When considering the switch from Intel to AMD, don't be fooled by comparing clock speeds! Intel has been ahead of AMD in the performance-per-clock game for a long time, and while some of these benchmarks look more promising than my disappointing experience (buying Magny Cours, and later upgrading to Interlagos), less-expensive (and lower TDP) Intel CPUs in many of these benchmarks still come out ahead of Ryzen. The tests where the Ryzen does shine generally seem to involve parallel workloads, but bear in mind that most of the stuff you wait for your computer to do are still bottlenecked by a single thread.
I disagree. It's all dependent on use case, but as a sysadmin I have seen real world use cases where people are doing multiple things at once and one bottlenecked program on an intel will slow the system to a halt whereas the AMD will keep chugging on the rest of the multitasking going on, and that's a very real benefit.
For example, how many people these days actuall just run with one monitor and do just one thing at a time? I certainly don't, and for example, on my i7 laptop, if I have firefox up on the second monitor and play cs-go, I get 20fps less. That never happened on my AMD FX system...
In essence what I am saying is parallel workloads are becoming the norm, and thats why I'm betting on AMD in the long run.
The world where everything is single-threaded is quickly shrinking, and the world where people only do one thing is as well. For example, lots of game engines traditionally had this problem, but they are getting better and better and multi-threading for perf gains.
Intels IPC advantage has mostly evaporated with Ryzen.
They went from a 50-60% advantage to 5-6% advantage for kabylake and near parity with Broadwell (current high thread count Xeons and Extreme consumer platforms).
I've used AMD hardware on a very heavily loaded webserver to good effect. This on a relatively affordable HP server with two CPU slots, two Opteron 6274's in there and a good amount of ram to go with it.
Super stable and very good performance for relatively little money. Web stuff is one of those places where multi-threading and lots of cores is an easy win due to the nature of the workload.
I imagine unless your workload is MS SQL or Oracle (if for no other reason than you'll spend more on licensing than your CPU, might as well get the most out of it) then Naples is probably going to be very appealing when it comes out later this year. Hell, I'm tempted to replace my 9 month old ThinkServer TD340 depending on how much the chips cost, I'm looking at $1000 to put a reasonable pair of 2nd generation E5 chips in this already.
If the rumors [0][1] about Ryzen 9 (12 and 16 core HEDT CPU's for under 1000$) are true, and Naples starts at a similar price point things could get really interesting.
The nice thing about those cpus is that your argumentation pretty much does not apply anymore. Yes, Intel is still faster in single thread workloads, but the gap is not that big anymore. The benchmarks show the in areas that were historically like you describe, especially gaming, the Ryzen R5 has pretty great results. It doesn't win against the i7-7700K, and it looks not too good in Rocket League, but it has good results in GTA 5.
And actually, the difference is less performance-per-clock now, but more that higher Intel cpus, the 7600K and 7700K, have a higher clock to start with.
>The tests where the Ryzen does shine generally seem to involve parallel workloads, but bear in mind that most of the stuff you wait for your computer to do are still bottlenecked by a single thread.
Who exactly do you think visits these forums? One-tab open in the browser grandmas?
I imagine most people here can make full use of at least 4-cores/8 threads, at all times, between compiling, rendering, editing, video streaming, joggling between 50 browser tabs and other programs, opening one or two VMs for testing, running local web servers, and so on.
That is kind of the point of the benchmarks. Intel CPUs come out ahead in terms of IPC, but they aren't utterly destroying AMD as they were in the past few generations. That performance leap coupled with lower price point/TDP and more cores and threads do make AMD CPUs a lot more attractive than they have been for a lot of years.
