is going to be an interesting time for consumers and enthusiasts coming soon. Maybe we will even get better prices."
Intel responded via its official verified "Intel Gaming" Twitter account, tweeting: ".@AMDRyzen, if you wanted an Intel Core i7-8086K processor too, you could have just asked us. :) Thanks for helping us celebrate the 8086!"
Blablabla... (Score:3, Insightful)
Give me a SECURE CPU without your fucking backdoors and incompetent bullshit instead of talking shit constantly, you fucking retards.
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That's a competitive problem for Intel - firstly, it means they'll piss off their government friends. That means less money coming in, which means higher prices for their chips.
Re:Blablabla... (Score:5, Insightful)
AMD has you covered. As well as being more secure than Intel out of the box, they do timely updates when required and support a number of security enhancing features that Intel does not. For example, encrypted RAM.
Unfortunately they still have closed source microcode and the like, but even that is much more minimal than Intel's.
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Intel has the broad scale and support infrastructure for large enterprise and government that AMD simply can't match. No matter how good their CPUs might be, they're simply too small to have the people to dedicate the way Intel does...and that hurts them most.
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Give me a SECURE CPU without your fucking backdoors
Why didn't you just ask. We'll ship it wrapped in tinfoil for your pleasure.
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Sign of the times. (Score:2)
From the title, did anyone else think some employee went on a shooting spree at their competitor?
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Not I.
Then again, I am current on my memes amd internet slang ;).
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That typo amuses me way more than it should ;).
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Re:Sign of the times. (Score:5, Funny)
From the title, did anyone else think some employee went on a shooting spree at their competitor?
No, not all of us live in the USA.
Re: Intel winning on price according to author? (Score:5, Insightful)
We look at combined price of CPU and motherboard because almost everyone buys those two together. Who cares if AMD's high end $800 processor needs a $300 motherboard if Intel's high end desktop processor costs $2000 sans motherboard?
Re: Intel winning on price according to author? (Score:4, Informative)
Even better, look at TCO. AMD's sockets and motherboards have historically lasted a lot, lot longer than Intel's. This generation is looking no different.
Also, AMD give you more PCIe lanes, so if/when USB 4.0 or Thunderfart X comes out you should be able to slap a card in and get decent performance without having to replace the motherboard just to get enough lanes for full performance.
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It's an ancient technique to avoid needing floating point maths, where you simply multiply everything by 65536 and use 32 bit ints. So 1.0000 becomes 65536... But calling that constant "one" is one of the best examples of terrible variable naming I've come across.
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Am3 is over a decade old. You can still buy a cpu today for it that is only a few years old. And you can pop it into a 10 year old motherboard without worries. Try that on Intel. I suggest trying to spread your disinformation campaign someplace else. Intel has gone as far as releasing the SAME cpu and making you buy a new socket for it.
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I haven't seen AMD keep any of their latest sockets around that long either. People remember some of the older ones like AM3 (which is nearly 10 years old) and Socket A which also lasted forever, but forget ones like Socket 754 which was here today, gone tomorrow. And besides, Intel has kept some of their Sockets around for a while too, like LGA775 which started out with single-core Pentium 4's and ended with the Core 2 Quad processors.
Wouldn't be the first time (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in the day when AMD first released their Opteron CPU (Codename Sledgehammer), they had some demo motherboards called AMD Melody. On the silkscreen of that motherboards there was indeed a melody - actually the "Intel inside" jingle score with a sledgehammer hanging over it.
And now, still remembering this, I feel really old.
Re: Wouldn't be the first time (Score:1)
AMD are the 'professional wrestlers' of the CPU market. Playing to their band of fans with blustery stunts and imagery. Perhaps their parts have merit. I certainly appreciate the AMD processor in my Acer Aspire One netbook. It was inexpensive. I am pretty sure one of my first motherboards ever had an AMD 8088 processor chip. Second sources keep prices down.
The gladiator bluster is a little dumb, though.
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Oh, I had a Slot A CPU as well. Matter of fact, it was a very rare one - a Slot A Thunderbird. Wasn't even close to my first AMD CPU though.
BS. (Score:2)
Slot A was an early Athlon interface, nothing whatsoever to do with nintendo. Slashdot really has gone down the flusher.
I still have an AMD a80286-16 sitting here, in a motherboard, doubt it runs.
Incoherent (Score:5, Insightful)
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And drunk!
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And in Marketing!
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Nah I'm an electrician.
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Well, it uses the expression "shots fired..." in a headline describing an obscure publicity stunt...
Re:Wake me when . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
How on Earth do you figure that? You've got he same number of operations per second either way, and a single core is much more versatile - anything you can do on a multi-core processor, you can do sequentially on a single core, and there's a LOT of things that can't be efficiently decomposed into parallel tasks, in which case the single core wins hands down.
The only potential performance advantages for the multi-core are in cache and memory bus size - but you can easily give a single core as much cache as the combined multi-core, and unless things have changed recently the memory itself is usually slower than the bus.
Now, power consumption may be a legitimate advantage with slower processors, so if you're running a massively parallel task where the performance per watt is more important than the absolute performance of any node, then yes - more boxes with slower, more power-efficient multi-core processors will quite possibly win.
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"The only potential performance advantages for the multi-core are in cache and memory bus size"
"Now, power consumption may be a legitimate advantage"
The only two advantages are bus size, power consumption, and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.
Re:Not all true (Score:5, Insightful)
The 8086K one being a 40th anniversary one, yeah. If I had won I'd have kept it in the box and never used it. I already have an AMD system but if I wanted a new threadripper I'd just go buy it. Holding the 8086K as a collector's item seem more interesting. Though, the lighthearted jabs are entertaining from both sides!
No thanks (Score:1)
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Not enough back doors, speculative execution security failures, and anticompetitive (Google keyboard did NOT want to type that word, what a surprise) behavior for you? Just want to make sure you support the greater of evils at all times?
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Just want to make sure you support the greater of evils at all times?
Definitely--I supported Google back when they were supposedly the little good guy, and now they're just the same as all of the other evil giants. AMD made me mad because of the crummy update process for my old laptop's onboard graphics, and I've always had better experiences with Intel. Of course, it's all just subjective, and someone else will say that they had better experiences with AMD.
AMD responds: (Score:1)
We're positive you'll understand the spectre of such a request would not bode well with management.
40 years of crap (Score:3)
The i7-8086K is a 40 year anniversary of the 8086 CPU.
40 years of only incremental upgrades to a crap ISA. It is still what is holding the x86-64 platform back.
I can't wait for AArch64, or even RISC-V, to become mainstream.
(posted from a PC with an intel i7 :-P )
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40 years of legacy (Score:2)
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Tell me what, specifically, about AMD64 is holding back hardware?
Keep in mind all modern AMD64 hardware actually implements the ISA in microcode.
Any casulties yet? (Score:2)
No? ... Corporate wars are sooo booooring. Can't we have a fatal Godzilla attack or something?
They deserve it (Score:1)
"AMD is shooting back at Intel like its easy for them"
In a way, Intel folks deserve it. They had the horsepower and acted with tiny, neglible incremental updates for ages. Then AMD puts on the table a 16-core/32-thread CPU and an architecture able to compete with intel in laptops.
I cannot wait for manufacturer to broaden their catalogues with more AMD laptops... and wait for the price battle.
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Lighten up Francis.
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Calm down (but only if you elect to) and head to your padded, soft-lit, safe space room in a conflict-free environment where vegan cookies and non-gmo soy milk will be served. Your daily serving of brain-neutering medication will be waiting for you of course. /s
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We've had more than a couple reports of people actually being shot at work lately; this headline was in poor taste. When I see a headline here that starts with "shots fired" I expect it's likely to be followed with a body count.
This entire post could've been replaced with, "Teh gunz!!! Oh noes!!!!"
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Well said
Expensive eh? (Score:2)
will have to pony up for a much more expensive X399 motherboard with the TR4 socket
Doesn't matter, they will not be able to afford the RAM anyways :)
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will have to pony up for a much more expensive X399 motherboard with the TR4 socket
Doesn't matter, they will not be able to afford the RAM anyways :)
Sadly, RAM is expensive on both ends of the bus.
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Looks like you'll be stuck with ARM of you want any kind of performance.
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Aren't AMD based in Austin, Texas?
You'd best write to Samsung, ask them to enter the x64 chip market.
And no Meltdown (Score:3)
Regardless, those who do swap their Intel Core silicon for an AMD Threadripper chip will gain 10 cores and quad-channel memory, not to mention quite a bit of resale value.
Not to mention the lack of Meltdown.
Shots were fired but Security got hit instead (Score:2)
When are we going to get robust and secure CPUs?
So no mass shooting? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Core fail.... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's you who's missing the point. Intel makes fun of AMD by saying they wanted the Intel CPUs so badly... it's PR and the whole world is watching. They can't talk crap about their competition. Making lighthearted fun of them is the way to go.
Re:Core fail.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Dude, Intel intel isn't in a position to talk crap. Or rather that's all they can do because they have squat to compete with, and everyone but the terminally stupid knows it.
Did you see that ridiculous "5 GHz" demo they made at Computex? Allegedly coming "soon" to market. Oh wait it's not, they "forgot" to tell it was a 1kW+ overclocked abortion on a custom 28 phase VRM, with an industrial 1kW water-cooler keeping the coolant at sub-ambient, most probably -10 C. A several years old CPU at that which normally sells for 10k+ USD?
That's desperation right there. Intel have emptied the cupboards, they have nothing left. Anything new will take years to come to market.
Re: Core fail.... (Score:3, Insightful)
All Intel has to do is rest on the laurels of their market share. It doesn't cost them much to let their salescritters tussle with the AMD salescritters.
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epyc has more pci-e lanes with 1 cpu (Score:2)
epyc has more pci-e lanes with 1 cpu.
Say you want an storage node with a lot of I/O say pci-e storage then with just 1 amd cpu you get 128 pci-e lanes vs UP to 48 lanes. And intel can be like the high end desktop and make some low end chips in the range have as low as 16-24 lanes
Re: Core fail.... (Score:4, Informative)
Businesses are already beginning to switch over to EPYC.
No they really aren't. At least not in any significant way, it takes multiple generations of hardware to win over larger enterprises and AMD still have to prove themselves in the longhaul, enterprises don't switch just because one gen happens to be better. I hope AMD are on a winning streak but it will take at least a 2-3 more years of them maintaining a significant advantage to have a real market impact.
I just checked that the L8s_v2 and L16s_v2 (L series v2) has popped up on my VM size selection on my Azure dashboard. Those specifically use AMD EPYC 7551 processors. So yeah, EPYC has already entered production environment in Azure
Re: Core fail.... (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft specifically announced the L series as INTEL XEON E5 v3's. So either they got their own announcement wrong or you got your information confused.
L Series yes, L Series v2 [microsoft.com] uses EPYC
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Re: Core fail.... (Score:1)
Highly doubt that. We're just looking at piloting an Epyc processor but everything will continue to be Intel until we can be absolutely sure everything is compatible and cost savings are actually worth it.
When you configure a $25000 server $500 in savings doesn't matter much.
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Ecosystem is king.
AMD need to invest in getting OpenCL support into machine learning frameworks. Nvidia have that market locked up -tight- and it's not good for innovation. Like, they're able to deliberately cripple geforce fp16 performance with zero ramifications.
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When you configure a $25000 server $500 in savings doesn't matter much.
And that about sums up AMD vs Intel. Same as the last time AMD had a performance edge. They picked up some market share from people trying to save money ... and the large majority of corporate marched right on by the whole thing. I know I (in my corporate persona) did. I know we will again unless something profound changes.
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And that about sums up AMD vs Intel. Same as the last time AMD had a performance edge. They picked up some market share from people trying to save money
So, do they perform better, or are they cheaper? Your argument immediately says both as if they are mutually exclusive.
Translation: You had to defend Intel... somehow... anyway you could... making no sense is one of those ways.
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Everything is optimized for Intel. There are some applications that use Intel-specific processor opcodes that AMD doesn't handle nearly as quickly especially in CAD and HPC, sure eventually AMD will emulate the behavior but they always seem behind. One such things is VM's - since everything is Intel, you have to stay with Intel or stay with AMD if you want to migrate between hypervisors. Migrating to AMD platform for a cluster suddenly requires both downtime and/or chucking all your "old" machines but AMD h
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Intel have emptied the cupboards, they have nothing left.
Oh boy, Have you hit the nail on the head right there. The engineering in Intel has hit a super low point in enthusiasm. The 10nm scale took a serious toll on the group and it's not even out of lab yet. Figuring a way to mass produce 10nm is a lot harder than a lot of folks had planned on. Then IBM is over there with their 10nm process and that was just a super gut punch to a lot. Add in the whole Spectre and Meltdown and how resources got pulled over the place for that... Yeah, Intel is seriously str
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they have squat to compete with
I think you're forgetting about thread performance. Unless you can fully utilize 16 cores (gamers and casual desktop users generally can't), the 8086 actually performs better than AMD's replacement.
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It's you who's missing the point. Intel makes fun of AMD by saying they wanted the Intel CPUs so badly... it's PR and the whole world is watching. They can't talk crap about their competition. Making lighthearted fun of them is the way to go.
It honestly couldn't have been worst than Intel's PR stunt at Computex with a server processor, and trying to pass it off as a desktop product.
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Re:Core fail.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Core fail.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Core fail.... (Score:1)
They should have ignored it. Streisand effect - I didnâ(TM)t know about either promotion but now I know about both.
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INTEL responses "our CPU's so great even our competitors will throw away their own to get one"
If AMD destroy the CPU's "wow what a waste, those could have been used for charity, don't worry though we will donate additional CPU's to a childrens hospital to cover what AMD were too tight arsed to do"
AMD give them away "N
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Boy talk about missing the point....
The only one missing the point is you. This isn't so much as missing a point as it is taking a point with a marketing tactic and reversing it against a competitor.
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Boy talk about missing the point....
The only one missing the point is you. This isn't so much as missing a point as it is taking a point with a marketing tactic and reversing it against a competitor.
There were points made from both AMD and Intel. I'm surprised no one saw both. In hindsight it really doesn't matter. Both companies made bad PR stunts. It's just the usual competition.
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Ryzen 2xxx series has almost fixed that. Figure by 2020 they will be ahead. Currently they're ahead in some cases on single thread already.