Wednesday, July 12th 2017

Intel Says AMD EPYC Processors "Glued-together" in Official Slide Deck

So, yes, Intel, I think the AMD engineers who have developed the Zen architecture from the ground-up would take issue with that. Especially when AMD's "Glued-together" dies actually wipe the proverbial floor with the blue company's chips in power-performance ratios, and deliver much better multi-threaded performance than Intel's offerings. Not bad for a "Glued-together" solution, I'd say.

Our resident W1zzard had this to say regarding AMD's latest CPUs: "The SenseMi power-management system seems to be working well in idle, with the 8-core machine drawing the same amount of power as Intel's quad-core "Kaby Lake" machine." And "At stock speeds, the energy-efficiency of Ryzen is truly phenomenal. Prime95 loads all cores and threads on the chip, and the Ryzen ends up with as much power draw as the quad-core Intel i7-7700K. The high power draw result of the overclocked chip is due to the increased voltage needed to achieve stable operation." And let's not forget this: This is epic. We're assuming you've sifted through our game-test results before seeing this page, and so you'll find that the gaming power draw of the 8-core Ryzen makes Intel's quad-core i7-7700K look bad. Power draw is as much as 30W lesser! Ryzen is hands down the most energy-efficient performance CPU AMD ever made, and easily outclasses Intel's 14 nm "leadership." Good show."
On SMT implementation between AMD's SMT and Intel's HT, Intel is basically comparing a $2,200 8-core Xeon to AMD's usually $499 Ryzen 7 1800X. They are correct in terms of core parity there, at least, but I think it goes more against Intel's customer fleecing in core/price ratios than anything else. And it's certainly a coincidence that for Intel to achieve these SMT implementation scaling numbers, which paints them in good light, they had to down-clock the Ryzen 1800X to 2.2 GHz. So, yes. Even though independent review sites have put AMD's EPYC 7601 SMT-powered improvement in various workloads at a 24% average improvement, and Intel's Xeon 8176 falls short of that at 19.58% (even rounding AMD's score down and Intel's up, that's still how big the gap is.)
Here, Intel is comparing their server-grade processors with AMD's Ryzen, desktop processors gaming woes, which really, is one of the best examples of comparing apples to oranges that I've seen in a long time. So AMD's server platform will require optimizations as well because Ryzen did, for incomparably different workloads? History does inform the future, but not to the extent that Intel is putting it here to, certainly. Putting things in the same perspective, is Intel saying that their Xeon ecosystem sees gaming-specific optimizations?
Ah, the "Glued-together" dies. Let's forget how AMD's Zen cores actually look like they were architected from the get-go for modularity and scaling, which has allowed the company to keep die-sizes to a minimum and yields to a maximum. This means that from a same-sized wafer, AMD can make more Ryzen/EPYC processors (because yes, that's the beauty of it, they're almost interchangeable), and in all likelihood, have more of those full-fledged dies without any defects that affect yields.

This is one of the reasons why AMD is able to offer an unlocked, true 8-core, 16-thread CPU in the Ryzen 7 1700 at less than Intel's 4-core, 8-thread i7 7700K (which consumes more power) - but also because AMD is democratizing access to cores while Intel maximized profits at the consumer's cost for almost a decade. And Infinity Fabric, which AMD also has implemented in their Vega architecture and will probably be used for the company's Zen-based APUs and next-gen Navi graphics architecture, is only glue. Intel would certainly like to be so lucky, since AMD's Infinity Fabric actually delivers more bandwidth than their UPI (Ultra Path Interconnect.)
Here, Intel are telling us how much better for the customer it is to be hard-locked to Intel's ecosystem for virtualization, since "VMs running on Intel Xeon processor compute pools can only live migrate to other Intel VM Pools". It's like they're saying "just imagine the amount of work you'll have to migrate these to AMD. Better remain with us."

Update: As some users pointed out, I used Ryzen 7 1800X power consumption figures as an example, instead of EPYC (those pictures are right here now.)
However, I consider that Intel themselves opened that door when they compared their Xeon, $2,200 offering with AMD's sub $499 Ryzen 7 1800X, which isn't a server CPU (and they down-clocked it to boot, let's not forget that.) That said, for comparison and fairness purposes, I'll just leave these here, courtesy of Anandtech, comparing dual Xeon systems (E5-2699 and the new Xeon 8176) with a dual EPYC 7601 system:

Performance in POV-Ray:
And maximum power consumption on the same application:
So essentially, AMD has 8 more cores, 16 more threads, delivers 16% more performance than Intel's e5-2699 system and 32% more performance than Intel's "non glued-together" Xeon 8176. AMD's chip does all that while consuming 23% less power than the Xeon e5-2699, and 28% less than the Xeon 8176. Not too shabby. I'll take my CPUs with this kind of glue any day.

Check the full press slides in the source. There's an interesting read there, even if there are those chuckle-worthy Intel comments that look like grappling at straws when real arguments are absent. But hey, that's this editor's interpretation. I reserve myself the right to be wrong, and to be slightly emotional at these underhanded tactics. It's just plain disrespectful for a company which stands on its engineers' shoulders to deride another's with no compelling argument.
Sources: Computerbase.de, Reddit, AnandTech SMT Integer Performance
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159 Comments on Intel Says AMD EPYC Processors "Glued-together" in Official Slide Deck

#151
RealNeil
Doesn't it all come down to the consumer and what we'll buy for our dollar?

Yeah, Intel is trying to convince people that AMD's products are shit, but those of us who use them at home (I mean my 1700X system) are liking how they perform. Benchmark comparisons don't always paint the full picture for home usage. They remain an indicator at best.
Big Blue has shown us in the past that they can get pretty aggressive against the competition that they face.
Anti-Trust issues have cost them a lot of money before. (we all know that they have deep pockets for such expenses)

Seeing them trying to kneecap AMD's Threadripper product is just business as usual for them.
Looking at the negative reviews concerning their X299 platform's VRM heat issues, and CPU power usage stifling decent overclocks makes me thing that they're throwing rocks from inside a glass house.
I'm reading about these issues all over the web tech world.

Make no mistake, I love my three Intel boxes X99, Z120, and Z97. They were as good as I could afford at the time and I'm not disappointed with any of them.
I took my time and waited for reviews and secondary reviews on them all before I bought. They were superior to AMD at the time.

But now, it's not so true anymore. (and if it is, it's not by such a wide margin anymore)
I really like seeing AMD kick it up. I hope that they gain more market share too.

EDIT: I just tested my Ryzen 1700X system against my X99 i7-6850K Box.
The Ryzen outperformed the Intel in some of the tests, but the screen I'm using with it will only go to 1600x1200 resolution. Passmark took points off of my score for that.

Here are a few pics of the results. The first pic is the Ryzen, and the second is the X99.

Posted on Reply
#152
cdawall
where the hell are my stars
RealNeilDoesn't it all come down to the consumer and what we'll buy for our dollar?

Yeah, Intel is trying to convince people that AMD's products are shit, but those of us who use them at home (I mean my 1700X system) are liking how they perform. Benchmark comparisons don't always paint the full picture for home usage. They remain an indicator at best.
Big Blue has shown us in the past that they can get pretty aggressive against the competition that they face.
Anti-Trust issues have cost them a lot of money before. (we all know that they have deep pockets for such expenses)

Seeing them trying to kneecap AMD's Threadripper product is just business as usual for them.
Looking at the negative reviews concerning their X299 platform's VRM heat issues, and CPU power usage stifling decent overclocks makes me thing that they're throwing rocks from inside a glass house.
I'm reading about these issues all over the web tech world.

Make no mistake, I love my three Intel boxes X99, Z120, and Z97. They were as good as I could afford at the time and I'm not disappointed with any of them.
I took my time and waited for reviews and secondary reviews on them all before I bought. They were superior to AMD at the time.

But now, it's not so true anymore. (and if it is, it's not by such a wide margin anymore)
I really like seeing AMD kick it up. I hope that they gain more market share too.

EDIT: I just tested my Ryzen 1700X system against my X99 i7-6850K Box.
The Ryzen outperformed the Intel in some of the tests, but the screen I'm using with it will only go to 1600x1200 resolution. Passmark took points off of my score for that.

Here are a few pics of the results. The first pic is the Ryzen, and the second is the X99.

Just for perspective this is my 5960X.

Posted on Reply
#154
cdawall
where the hell are my stars
EarthDogPassmark.

Giggles.
Agreed I have actually never used it before, but was curious how it compared lol
Posted on Reply
#155
RealNeil
I usually stay with the Benchmark tests that most of us use, but I wanted to try it out.


That 5960X is a beast, but way out of my budget.
Posted on Reply
#156
dont whant to set it"'
blah blah blah sure ryzen's are good chips but switching from a 4.69ghz@1.3v( conservative) unless free ... well it could be down to each and everyone's case/preference, I game on sc2, chronos matters[ clocks]
Posted on Reply
#158
Hängyord
YoRkFiElDWhat is that BS about gaming power consumption of Ryzen??? Of course it has lower power consumption because of the limits of the Ryzen architecture it can't be properly utilized and provides sub par performance to an "only" 4 core chip...Actually Ryzen's single core performance is sh..t and a lot of applications still relies on lightly threaded performance where high single core performance is needed. Overclockability of Ryzen is mostly presented as 4 GHz as a matter of course, but that's not the case, lot of Ryzens are really rubbish binned and some can't even do 3.8 GHz.
wow... Intel fanbaby detected!
Posted on Reply
#159
RealNeil
The reviews are out, and Threadripper seems to be a real sweet-spot for a lot of people.

I think that if Intel ~or~ AMD want loyalty, they should buy dogs.
That said,....I really like both my X99s, my Ryzen, and the new i9-7900X that I just traded some video cards for.
These are the best of times to be a consumer!
Posted on Reply
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