Don’t sell gaming short. A CPU that performs great in games has never performed poorly in other workloads, likewise, a CPU that performs poorly in games…
The only exceptions I have ever seen were software stack related. Many games are an absolute worst case scenario for CPSs. Memory bandwidth and/or latency constrained, lightly threaded, etc.
I mean, the tests are already there. I get where you are coming from, however. Even if I were still on Zen 2, I would not be considering ADL-S, but I have been preaching for quite a while about how SPR-S is going to be a problem for AMD (mostly due to > Zen 3 IPC and > 2S support, allowing for higher compute density).
We will see how it pans out. Things are quite different in the enterprise world. Quite a few folks here claim that vendors are reluctant to embrace > 2S designs. Knowing what I know about the industry, I disagree, but I am not afraid to admit when I am wrong. That being said, I suspect that at minimum, Intel will win purely based on brand recognition. Beyond that, SPR-S looks to soundly beat Milan in nearly every workload and a 4S SPR system will absolutely wipe even Milan-X off the map for the most popular and relevant cloud based workloads. I do strongly suspect that AMD will continue to win some key benchmarks, but those benchmarks will be niche compared to the broader industry.
I hope I am wrong, of course (my AMD shares and options will suffer), but after watching the players in the industry for this long…
We where talking about Threadripper and Threadripper WX. Games don’t really figure into this equation. From the benchmarks I have seen, most games stop scaling with core count at a small number of cores. Benchmarks I have seen scaled a little up to 10 cores, but that was with the most demanding games and the highest performance GPU. Most people aren’t running 3090s, so they will be gpu limited even with relatively weak, but modern CPUs. The regular Threadripper 5000 will do very well in games, but that isn’t a reason to buy one.
If you start talking Epyc enterprise level, then the power consumption becomes much more of an issue. My work has had to upgrade the AC in out modest server room several times. The cost of powering new servers is a limitation. I doubt Intel will even beat Milan-x in most benchmarks and they will likely take more power to do it. It will be application specific; it always is. Milan-x gets a massive boost in many applications with the massive amount of SRAM. That will be difficult to beat. Genoa will be significantly more power efficient with a new, 6nm IO die. Later, but possibly not that much later will be Bergamo, with likely pervasive use of stacking. Bergamo will be massive increase in power efficiency.
AMD’s chips will likely be significantly cheaper to make also. There is a possibility that Bergamo will actually be a single reticle sized stacked package since most of the cache could be stacked. That also could be on the order of GB of stacked cache. GPUs may get up to 512 MB with RDNA3. It may be some of the same chips used in Bergamo for truly massive amounts of SRAM.
I haven’t been paying too much attention to Intel and their overclocked parts. Selling high power consumption, overclocked parts will not work in the server space. Depending on when/if intel delivers, they may have a small window, but I don’t think it looks good. Perhaps they catch up with Milan, but then there is Milan-X, then there is Genoa; new lower power IO die and up to 96 cores and you’re talking about 50 something? That isn’t even getting into Bergamo with 128 cores and possibly near ARM server chip levels of power consumption; the real competition may end up between AMD and ARM solutions with intel in third place. I saw some benchmarks, probably at phoronix where intel actually was in third place to the AMD and ARM processors in first and second.
Going to 4 socket capable is unlikely to help. Four socket boards are going against the trends. They are huge and expensive. Most systems these days are single or dual socket boards connected by infiniband or other high speed interconnect. A lot of systems are things like 4 separate single or dual sockets packed into a 2U or similar (1u high and half width for each server). The market for actual 4 socket servers is tiny. They even have gpu servers built this way.
I suspect the reason we might get a Zen 4 preview at CES is that a lot of hyper scalers and other large partners will have final Genoa silicon soon if not already. It will be difficult to keep things secret under those circumstances. Milan, Milan-x, and Genoa may coexist for a while since the server market will be slower to switch to a completely new platform. It may be slowed down by DDR5 availability also.