AMD's Lisa Su: Our processor sales are Ryzen faster than the PC market is growing Sometimes, things just go right. AMD on Tuesday reported record full-year and fourth-quarter financial figures, all due to interest in its chips across the board, from microprocessors in PCs and servers to GPUs in games consoles, and all during a pandemic. In a conference call with financial analysts after revealing the …
There are two sides to this. AMD have finally produced the kick-arse top end chips and graphics cards that no-one actually buys, but everyone drools over for marketing. They also outsourced manufacturing so that they avoiding shortages by being "just another IC at TSMC".
Intel have at the same time stagnated. They don't bother competing with NVidia, and they have embarrassing price tags on their high end stuff. They haven't realised, for example, that 10nm and 7nm are marketing labels that they can fudge.
At the end of the day, both companies' money is made with boring low end chips, but not playing the marketing game is eventually going to cost Intel... When was the last time you heard that "Intel Inside" jingle?
Quite a turnaround for AMD given where they were 5 years ago. I too have a Ryzen-powered PC after finally replacing my ageing Core i5 system a couple of years ago. I'm very happy with it indeed, it's fast, quiet, reliable and didn't break the bank either.
Good to see some decent and sustained competition for Intel once again. Keep it up AMD!
Had an i5 2500k for about 9 years. Heavily over clocked and it just plowed away. Intels replacements always seemed overpriced for the marginal improvements (until after 7 years they finally managed to poke more than a 3rd more performance out a chip that didn't involve investing thousands). Then came Ryzen 1/2 and I pondered... Ummmed and arrrred....
Then Ryzen 3700x was released and yes. I bought it on release day (pre-ordered it on amazon, was told it'd be 3 weeks before delivery, cancelled and found a local reseller with stock so went there instead).
You can pick he chop up about £60 less than I paid for it but I was more than happy to pay for it then. And I still am now (though I do keep eyeing up those tasty looking 5000 chips...)
Core counts up, clock speeds roughly the same, efficiencies internal to the chip and bus designs too. A lot to like from AMD currently. I've not long jumped from an i7-6700K to Ryzen 3800XT. For most users, AMD's current offerings at the same price point as Intel are the better choice. In exceptional cases or workloads one or the other have their pros and cons. Mid-range and creative type users, AMD generally have an advantage right now. High-end is a tougher split; if you want raw single thread clocks versus many parallel paths.
The most important thing is there is competition; which means the two parties can't price gouge for what you want.
Unlike the video card world where there is no longer enough production (and bitcoin insanity not helping) for anyone to have meaningful prices or stock.
Intel and TSMC measure "feature size" differently. Intel is indeed behind AMD, but at "7 nm" it's behind on yield, not process. AMD's "7 nm" parts are equivalent to Intel's "10 nm" parts in terms of transistors per square micrometre (some measures actually put Intel ahead, but none claim that AMD's 7 nm parts are meaningfully denser than Intel's 10 nm ones).
Intel's forthcoming "7 nm" process is significantly more dense than TSMC's "5 nm" process, so Intel would take a lead again... however, those devices don't start production until 2022, whereas TSMC is already making 5 nm parts right now, notably for Apple.
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