While we only have a rough idea of the performance yet, achieving this performance without SMT(HT) is a great achievement, and it greatly reduces the risk of crippling hardware bugs, like we've seen so many of in recent generations.
As we can see with Intel's P-core design goals, this generation is about future scalability, along with the removed constraints from dropping SMT whcich will probably take a couple of iterations to fully leverage, does at the very least indicate Intel have great improvements coming down the line. (But if you're sitting on an Alder Lake or Raptor Lake, you might want to skip this one…)
I hope this added flexibility means they will be bolder in making their big Xeons more powerful using more execution units.
And in these slides, Intel didn't mention that its new CPUs will have AVX-512, like the AM5 CPUs do
The seemingly missing AVX-512 is a grave mistake, so the performance advantage of Zen 4/5 here will only increase over time.
and it also didn't show any competitors to AMD's "3D cache" CPUs.
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Intel should have added more L2 and L3 cache memory to improve gaming performance, instead of adding this excessive amount of E-cores.
I'm glad Intel doesn't add piles of L3 cache, as this is mostly an "optimization" (or rather compensation) to help bloated software, and I don't want to give game or application developers an incentive to stop optimizing their code. Large L3 only significantly helps select applications and games, and the rest of the current games are largely not bottlenecked by faster CPUs from either vendor.
We can't fully predict what future games will look like, but if they are computationally dense, they'll scale better with CPUs that have more powerful cores. If they are even more bloated, then there is a chance large L3 caches will help.
But the E-cores are a gimmick though…
For these reasons, I still think the AM5 platform is more advantageous.
It depends on what your use case(s) are. If it's only gaming and "light" office use, then priorities will be quite different more of "power user"/prosumer which typically do a mix of "productive" applications and potentially gaming. At least with the Alder/Raptor Lake family, Zen4/5 has offered a compelling alternative for gamers, especially for more mid-range builds as the efficiency offers savings in terms of lower cooler requirements.
But as I was saying in another thread, Zen 5 looks very appealing at first glance to prosumers with 12 and 16 core options, AVX-512, etc., but then looking at the finer details there are serious compromises on the IO side. With precious PCIe lanes tied up to USB4, only 4 lanes to chipset, and 2nd and 3rd M.2 shares lanes with the graphics card, and limitations for each motherboard of how chipset lanes and SATA ports are configured, prosumers are likely to end up in a situation where their choice of motherboard limits them somehow down the road.
Arrow Lake' Z890 motherboards seem to be better in this regard, but the last point is valid here too, as it seems like very few Z890 motherboards are close to offering the features of their chipset (which is so absurd in my mind), and the well featured motherboards for Arrow Lake will likely be limited to mostly W880.
But this is what you get with mainstream platforms these days; significant compromises. It seems to me that mainstream is increasingly becoming platforms only for either pure gaming or "light office use", and once a user needs a little more then they are either hamstrung, or needs to keep upgrading systems more often. If you want a system to last 5-8 years of heavy use, then Threadripper and Xeon-W quickly becomes more attractive, despite their more limited availability.
I wish tech sites like this gave more attention to these platforms(high-end workstations), so hopefully the vendors get more feedback and the increased attention would drive motherboard vendors to make better lineups. But hopefully not with primarily an OC focus (like the limited YouTube coverage typically do), but more of a real-world prosumer focus.