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Speculation: Will AMD survive the coming hurdles?

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Dec 30, 2016
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Speculation: Will AMD survive the coming hurdles?

So I've been an ATI fan since high school and always wanted to work for them as they were a Canadian company doing great things. As we all know though, they did not survive against Nvidia and the international scene. AMD acquiring them sucked, but at least the company lived on in some fashion, even though AMD itself has routinely been trampled on by Intel. Now, Intel has slacked off due to their market share and been caught off guard by AND's innovations. This is good news for AMD and for us as consumers, but there's a huge problem in all of this for end users. The thing is, Intel and Nvidia both have deep cash reserves and so even while both have marginally improved products compared to their high end of last gen; Intel is serious about entering the gpi market sometime next year and Nvidia seemingly has a strong improvement coming. So where does this leave AMD? Both Intel and Nvidia have no qualms about sky high prices, and if Intel really puts pressure on the gpu market..history tells me that AMD will suffer more than Nvidia.

For myself, I have a dying mobo but am still waiting for Q3 2020, to see what all three bring to the table before committing to my next 5+ year system. I've nearly gone with a 3600x and 5700 XT a few times recently, but as the end user, my wallet is more important than fanboyism.

How do you guys think the pc landscape will shake up next year? Do you think Intel will do any damage?
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On the CPU front, AMD wins in price, even if not on absolute performance. The battle is the server CPUs. If AMD wins there, they are set for a few years.
I have a 3600x by the way with an X570 board. 3rd gen Ryzen made me buy a new computer. I would not have paid Intel money for an upgrade from my 4th gen i5.
On the graphics side, right, Intel will compete most likely low and mid range, where AMD is now. But I think there is a lot of margin there, I remember not so long ago a mid range video card was $250, now they are $500, in USD I mean.
I am waiting for a decent custom RX 5700 XT to drop below $500 (CAD) and will get one. Again, I will not pay Nvidia money.
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Intel sells the most video chips (desktop non-gaming). Nvidia is 2nd place, AMD 3rd. AMD is doing just fine here. AMD can continue invovating their cpu design until Intel has something completely different that leapfrogs AMD's architecture, and Intel increasingly is putting fewer resources into their cpu division so it might not happen for a long time.
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All of these companies, including Apple, are hitting the wall in terms of the laws of physics. Mobile chips were seeing huge gains until recently; now we’re lucky if we see a 20% improvement per year. On the desktop side, the gains are even more marginal. AMD has had a big problem in their GPU division for some time now. Poor engineering decisions. Their chips run hot, don’t clock high enough, and they have poor efficiency. The AMD drivers have become too buggy. Plus AMD is far from feature parity with nVidia at this point.

Intel now has Raja Koduri working for them. The same guy that ruined AMD’s graphics division. I don’t see that ending well.

I personally think that Apple is going to take over completely. It’s a matter of time. Their iPad Pro is already more powerful than an Xbox One. Apple already has more powerful chips than that, also.
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You guys really think Intel will compete in the low end primarily with their gpus? I believe they'll want to make an impression and recent news has it that they may go down the route of Nvidia by including things such as hardware ray tracing, I don't see that fitting the low end market alone.

And yes,I did omit apple because I don't really see them competing for the same customers as they're a really proprietary company.
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x3fann wrote: You guys really think Intel will compete in the low end primarily with their gpus? I believe they'll want to make an impression and recent news has it that they may go down the route of Nvidia by including things such as hardware ray tracing, I don't see that fitting the low end market alone.
Sadly they're all over the place, Raja Koduri's statements make the Intel Xe a question mark as to what the heck its going to be in the first place. Can't make any judgements until we see a lot more info rather than them leaking some info then denying it, the ray tracing thing they've already walked back claiming "translation error". Intel for now is a non factor until they have something concrete to present.
- Jegan V
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JeganV wrote: Sadly they're all over the place, Raja Koduri's statements make the Intel Xe a question mark as to what the heck its going to be in the first place. Can't make any judgements until we see a lot more info rather than them leaking some info then denying it, the ray tracing thing they've already walked back claiming "translation error". Intel for now is a non factor until they have something concrete to present.
Yeah, their marketing has been made fun of a lot recently with their obfuscation. It'll be interesting to see where Intel ends up in both cpu and gpu markets, I don't see their market share falling fast soon as they have so many specialized groups. But, that might be the problem too in that they think they're invincible and people will buy their stuff no matter what. It's the same thing with Nvidia, they have their gpu line for home users, but also play big roles in other industries such as vehicles and medical.

I found a great deal on a high end z390 board a week ago and was going to buy it, but after doing some research I learned how much of a rehash the chipset was and how Intel locked out certain processors again, but some Chinese have it working. It's all very stupid, I get that they need to make money, but their never ending socket changes really sucks for end users, especially when their are often minute changes involved. To their credit though, I have never had an Intel system fail on me and the first pc I ever had came with an Intel orm board, and it still works to this day along with the processor. 13 years now and counting.
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Intel hasn't shown it is interested in capturing the GPU crown for the gaming market. They have mentioned repeatedly they are looking at the professional market longer term, but some of that can trickle down to the lower-medium end if they do this right. This rajit guy is bringing with him expertise on how to get this done.
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x3fann wrote: So I've been an ATI fan since high school and always wanted to work for them as they were a Canadian company doing great things. As we all know though, they did not survive against Nvidia and the international scene. AMD acquiring them sucked, but at least the company lived on in some fashion, even though AMD itself has routinely been trampled on by Intel. Now, Intel has slacked off due to their market share and been caught off guard by AND's innovations. This is good news for AMD and for us as consumers, but there's a huge problem in all of this for end users. The thing is, Intel and Nvidia both have deep cash reserves and so even while both have marginally improved products compared to their high end of last gen; Intel is serious about entering the gpi market sometime next year and Nvidia seemingly has a strong improvement coming. So where does this leave AMD? Both Intel and Nvidia have no qualms about sky high prices, and if Intel really puts pressure on the gpu market..history tells me that AMD will suffer more than Nvidia.

For myself, I have a dying mobo but am still waiting for Q3 2020, to see what all three bring to the table before committing to my next 5+ year system. I've nearly gone with a 3600x and 5700 XT a few times recently, but as the end user, my wallet is more important than fanboyism.

How do you guys think the pc landscape will shake up next year? Do you think Intel will do any damage?
AMD is doing really good right now, especially with this latest CPU consumer release. Good chipset motherboards, high frequency ram and very good processors. Intel is on damage control.

You have them trying to fix all the Spectre and Meltdown with patches and BIOS updates that hinder CPU performance on older systems, minimal performance gains over the years since AMD wasn't doing much with Bulldozer. They shot themselves in the foot again by changing Sockets for 10th gen processors. Socket 1120 for consumers if you want 10th gen processor, that will still be using PCI-E 3.0 lanes. They could have changed to PCI-E 4.0 standard like AMD chose to. Also who's to say that Socket 1151 boards couldn't support a 10th gen CPU, especially high-end Z370/Z390 boards with really good VRM's? That was a big mistake. Intel knows this.

So much so, that they made the 10th gen processors available as an upgrade path for LGA2066 socket users to not lose their fanbase on those that purchased LGA2066 and were stuck at Skylake-X processors. Now, magically (just like Nvidia with its G-sync bulls**t) LGA2066 boards will support 10th GEN CPU's with the top end being under $1000 and adding a total of 48 PCI-E lanes. 24 on board and 24 on the CPU ... because they know AMD screwed them good and this is damage control by Intel for their high end systems. TBH, so if they did that for 2066, why not support 10th on on Z370/Z390 or even make Z470/490 and both boards support the 10th line, they know they screwed up really good.

Intel 10th Gen Core X "Cascade Lake-X" Pricing and Specs Detailed

New Asus TUF X299 Mark 2 Bios
Subject says it all. But what is most interesting is that the new bios opens the board to the Intel i9 10000 Cascade Lake-X series processors, which are not released yet. I have never seen Asus do this before. And nothing in their bios support page yet about exactly what i9 10000 Cascade Lake-X processors are supported. Yes, I know the Cascade Lake-X is a Skylake-X refresh. Let's see what emerges and the price point.
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Also, as for the GPU division they "promised" something by 2020 but don't be too optimistic on that time frame. With Raja now in charge who knows what direction Intel will take should they continue to proceed to engage in the discreet GPU market. Only time will tell. I wouldn't get my hopes up just yet.

Now ... finally after all of that ... as for the GPU side of things, I recommend you watch this video. Yes the Vega's are over priced and didn't perform as expected as well as buggy drivers, same thing going on with the Navi 5700/XT GPU's but once the drivers get sorted out I'm sure things will be much better. Don't forget Ray Tracing is only going to get better and with supposed AMD 5900 series cards they are supposed to introduce rDNA 2.0. There is already proof out there that AMD GPU's can do Ray Tracing and it's not an exclusive to Nvidia as they claim.

Watch this before jumping to any conclusions ...


Just a quick few pointers as the video is about 20 min long but it sums up that ...

- rDNA 2.0 vs Turing Ray Tracing, backwards compatability which developers can easily program.

-Turing Ray Tracing is on borrowed time

-This video brings one thing to mind GSYNC and we all know what happen with that Nvidia "locked-in" system (failed and opened up to Freesync)

-Next gen consoles (PS5, XBOX 2?) will support Ray Tracing powered by AMD using rDNA which developers can easily program. Turing is displaying demos with all the extra fancy tensor cores and hardware not even being fully utilized while AMD can emulate the same "Ray Tracing" at less cost. Some are getting the feeling that "Turing RTX" is like what happened to PhysX. Remember that?
"DirectX Raytracing (DXR) is a feature of Microsoft's DirectX" It is designed to run on any GPU.
...yet somehow that point is never brought up....intentional misinformation is so irritating, its a relief to know some people actually understand RTX is just Nvidias implementation of DXR, which IS what the next XBOX will use....being that Microsoft pushes Direct X more than ever now with their focus on XBOX/PC compatibility...
“Raytracing is the future!” Words from Nvidia, therefore raytracing is associated with Nvidia. Rule no. 1 of sales - Always let the mark sell itself!

You be the judge for yourself. (Coming from someone using a 1080Ti)

TL;DR - AMD will survive 100% and is pushing back against Intel and Nvidia. Nothing to worry about. (Besides pricing) But these are interesting times in the CPU & GPU market.

I see a lot of users going the AMD 3600/3700 +X570 + 5700XT route and being satisfied with their end decisions.
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amd is kinda weak in their gpu line up, even with 7nm process, what is amd doing all these time?
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putting their smallish R&D into cpu division which was the right choice since this is where they have to make their bread and butter. The bitmining craze actually created demand for their weak gpu lines, so in the end they did just fine.
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why would amd be too worried at all are they not also the socs behind both the ps4 and the xbox 1.
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AMD hit pay dirt with their server and desktop CPUs, GPUs are a very distant 3rd consideration.

Intel is probably scambling to protect their server and desktop CPU business from AMD as well as pimping optane memory and being the boss of mobile x86 CPUs, GPUs are a distant 4th consideration.

Nvidia is the only company that is primarily focused on GPUs.

I think Intel Optane will be a game changer, moreso than new CPU or GPU developments.
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toalan wrote: I think Intel Optane will be a game changer, moreso than new CPU or GPU developments.
Not for consumers, it won't. Maybe in the enterprise segment.
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I thought being confirmed for the PS5 and Xbox Scarlett is enough for them to 'survive'?

And their CPU's are a legitimate option now. Wasn't true for nearly a decade+

And their custom Ryzen for the next MS Surface book has to be a win too.
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Of course the will. They've been crushing intel the last couple of years.
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I believe Intel will maintain it's single thread dominance; not that it generally matters much, since single threaded tasks are often not limited by the CPU, but they'll have that. AMD will be winning on all other fronts for the foreseeable future (we are starting to see the fruits of programmer's labour in new apps being generally parity AMD<->Intel); the 3950x will be the multi-thread king over any 14++++++ chip, and the new Threadripper chips should pretty handily deal with any HEDT chip from Intel (both of which will arrive before the competing chip from Intel). On the server front, Intel only really has longevity as their final frontier (which, admittedly, is extremely important). However, Intel is battling security mitigations that are hitting the server space hard, whereas AMD is offering every single measurable performance metric better; server space is already shaping up to be a big gainer for AMD, barring something unfortunate being discovered against AMD's chips (far less likely, given ZEN2 core updates). Also, consoles are AMD, as are a growing number of higher-profile devices (Surface).

On the GPU front, the 5700 / 5700XT are undoubtedly better than their nVidia counterpart ($$$/performance). Outright maximum performance, nVidia definitely has that, but that's a VERY small part of the graphics market. Intel coming into the GPU field is a potential problem though, assuming they can make something that works (which doesn't seem realistic, given their continual failures in the market). Intel has been stuck on the innovation front for some time now, but so was AMD just 3 years ago, so things CAN change. nVidias dominance in automotive systems is probably unstoppable any time soon.

Assuming Intel doesn't come up with something soon-ish (their 10nm process doesn't seem to be helping much), they will maintain their brand dominance (Intel inside), but performance dominance outside of special use-cases doesn't look to be in the cards for at least a year, if not 2. At that point, AMD will have released ZEN3 cores at minimum, and the large advancement from ZEN to ZEN2 does give me high hopes the ZEN3 rumours are likely correct (+8% IPC, +200MHz). If so, Intel's 200MHz gain, and negligible IPC gain, should put them in a firm second across the board.

Note: you're thinking about AMD/Intel from our Canadian/American perspective, versus from basically every other country. I will say, AMD is HUGE in China; their purchasing power is insane compared to ours. If anything, Zhaoxin is something to be potentially worried about on that front; their chips are INSANELY cheap, and they're making enormous leaps in performance generation to generation. With the US poking them, a fire has been lit under their arses to make a domestic CPU. Two years ago, they were on 32nm with a 2GHz chip. This year it was 16nm (3GHz), and was said to have performance on par with chips only a few generations back from Intel's current i5 offerings (which is insane, since Intel hasn't really changed anything over the last few generations, though I believe they might be embellishing a bit). The newest chip in development should be on TSMCs 7nm (2020 IIRC), meaning it will likely be power-parity with AMD (e.g. better than Intel), similar clocks, DDR5, PCIe 4.0, etc etc. At present, they're basically just used in Chinese hardware, but that doesn't have to stay that way, ESPECIALLY if the US keeps poking China; TSMC is greatly expanding its manufacturing capability, meaning those chips could go from low production to high production pretty quick.
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ChubChub wrote: I believe Intel will maintain it's single thread dominance; not that it generally matters much, since single threaded tasks are often not limited by the CPU, but they'll have that. AMD will be winning on all other fronts for the foreseeable future (we are starting to see the fruits of programmer's labour in new apps being generally parity AMD<->Intel); the 3950x will be the multi-thread king over any 14++++++ chip, and the new Threadripper chips should pretty handily deal with any HEDT chip from Intel (both of which will arrive before the competing chip from Intel). On the server front, Intel only really has longevity as their final frontier (which, admittedly, is extremely important). However, Intel is battling security mitigations that are hitting the server space hard, whereas AMD is offering every single measurable performance metric better; server space is already shaping up to be a big gainer for AMD, barring something unfortunate being discovered against AMD's chips (far less likely, given ZEN2 core updates). Also, consoles are AMD, as are a growing number of higher-profile devices (Surface).

On the GPU front, the 5700 / 5700XT are undoubtedly better than their nVidia counterpart ($$$/performance). Outright maximum performance, nVidia definitely has that, but that's a VERY small part of the graphics market. Intel coming into the GPU field is a potential problem though, assuming they can make something that works (which doesn't seem realistic, given their continual failures in the market). Intel has been stuck on the innovation front for some time now, but so was AMD just 3 years ago, so things CAN change. nVidias dominance in automotive systems is probably unstoppable any time soon.

Assuming Intel doesn't come up with something soon-ish (their 10nm process doesn't seem to be helping much), they will maintain their brand dominance (Intel inside), but performance dominance outside of special use-cases doesn't look to be in the cards for at least a year, if not 2. At that point, AMD will have released ZEN3 cores at minimum, and the large advancement from ZEN to ZEN2 does give me high hopes the ZEN3 rumours are likely correct (+8% IPC, +200MHz). If so, Intel's 200MHz gain, and negligible IPC gain, should put them in a firm second across the board.

Note: you're thinking about AMD/Intel from our Canadian/American perspective, versus from basically every other country. I will say, AMD is HUGE in China; their purchasing power is insane compared to ours. If anything, Zhaoxin is something to be potentially worried about on that front; their chips are INSANELY cheap, and they're making enormous leaps in performance generation to generation. With the US poking them, a fire has been lit under their arses to make a domestic CPU. Two years ago, they were on 32nm with a 2GHz chip. This year it was 16nm (3GHz), and was said to have performance on par with chips only a few generations back from Intel's current i5 offerings (which is insane, since Intel hasn't really changed anything over the last few generations, though I believe they might be embellishing a bit). The newest chip in development should be on TSMCs 7nm (2020 IIRC), meaning it will likely be power-parity with AMD (e.g. better than Intel), similar clocks, DDR5, PCIe 4.0, etc etc. At present, they're basically just used in Chinese hardware, but that doesn't have to stay that way, ESPECIALLY if the US keeps poking China; TSMC is greatly expanding its manufacturing capability, meaning those chips could go from low production to high production pretty quick.
Nice post. Just a bit unsure about your single threaded comments. You seem to be spinning/downplaying Intel’s advantage there.

AMD has a ways to go still. They are very competitive right now but given the choice between an Intel CPU and an AMD one, all things being equal (price, core count), I would take the Intel chip and so would practically anyone else with half a brain and lack of brand bias. My point is that the Intel chips are still technically superior, by a bit.
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AMD is cheating this generation by putting out core that not all can turbo to what is promised. Intel doesn't do this type of shitty trickery. But there is no denying AMD has caught up with Intel in technology. AMD still cant overclock well but since they are priced lower and most buyers don't overclock anyways this is a moot point.
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SickBeast wrote: Nice post. Just a bit unsure about your single threaded comments. You seem to be spinning/downplaying Intel’s advantage there.

AMD has a ways to go still. They are very competitive right now but given the choice between an Intel CPU and an AMD one, all things being equal (price, core count), I would take the Intel chip and so would practically anyone else with half a brain and lack of brand bias. My point is that the Intel chips are still technically superior, by a bit.
I am not sure how "Intel will maintain it's single thread dominance" is downplaying their single-threaded dominance, but sure. However, since you're picking this metric: if you're averaging things out, Intel has a 5-8ish% lead in single threaded workloads (namely: games ... if you ignore games, AMD is at parity, if not better, but I assume you're referring to games, since it is what you'd have care about to match your narrative). Also, that games dominance is for people who buy high-end videocards, but don't care about how good the game looks; for the 99.9% of people who play GPU limited, the chips function identically.

As for "all things being equal", the 3700x (8/16) $319 vs 9900k (8/16) @ $449 (or even a 9700k [8/8] @ $299) ... how is the AMD not an obvious option? Those chips are virtually identical in normal use-cases, and AMD boards (of feature parity) are considerably cheaper. You have to have some pretty special use-cases to pick an Intel chip over an AMD in anything except the low-end (e.g. you're the kind of person that wants a gaming console, but doesn't want to buy a gaming console).

I'd love to hear about Intel's "by a bit" superiority. They have AVX512, which is cool if you need it, but that's basically it. Everything else is a "win some/lose some" type situation.
badOne wrote: AMD is cheating this generation by putting out core that not all can turbo to what is promised. Intel doesn't do this type of shitty trickery. But there is no denying AMD has caught up with Intel in technology. AMD still cant overclock well but since they are priced lower and most buyers don't overclock anyways this is a moot point.
You'd be surprised what people can happily deny. It does suck that AMD chips are essentially binned to their max clocks; I had high hopes for PBO (and still do for the Nov. update, that is coming with new microcode; fingers crossed), but Intel's chips are the same way (can't boost all cores to max boost). However, you have the option of dumping 300w into them and get those all core overclocks; AMD doesn't have that option.
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