this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2024
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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.)
I'm with you on all this. Fuck Intel.
Same here. I hate Intel so much, I won't even work there, despite it being my current industry and having been headhunted by their recruiter. It was so satisfying to tell them to go pound sand.
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've been on AMD and ATi since the Athlon 64 days on the desktop.
Laptops are always Intel, simply because that's what I can find, even if every time I scour the market extensively.
Honestly I was and am, an AMD fan but if you went back a few years you would not have wanted and AMD laptop. I had one and it was truly awful.
Battery issues. Low processing power. App crashes and video playback issues. And this was on a more expensive one with a dedicated GPU...
And then Ryzen came out. You can get AMD laptops now and I mean that like they exist, but also, as they actually are nice. (Have one)
But in 2013 it was Intel or you were better off with nothing.
(c) upgradability and not having motherboards be disposable on purpose
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.
ARM looking pretty good too these days
Not really
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.
ARM chips aren't better at power efficiency compared to x84 above 10 or 15W or so. Apple is getting a lot out of them because TSMC 3nm; even the upcoming AMD 9000 series will only be on TSMC 4nm.
ARM is great for having more than one competent company in the market, though.
As long as the apps all work. So much stuff is browser based now, but something will always turns up that doesn't work. Something like mandatory timesheet software, a bespoke tool etc.
But isn't there x86 emulation for those edge cases?
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 mixes bag. iirc atm the gpu on the Snapdragon X Elite os 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
Arm servers are slow, and arm laptops are not compatible with Linux.
Eh, it looks like ARM laptops are coming along. I give it a year or so for the process to be smooth.
For servers, AWS Graviton seems to be pretty solid. I honestly don't need top performance and could probably get away with a Quartz64 SBC, I just don't want to worry about RAM and would really like 16GB. I just need to server a dozen or so docker containers with really low load, and I want to do that with as little power as I can get away with for minimum noise. It doesn't need to transcode or anything.
Man so many SBCs come so close to what you're looking for but no one has that level of I/O. I was just looking at the ZimaBlade / ZimaBoard and they don't quite get there either: 2 x SATA and a PCIe 2.0 x4. ZimaBlade has Thunderbolt 4, maybe you can squeeze a few more drives in there with a separate power supply? Seems mildly annoying but on the other hand, their SBCs only draw like 10 watts.
Not sure what your application is but if you're open to clustering them that could be an option.
Here's my actual requirements:
Services:
The ZimaBlade is probably good enough (would need to figure out SATA power), I'll have to look at some performance numbers. I'm a little worried since it seems to be worse than my old Phenom II x4, which was the old CPU for this machine. I'm currently using my old Ryzen 1700, but I'd be fine downgrading a bit if it meant significantly lower power usage. I'd really like to put this under my bed, and it needs to be very quiet to do that.
ARM laptops don't support ACPI, which makes them really hard for Linux to support. Having to go back two years to find a laptop with wifi and gpu support on Linux isn't practical. If Qualcomm and Apple officially supported Linux like Intel and AMD do, it would be a different story. As it is right now, even Android phones are forced to use closed-source blobs just to boot.
Those numbers from Amazon are misleading. Linus Torvalds actually builds on an Ampere machine, but they don't actually do that well in benchmarks.
https://www.phoronix.com/review/graviton4-96-core
Servers being slow is usually fine. They're already at way lower clocks than consumer chips because almost all that matters is power efficiency.
Datacenter cpus are actually really good for NASes considering the explosion of NVMe storage. Most consumer CPUs are limited to just 5 m.2 drives and a 10gbit NIC. But a server mobo will open up for 10+ drives. Something cheap like a first gen Epyc motherboard gives you a ton of flexibility and speed if you're ok with the idle power consumption.
hmm. not really. I can't beat AMD. Only in power-consumption, sure, but not in real performance.
It's not quite there for desktop use yet, but it probably won't be too much longer.
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).
I'll take that as well please.