If Intel sells $5 CPUs, will you change your mind? I don't understand the obsessive praise of AMD. Keep in mind that Jim Keller, an Intel ex-chip architect lead the AMD Zen platform when he was hired in 2013 (after working at Apple on the A4/A5 SOCs). It is the same dude competing against himself. Btw, he is back at Intel since 2018 to help Intel out.
I'm not sure how this relates to the parent comment. They stated that no matter what your budget is, Intel is always the worse option currently. Their chips cost more and do less when they used to cost more and do more.
I got the fastest CPU my motherboard could handle. But looking at the performance charts, there were AMD CPUs with 25% and 50% more performance costing hundreds of dollars less than what I spent.
I could have spent that money on a motherboard and some extra RAM, but didn't feel like doing the work. Meaning this was an upgrade from an under powered CPU to a newer chip that was not available when I did the build originally.
The vast majority of users would find a 50% performance improvement and a huge price reduction to be worth the extra effort of replacing the mobo, especially since they already have to replace the cpu and likely put the mobo in to start with.
>> If Intel sells $5 CPUs, will you change your mind?
Sure, if they were selling i9s for $5.
But the OP's point is the opposite. "Regardless of the pricing" means even that if you ignored the huge costs of Intel's best CPUs they were generally the highest performance option given your unlimited budget.
That's not really the case anymore, except for very specific workloads.
> I don't understand the obsessive praise of AMD.
"obsessive" seems unnecessary. People are praising AMD because they are finally bringing performance competition to the CPU market, which is great for consumers.
I mean, it's nice to see that after years of stagnation, AMD is now able to hit best IPC, more cores/chip, best perf/watt, and close enough singlethreaded perf. And AMD $/perf is better too. An Intel chip at the right price is probably fine -- although, they've lost a lot of perf to mitigate security issues, so I dunno. Intel has also been pretty stagnated the last several years (what are we on, the 5th respin of Skylake?)
Jim Keller's work at Intel should probably start showing up in 2021 or 2022... Could be pretty exciting, or Intel corporate politics could bury it all.
I don't know how Jim Keller is going to help Intel since Intel has trouble with its fabs and process nodes, not with the architecture. If Intel would be using TSMC or Samsung, it would be at least on par with AMD with IPC and core count.
Don't forget Keller's earlier work on the DEC Alpha, which was a real engineering marvel for its time, finding its way into the Cray T3D and T3E supercomputers.
Based on Keller's work with the DEC Alpha, I was looking forward to investing in PASemi, but Apple acquired PASemi to design mobile chips before PASemi IPO'd.
If Intel sells $5 CPUs, will you change your mind? I don't understand the obsessive praise of AMD. Keep in mind that Jim Keller, an Intel ex-chip architect lead the AMD Zen platform when he was hired in 2013 (after working at Apple on the A4/A5 SOCs). It is the same dude competing against himself. Btw, he is back at Intel since 2018 to help Intel out.