I’ve been buying AMD for – holy shit – 25 years now, and have never once regretted it. I don’t consider myself a fanboi; I just (a) prefer having the best performance-per-dollar rather than best performance outright, and (b) like rooting for the underdog.
But if Intel keeps fucking up like this, I might have to switch on grounds of (b)!
spoiler
(Realistically I’d be more likely to switch to ARM or even RISCV, though. Even if Intel became an underdog, my memory of their anti-competitive and anti-consumer bad behavior remains long.)
Sorry but after the amazing Athlon x2, the core and core 2 (then i series) lines fuckin wrecked AMD for YEARS. Ryzen took the belt back but AMD was absolutely wrecked through the core and i series.
Source: computer building company and also history
tl:dr: AMD sucked ass for value and performance between core 2 and Ryzen, then became amazing again after Ryzen was released.
I ran an AMD Phenom II x4 955 Black Edition for ~5 years, then gave it to a friend who ran it for another 5 years. We overclocked the hell out of it up to 4ghz, and there is no way you were getting gaming performance that good from Intel dollar-for-dollar, so no AMD did not suck from Core 2 on. You need to shift that timeframe up to Bulldozer, and even then Bulldozer and the other FX CPUs ended up aging better than their Intel counterparts, and at their adjusted prices were at least reasonable products.
Doesn’t change the fact AMD lied about Bulldozer, nor does it change Intel using its market leader position to release single-digit performance increases for a decade and strip everything i5 and lower down to artificially make i7 more valuable. Funny how easy it is to forget how shit it was to be a PC gamer then after two crypto booms.
I’ve had nothing but issues with some computers, laptops, etc… once I discovered the common factor was Intel, I haven’t had a single problem with any of my devices since. AMD all the way for CPUs.
Genuinely, I’ve also been an AMD buyer since I started building 12 years ago. I started out as a fan boy but mellowed out over the years. I know the old FX were garbage but it’s what I started on, and I genuinely enjoy the 4 gens of Intel since ivy bridge, but between the affordability and being able to upgrade without changing the motherboard every generation, I’ve just been using Ryzen all these years.
arm is very primed to take a lot of market share of server market from intel. Amazon is already very committed on making their graviton arm cpu their main cpu, which they own a huge lion share of the server market on alone.
for consumers, arm adoption is fully reliant on the respective operating systems and compatibility to get ironed out.
Yeah, I manage the infrastructure for almost 150 WordPress sites, and I moved them all to ARM servers a while ago, because they’re 10% or 20% cheaper on AWS.
Websites are rarely bottlenecked by the CPU, so that power efficiency is very significant.
I really think that most people who think that they want ARM machines are wrong, at least given the state of things in 2024. Like, maybe you use Linux…but do you want to run x86 Windows binary-only games? Even if you can get 'em running, you’ve lost the power efficiency. What’s hardware support like? Do you want to be able to buy other components? If you like stuff like that Framework laptop, which seems popular on here, an SoC is heading in the opposite direction of that – an all-in-one, non-expandable manufacturer-specified system.
But yours is a legit application. A non-CPU-constrained datacenter application running open-source software compiled against ARM, where someone else has validated that the hardware is all good for the OS.
I would not go ARM for a desktop or laptop as things stand, though.
If you didn’t want to game on your laptop, would an ARM device not be better for office work? Considering they’re quiet and their battery lasts forever.
Linux works great on ARM, I just want something similar to most mini-ITX boards (4x SATA, 2x mini-PCIe, and RAM slots), and I’ll convert my DIY NAS to ARM. But there just isn’t anything between RAM-limited SBCs and datacenter ARM boards.
arm is a mixed bag. iirc atm the gpu on the Snapdragon X Elite is disabled on Linux, and consumer support is reliant on how well the hardware manufacturer supports it if it closed source driver. In the case of qualcomm, the history doesnt look great for it
Apparently (from another comment on a thread about arm from a few weeks ago) consumer GPU bioses contain some x86 instructions that get run on the CPU, so getting full support for ARM isn’t as simple as swapping the cards over to a new motherboard. There are ways to hack around it (some people got AMD GPUs booting on a raspberry pi 5 using its PCIe lanes with a bunch of adapters) but it is pretty unreliable.
Yeah, there are some software issues that need to be resolved, but the bigger issue AFAIK is having the hardware to handle it. The few ARM devices with a PCIe slot often don’t fully implement the spec, such as power delivery. Because of that, driver work just doesn’t happen, because nobody can realistically use it.
If they provide a proper PCIe slot (8-16 lanes, on-spec power delivery, etc), getting the drivers updated should be relatively easy (months, not years).
RISC-V isn’t there yet, but it’s moving in the right direction. A completely open architecture is something many of us have wanted for ages. It’s worth keeping an eye on.
I hope so, I accidentally advised a client to snatch up a snapdragon surface (because they had to have a dog shit surface) and I hadn’t realized that a lot of shit doesn’t quite work yet. Most of it does, which is awesome, but it needs to pick up the pace
Depends on the desktop. I have a NanoPC T4, originally as a set top box (that’s what the RK3399 was designed for, has a beast of a VPU) now on light server and wlan AP duty, and it’s plenty fast enough for a browser and office. Provided you give it an SSD, that is.
Speaking of Desktop though the graphics driver situation is atrocious. There’s been movement since I last had a monitor hooked up to it but let’s just say the linux blob that came with it could do gles2, while the android driver does vulkan. Presumably because ARM wants Rockchip to pay per fucking feature per OS for Mali drivers.
Oh the VPU that I mentioned? As said, a beast, decodes 4k h264 at 60Hz, very good driver support, well-documented instruction set, mpv supports it out of the box, but because the Mali drivers are shit you only get an overlay, no window system integration because it can’t paint to gles2 textures. Throwback to the 90s.
Sidenote some madlads got a dedicated GPU running on the thing. M.2 to PCIe adapter, and presumably a lot of duct tape code.
GPU support is a real mess. Those ARM SOCs are intended for embeded systems, not PCs. None of the manufacturers want to release an open source driver and the blobs typically don’t work with a recent kernel.
For ARM on the desktop, I would want an ATX motherboard with a socketed 3+ GHz CPU with 8-16 cores, socketed RAM and a PCIe slot for a desktop GPU.
Almost all Linux software will run natively on ARM if you have a working GPU. Getting windows games to run on ARM with decent performance would probably be difficult. It would probably need a CPU that’s been optimized for emulating x86 like what Apple did with theirs.
If there were decent homelab ARM CPUs, I’d be all over that. But everything is either memory limited (e.g. max 8GB) or datacenter grade (so $$$$). I want something like a Snapdragon with 4x SATA, 2x m.2, 2+ USB-C, and support for 16GB+ RAM in a mini-ITX form factor. Give it to me for $200-400, and I’ll buy it if it can beat my current NAS in power efficiency (not hard, it’s a Ryzen 1700).
Because optimization isn’t secondary or even tertiary to the average modern design philosophy. The extra power is, unfortunately, mandatory for a decent user experience.
Buy AMD. Got it!
I’ve been buying AMD for – holy shit – 25 years now, and have never once regretted it. I don’t consider myself a fanboi; I just (a) prefer having the best performance-per-dollar rather than best performance outright, and (b) like rooting for the underdog.
But if Intel keeps fucking up like this, I might have to switch on grounds of (b)!
spoiler
(Realistically I’d be more likely to switch to ARM or even RISCV, though. Even if Intel became an underdog, my memory of their anti-competitive and anti-consumer bad behavior remains long.)
Sorry but after the amazing Athlon x2, the core and core 2 (then i series) lines fuckin wrecked AMD for YEARS. Ryzen took the belt back but AMD was absolutely wrecked through the core and i series.
Source: computer building company and also history
tl:dr: AMD sucked ass for value and performance between core 2 and Ryzen, then became amazing again after Ryzen was released.
AMD “bulldozer” architecture CPUs were indeed pretty bad compared to Intel Core 2, but they were also really cheap.
I ran an AMD Phenom II x4 955 Black Edition for ~5 years, then gave it to a friend who ran it for another 5 years. We overclocked the hell out of it up to 4ghz, and there is no way you were getting gaming performance that good from Intel dollar-for-dollar, so no AMD did not suck from Core 2 on. You need to shift that timeframe up to Bulldozer, and even then Bulldozer and the other FX CPUs ended up aging better than their Intel counterparts, and at their adjusted prices were at least reasonable products.
Doesn’t change the fact AMD lied about Bulldozer, nor does it change Intel using its market leader position to release single-digit performance increases for a decade and strip everything i5 and lower down to artificially make i7 more valuable. Funny how easy it is to forget how shit it was to be a PC gamer then after two crypto booms.
I’ve had nothing but issues with some computers, laptops, etc… once I discovered the common factor was Intel, I haven’t had a single problem with any of my devices since. AMD all the way for CPUs.
I hate the way Intel is going, but I’ve been using Intel chips for over 30 years and never had an issue.
So your statement is kind of pointless, since it’s such a small data set, it’s irrelevant and nothing to draw any conclusion from.
I’m with you on all this. Fuck Intel.
© upgradability and not having motherboards be disposable on purpose
Genuinely, I’ve also been an AMD buyer since I started building 12 years ago. I started out as a fan boy but mellowed out over the years. I know the old FX were garbage but it’s what I started on, and I genuinely enjoy the 4 gens of Intel since ivy bridge, but between the affordability and being able to upgrade without changing the motherboard every generation, I’ve just been using Ryzen all these years.
ARM looking pretty good too these days
arm is very primed to take a lot of market share of server market from intel. Amazon is already very committed on making their graviton arm cpu their main cpu, which they own a huge lion share of the server market on alone.
for consumers, arm adoption is fully reliant on the respective operating systems and compatibility to get ironed out.
Yeah, I manage the infrastructure for almost 150 WordPress sites, and I moved them all to ARM servers a while ago, because they’re 10% or 20% cheaper on AWS.
Websites are rarely bottlenecked by the CPU, so that power efficiency is very significant.
I really think that most people who think that they want ARM machines are wrong, at least given the state of things in 2024. Like, maybe you use Linux…but do you want to run x86 Windows binary-only games? Even if you can get 'em running, you’ve lost the power efficiency. What’s hardware support like? Do you want to be able to buy other components? If you like stuff like that Framework laptop, which seems popular on here, an SoC is heading in the opposite direction of that – an all-in-one, non-expandable manufacturer-specified system.
But yours is a legit application. A non-CPU-constrained datacenter application running open-source software compiled against ARM, where someone else has validated that the hardware is all good for the OS.
I would not go ARM for a desktop or laptop as things stand, though.
If you didn’t want to game on your laptop, would an ARM device not be better for office work? Considering they’re quiet and their battery lasts forever.
Linux works great on ARM, I just want something similar to most mini-ITX boards (4x SATA, 2x mini-PCIe, and RAM slots), and I’ll convert my DIY NAS to ARM. But there just isn’t anything between RAM-limited SBCs and datacenter ARM boards.
arm is a mixed bag. iirc atm the gpu on the Snapdragon X Elite is disabled on Linux, and consumer support is reliant on how well the hardware manufacturer supports it if it closed source driver. In the case of qualcomm, the history doesnt look great for it
Eh, if they give me a PCIe slot, I’m happy to use that in the meantime. My current NAS uses an old NVIDIA GPU, so I’d just move that over.
Apparently (from another comment on a thread about arm from a few weeks ago) consumer GPU bioses contain some x86 instructions that get run on the CPU, so getting full support for ARM isn’t as simple as swapping the cards over to a new motherboard. There are ways to hack around it (some people got AMD GPUs booting on a raspberry pi 5 using its PCIe lanes with a bunch of adapters) but it is pretty unreliable.
Yeah, there are some software issues that need to be resolved, but the bigger issue AFAIK is having the hardware to handle it. The few ARM devices with a PCIe slot often don’t fully implement the spec, such as power delivery. Because of that, driver work just doesn’t happen, because nobody can realistically use it.
If they provide a proper PCIe slot (8-16 lanes, on-spec power delivery, etc), getting the drivers updated should be relatively easy (months, not years).
deleted by creator
RISC-V isn’t there yet, but it’s moving in the right direction. A completely open architecture is something many of us have wanted for ages. It’s worth keeping an eye on.
It’s not quite there for desktop use yet, but it probably won’t be too much longer.
I hope so, I accidentally advised a client to snatch up a snapdragon surface (because they had to have a dog shit surface) and I hadn’t realized that a lot of shit doesn’t quite work yet. Most of it does, which is awesome, but it needs to pick up the pace
Depends on the desktop. I have a NanoPC T4, originally as a set top box (that’s what the RK3399 was designed for, has a beast of a VPU) now on light server and wlan AP duty, and it’s plenty fast enough for a browser and office. Provided you give it an SSD, that is.
Speaking of Desktop though the graphics driver situation is atrocious. There’s been movement since I last had a monitor hooked up to it but let’s just say the linux blob that came with it could do gles2, while the android driver does vulkan. Presumably because ARM wants Rockchip to pay per fucking feature per OS for Mali drivers.
Oh the VPU that I mentioned? As said, a beast, decodes 4k h264 at 60Hz, very good driver support, well-documented instruction set, mpv supports it out of the box, but because the Mali drivers are shit you only get an overlay, no window system integration because it can’t paint to gles2 textures. Throwback to the 90s.
Sidenote some madlads got a dedicated GPU running on the thing. M.2 to PCIe adapter, and presumably a lot of duct tape code.
GPU support is a real mess. Those ARM SOCs are intended for embeded systems, not PCs. None of the manufacturers want to release an open source driver and the blobs typically don’t work with a recent kernel.
For ARM on the desktop, I would want an ATX motherboard with a socketed 3+ GHz CPU with 8-16 cores, socketed RAM and a PCIe slot for a desktop GPU.
Almost all Linux software will run natively on ARM if you have a working GPU. Getting windows games to run on ARM with decent performance would probably be difficult. It would probably need a CPU that’s been optimized for emulating x86 like what Apple did with theirs.
If there were decent homelab ARM CPUs, I’d be all over that. But everything is either memory limited (e.g. max 8GB) or datacenter grade (so $$$$). I want something like a Snapdragon with 4x SATA, 2x m.2, 2+ USB-C, and support for 16GB+ RAM in a mini-ITX form factor. Give it to me for $200-400, and I’ll buy it if it can beat my current NAS in power efficiency (not hard, it’s a Ryzen 1700).
For real?
No.
Why?
Because optimization isn’t secondary or even tertiary to the average modern design philosophy. The extra power is, unfortunately, mandatory for a decent user experience.
Not really
Smells like a future class action lawsuit to me.
You mean the type where the lawyers get eight figure payouts and you get a ten dollar check?
uber eats voucher*
I understood that reference.
There are reports that the vouchers handed out were canceled before anyone could use them.
Yeah that’s pretty shitty to continue to sell a part that they know is defective.
Yet they do it all the time when a higher specs CPU is fabricated with physical defects and is then presented as a lower specs variant.
Nobody objects to binning, because people know what they’re getting and the part functions within the specified parameters.
And so do these, under the updated parameters.