Tuesday, October 12th 2021
AMD Celebrates 5 Years of Ryzen...and Insomnia at Intel
AMD disrupted a decade of $350 quad-core from Intel with its path-breaking Ryzen processor and the "Zen" microarchitecture, which enters 5th year in the market (5 years since tapeout). AMD went into the Ryzen processor launch as a company that had been written off in the CPU space by PC enthusiasts, and "Zen" was at best expected to give AMD another round of processors to sell around $250. Boy was everyone wrong. The Ryzen 7 1800X eight-core processor brought HEDT-levels of performance to the mainstream desktop form-factor, and its HEDT counterpart, the Threadripper, dominated Intel's Core X series ever since.
Intel's first response to the 1800X was a 50% increase in CPU core counts calculating that AMD would only see marginal IPC increases going forward, and the superior IPC of "Skylake" cores, along with a 6-core/12-thread setup in the Core i7-8700K would see things through. This is roughly when Intel faced severe supply shortages that spiraled prices out of control, giving AMD space to come out with the Ryzen 7 2700X with a 4% IPC increase, and improved multi-threaded performance, but more importantly, predictable pricing at around $330. Months later, Intel refreshed its lineup with the 9th Gen, and finally attained parity with AMD in core counts, with the Core i9-9900K.
The i9-9900K put Intel back into the hands of the enthusiasts on account of high IPC and core-counts. AMD responded with the unthinkable—doubling CPU core counts to 16, and the "Zen 2" microarchitecture posting a double-digit % IPC increase. These took the performance crown away from Intel, which could only clutch on to the slightly higher IPC of its CPU cores, which resulted in higher gaming performance. The 10th Gen i9-10900K dialed core-counts up to 10 and no further, as Intel had hit the upper limits of how many cores it could cram into a 14 nm silicon that fits on Socket-Hx. AMD's posted a consecutive double-digit IPC gain with "Zen 3," which finally took the performance crown away from Intel. Having ceded the multi-threaded performance space squarely to AMD, Intel thought it could develop a gaming powerhouse processor despite being limited to 14 nm, and came up with the 11th Gen "Rocket Lake." Its gaming performance fell short of expectations, and AMD remains the brand of choice for PC enthusiasts. Intel is once again looking to change this, with the 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake." We'll know soon enough if it succeeded.
Source:
Andreas Schilling (Twitter)
Intel's first response to the 1800X was a 50% increase in CPU core counts calculating that AMD would only see marginal IPC increases going forward, and the superior IPC of "Skylake" cores, along with a 6-core/12-thread setup in the Core i7-8700K would see things through. This is roughly when Intel faced severe supply shortages that spiraled prices out of control, giving AMD space to come out with the Ryzen 7 2700X with a 4% IPC increase, and improved multi-threaded performance, but more importantly, predictable pricing at around $330. Months later, Intel refreshed its lineup with the 9th Gen, and finally attained parity with AMD in core counts, with the Core i9-9900K.
26 Comments on AMD Celebrates 5 Years of Ryzen...and Insomnia at Intel
That being said, I don't think AMD's presence is completely guaranteed in the future as they have a huge, uphill battle with a resurgent Intel. I've said this way too much on here, but Intel has an R&D budget 6.5x greater than AMD (2020 R&D budget is $13.65 billion vs $1.98 Billion....Nvidia's is $3.9 Billion just as an FYI) and a revenue stream nearly 8x greater than AMD (2020 Revenue $77.87 billion vs $9.76 billion), and this is a huge disadvantage for AMD to contend with, and makes it all that more impressive to consider that AMD has been not only able to compete, but best Intel the last few years (and compete with Nvidia while their R&D budget is basically double that of AMD's and is basically only spend on GPU tech versus GPU and x86 for AMD). Unfortunately for AMD, it has not had nearly enough market penetration in the mobile x86 market and enterprise, which have substantially larger T.A.M.'s than Desktop OEM x86 and desktop DIY (which is probably the smallest).
While things look good for AMD right now, their presence is definitely not guaranteed in the x86 space in the future...."enthusiasts" can be either extremely fickle, so just two consecutive generations of AMD only reaching parity or being slightly behind Intel could have serious consequences, or they're stubbornly loyal, with many never even contemplating trying AMD over the past few years despite being the better option in most use cases....this is especially true in the lucrative market of mobile x86. The vast majority of consumers only ever consider buying a laptop, and literally probably don't even associate a desktop with the word "computer" in their mind. That said, the overwhelming majority of these consumers basically instinctively buy an Intel based laptop, and probably either don't even know of AMD's existence, or never bother to do any research (as most people abstain from doing when purchasing any item) and don't even understand AMD as a viable option that offers better performance and battery life in many use cases. Part of this probably has to do with OEMs keeping AMD out of their mid to top tier laptop designs up until recently so that they didn't get the exposure they needed, but also the large amount of inertia AMD had to and has to overcome with respect to the "mentia" of consumers with respect to their brand.
Perhaps I'm being too worried, but I'm concerned that AMD didn't achieve enough market penetration over the past several years while they were in a position of complete domination (the chip shortage really hurt AMD in this respect, as they haven't been able to move nearly as much product as they undoubtedly would have with Zen3 and RDNA2 since Covid. With Intel resurgent, which was only inevitable, the next 3-5 years will be the ones that define not only the future of AMD, but of the prospects of continued, legitimate competition in the x86 space for general consumers and x86 enthusiasts alike. It would have been preferable for AMD to at least have another three years of dominance with a completely unhindered supply chain to achieve 15%-20% share in enterprise and perhaps 30% in mobile in order to build top of mind awareness amongst general consumers and to accumulate financial resources large enough to effectively combat Intel in the future.....all for the sake of ensuring continued competition in the long term.
Prelimary reports, including one on this very website, have rumored Zen4 IPC increases to be at 29%, which would easily overcome any alderlake advantage, add into this other improvements such as switching to 5nm, V-cache, frequency increases, etc and Zen4 could definitely achieve 35%+ (the v-chache on Zen3 has been claimed to increase overall performance by 15% alone) core for core performance improvements over Zen3....but if this is another year away, it'd be facing raptorlake (I think) and that's a whole different story. Either way, Lisa Su will do everything possible with the resources available to her, but the question is whether that's enough to overcome Intel's extreme advantage in financial resources
The student has become the master.
sure yeah a RX 550 with 2GB for 130€ even a RX 550 with 4GB for 240€.
Bad times to buy a new GPU for sure but from Nvidia i can get a 1030 GDDR5 for 90€, a 1050TI for 160€ and a 1650 for 230€.
And, the prices were intentionally increased to reduce demands during the Pandemic - 6 months later, and demand was finally sated.
While I will agree the 5600x is overpriced, the $239 5600G gives new life to Zen 3
The bare minimum Alder Lake will do is hopefully force AMD to lower 5000 series prices and introduce 3D cache models at no higher price points than what the 5000 series launched with.
When your existing memory controllers are already laid-out, it's going to take a lot of hacking to make it all work under unified memory map - so, they just made new motherboards!!
That's because unlike HEDT where AMD achieved utter dominance they could not do the same with their paltry ~15% market share. Breaking backward compatibility there would have pissed off their enterprise customers.
On the other hand Intel was sucking all our blood with their prices before Ryzen, now all their products are so cheap.
This isn't as simple as one is the devil and the other angels and then flipped. This is how the competition works. If there is no competition they go crazy, if they are down they lower prices, if they are on the upper hand they increase prices.
They are just companies, max profits. They couldn't care less about us, just our money.
I have only AMD APU till now Godavari for FM2+ but in future ill never buy anything from them.
Oligopol or Monopol fuck off :shadedshu:
Intel did the exact same thing before, and will likely do it again if they ever get the throne back.
Get used to it, drop any fanboyism or brand loyalty you may have. Those are just silly ideas when the two brands are massive corporations that act only to keep the profits going and shareholders happy. Buy what's convenient for you, end of the story.
CONGRATS 5 YEARS of RYZEN !
Regardless of public opinion.
If AMD had gone 6 feet under, I wouldn't know if I could have afforded a decent gaming computer... or maybe a mediocre 4-core one.
I can't say the same the same for laptops though... due to market dominance... but I don't expect many people to understand what this means.