AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3000 32-core CPU is more bad news for Intel

https://www.zdnet.com/article/amd-ryzen-threadripper-3000-32-core-cpu-is-more-bad-news-for-intel/

by rbanffy • 7 years ago

277 157 7 years ago

Symmetry• 7 years ago

AMD is in a really good position right now.

Intel still has the lead in low idle power which is good in laptops.

Ryzen lets different cores have different max frequencies so if your code is single threaded and your operating system isn't the newest that could be a reason to go Intel. Likewise if its single threaded and can take advantage of AVX-512 or the Intel Math Kernel Library.

But otherwise?

Jonnax• 7 years ago

I hear a lot about AVX-512 being really good.

Is there any software that's commonly used that has a measurable performance boost with it? Or is it more specialised stuff?

devonkim• 7 years ago

Newer versions of the x265 encoder for h.265 / HEVC video standard get significant speed-ups. I believe Handbrake was recently updated for it.

KingMachiavelli• 7 years ago

From what I've read on AVX-512, the big disadvantage is that the AVX-512 instructions are very CPU intensive so the max clock speeds is reduced if you heavily use AVX-512 instructions.

Another disadvantage is that you have to recompile your code to use AVX512 but it seems general enough that compilers will use the instructions (to an extent) without specialized code [1].

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GCC-8-AV...

dragontamer6• 7 years ago

I hear a lot about AVX-512 being really good.

Its a great instruction set, Absolutely great, AVX512 supports gather/scatter, a whole slew of efficient processing instructions, etc. etc.

However, AVX512 has poor implementations right now. Skylake-X is one of the only implementations, and running it drops the clock-rate in ways that are difficult to predict. (One core running AVX512 drops the clock of other cores, slowing down the throughput of the entire server).

Traditionally, the first implementation of these instruction sets always a degree of "emulated". For example, the gather/scatter instructions aren't much faster than load/stores in practice.

So while the AVX512 instruction set could theoretically be efficiently implemented, it seem like Skylake-X's implementation leaves much to be desired. Hopefully future implementations will be better.

------

The other major implementation of AVX512 is Xeon Phi, which has been deemed end-of-life. I like the idea of Xeon Phi, but it just didn't seem to work out in practice.

3JPLW• 7 years ago

One challenge with AVX-512 is that it can actually _slow down_ your code. It's so power hungry that if you're using it on more than one core it almost immediately incurs significant throttling. Now, if everything you're doing is 512 bits at a time, you're still winning. But if you're interleaving scalar and vector arithmetic, the drop in clock speeds could slow down the scalar code quite substantially.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/on-the-dangers-of-intels-frequen...

pkaye• 7 years ago

I've used it once but on Intel the clock is throttled with AVX-512 so the overall program performance improved only 1% because the non-SIMD code was running at a slower clock.

ogrisel• 7 years ago

The BLAS & Lapack subset of the API of the Intel Math Kernel Library (MKL) is very well implemented in open source projects such as OpenBLAS and BLIS:

https://github.com/flame/blis

Both are well optimized for AMD CPUs.

vj44• 7 years ago

I work in this space... and let's just say that MKL is definitely NOT well optimized for AMD's chips. You'll be lucky to get 10-20% efficiency. Nevermind openblas.

dragontamer6• 7 years ago

The main selling point for Intel isn't speed anymore.

Intel still has superior performance counters and debugging features. Mozilla's rr (Record and Replay framework) only works on Intel for example, and Intel vTune is a very good tool. AVX512 is also an advantage, as you've noted.

There are other instruction set advantages: I think Intel has faster division / modulus operator, and also has single-clock pext / pdep (useful in chess programs).

For most people however, who might not be using those tools, I'd argue that AMD's offerings are superior.

rbanffy4• 7 years ago

Even if you do, in most cases you won't use them on all your workloads. This means not all your boxes need to be Intel.

nwmcsween• 7 years ago

It also has superior vulnerabilities

znpy• 7 years ago

For the consumer market, this small advantages are not worth considering, imho. Amd processors do more and cost less, and power consumption is being optimised at each iteration.

For server/pro market they might be worth considering but again, the huge BOM cut that you get by choosing AMD processor might be worth the performance penalty.

luizfelberti• 7 years ago

Is AVX512 really an advantage though?

Intel is infamous for severely downclocking the processor for these and other AVX/SSE family instructions, to a point where sometimes using them makes the program slower than it would be otherwise, especially if you're constantly provoking frequency switches between them and regular instructions.

AMD might not have implemented AVX512 specifically yet (there's nothing legally keeping them from doing so however, they have patent sharing agreements with Intel regarding the entire x86/x64 ISA and extensions), but what they currently DO have is all common SIMD extensions implemented (up to SSE4 and AVX2 if I'm not mistaken) without incurring any frequency penalties on clock speeds for using them.

I can live without AVX512 for now, even though I'd be happier to have it. But I would really rather not have it if it came out in the same crap implementation that Intel has.

heinrich5991• 7 years ago

Mozilla's rr (Record and Replay framework) only works on Intel for example

Can you source that? I can't find it on the Wikipedia page[1] or its homepage[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rr_(debugging)&ol... [2]: https://rr-project.org/

Mathnerd314• 7 years ago

I looked for some numbers on low idle power, apparently 3k significantly improved something: https://www.reddit.com/r/AMD_Stock/comments/ado0ix/ryzen_mob.... This reviewer seems impressed, something about only using 10W in idle on desktop: https://youtu.be/M5pHUHGZ7hU?t=363.

And a head-to-head test of a laptop available in AMD and Intel variants says it has better battery life, although the screen panel could be the reason: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-T495-Review-bu...

I'd like more info, and Intel still probably has a lot of firmware tweaks etc. that AMD has to implement to win microbenchmarks, but to a first order it's not clear Intel has a lead there anymore.

zelon88• 7 years ago

I think most server operators look at overall performance. Once you start buying hardware specifically for one purpose you're cornering yourself.

Besides, who spends $15,000 on a mid-high end server to run single threaded applications anyway?

eyegor6• 7 years ago

I happen to know of several companies doing physics problems that scale poorly across cores that spend far north of that, usually building out small clusters. Then you run 100s of independent simulations since each individual one doesn't really scale.

z3t4• 7 years ago

I would say most apps don't benefit from multiple cores. So single threaded performance is still important.

guelo• 7 years ago

Why is AMD making these chips with 14nm transistors instead of using TSMC's 7nm stuff? AMD is only catching up to Intel because Intel's 10nm has been delayed so much, but if Intel can ever figure out their 10nm process they'll be in the lead again.

brackle• 7 years ago

What are you talking about? Zen 2(Ryzen 3000) uses 7 nm.

astrodust5• 7 years ago

It's a composite chip (chiplets) with different parts made using different processes for various reasons.

exar08152• 7 years ago

AFAIK is Threadripper 2 12nm. I guess its because they can deliver very high speed with that process, without cannibalizing the already overtaxed TSMC-7nm Lines.

Threadripper-users dont care that much about energy efficiency - and its a small market, which gets cannibalized by the 3950X in the new generation.

arcticbull4• 7 years ago

It's 7nm, similar to Rome.

cooljacob204• 7 years ago

Apparently it is 7nm. https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-threadripper-...

jdietrich• 7 years ago

AMD use 14nm for the IO die and 7nm for the compute chiplets. 10nm won't help much - after all the security fixes that Intel have had to implement, AMD have the IPC advantage.

arcticbull4• 7 years ago

And further, "nm" these days are marketing numbers. It's totally possible that AMD's 7nm isn't directly comparable to a 7nm (or 10nm) Intel process.

arcticbull4• 7 years ago

Their biggest win over Intel was using 14nm IO bridge to connect 7nm CPU cores ("chiplets") in the Ryzen 3000 era. They use 14nm for IO where there's little benefit to the process shrink so they can save the lower-yielding 7nm process for where it counts: cores.

DuskStar2• 7 years ago

And I think you're missing the biggest bit, there - each set of 8 cores is its own die. That means that if they have a yield of 95% for that one die, they'll have a yield of 95% for a 64 core monster, too. Compare with Intel, where octupling the die area means their yields would go from 95% to 0.95^8 = 66%. (And if they had 50% yields to start, Intel would end up with 0.4% yields after octupling - AMD would still have 50% total)

randogogogo• 7 years ago

This can be a bit confusing, basically some parts within the CPU package 7nm dies and other parts are 14nm dies. The chiplets that are the CPU core are the prior, interconnects (or the I/O die) is the latter.

rbanffy4• 7 years ago

As a fun fact, IBM's newest (and quite impressive) mainframe, the z15, is still using the same Global Foundries 14nm process the z14 did. The next generation (including POWER10) will probably be 7nm, but not come from GF.

It runs above 5 GHz.

snvzz• 7 years ago

if Intel can ever figure out their 10nm process they'll be in the lead again.

What are you basing this claim on?

All we know Zen2 targeted beating an hypothetical 10nm Intel CPU which has not shown up.

As it has not shown up, it remains hypothetical. Wild what-ifs.

GiorgioG3• 7 years ago

I have the original Threadripper 1950X overclocked to 4.1ghz and I’ve been pretty happy with it. As a developer I can’t find much reason to upgrade 2 years after its release. Single core improvements (from AMD or Intel) aren’t game-changing. More cores won’t do anything for me (.NET Core, angular, etc) I’ve considered switching back to intel for their 5ghz processors but based on benchmarks, I wouldn’t see anything but marginal improvements. All in all, competition is good, but I wish they’d focus on single core performance improvements.

ses19842• 7 years ago

I can still put more cores to work, compiling stuff.

I have a 6 core quad channel intel and I've been waiting for this threadripper to come out.

rbanffy4• 7 years ago

Maybe, but how often do people compile their software?

astrodust5• 7 years ago

If you ever get into Docker/Kubernetes, being able to spin up a local cluster for testing is a pretty big deal. Having that running in the background and not impacting your usual workload is huge.

I've been testing a Kubernetes cluster built on 32-core AMD servers and it's unreal the workloads you can throw at them. I'm used to 4 or 8-core Xeon chips and this is a whole different game.

marmaduke2• 7 years ago

How much of that is core count though? I've used minikube several times and it didn't seem to matter much how many cores it had (beyond 4)

rbanffy4• 7 years ago

That's true, but memory/IO is a much bigger issue in this scenario than processing power. While running a cluster in VMs, I'm frequently limited by IO (and if your VMs use more memory than it's physically available, you'll quickly descent into swap hell) well before my CPUs register a significant uptick in usage.

And, mind you, my workstation is 4 year old Xeon with 64 gigs of memory and reasonably fast (but not amazing) SATA SSD.

On a side note, I work more and more from a couple of i3 and i5 laptops and only use the workstation to do heavy lifting tasks, such as replicating these more exotic setups.

arcticbull4• 7 years ago

They're doing both. AMD has ramped single-core performance, at least from an IPC perspective, massively. From Excavator (2015) to Ryzen we saw a 52% increase in IPC. From Ryzen 1000 to 2000 (Zen+) we saw a 3% increase in IPC. From Ryzen 2000 to 3000 (Zen2) we saw a 15% increase in IPC.

From 2015 to 2019 we saw a total IPC boost on the AMD side of over 80%, and an increase in max core count in the desktop line of 433%, from 6 to 32.

I'm okay with this progress :)

GiorgioG3• 7 years ago

The progress is ok, just incremental. AMD had been playing catch up, until Ryzen/Threadripper.

Just for comparison, here are the numbers from my GeekBench 4 run:

Single-Threaded: 4,746 Multi-Threaded: 34,586

According to a leaked benchmark, the Threadripper 3000's numbers are:

Single-Threaded: 5,519 Multi-Threaded: 68,279

The multithreaded benchmark is 2x, that's a no-brainer since it's likely to have 32 cores vs the 1950x's 16 cores. Now, I will say that TR3000 benchmark is not overclocked (3.6ghz.) But from what I've read, it seems like there's not much room for these latest chips to be overclocked. So, despite being the 3rd iteration, the TR3000 is only 16% faster in single-threaded benchmarks than my 1950X.

Intel's 9900K (overclocked) gets a single-threaded GB4 score of ~7,000. That (or its successor) may be my next machine.

alteria• 7 years ago

To be fair, Excavator was pretty poor compared to the Intel offerings that generation.

But 15% the last generation is definitely impressive, especially when compared to the 3-5% gains from 14++++ that Intel has been offering.

agumonkey• 7 years ago

I'd love to have even a 1st gen ryzen to know what it's like to be able to compile massively without feeling it.

Right now my poor x201 overheats to death if I use rustc carelessly.

kllrnohj7• 7 years ago

The biggest upgrade over Threadripper 1950X is that the new ones are no longer NUMA. So performance across the cores will be much more consistent even if the peaks are not that much bigger.

If your development involves compiling code then the 2x larger L3 is also going to result in huge improvements to code compilation speed as seen in the Epyc Rome reviews. Example: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd-epyc... - compare the 7601 vs. the 7502. Both are 32c/64t parts. Both have close-enough base clocks & turbo clocks. But the new one (7502) absolutely smokes the old one (7601) at both kernel compile in GCC and LLVM compile. Compilers love that L3 it seems.

All signs point to Threadripper 3000 still being sTR4 compatible, so that means you could drop in a CPU that gives you +15% single core performance vs. previous gen's best case, no more NUMA domains bringing more consistent performance, lower power usage, and double the L3 for much faster compiles.

That's pretty awesome particularly given we're only talking a ~2 year gap between the products.

loeg7• 7 years ago

Wait in what sense are the new Threadrippers no longer NUMA?

Edit: Found the Zen 2 Epyc marketing materials that describe this. Yes, apparently memory access on a single socket is uniform, in that all memory access is indirected over the IO chiplet[1]! This may hurt best-case access latency for NUMA-aware workloads? Just speculating.

It's not like non-local caches go away with uniform DRAM access latencies — unless L1/L2/L3 are also non-local to the core and indirected behind the IO chiplet. Which would be really surprising.

[1] https://www.servethehome.com/amd-epyc-7002-series-rome-deliv...

kraig9112• 7 years ago

Now if only programming multi-core work could catch up to this hardware. Honestly chips with more cores is starting to sound like cars with more wheels or I guess more valves lately.

Doesn't matter the horsepower the speed limit is the same until we can make software better.

brianobush• 7 years ago

Depends on the problem domain. Some problems/algorithms, like genetic algorithms, are simple to implement on multicore systems with thread pools with significant gains in overall performance.

lawn• 7 years ago

At work our homegrown programming language is still single threaded only. Feels bad man.

klodolph• 7 years ago

This is a very outdated complaint, we are using all cores these days, just not on all systems. Backend software is concurrent & distributed, and although utilization is lower than we’d like, the extra cores are not going to waste.

However, if you put this in a machine you use for playing games or checking Facebook then you might think that it’s a waste, and you’d be right. There is plenty of software out there which is still single-threaded, but it’s not dominating our utilization.

mrguyorama• 7 years ago

Honestly with the way chrome and firefox behave nowadays, even grandma looking at facebook benefits from multiple cores

benj111• 7 years ago

"or I guess more valves lately."

Extra valves can increase efficiency, which is probably why the valve count is increasing, can't say I've noticed though.

Extra wheels can improve aerodynamics also.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrrell_P34

I'll stop undermining your point now :)

kraig9112• 7 years ago

Efficiency does not mean you're going faster though. My point still stands.

Multi-core processors can invariably let us do more. I get it - valid point. But we're not doing more. We're just cruising along at the same speed I think.

kllrnohj7• 7 years ago

Doesn't matter the horsepower the speed limit is the same until we can make software better.

For developers code compilations benefit from more cores. For hobby 3d artists their renderings benefit from more cores. For hobby video creators their editing & rendering benefits from more cores. For hobby IT usages the extra PCI-E lanes and ECC RAM gets you the capability of doing server-like virtualization without spending server money.

Threadripper is an HEDT platform, same as Skylake-X. This is not targeting mass market usage, so complaining about mass-market viability is rather irrelevant.

otakucode• 7 years ago

Since the beginning I have always wondered when I came across complaints about there not being enough multi-core software. Am I the only one with more than 1 process running on my system?

twotwotwo2• 7 years ago

Worth noting AMD just announced that the first third-gen Threadripper will come out in Nov with 24 cores, and the planned 16-core mainstream chip (the 3950X) is delayed to November: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-ryzen-9-3950x-delay-la...

A 32-core chip is still almost certain to show up, since benchmarks have leaked, and folks have also leaked some pics of 3950X's and packaging, but I guess supply/demand have kept everything from coming out yet.

As the Tom's post notes, server and client chips use the same chiplets, so it could be that most of the higher-binned ones are going to server parts; some are higher-margin (7742 is almost $100/core, vs. 3950X under $50/core) and plausible there're some enterprise orders (AWS etc.) getting priority. I wonder if they tightened the binning for the 3950X to respond to the fuss over turbo, too.

I had never really considered everything that goes into getting to that SKU/price list and launch date: you don't really know how much supply you'll have at various perf levels, or what demand there will be for what at what price, and if you don't exactly match them you might end up losing money by underpricing, by having to nerf good silicon to fill highly-demanded lower-end SKUs, or by having a shortage that makes customers go elsewhere. (Plus vendors don't just have the public SKU list, they're working out contracts with OEMs/other big customers. And who knows what the competition will do.) High stakes, and practically speaking no backsies; seeing how upset folks are about turbo clocks, imagine if AMD announced a price hike. Glad it's not my job.

kllrnohj7• 7 years ago

As the Tom's post notes, server and client chips use the same chiplets, so it could be that most of the higher-binned ones are going to server parts; some are higher-margin (7742 is almost $100/core, vs. 3950X under $50/core)

The 7742 is the "halo" chip, though. Or was, rather, until the Epyc 7H12 was announced.

Other Epycs have much lower $/core. For example the 24-core EPYC 7352 is $1350, making it $56/core. The 16-core EPYC 7282 is actually even cheaper than the 3950X at $650, or $40/core.

No doubt bulk orders are going to get the priority, but the margins may not actually be that different depending on what companies are actually bulk-ordering. The $/core drops pretty quickly even just going down slightly in the stack. The 32c 7452 is $65/core.

And we don't entirely know which aspect of the binning is the limiting factor. If it's just functional cores that's going to be different from if they run at the right frequency/voltage. Epyc is all 225 W or lower. Threadripper 3000 AMD could pretty easily slap a 300W TDP on it and ram voltage through the chips that couldn't cut it at Epyc specs. The 2990WX is, after all, a 250W TDP part. The existing socket is already spec'd for more power capability than the top-end Epyc.

Teknoman117• 7 years ago

They also get cheaper if you only buy the single socket versions (assuming you don't need dual socket). The 7702P (the single socket 64 core) is $4425, or $70/core.

twotwotwo2• 7 years ago

I don't really hard-disagree with any of that; we're all guessing. The co. sending chiplets where they fetch the most also doesn't seem outlandish as a factor, though.

FWIW, here's the price-per-core chart for the whole second-gen server line:

https://www.servethehome.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/AMD-...

(Doesn't factor in voltage/freq needs for different SKUs, some of them needing fully-working chiplets, etc. Still.)

The low pricing on the 7282 and a few others is interesting, too. Wonder if it's a factor that it can use partially-working chiplets since the server I/O die can take up to eight chiplets and the client die only two, or if that's totally unrelated.

tracker1• 7 years ago

TSMC has also had issues meeting demand directy, they're at a 6 month backlog for 7nm. It seems like the demand has been huge, and a lot of server vendors who have been waiting to upgrade servers are going AMD and pulling the triggers now.

The 3900X has been pretty much sold out since launch, and sells out within hours of inventory showing on newegg/amazon. Been using a 3600 on a new build, waiting for 3950X. And likewise a lot of the aftermarket design rx5700xt cards have been selling out quickly. Took 4 tries to get the gigabyte one. First two times, sold out before I saw the notice, third it sold out while in my card going through checkout. Then I got the order in.

qwerty4561272• 7 years ago

I'd rather choose really big caches per core than really big number of cores.

kllrnohj7• 7 years ago

Zen2 is 16MB L3 per ccx across the entire stack (hence why even the Ryzen 5 3600 is 32MB of L3 - it has 2 CCXs). There's no reason to assume this won't be true on Threadripper 3000. So a 32-core Threadripper 3000 would have at least 128MB of L3.

qwerty4561272• 7 years ago

L2 cache is what matters. Zen2 has just 512 KiB per core. My old Pentium-M had 2MB. I wish modern CPUs had at least this much.

undersuit• 7 years ago

Top end EPYC has 256MB of L3 cache, I still have a Debian 8 Netboot usb drive of the same capacity.

elheffe802• 7 years ago

But what processor is best for Dwarf Fortress?

Sephr• 7 years ago

Probably the Mill CPU once the hardware actually exists.

gautamcgoel• 7 years ago

Is the Mill CPU still happening? Haven't heard about it in a while...

dragontamer6• 7 years ago

Dwarf Fortress is IIRC mainly limited by RAM latency. So you really should be trying to get 3600 MHz RAM with as tight timings (maybe CL16 timings?) as possible.

Dwarf Fortress's simulation is all about pointer-indirection and jumping around memory. The CPU doesn't really do much except wait for RAM most of the time. It takes ~50ns to talk to RAM, but the CPU is clocked at 4GHz (0.25 nanoseconds), giving you an idea of scale. The RAM tightening can bring your latency anywhere from 50ns to 200ns depending on how well you tune your RAM parameters, and depending on chips and stuff. (Servers usually have lots of slow LRDIMM RAM over multiple-sockets that can be 200ns latency or worse).

AMD takes their design out of the server-playbook, and seems to have ~100ns main DDR4 RAM Latency. So Dwarf Fortress probably will be faster on Intel i9-9900k (monolithic design with integrated memory controller and 50ns main memory latency).

d33• 7 years ago

Interesting! Is there a simple way to measure memory latency?

elheffe802• 7 years ago

Awesome! Thanks for the write up and good info.

khalilravanna• 7 years ago

But will they actually be generally available for purchase? I was super excited to grab an AMD Ryzen 3900x when they came out mid-July and they've been consistently sold out since then. That's over 3 months with the only reliable way to get one being to buy one for almost twice the MSRP from 3rd party resellers at $800-900 vs MSRP of $500.

tuananh• 7 years ago

demand in US is really high. in my country (SEA), 3900x is available almost every big computer shop.

loeg7• 7 years ago

By what mechanism would the multicore performance rise 2x without increased single-core performance? I'm kind of confused. Eliminating intra-CPU concurrency bottlenecks, I guess?

FartyMcFarter• 7 years ago

Which benchmark or comparison are you referring to?

loeg7• 7 years ago

Pretty much the only numbers in TFA:

The single-core score of 1,275 is pretty much the same as for the current flagship Threadripper 2990WX, ...
But when it comes to multi-core, the Threadripper 3000's score of 23,015 absolutely destroys the Threadripper 2990WX's score of 13,400, ...

Traster• 7 years ago

It's not likely but you could do a 32 core 128 thread version.

loeg7• 7 years ago

My understanding is that the underlying CCXs and cores are identical across the Zen 2 product line, and all have exactly 2 threads per core. No?

txdv• 7 years ago

All the cores need to synchronize memory between each other, I guess you can improve speed on that part.

kuon• 7 years ago

I just built a new workstation and went AMD. I'm amazed by the performances. I have a threadripper 1920 and it performs really well under many different loads (compiling, gaming, video editing). It also handles my dev vms very well. Of course this is purely based on my feeling, but I had an i7-9700 before and while I had faster FPS in some games, it was really bad at handling vms.

This is subjective, but I have a really good feeling about AMD, both on CPU and GPU side.

Only thing I could ask is for more open source (open source CPU firmware), but I think this is only a dream.

eyegor6• 7 years ago

The single-core score of 1,275 is pretty much the same as for the current flagship Threadripper 2990WX, and is actually slightly lower than the 1,334 that the Intel i9-9900K scores.

In what world is this a valid comparison? No one shopping for a $500 8 core consumer cpu is looking at a $1700 32 core hedt chip. They're entirely different markets. If you can use 32 cores you'd be looking at intels x series at a minimum, if not xeons. This is silly at best, if not intentionally misleading.

blurbleblurble• 7 years ago

Rumor has it there's a 64 core chip coming ~ this year too! With 128 threads, of course.

The following article calls it a "one-two punch"... wow!

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/amd-ryzen-threadripp...

ethanpil• 7 years ago

I'm ignorant in stock trading, I admit. But I dont understand why AMD stock isn't blowing up. It's done a recovery after a market wide dip, but hasn't all this Intel beating news raised the hype? So many other tech companies are so severly overvalued and hyped daily. Why is AMD a steady 28-32?

gleenn• 7 years ago

TL;DR: industry momentum

I've read this elsewhere on HN, basically it boils down to having great tech doesn't mean everyone drops all their existing Intel tooling or Intel-optimized source code. If you care a lot about performance, then you'll care about those things. For everyone else, they just want a reasonably priced processor, and most PC manufacturers have large contracts to get those CPUs at a good enough price from Intel to also not want to switch all their motherboards and factory setups and driver in order.

christophilus• 7 years ago

With a p/e of 166, there’s a lot of optimism priced in.

s1artibartfast• 7 years ago

Even more amazing when you compare it to Intel with a p/e of 11

mdemare• 7 years ago

It was below 3 in 2016.

CyanLite4• 7 years ago

This. I bought at $1.56 and sold at $29 for an unbelievably awesome trade. Will pick up more anytime it dips below $30.

yummypaint2• 7 years ago

Considering how undervalued they have been for the last decade, things have moved definitively in the right direction. The recent releases and developments are still fresh news and i suspect the people/computers responsible for most of their volume operate at a longer timescale

NicoJuicy• 7 years ago

It took a while to get the jump from 10 to 30. I actually was unlucky for selling just before, as it took too long ( holding it for a year).

I see it going to it's old peak soon. And it will just be as swift as it was before

abledon• 7 years ago

As more people move to city cores from rural areas... I think computers are becoming the next generations 'car', in terms of an object to soup up with new parts.

thelittleone• 7 years ago

Interesting metaphor. It has been this way since the 1980s. For instance, in 1985/86 it was popular to upgrade your 386sx with an i387 math co-processor which is something like adding a cat back exhaust system on your car. Later on increasing RAM, installing QEMM for boosting available memory for DOS games and over clocking and then add on 3D video accelerator cards. There was even a physics add-on card at one point. Mostly these focused on performance gains. The shift towards LED bling and aesthetics is more recent though.

fortran77• 7 years ago

Why do y'all hate Intel so much?

floatboth2• 7 years ago

Because they're the dominant player (and the history of getting to that dominance is very sketchy, including $billion fines in the EU for bribing OEMs to use their processors)

archi42• 7 years ago

The article references a Geekbench score that's now taken offline.

Google Cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=de&ei=ewaGXa...

Results (also in the article): Geekbench v5.0.1 Tryout for Windows x86 (64-bit); 1275 single core, 23015 multi-core for 32C/64T @ 3.59GHz Base Frequency (and with 32GB DDR4, no info on 4 or 8 channel).

AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3000 32-core CPU is more bad news for Intel

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