It's official: Intel lost the single-threaded desktop performance crown to AMD

Author: vanburen

Score: 68

Comments: 16

Date: 2020-11-05 14:06:24

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iainctduncan wrote at 2020-11-05 15:19:22:

Has anyone tried these for audio work? Sounds like they would be amazing. Just curious, as I'd like to build a new audio workstation soon. For those who don't know, the norm in high performance audio work is to have _one_ thread per core do your heavy processing (the DSP), and sharing across cores is actually still really tricky and sub-optimal.

intricatedetail wrote at 2020-11-05 19:24:53:

I would expect 5950x to be equal 9900k for single core. Not ideal for audio but there is nothing better and with 16 cores you should get twice as much tracks running in realtime.

errantspark wrote at 2020-11-05 20:00:44:

Wait what? Aren't the benchmarks we're seeing pop up all over today saying that the 5950X is about 18% better than the 10900K in single core workloads? How do you figure that it would be equivalent to the LAST gen from Intel?

intricatedetail wrote at 2020-11-05 21:34:08:

I am talking about 9900k at 5.1-5.2 GHz.

jcelerier wrote at 2020-11-05 16:56:49:

3900X was equivalent or quite below Intel on various benches, e.g. for Kontakt:

http://www.scanproaudio.info/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Dawb...

Full article:

http://www.scanproaudio.info/2019/07/12/amd-ryzen-3600-3700x...

so I wouldn't hold my breath, but still on the lookout for a good surprise

ldng wrote at 2020-11-05 17:33:01:

I though Intel 9xxx is high end and AMD 3xxx is low end ? In that case how could this bench mean anything ?

Woden501 wrote at 2020-11-05 17:52:50:

The 3900X was one of the highest-end consumer Zen2 CPUs. If I'm remembering correctly only the 3950X was above it without jumping up to the Threadripper line of CPUs.

exar0815 wrote at 2020-11-05 18:10:37:

The first number signifies the generation. What you mean is intel with its i3/i5/i7/i9 marketing Names to segment features behind arbitrary performance classes.

AMD3XXX goes from 4 Cores on 3100 to 3995 with 64 cores.

ldng wrote at 2020-11-06 11:07:00:

Right, forgot about that marketing trick. My bad.

mmm_grayons wrote at 2020-11-05 21:19:23:

My understanding is that most audio work is mac, so wouldn't that be an issue? I know AMD hackintoshes exist, though can be a bit tricky to set up in a stable fashion. It might take some time for support, too.

intricatedetail wrote at 2020-11-05 21:36:30:

Macs are severly behind in terms of audio work. If you get something like UAD then Mac is viable, but when you start using better quality plugins like from Acustica Audio, then Mac no longer makes sense as it is too slow.

csjr wrote at 2020-11-06 01:45:08:

Exciting times. Maybe AMD will lose its crown to Apple next week?

Wowfunhappy wrote at 2020-11-06 01:53:09:

In single core performance, for general workloads? Apple's chips are good, particularly when you factor in power efficiency, but c'mon.

gpapilion wrote at 2020-11-05 16:08:43:

Intel has been moving to a server chip first strategy. I’m not sure this was a good idea.

OldHand2018 wrote at 2020-11-05 19:17:31:

If it was a strategy, it's not necessarily such a crazy one.

They would have known earlier than most that Apple was moving to ARM. Microsoft and others (Samsung at least) have been selling lower-end consumer computers with ARM chips - and they don't look like they're going to abandon this market any time soon.

As long as Apple's transition isn't a complete disaster, the "good enough" volume sales computer gets closer and closer to being ARM every year, leaving x86 on the desktop a smaller and smaller niche.

Or not. I am not even remotely close to being an expert!

karmakaze wrote at 2020-11-05 18:21:19:

I don't know if what Intel has been doing are so much strategies as whatever can be done to hold market share. They could claim single-thread performance or smaller process nodes having lost throughput or power efficiency. Then added the rarely beneficial AVX512 as a differentiator.