OrangeKhrush
[H]ard|Gawd
- Joined
- Dec 15, 2016
- Messages
- 1,673
To be more specific, I've seen the research done by companies like MSI, Intel and GIGABYTE which shows that the traditional PC has been replaced by a niche system built primarily for gaming and workstation tasks. General computing is done by traditional mobile and tablet devices now. I've worked in the corporate IT world as a contractor for a lot of different companies over a 20 year period. I've seen the trend in large organizations towards mobile devices for more than 10 years now. Corporations typically issue laptops rather than desktops. Server densities have grown to allow more applications to be virtualized. The traditional desktop and server model we knew from the 1990's doesn't really exist anymore. In the home, you won't find too many new OEM machines used for traditional non-performance oriented tasks. When you encounter these machines, they are typically very old.
This is why companies like MSI have rebranded so much hardware around being gaming oriented. They are doing this because it works. Traditional motherboards on the lower end of the spectrum probably see far more sales I China and emerging markets than in the U.S..
Lastly, there is little data for Epyc, because chances are it isn't out there in any kind of serious quantities. I get the impression that OEMs didn't have a massive amount of time to do the type of validation and QVL testing that's normally required to get those products ready for production. Sure, they are out there now, but a lot of companies are going to be leary of them. Many people making IT decisions will go with what they know. Believe it or not, many of the people who make purchasing decisions in data centers and businesses know surprisingly little about computer hardware. They'll buy the brands and models they are used to buying until the OEM steers them towards something else after discontinuing that model.
While I think AMD's lack of presence in the market may have contributed to declining sales in some cases, I think that the overwhelming reason for a reduction in traditional PC sales comes from the proliferation of mobile devices over all other factors. Intel's obviously shifted it's strategies towards mobile and server markets which are in demand. Desktop offerings are either some sort of scaled up mobile CPU or some scaled back server CPU. Both have performance per watt as one of their main selling points. Furthermore, I don't think that Intel's lack of progress has as much to do with AMD as people seem to believe. I think it has to do with the fact that performance per watt improvements are harder to achieve than simple increases in performance.
Intel isn't stupid. It's kept it's prices for the top end of the mainstream segment pretty consistent since the Sandy Bridge days. The HEDT segment has only shown significant price changes on the high end, and really only due to Intel offering higher and higher end commercial silicon from the Xeon line in the Core i7 /i9 families. Intel learned from the Core i7 980X that the only Extreme Editions that sell are the ones that offer something significant that enthusiasts can't get through simple overclocking. That's why it was far more successful than it's successor, and why higher core counts are reserved for those higher end chips.
Intel's done the best that it can regarding IPC and clock speed improvements. If Intel could have brought us 6GHz CPU's with reasonable TDP's and greater IPC while still maintaining it's performance per watt improvements it likely would have. Intel damn well knows that lots of people have stuck with their 2500K and 2600K CPU's due to a lack of performance in subsequent products. This is why they've tried to sell it's CPUs to gamers through various marketing ploys and through platform features. It's not nothing else to entice gamers with. That's why Intel said shit like: "Skylake was built from the ground up for gaming" which we know is highly unlikely to be a completely true statement.
Yes, they've reacted to AMD with a scorched earth type of strategy because it hadn't counted on how good Zen actually was. Zen isn't faster, but it does offer more bang for your buck in a lot of cases. Intel probably wouldn't have released a six core mainstream part were it not for AMD. It wouldn't have released a stupid and nearly useless four core part for it's HEDT motherboards were it not for AMD. Intel almost certainly wouldn't have released anything beyond 10 or 12 cores for the HEDT market without Threadripper either. So yes, Intel does react to the slightest hint of a threat and that's good, but AMD's lack of presence in the market isn't responsible for the decline in PC sales by a huge amount, if at all. It's also not necessarily responsible for Intel's lack of IPC improvements over the years. The need for a raw performance increase over the previous generation hasn't been present on it's own in almost a decade.
I fully go with this.
The debate on Zen and fast comes with caveats, in gaming stock clocks or anything that remains lightly or single threaded AMD can't keep up to the newer Intel stuff, however gaming is no longer traditional, gaming is slowly moving to 4K and gaming is becoming very Twitch/Stream centric and AMD seemed to have factored that into how they designed Zen, perhaps not taking intel on in showdown of clocks and ST performance but rather give enough of that with plenty of resources to focus on new generation stream gaming. The recent runs of streamed gaming shows AMD offering tremendous bang for buck and at 4K gaming almost everything is going to be GPU limited which for gaming is the better scenario. Further how fast AMD is should be assessed on equal clock speed, the common caveat is that Intels clocks are anywhere from 22 to 34% higher than AMD's and that is a massive factor.
In heavy CPU renders AMD remains comfortable even after Coffee lake and its maddening high clocks Zen remains tremendous. Going on Steve Burkes Blender 4N run if calculating Watt seconds of work to complete, the Ryzen 7 1700 is 5% more efficient and 34% faster t han t he 8400 in doing the job despite running more resources.
I reserve AMD recommendations for a certain types of users but its hard to be overlooking AMD like it was for far to long when there was no reason to own a AMD CPU.