AMD is dominating Intel in Amazon's best-selling CPUs list

https://www.techspot.com/news/82962-amd-dominating-intel-amazon-best-selling-cpu-list.html

by ekoutanov • 7 years ago

203 91 7 years ago

jaredtn• 7 years ago

AMD is blowing Intel out of the water with the latest benchmarks. Intel's lone remaining advantage is its MKL performance in single-threaded performance (and they've done some shady handicapping of AMD CPUs to get there), but in multiprocessing and most ML workflows AMD is the clear winner. The ThreadRipper series is an amazing product.

shaklee33• 7 years ago

I would say that AMD should make their own mkl if they want to compete. It's fine that it runs on AMD, but it is, after all, a closed-source library made by Intel.

At some point amd needs to take the software side seriously. Same goes for GPU.

stevefan1999• 7 years ago

What about OpenBLAS?

puranjay3• 7 years ago

The 3950x Threadripper numbers make Intel look like a chump. The only areas where Intel still has an edge is single core performance. In anything multicore, AMD's numbers are downright outrageous

distances• 7 years ago

3950X isn't a Threadripper. Which is just even more impressive.

fnord77• 7 years ago

from a developer point of view, AMD does not support record/replay debugging execution

xeeeeeeeeeeenu• 7 years ago

Changing that is a work in progress: https://github.com/mozilla/rr/issues/2034

clarry• 7 years ago

Is it? Based on the comments, the situation looks like "it doesn't work and nobody has figured out how to make it work."

binarycrusader• 7 years ago

With rr maybe but visual studio’s or windbg’s time travel debugging works just fine afaik.

rubber_duck• 7 years ago

Meanwhile Intel is still the only good option for laptops and I haven't used a desktop for 5+ years. Not saying this to bring down Intel success just wondering how much volume is in desktop vs laptop and hoping AMD can transition here as well.

neogodless• 7 years ago

Nah Zen isn't perfect for laptop but I've seen them in action and they are good options. Of course, Zen 2 APUs will help things there.

Redoubts• 7 years ago

I’m waiting for January where they release their mobile offerings. Hopefully they’ll be able to impress a little more this time around.

gameswithgo• 7 years ago

laptops are hard for amd due to oem backroom deals with intel, but with the popularity of zen2 that should start to crack i think. once zen2 mobile cpus hit the market we will start to see more amd laptops i think

agumonkey3• 7 years ago

Some supermarket ads in the mail last month showed 3 laptops, 1 very low end atom x5 "skype machine" and 2 amd zen based medium class.

I think zen will make a lot of sense for the majority of people. price/perf will reign over intel potential hedt products. If you give a 4 core + good gpu to the average joe for half the price of an intel he'll probably never look back.

tsss• 7 years ago

AMD has always been better at price/performance but in the laptop space the number 1 through 10 most important features are efficiency. Intel CPUs use less power and make less heat, which has always been the limiting factor.

majewsky• 7 years ago

My notebook (2018 Thinkpad E485) has a Ryzen 5 2500U APU and I'm happy with it. The only bad thing about that notebook is lack of Thunderbolt.

josteink• 7 years ago

Meanwhile Intel is still the only good option for laptops

The new Thinkpad E595 replaces an Intel CPU with Ryzen (5/7 3x00U), and some reviews[1] seems to claim it’s a better laptop for it.

[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-E595-laptop-re...

Shakahs• 7 years ago

I know AMD's resurgence is old news by now, but it's still impressive to look at Amazon's CPU best sellers and see them holding the entire top 10. The first Intel product is the i7-9700K at #12.

https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Computers-Accessories-Co...

xiphias2• 7 years ago

If I look at the AMD stock price it seems like when Lisa Su took over AMD in 2014 she brought it back from the dead (and made a 10x valuation in 5 years).

Here's a relatively fresh iterview with her if others are interested as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amBe2bofVas

NOGDP• 7 years ago

I'm no expert but the 200x P/E ratio seems risky in terms of investing.

bgorman• 7 years ago

AMD stock has been one of the most speculative stocks over the past ten years

jdsully• 7 years ago

It's a bet they can take dramatic share from Intel. Intel earned $21bln last year, if they had AMD's market cap it would be a P/E of 2.07.

If you don't believe AMD can take significant share away from Intel then the valuation doesn't make sense.

paulie_a• 7 years ago

AMD has consistently been a winner of a stock to buy and sell for the last 15 years with basically no risk.

ac29• 7 years ago

I'd give far more credit to Jim Keller, who returned in 2012 and designed Zen. AMD also benefited from Intel stumbling on 10nm and TSMC leapfrogging them. Zen 2 wouldn't be nearly as compelling if it was stuck on Global Foundries 14/12nm process (which is actually licensed from Samsung).

To AMD's credit though, they've executed very well - Jim left in 2015 with more than several Zen generations designed, but there has obviously been significant effort by far more people than just the project lead.

agumonkey3• 7 years ago

And to all the people around in the Ati merger and APU era because they wanted to try new things. It didn't work but they were already innovating and they kept going even when struggling.

Roritharr2• 7 years ago

I'd love to get career advice from him. He's famous for all the right reasons!

Sadly rare nowadays.

baybal2• 7 years ago

Zen was not designed by Keller. He had his hand on Zen 2, and in a role more of a project manager/team lead than a chief architect

_nickwhite• 7 years ago

Better performance [2] with less cores, much better pricing, and the kicker for me is PCI Express 4.0 [1]. Intel doesn't even support the newest generation of NVMe storage. So yeah, AMD is dominating for a good reason- for now anyways.

[1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/3400176/pcie-40-everything-y...

[2] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

judge2020• 7 years ago

I think you mean "with more cores", not less.

wmf2• 7 years ago

AMD has more cores available, but also AMD's cheaper 16-core beats Intel's 18-core in many tests.

mey• 7 years ago

Plus ECC support

spamizbad2• 7 years ago

Any motherboards with LRDIMM/RDIMM support?

Proven• 7 years ago

Not everyone has use for those advantages. To me they are meaningless (I have no need for "better" performance, I have no use for PCI 4.0, etc). I buy Intel CPUs because lower heat dissipation and power consumption at the performance level I need. I have avoided buying the relatively cheaper but power hungry Intel CPUs for many years.

By all means, please buy AMD. The more people do that, the better deal I get for Intel models I want to buy.

edeion• 7 years ago

There is likely some degree of humor in your message but I'm not sure. Why are you interested in lower power consumption? To save money on the electricity bill? Or for environmental reasons?

You mention you bought more expensive CPUs to get lower power consumption... Which points to the environmental reason. But you call others to buy AMD to get cheaper Intels, which would in turn rise the global power consumption.

I guess that last sentence is to be read as a joke but as a result I'm really confused by your comment :(

spzb• 7 years ago

The "bang for your buck" value statistics are quite stark. 17 of the top 20 are held by AMD. Intel's i9s in particular look very expensive for the performance

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_available.html

nknealk• 7 years ago

They’re also making headway into the data center space. AWS has recently announced that compute dense instances will have an AMD powered version. They already have AMD offerings for GP and RAM dense instances.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-new-amd-powere...

gundmc• 7 years ago

GCP and Azure are offering AMD Epyc Rome based instances as well. Intel is losing their death grip on the data center space quickly.

https://cloudblog.withgoogle.com/products/compute/amd-epyc-p...

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-new-amd-ep...

pavelevst• 7 years ago

Hetzner also have some well priced offers with AMD cpus

Bootwizard• 7 years ago

That's a last generation processor...their current generation is much more impressive. Twice as powerful than anything Intel has to offer at the SAME price as Intel.

zaroth• 7 years ago

Can anything beat the price/performance of the 2700x for $160 though?

tyingq• 7 years ago

Interesting for sure, but the market for people that buy a CPU chip as a standalone item probably doesn't relate much to the overall market.

I am rooting for AMD though. Competition was sorely needed.

topspin• 7 years ago

Interesting for sure, but the market for people that buy a CPU chip as a standalone item probably doesn't relate much to the overall market.

The question then becomes how much the 'overall market' relates to profits. These manufacturers have consistently marketed to the enthusiast/home builder end of the market for decades now; they've never seriously neglected it. I suspect these sales are highly lucrative despite the relatively small volume. It astonishes me that one can mail order a 4096 pin device (sTRX4) and install it by hand in the kitchen, yet here we are, and it's been that way for a rather long time now. If it wasn't profitable the manufacturers would have stop feeding this market long ago.

puranjay3• 7 years ago

But this market influences purchase decisions at an enterprise level. You get the enthusiasts on your side and they'll recommend you over others when the CIO needs to find a new vendor.

beatgammit2• 7 years ago

Eh, gamers buy CPUs directly, and that's a growing market. That's smaller than the enterprise market, but many gamers are also tech professionals that make decisions about what hardware they buy.

Hopefully that's enough to counteract the deals Intel has made in the past. Enterprises should run on the best products, not the best contract.

ChuckMcM3• 7 years ago

My TR3960X came in today, the TR3990X is on order :-). Since my current chassis isn't configured for liquid cooling I went with an air cooling solution and it is freakishly large, seriously.

ssutch3• 7 years ago

Pics!

ChuckMcM3• 7 years ago

https://twitter.com/ChuckMcManis/status/1200587968341110786/...

qes3• 7 years ago

My TR3960X came in today

From where?!? All I can find is B&H Photo with a pre-order estimating a month wait.

ChuckMcM3• 7 years ago

A shop in the Bay Area called "Central Computers." Once ASUS announced their TR40 motherboard I told him I wanted that, 64GB of RAM, and a 3960 or 3970 when they came in. He called me Friday morning and said, "ok we have it". Since by that time the 3990 had been announced as well I told him to put me down for one of those when they got them as well to replace the 3960.

MikusR• 7 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3817116

spicyramen• 7 years ago

This is great news for competition, same goes for GPU where Nvidia is still a monopoly

jacek• 7 years ago

When we consider deep learning practitioners and others relying on CUDA then yes, nvidia still has monopoly. But for gamers AMD's Radeon GPU is a compelling alternative.

kungtotte2• 7 years ago

For anyone on Linux it's also a better choice with Radeon, since they're actually cooperating with writing a FOSS driver for their cards. With nVidia you're stuck with a less than stellar third party FOSS driver or using nVidia's own proprietary driver.

ajconway• 7 years ago

As a mid-range option, maybe, but RTX absolutely dominates the high-end gaming this year.

Roritharr2• 7 years ago

It's really fascinating to watch them capture market share as you see where Intel is still entrenched for all kinds of reasons which are not price/perf wise.

For example, we can't use AWS t3a instances with EPYC Cores as our Management Provider has all their images only compiled for, optimized and tested on Intel based VMs.

The difference is still not large enough to bother to look into it, but next generation I expect the difference will be so large they can't ignore it.

rwmj• 7 years ago

Another couple of differences: No support for rr because of some lack of performance counters[1]. I also found that lm-sensors can barely see my AMD Ryzen at all, missing all core temp information. I'm hoping that both of these will be fixed since it doesn't seem that AMD is missing anything intrinsicly.

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/rr/issues/2034

62747478182• 7 years ago

I also found that lm-sensors can barely see my AMD Ryzen at all, missing all core temp information.

This is fixed in Kernel 5.4, and some distros backported the fix to 5.3.

I'm using Debian stable, with a kernel from buster-backports, and I can see the temperature for my CPU (Ryzen 7) and the GPU (Radeon RX 580).

touisteur• 7 years ago

And no support for Processor Trace or Coresight or some equivalent, which are amazing debug techs. Once you have them it's hard to live without...

TheBobinator• 7 years ago

Intel owns their own manufacturing process so they can crank out more volume than TSMC can on the smaller process nodes. TSMC Has a roadmap to 3nm by 2023, Intel is looking at 7nm by 2021.

Unless Intel manufactures on TSMC's line, AMD will have a clear, near double to triple performance advantage for the next 2 generations. You're going to see Intel become the value brand for awhile and they're trying to avoid that because they are used to a cash cow.

qes3• 7 years ago

near double to triple performance advantage

Not even remotely close. Really, where do you get some notion of AMD having "double" the performance of Intel? Pass the dutch, bro.

mamon• 7 years ago

Please keep in mind that the process names have become meaningless marketing terms. Intel is currently a bit behind due to their 10nm fiasco, but it is entirely possible that Intel's 7nm will beat TSMC 3nm process. AMD can have 10-15% advantage for the next couple years, but 2x-3x? That's never gonna happen.

ComradeUlyanov• 7 years ago

Not a surprise. AMD offers better CPUs at better prices.

millstone• 7 years ago

The article ought to have acknowledged the numbers for whole PC sales, which paint a different picture:

8/10 of Amazon's best selling laptops are Intel: https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/pc/565108/

9/10 for desktop PCs: https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Electronics-Desktop-Comp...

eklavya• 7 years ago

I wish apple started providing an amd macbook.

terramex• 7 years ago

Right now AMD mobile chips are still less power efficient than Intel's.

beatgammit2• 7 years ago

A little, but it's not that bad, especially since AMD's iGPU is way better. The 7nm mobile CPUs that are likely coming next year should fix that.

That being said, I specifically sought out an AMD laptop because I want 4 cores and a better GPU without a dedicated GPU (battery and simplicity under Linux). I get enough battery life for now (~5 hours I think) on my ThinkPad E495, and if I need more, I'll get a USB power bank.

jedisct1• 7 years ago

Is it worth buying a Macbook Pro 16", or is Intel going to react with far better CPUs in the forthcoming months, including for laptops?

Shorel2• 7 years ago

Now I want all these AMD CPU innovations to apply to Laptop processors too. Most computers sold nowadays are laptops.

I am writing this from a Ryzen 5 laptop that's not really faster than the i5 laptop it replaced. If any, it is a bit slower, even with double the cores.

The Radeon GPU on the other hand is way ahead of the previous integrated Intel GPU.

hu3• 7 years ago

Got me curious. What laptop model?

I'm in the market for a new laptop.

Shorel2• 7 years ago

Mine is a Dell Inspiron 13 7375 2-in-1, and it has a Ryzen 2500U APU. It is a year old this month.

mycall• 7 years ago

I wonder how much of this is due to brain drain due to political immigration policies.

AMD is dominating Intel in Amazon's best-selling CPUs list

Related Stories