'AMD has 30% of the CPU market for the first time in over a decade...' - Techradar

[Kenmitch]

I'm digging this out again. For work I'm looking for a new workstation due to various reasons. Mostly for general ML, data crunching tasks. But also interested in deep learning. Anyway I go looking around and all the common OEMs seem to offer is the xeon + NV option with base config something stupid as a 6-core xeon but already cascade-lake.

Some more niche shops I found some threadripper 2 options. Did not find a single workstation option with an epyc rome option (only normal rack servers) and in general OEMs liek dell or hpe still seem to be deeply entrenched in intel. This is an uphill battle for AMD as if a buyer isn't looking for epyc/TR he will almost certainly not find it / get a product with it.

I'm guessing you didn't check out the following link? Just click the drop down in the categories to see options.

https://www.amd.com/en/where-to-buy/workstations-cpu

It looks like maybe Velocity Micro could be a fit? From 3600 to the new Epyc's it looks like.

Customize Your ProMagix™ HD80 Workstation- Velocity Micro

Velocity Micro specializes in workstation computers, gaming desktops, and custom laptops designed for demanding workflows. Welcome to the New PC Experience.

www.velocitymicro.com

Might be best to wait for the new Threadrippers to come out if your going to pony up the $$$'s

 

[beginner99]

I'm guessing you didn't check out the following link?

Interesting but obviously vendor must be local (not US) for support and such. Not going to build something for work myself.

 

[Kenmitch]

Interesting but obviously vendor must be local (not US) for support and such. Not going to build something for work myself.

There's always the company sponsored vacation trip to the US for support....lol

 

[Atari2600]

I'm digging this out again. For work I'm looking for a new workstation due to various reasons. Mostly for general ML, data crunching tasks. But also interested in deep learning. Anyway I go looking around and all the common OEMs seem to offer is the xeon + NV option with base config something stupid as a 6-core xeon but already cascade-lake.

Some more niche shops I found some threadripper 2 options. Did not find a single workstation option with an epyc rome option (only normal rack servers) and in general OEMs liek dell or hpe still seem to be deeply entrenched in intel. This is an uphill battle for AMD as if a buyer isn't looking for epyc/TR he will almost certainly not find it / get a product with it.

Yeah, you need to try a more boutique shop.

Say Armari or PCSpecialist in the UK.

Dunno who in the States or Europe.

 

[chrisjames61]

It doesn't even matter for AMD at this point, as OEM's are becoming less and less of the market, 10 years ago OEM's accounted for 70%+ of all desktops built/sold, now it's about 50% and declining. More and more people are building their own PC's, the large OEM's are actually replaced by smaller OEM's, a lot of smaller online shops actually have paid services where for just $50 they assemble your parts and send you the PC.

So its not a big deal for AMD, and a lot of OEM's are using AMD more and more.

I really doubt it. Dell, H.P., Lenovo etc... each sell tens of millions of pc's per quarter to businesses alone. The guy that builds pc's at home, small shops etc... aren't even the smallest rounding error and aren't even on the radar as a blip.

 

[Guru]

I really doubt it. Dell, H.P., Lenovo etc... each sell tens of millions of pc's per quarter to businesses alone. The guy that builds pc's at home, small shops etc... aren't even the smallest rounding error and aren't even on the radar as a blip.

You need to check newegg, amazon, ebay, etc... sales numbers, I'm sure you'd be surprised how many people assemble their own pc's, or have friend do it or pay $50 bucks to a local pc shop to do it for them. They save a ton of money.

But at this point if AMD are outselling Intel just at individual sales it still suits them and OEM's don't matter as much because they are using up all 7nm available. They would have such big issues now if demand was say 30% higher through OEM's. They would literally become months behind with shipments.

 

[Arkaign]

I'm digging this out again. For work I'm looking for a new workstation due to various reasons. Mostly for general ML, data crunching tasks. But also interested in deep learning. Anyway I go looking around and all the common OEMs seem to offer is the xeon + NV option with base config something stupid as a 6-core xeon but already cascade-lake.

Some more niche shops I found some threadripper 2 options. Did not find a single workstation option with an epyc rome option (only normal rack servers) and in general OEMs liek dell or hpe still seem to be deeply entrenched in intel. This is an uphill battle for AMD as if a buyer isn't looking for epyc/TR he will almost certainly not find it / get a product with it.

Just noticing this thread and post. I have contacts with Google's AI personnel.

AI/ML/GANs, etc, are all extremely optimized for dGPU, similar to running mining algorithms, where a 2080ti is perhaps 8,000-20,000x faster than a $5000 Xeon.

Not that it's not worth having a good CPU and platform to work with, but I think if I were building with a capped budget, I'd go with something like this :

AMD 3900 or 3950
Noctua DH15 (no hassle cooling adequate for full sustained load)
64GB DDR4-3400
Pair of 2TB nVME for OS/Apps and Datastore
Pair of 8TB spinners for general storage
Titan RTX (or 2)
QUALITY 1200+ Platinum PSU
High Airflow Case

Going TR will give you potentially more cores, but little advantage for your purposes at a much higher platform cost that would reduce the budget for dGPU and SSD.

 

[thesmokingman]

No way does AMD have anywhere near 30%. They'd be making a lot more money if they were.

That's not how it works. You have to look at the margins. AMD is operating at 40% roughly, and will improve a few points here and there. They're in a quandry because they cannot continue with low margins but hopefully their industry wide perception will improve and then they'll be able to increase their gross margins. To give you an idea Intel is operating at 70% margins comparatively and even when they are down their margins are so stupidly high it barely affects them. This is also a sour point for all AMD investors since you know, they are not making the same profit dollar for dollar vs Intel. I suspect when the market and I mean not neccessarily consumers but corporate admins, ie, the buyers no longer think of AMD as cheap arse crap, they can then raise their margins. Add to that the amount of R&D they spent on Zen is a huge budget for AMD and yet a drop in the bucket for Intel...

On a side note I chat with some investors now and thhen and they tell me word from a lot of the old guys in buying positions still think of AMD as marginal. Still to this day with Zen killing it on a technological level, many still view AMD as subpar versus Intel. I was lol'ing at that... it's hard to explain to ppl who don't know the difference and only go by word of mouth. Hell 99% of analyst have no clue the differences in architecture between the two camps, smh.

 

[CHADBOGA]

On a side note I chat with some investors now and thhen and they tell me word from a lot of the old guys in buying positions still think of AMD as marginal. Still to this day with Zen killing it on a technological level, many still view AMD as subpar versus Intel. I was lol'ing at that... it's hard to explain to ppl who don't know the difference and only go by word of mouth. Hell 99% of analyst have no clue the differences in architecture between the two camps, smh.

This is why it is so laughable that people think Intel rebates were such a massive factor in stopping AMD becoming dominant in market share, during the K8 days.

 

[thesmokingman]

This is why it is so laughable that people think Intel rebates were such a massive factor in stopping AMD becoming dominant in market share, during the K8 days.

AMD had the dominant architecture back then. Then they magically could not sell a chip to save themselves, why? Oh that's cuz Intel was paying Dell a billion a year to not sell any AMD cpus. And w/o being able to sell to the market at large, AMD did not implode? Did not lose dearly needed revenue? That decade did not cement the the false perception that AMD is junk? Nah, not at all. The victims are to blame right? She asked for it yea?

 

[Hitman928]

That's not how it works. You have to look at the margins. AMD is operating at 40% roughly, and will improve a few points here and there. They're in a quandry because they cannot continue with low margins but hopefully their industry wide perception will improve and then they'll be able to increase their gross margins. To give you an idea Intel is operating at 70% margins comparatively and even when they are down their margins are so stupidly high it barely affects them. This is also a sour point for all AMD investors since you know, they are not making the same profit dollar for dollar vs Intel. I suspect when the market and I mean not neccessarily consumers but corporate admins, ie, the buyers no longer think of AMD as cheap arse crap, they can then raise their margins. Add to that the amount of R&D they spent on Zen is a huge budget for AMD and yet a drop in the bucket for Intel...

On a side note I chat with some investors now and thhen and they tell me word from a lot of the old guys in buying positions still think of AMD as marginal. Still to this day with Zen killing it on a technological level, many still view AMD as subpar versus Intel. I was lol'ing at that... it's hard to explain to ppl who don't know the difference and only go by word of mouth. Hell 99% of analyst have no clue the differences in architecture between the two camps, smh.

Epyc, Higher End and professional GPUs, and most desktop CPUs are all higher margin products, the problem is that by volume, they are still a small part of AMD sales. AMD still sales a ton of low end, pre-Zen CPUs right now and cheap GPUs as well as still having a decent amount of console volume. That's been slowly changing and more and more Zen sales have started to raise the overall margin from low to mid 20's before Zen to now ~40% margins. As more and more of their sales become Zen based and Epyc picks up more steam, margins will continue to grow. AMD has also found some recent success with datacenter GPUs and mid-high end consumer GPUs but there's still a long way to go there.

Of course, the console sales are expected to spike again next week which will be a drag on margins, but those designs are semi-custom and so they don't have to amortize these huge up front R&D costs over the life of the designs so even though they're not high margin, they're still very profitable in the long run. Which also brings up the fact that AMD can survive just fine with lower margins than intel because intel has to eat all the fab development costs that AMD doesn't, so intel has to have higher sales margins just to keep up. How much more, I don't really know, but it gets bigger and bigger every generation as fab processes become more and more expensive.

Lastly, yes, tech analysts are usually clueless when it comes to any real technical details.

tl;dr AMD, if they continue to execute according to plan, will continue to grow in profitability and can survive off of much lower margins than intel since they don't have to run their own fabs.

 

[CHADBOGA]

AMD had the dominant architecture back then. Then they magically could not sell a chip to save themselves, why? Oh that's cuz Intel was paying Dell a billion a year to not sell any AMD cpus. And w/o being able to sell to the market at large, AMD did not implode? Did not lose dearly needed revenue? That decade did not cement the the false perception that AMD is junk? Nah, not at all. The victims are to blame right? She asked for it yea?

AMD has the dominant architecture now and you yourself have written about their difficulties in getting people to buy them.

I make a reference to what you wrote and you effectively disown what you wrote. What the hell is with that?

Please calm yourself and try not to make ludicrous comparisons to sex crimes.

 

[thesmokingman]

AMD has the dominant architecture now and you yourself have written about their difficulties in getting people to buy them.

I make a reference to what you wrote and you effectively disown what you wrote. What the hell is with that?

Please calm yourself and try not to make ludicrous comparisons to sex crimes.

Seriously? You take what I wrote out of context and justify the anti-competitive crap Intel pulled for a decade. That sounds like victim blaming to me.

 

[CHADBOGA]

Seriously? You take what I wrote out of context and justify the anti-competitive crap Intel pulled for a decade. That sounds like victim blaming to me.

Where did I justify it?

My quoting of your post was perfectly in context.

 

[krumme]

Yes, Raven Ridge was particularly bad in this area (inherently buggy probably). Picasso is a lot better.

But I'm pretty sure the discrepancy @ idle has nearly nothing to do with process. Intel just has years of more experience doing that stuff, has lower power states, does more power gating
Even more importantly, Intel has worked years with OEMs helping to implement better Firmware, BIOSes, etc to keep Idle Power down (not to mention OS optimisations) ...

Just look at power efficiency charts on notebookcheck.net for Lenovos with a really similar chassis (and battery) and both AMD and Intel processors.


T495 vs T490 power numbers from this T495 review and this E495 review (I added the i5 from the search-box below the table).

Power Consumption (W)	Lenovo ThinkPad T495-20NKS01Y00 PRO R5 3500U, Vega 8, Samsung SSD PM981 MZVLB512HAJQ, IPS, 1920x1080, 14	Lenovo ThinkPad T490-20N3S02L00 I7 8565U, GeForce MX250, Toshiba XG5 KXG50ZNV512G, IGZO IPS LED, 1920x1080, 14	Lenovo ThinkPad T490-20N2004EGE I5 8265U, UHD Graphics 620, Toshiba KXG5AZNV256G, IGZO IPS LED, 1920x1080, 14	Lenovo ThinkPad E495-20NE000JGE 3500U, Vega 8, SK hynix BC501 HFM256GDHTNG, IPS, 1920x1080, 14	Lenovo ThinkPad E490-20N8000RGE 8265U, UHD Graphics 620, SK hynix BC501 HFM256GDHTNG, IPS, 1920x1080, 14
Idle Minimum	5.1	2.16	2.34	4.1	2.76
Idle Average	7.7	5.04	5.22	5.86	5.96
Idle Maximum	10.7	8.64	8.82	6.36	6.57
Load Average	35.8	63.2	35.8	30.4	28.2
Load Maximum	43.2	67.5	47.3	50	43.6

I bolded the winning scores for both the T and E chassis separately. Now, some observations:

• So much about "the same " TDP between i5 and i7. i7 T490 uses almost twice the burst power briefly for 10% gain.
• T490 vs T495 Intel with i5 has similar power draw to AMD while scoring 13% better in Cinebench R15 ST burst load and is equal in Multi Threaded one.
• E490 vs E495 AMD in reverse has better idle numbers and slightly worse load ones compared to i5 . This in turn means 25% better MT performance for Ryzen while it's still 15% worse in ST.

Moving on to Battery Life:

In battery life the AMD model actually does better than the Intel one:
Lenovo T495 (Ryzen R5 3500U)
View attachment 12066

Lenovo T490 (Core i7 8565U)
View attachment 12067


TL;DR
12nm and 14nm+ actually seem quite similar. AMDs worse Idle number are probably more connected to other factors. We will know better once we have Surface Laptop 3 Reviews (as it's full-stack optimized by Microsoft).

Thanx. That similarity in battery life was a huge surprise to me.
A cheapish 3500 series laptop will be a fantastic kids and occasional cheap gaming PC then.
When 7nm apu arives gf will continue to turn out cheap 12 nm stuff for years and imo it's a perfectly balanced apu for that low and lowish mid range market.
This apu vs a intel 620/630 gpu means 720 on low is viable on many modern AAA games like overwatch. It goes from fairly unusable to doable. Fine. If there is a 1-2w idle power loss tradeoff vs that benefit I take it each day for that market. It's a huge uplift for that lowend market. I dont think the oem actually sees this benefit yet.

 

[beginner99]

Just noticing this thread and post. I have contacts with Google's AI personnel.

AI/ML/GANs, etc, are all extremely optimized for dGPU, similar to running mining algorithms, where a 2080ti is perhaps 8,000-20,000x faster than a $5000 Xeon.

true but said workstation will mostly run CPU tasks like classic ML or other data crunching / processing. deep learning would actually be mostly experimental for now. It's a chicken-egg problem. If you don't invest in hardware you can't try it but if you don't have a use-case / business case and just want to use it for "experimenting" it's hard to get any money and of course cloud is not an option (legal issues, data leaving company network)

 

[Thunder 57]

This is why it is so laughable that people think Intel rebates were such a massive factor in stopping AMD becoming dominant in market share, during the K8 days.

AMD couldn't give away untold amounts of CPU's to HP. Dell was paid nicely to not ship AMD products. It was a bigger scandal than the Microsoft ones in the late 90's.

K8 was awesome. Why do you think it took until Nehalem and QPI to finally take them over?

AMD could not give away CPU's to HP and others. You don't think Intel, with a crappy P4/PD buying out OEM's had something to do with that?

This is the only link I could find for now, but with the A64 X2 it was even more damning (which, I guess, should be obvious).

Laughable? Well heck, back in the 90's into the 2000's Intel had commercials. Intel was the "name brand". Never mind if K7 or K8 were faster. Intel had such a lock that AMD couldn't give away CPU's. Does that sound like a good idea to you? Today, we again have competition. Intel is slashing prices. That is good for all of us. Maybe the avatar of a guy laughing with no teeth is a joke I'm missing, because I hope it isn't you. If it was, that might explain a few things.

 

[Abwx]

Yes, Raven Ridge was particularly bad in this area (inherently buggy probably). Picasso is a lot better.

But I'm pretty sure the discrepancy @ idle has nearly nothing to do with process. Intel just has years of more experience doing that stuff, has lower power states, does more power gating
Even more importantly, Intel has worked years with OEMs helping to implement better Firmware, BIOSes, etc to keep Idle Power down (not to mention OS optimisations) ...

Just look at power efficiency charts on notebookcheck.net for Lenovos with a really similar chassis (and battery) and both AMD and Intel processors.


T495 vs T490 power numbers from this T495 review and this E495 review (I added the i5 from the search-box below the table).

Power Consumption (W)	Lenovo ThinkPad T495-20NKS01Y00 PRO R5 3500U, Vega 8, Samsung SSD PM981 MZVLB512HAJQ, IPS, 1920x1080, 14	Lenovo ThinkPad T490-20N3S02L00 I7 8565U, GeForce MX250, Toshiba XG5 KXG50ZNV512G, IGZO IPS LED, 1920x1080, 14	Lenovo ThinkPad T490-20N2004EGE I5 8265U, UHD Graphics 620, Toshiba KXG5AZNV256G, IGZO IPS LED, 1920x1080, 14	Lenovo ThinkPad E495-20NE000JGE 3500U, Vega 8, SK hynix BC501 HFM256GDHTNG, IPS, 1920x1080, 14	Lenovo ThinkPad E490-20N8000RGE 8265U, UHD Graphics 620, SK hynix BC501 HFM256GDHTNG, IPS, 1920x1080, 14
Idle Minimum	5.1	2.16	2.34	4.1	2.76
Idle Average	7.7	5.04	5.22	5.86	5.96
Idle Maximum	10.7	8.64	8.82	6.36	6.57
Load Average	35.8	63.2	35.8	30.4	28.2
Load Maximum	43.2	67.5	47.3	50	43.6

I bolded the winning scores for both the T and E chassis separately. Now, some observations:

• So much about "the same " TDP between i5 and i7. i7 T490 uses almost twice the burst power briefly for 10% gain.
• T490 vs T495 Intel with i5 has similar power draw to AMD while scoring 13% better in Cinebench R15 ST burst load and is equal in Multi Threaded one.
• E490 vs E495 AMD in reverse has better idle numbers and slightly worse load ones compared to i5 . This in turn means 25% better MT performance for Ryzen while it's still 15% worse in ST.

Moving on to Battery Life:

In battery life the AMD model actually does better than the Intel one:
Lenovo T495 (Ryzen R5 3500U)
View attachment 12066

Lenovo T490 (Core i7 8565U)
View attachment 12067


TL;DR
12nm and 14nm+ actually seem quite similar. AMDs worse Idle number are probably more connected to other factors. We will know better once we have Surface Laptop 3 Reviews (as it's full-stack optimized by Microsoft).

If the battery life is comparable then it meand that the alleged idle power numbers are truncated if not blatantly made up.

They are measured at the main and i can tell you by experience that there s not a single AC adaptator that get below 2W when unplugged from the laptop, so NBC measuring an dling laptop at 2.16-2.34W is totally unrealistic unless the laptop is powered off or in deep sleep mode.

 

[Zucker2k]

K8 was awesome. Why do you think it took until Nehalem and QPI to finally take them over?

Is K8 pre or post Conroe?

 

[BigDaveX]

Is K8 pre or post Conroe?

Pre Conroe - and K8 was slower than both the desktop and server/workstation version of Conroe. K10 on the other hand pretty handily curb-stomped the Conroe (and Penryn) based Xeons once AMD had gotten the clockspeeds up; it took until Nehalem for Intel to finally put themselves ahead of Opteron.

 

[DrMrLordX]

@Arkaign

I would think the TR platform (or Intel HEDT) might be good for the extra PCIe lanes if he ever wants to add more dGPUs or NVMe drives.

 

[Thunder 57]

Is K8 pre or post Conroe?

K8 was three years before Conroe. Even with Conroe, Intel was behind in the server market because they were strangled by the FSB. Intel shot back with Nehalem and QPI and dominated the server market until now. AMD still has a ways to go though.

 

[Markfw]

K8 was three years before Conroe. Even with Conroe, Intel was behind in the server market because they were strangled by the FSB. Intel shot back with Nehalem and QPI and dominated the server market until now. AMD still has a ways to go though.

Yes, I agree. They have the server products that blow out the Intel offerings at the moment. Rome can't be touched by anything that Intel has for about 2 years. But will they get the marketshare before Intel strikes back ? I am not betting anything at the moment, but wishing that AMD came come on strong for at least a year, maybe 2, and make the server market competitive again. This "Intel is the only way to go in the datacenter" mindshare is over a decade old. Companies need to change over, at least for the next 2 years. IF that happens, then we might have a real market longer term.