Hello fellow users.

Let's use this thread to discuss competition between the notable technology giants, with a focus on their application to commercial and enterprise computing!



I'm going to sit down tonight and write a post about my experience buying AMD EPYC processors, my own scientific computing endeavors, and why I think Intel is massively undervalued and will still be the choice computing platform for the future regardless of how many cores AMD can shove on a CPU unit.

It basically boils down to memory. I'm struggling with 256Gb of memory for even my own basic computing endeavors, meaning that even though I have 128 cores, I can only fully utilize about 24 of them. If I wanted to make full use it would require north of 10Tb of memory, which AMD cannot come anywhere near supporting. Meanwhile Intel has access to 8Tb memory boards, 8x scalable systems, and Intel Optane, which can act as backup cache to keep the CPUs fed even when maxing out memory. This is incredibly important for scientific computing and data-heavy applications like AI training. So even though AMD has the highest compute processors, Intel has a massive lead in being able to utilize their compute effectively for current technologies.

Cheers!

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Jan 28 2021 01:56pm

I know you often go on about intel but you don’t think AMD will steal their market share (more than they already have) over the next couple years? Intel has undercut themselves numerous times this year to get contracts that otherwise would have gone to AMD. IDK how long that can last

Of course I am biased as a big time AMD holder

I was going to sit down and write up something about AMD vs Intel, then at 3 p.m. Friday I got told by the pathologist reading our slides that we need to redo them since our protocol wasn't very good. So now I'm working all weekend. Yay..... Been at work for the past 12 hours.

AMD will likely continue to take some market share since they do have access to PCIE 4.0 significantly ahead of any offerings by Intel and they have higher core counts, but unless they get seriously improved memory solutions they won't be able to take the majority from Intel.

Once you have 32, 64, 128 cores on a single system it's actually more important to be able to feed those cores data than it is to keep upping your processing power. Processors have very small cache, and when that is used up it takes data from the RAM, and when that is used up it has to fetch from hard drives. Every step has something like a 100 factor decrease in access speed, so by the time you are getting into the hard drives you've lost your data throughput. Intel has optane and insanely fast PCIE SSDs to allow for more options, as well as motherboards that can use 8Tb or more RAM where AMD only has 4 Tb. Overall this means that anything data intensive will almost certainly be done on Intel. Additionally, Intel has probably the fastest math libraries out there in the form of intel Math Kernel Library, so this also gives them an advantage in high-end computing. They get a significant boost to speed by taking advantage of Intel's subroutines. Intel writes its own instruction set extensions then licenses them out. Intel does basically everything.

Anyway, something to remember is that AMD is mostly just a processor company. They have CPU and GPU and associated things, but not a whole lot else. Intel does EVERYTHING. They make chipsets, license the x64 instruction sets to AMD, make their own SSDs, write new instruction sets, they have a GPU division coming up, they do a massive amount of coding for different organizations. Intel silicon gets into almost every single computer manufactured today and when they do something it's solid as hell. Intel's engineering team is worth their weight in gold.

So while AMD is solid atm, Intel is just a much more diversified and technologically adept company. Eventually they will take the CPU crown from AMD again and when that happens it will just be the cherry, not the cake.




Also Intel's P/E is 11, and AMDs is 40+. AMD's growth is priced in, and Intel's is not. Intel is insanely cheap right now. They should probably be around the same price as Nvidia.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Jan 30 2021 09:03pm

Very insightful

Much appreciated

I'm reminded of the horrors of the intel ME engine.
I sure wish there was an option somewhere for a modern, powerful computer that runs the software I need and has an OS and hardware that aren’t all shamefully vulnerable spyware that I have to hack myself to achieve any level of ownership whatsoever.

Once the government back door on intel crap is common knowledge among enthusiasts, the market will flock to AMD for refuge

this is probably why robinhood and other brokers wont allow investing in AMD