Are we going to see good Intel processors anymore?

StormClaw

StormClaw

Gawd
Joined
Jun 10, 2009
Messages
565
Guys, I've been out of the loop re: processors. So i see that Intel is taking a beating now (both in hardware and in stock prices) for some reason and AMD are selling like hot cakes and seem to be a much better choice (performance / price wise) than Intel.

Now, i've been an Intel customer for more than 20 years and i'm just to lazy / discouraged to research and jump on the AMD train.

I plan to upgrade (from i7-6700k) in a couple month, together with a better video card and new ram. So do you think Intel is going to get back on track with whatever they are developing? (I lost track of their "lakes"). I also would be needing a new laptop for work & travel.

What's the general consensus out there?
 
The gaming benchmarks I saw for a while still had Intel close to AMD. However, if you're looking ahead, Rocket Lake is coming up but more importantly, Alder Lake. There's a rumor Alder Lake (at least for some chips) will have a huge cache.
 
Intel will have to do something if they want to stay in business. AMD and Apple make processors that pretty much destroy Intel. So I would expect Intel to do something soon.
 
Intel chips work just fine. Ryzens are selling like hotcakes because yeah, they're better silicon. Intel chips are still plenty fast unless you need that bleeding edge performance.

Rocket Lake is looking the same honestly. Another 14nm chip pushed up against the wall. Shoot, they're even lopping cores off to push them even harder. It's gonna be fast SC, but run very hot especially for the core count.

If you're fine with handling the power draw and cooling, and want something in stock, then Intel is still a fine choice unless you need the cores.
 
The current situation basically mirrors where AMD was in prior years. Not winning, but still perfectly fine. With supplies being limited for AMD's stuff and gaming performance still neck and neck, there's till a place for Intel.
 
If you're building a gaming box Intel still competes but watch the heat. If its a workstation / desktop - AMD cores just obliterate Intel.
 
Last edited:
Mega6 said:
If you're building a gaming box Intel still competes but watch the heat. If its a workstation / desktop - AMD cores just obliterate Intel.
Click to expand...
Workstation like a web server? I should go AMD for those? (right now i use some dated xeons)
 
vegeta535 said:
Why wouldn't they? Intel will be back. People forget how much money they have. They still dominate the server market.
Click to expand...
Their server market share isn't based on performance metrics. They get annihilated on those metrics. Clearly there are many different reasons for their server position and most of which has nothing to do with performance, just saying.
 
thesmokingman said:
Their server market share isn't based on performance metrics. They get annihilated on those metrics. Clearly there are many different reasons for their server position and most of which has nothing to do with performance, just saying.
Click to expand...
No doubt but they still control it and it brings in more then the custom pc market. Hell they still dominate the OEM market. Still don't see many AMD PCs from them.
 
vegeta535 said:
No doubt but they still control it and it brings in more then the custom pc market. Hell they still dominate the OEM market. Still don't see many AMD PCs from them.
Click to expand...
Yeap, but again that's got nothing to do with performance. Intel still have a strangle hold on the state of things and none of which has anything to do with how good their chips are.
 
Performance wise, if your looking for a gaming build, Intel is an attractive option. The 10900K is $499.99 at Microcenter and is basically just as fast as AMD's 5800X, 5900X and 5950X in gaming. The difference? You can actually buy the 10900K.

In other use cases the AMD's are faster when comparing disparate core counts. AMD's 5900X and 5950X's are considerably better in most scenarios due to both a slight IPC advantage and greater core and thread counts. The 5900X is almost certainly a better buy given the pricing, but availability of the 5900X is pretty much nothing. The 5900X and 10900K are priced close enough that the Intel really has to be cheaper to make sense from a price/performance perspective.

The 5950X is the chip to have, but it comes at a much higher price than Intel's Core i9-10900K. If price points determine how you shop, they aren't really comparable. In short, if you need more cores, AMD is without question the better option. If all you do is play games, Intel is certainly a worthy alternative and for once the platform has an upgrade path while AM4 is at the end of the line.

All that said, Intel will probably be back some day. These things have a cyclical nature to them. When it comes to semiconductors, designs take years to develop and reach market. Intel can't simply raise clocks, double core counts or substantially raise IPC overnight. When you gamble in this market and bet on the wrong horse your stuck for years while you course correct.

Intel's Core 2 Duo and subsequent CPU's combined with AMD's bad design choices with Phenom and Bulldozer put them behind for more than a decade. Intel was only behind half that time with Netburst. Intel had only been behind for about two years so far. It had issues before that, but Intel still led over the original Ryzen CPU's.
 
Dan_D said:
Performance wise, if your looking for a gaming build, Intel is an attractive option. The 10900K is $499.99 at Microcenter and is basically just as fast as AMD's 5800X, 5900X and 5950X in gaming. The difference? You can actually buy the 10900K.
Click to expand...
I want PCI-E 4 and DDR5 support.
 
StormClaw said:
I want PCI-E 4 and DDR5 support.
Click to expand...

PCIe 4.0 support should be coming with Rocket Lake and be enabled on existing Z490 motherboards. DDR5 is obviously only going to show up on a future platform and with new CPU architectures.
 
for me, it's a choice between the cheapest rocket lake and the cheapest 4-6core ryzen APU.
i5 11400 vs r5 5000g


I don't really care about a little IPC advantage.
only price and availability and features matter to me.

rocket lake Xe has current video acceleration support, ryzen is behind, with the vega getting long in the tooth.

I just hope intel prices competitively.
 
Rocket Lake will regain the IPC crown... at double the watts of ryzen 5000. I think we'll see a rebound from them similar to what AMD did in the next few years.
 
I'm happy with the performance of my Intel processors so they are "good" to me which is pretty much all that matters. I don't get caught up in the fan boy craze just for bragging rights. I also never push these processors to their full potential anyways for the gaming I do so don't really care who has the best benchmarks.
 
vegeta535 said:
Why wouldn't they? Intel will be back. People forget how much money they have. They still dominate the server market.
Click to expand...
I've heard the line about Intel's deep pockets, but I don't see how that will necessary help them.
-Apple is building it's own chips
-Amazon is building it's own chips
-News this week is that Microsoft will start building it's own chips
-Nvidia is coming soon and coming hard with ARM CPUs

Intel is getting hammered from every angle...and is losing ground everywhere: servers, desktops, laptops.

Besides all this: AMD is kicking their butts, primarily because they aren't trying to manufacture their own chips, but are out-sourcing that to TSMC. TSMC has a five-year lead on Intel right now in manufacturing. They have 5nm chips and will introduce 3nm within a couple of years.
 
IceCaveMan said:
I've heard the line about Intel's deep pockets, but I don't see how that will necessary help them.
-Apple is building it's own chips
-Amazon is building it's own chips
-News this week is that Microsoft will start building it's own chips
-Nvidia is coming soon and coming hard with ARM CPUs

Intel is getting hammered from every angle...and is losing ground everywhere: servers, desktops, laptops.

Besides all this: AMD is kicking their butts, primarily because they aren't trying to manufacture their own chips, but are out-sourcing that to TSMC. TSMC has a five-year lead on Intel right now in manufacturing. They have 5nm chips and will introduce 3nm within a couple of years.
Click to expand...
Intel makes more then CPUs. Who knows what they have in the works for 5+ down the road. They are getting into GPUs also. AMD will be going up against the same competition as Intel in the cpu space. Intel is more diverse then AMD atm. X86/64 is not the future of PCs.
 
StormClaw said:
AMD are selling like hot cakes and seem to be a much better choice (performance / price wise) than Intel.
Click to expand...

If they were both selling at MSRP that would be true. Supply and demand has taken care of that though. CPUs like 10400f and 10600k are better value than what you could get from AMD for the same money.
 
vegeta535 said:
Why wouldn't they? Intel will be back. People forget how much money they have. They still dominate the server market.
Click to expand...
And Laptop market and desktop market:

AMD is growing fast, Q4 2019:
oHADDLBrcLq2AaWoCr4nAJ-970-80.jpg

Last updated numbers, AMD had 20.1% of desktop, 20.2 of notebook, x86 outside the lot was 20.2% now

But tend to be between 5 to 20% of the market share, we can have a bit distorted sense because in the custom build world and benchmark world, AMD is even the most popular option now (or maybe I am reading those numbers wrong and they about computer being used and not sold, but they swing so fast they look like new sales).

Has for the general consensus, it always in the past being a rule that Intel will always came back on top versus AMD because of the war chest, and many challenged that notion in the past and it did look at some point like it was not certain, but that rules always ended up winning at the end, we could expect it to happen again, but like most rules they tend to become false at one point.
 
Last edited:
I'm considering a 10700k build for my son next. My sons rig got left here when he moved out and someone scavenged a bunch of parts from it. I can't say who it was but he's a bit bummed lol.
 
NIZMOZ said:
Intel will have to do something if they want to stay in business. AMD and Apple make processors that pretty much destroy Intel. So I would expect Intel to do something soon.
Click to expand...

All they need to do at this point is have a product people can actually buy.
 
Honestly with how pricing is going, after 15 years of nothing but AMD systems, my next will likely be an Intel.

Price/perf is most important to me, and frankly despite AMD performance increases, their price had outpaced, while Intel is clearly struggling with node and the security boondoggle. Intel prices have become more reasonable.

In short, Intel has lots of good CPUs.
 
IceCaveMan said:
I've heard the line about Intel's deep pockets, but I don't see how that will necessary help them.
-Apple is building it's own chips
-Amazon is building it's own chips
-News this week is that Microsoft will start building it's own chips
-Nvidia is coming soon and coming hard with ARM CPUs

Intel is getting hammered from every angle...and is losing ground everywhere: servers, desktops, laptops.

Besides all this: AMD is kicking their butts, primarily because they aren't trying to manufacture their own chips, but are out-sourcing that to TSMC. TSMC has a five-year lead on Intel right now in manufacturing. They have 5nm chips and will introduce 3nm within a couple of years.
Click to expand...


i wonder why intel can't just hire tsmc as a stopgap while they iron out their bugs.

instead, intel would rather backport tigerlake to 14nm.
come on now
 
Yeah it's weird, but we're still waiting for the Conroe/Core2 moment of 2006. Maybe when node issues finally get resolved, we'll see that.
AMD surprising buyers with the $299 (and especially) $499 price isn't quite $1,000 A64 X2 level of fleecing, but in this economy, it might as well be. Nevermind the secondary market. Or you wait in line at Microcenter - your choice lmao.

There's no tray Opteron to take the bite out of that price raise either - oh how times have changed.
 
Kdawg said:
i wonder why intel can't just hire tsmc as a stopgap while they iron out their bugs.

instead, intel would rather backport tigerlake to 14nm.
come on now
Click to expand...

I'm not sure how much good that would do them right now. TSMC is so backlogged anything they might be able to produce for Intel would be a tiny trickle of products. This unprecedented supply shortage is the only reason Intel hasn't lost even more market share than they already have. The longer this lasts, the better it is for them to get their shit together while minimizing their losses.
 
Kdawg said:
i wonder why intel can't just hire tsmc as a stopgap while they iron out their bugs.
Click to expand...
I no virtually nothing, but I would imagine Intel need are really big, intel make nearly 1 millions wafer starts a month almost all for themselves, they are not biggest chips maker anymore but not that far either.

that it could be hard to just hire anyone in the world to shift all that production and they are such a giant chips maker that they would they not need to find someone else chips to make with all that giants infrastructure of chips making they own that we can imagine quite optimized to make intel x86 cpus and maybe not that good for anything else.

Apparently:
https://www.extremetech.com/computi...-capacity-for-intel-views-orders-as-temporary

They did try, but the size of need would have require TSMC to build capacity and expecting it to be temporary (stop-gap like you said) refused to do it.
 
WilyKit said:
I'm not sure how much good that would do them right now. TSMC is so backlogged anything they might be able to produce for Intel would be a tiny trickle of products. This unprecedented supply shortage is the only reason Intel hasn't lost even more market share than they already have. The longer this lasts, the better it is for them to get their shit together while minimizing their losses.
Click to expand...
Exactly. If TSMC had spare capacity AMD would be booking it for more Waffers for PS5, XBox, GPU or CPU.

Honestly these companies (team green, red and blue) are not competing with each other. They are competing with historical demand caused by lockdowns driving working from home and at home entertainment. Everything team red, green and blue can make is being bought. Market share is almost purely a function of production and not relatively performance.
 
travm said:
Honestly with how pricing is going, after 15 years of nothing but AMD systems, my next will likely be an Intel.

Price/perf is most important to me, and frankly despite AMD performance increases, their price had outpaced, while Intel is clearly struggling with node and the security boondoggle. Intel prices have become more reasonable.

In short, Intel has lots of good CPUs.
Click to expand...

I've never been that way. I've always based my buying decisions on whatever is the best performing hardware available. Price/performance only factors into my decisions in extreme cases. For example: I wanted a Threadripper 3960X, but I don't do anything that would justify the cost increase over the Ryzen 9 3950X. I ended up with the latter because the 3960X just didn't make sense for me.
 
vegeta535 said:
No doubt but they still control it and it brings in more then the custom pc market. Hell they still dominate the OEM market. Still don't see many AMD PCs from them.
Click to expand...
It's normal, OEM want stable PC, not BIOS update every month that fix "something" unstable...
 
Apple financially committed to millions of 5nm TSMC chips...and they did it *years ago*. iPhones and new M1 Macs haven't seen major supply problems.

Meanwhile we see TSMC's great-but-not-top-of-class 7 nm chips going to AMD and console makers...and in insufficient supply.

Apple has already paid in advance for 1st-in-line status for TSMC's 3nm parts, which are expected in a couple of years.

When you are talking tens of millions, hundreds of millions of chips...it's not like you can place a Rush-Order and get chips in a day, or a week or a month, or even half-a-year. These products are ordered long in advance.
 
Dan_D said:
I've never been that way. I've always based my buying decisions on whatever is the best performing hardware available. Price/performance only factors into my decisions in extreme cases. For example: I wanted a Threadripper 3960X, but I don't do anything that would justify the cost increase over the Ryzen 9 3950X. I ended up with the latter because the 3960X just didn't make sense for me.
Click to expand...
I'm sure lots of people are like that. Just pointing out that just because AMD now has higher prices and performance doesn't mean Intel CPUs are suddenly bad. They are still very good chips. If Intel could get their platform prices and fragmentation under control I would be singing their praise. Competition is good.
 
Dan_D said:
I've never been that way. I've always based my buying decisions on whatever is the best performing hardware available. Price/performance only factors into my decisions in extreme cases. For example: I wanted a Threadripper 3960X, but I don't do anything that would justify the cost increase over the Ryzen 9 3950X. I ended up with the latter because the 3960X just didn't make sense for me.
Click to expand...

So in other words, price performance was at the heart of the decision even though you said it wasn't. Realistically, it's at the heart of EVERYONE'S decision.

Everyone makes the determination of what price they want to spend for the performance that's acceptable to them.
 
Dan_D said:
Performance wise, if your looking for a gaming build, Intel is an attractive option. The 10900K is $499.99 at Microcenter and is basically just as fast as AMD's 5800X, 5900X and 5950X in gaming. The difference? You can actually buy the 10900K.

In other use cases the AMD's are faster when comparing disparate core counts. AMD's 5900X and 5950X's are considerably better in most scenarios due to both a slight IPC advantage and greater core and thread counts. The 5900X is almost certainly a better buy given the pricing, but availability of the 5900X is pretty much nothing. The 5900X and 10900K are priced close enough that the Intel really has to be cheaper to make sense from a price/performance perspective.

The 5950X is the chip to have, but it comes at a much higher price than Intel's Core i9-10900K. If price points determine how you shop, they aren't really comparable. In short, if you need more cores, AMD is without question the better option. If all you do is play games, Intel is certainly a worthy alternative and for once the platform has an upgrade path while AM4 is at the end of the line.

All that said, Intel will probably be back some day. These things have a cyclical nature to them. When it comes to semiconductors, designs take years to develop and reach market. Intel can't simply raise clocks, double core counts or substantially raise IPC overnight. When you gamble in this market and bet on the wrong horse your stuck for years while you course correct.

Intel's Core 2 Duo and subsequent CPU's combined with AMD's bad design choices with Phenom and Bulldozer put them behind for more than a decade. Intel was only behind half that time with Netburst. Intel had only been behind for about two years so far. It had issues before that, but Intel still led over the original Ryzen CPU's.
Click to expand...

Hard to recommend the 10900k over the 10850k being that they offer effectively identical performance. 10850k @ $400 IMO is the processor to get if you want more than 6 cores and you can't find a 5900x.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top