19 comments

[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 41.7 ms ] thread
(On desktop systems)
No, also laptops. The article had a chart for that too. It's all systems.
Windows 10 EOL is probably helping to churn a lot of aging Intel chips out here. I can't imagine anyone in the know is building a new desktop with an Intel anything in it these days, either.
If you are doing integrated GPU transcoding, Intel is still the best option.

That’s a bit niche though. But for a NAS is great.

Windows 10 will be the last msft os I ever use. I rebuilt using AMD CPU/GP booted up Fedora 42 and I have never had to run a single shell command to get anything to work. I don't even notice my OS. Work, games, local models (this one still takes some tweaking but is better), all work fine
Goodness I still can't stand his articles. For me, my understanding of the situation was that everything before maybe Ryzen 2-3000 was like "meh, it's good enough". You can actually see a bump in Q1 2017 when Ryzen first came out. I really hoped to see annotated graphs, long term analysis, etc.
This could swing so hard with sudden geopolitical triggers. I also see Intel positioning itself very strongly for its next generation chips.
AMD chips are just as fast but with lower thermal output. Why would anyone use Intel at this point?
Can anyone explain what prevents AMD from making x86_64 chips competitive with ARM on the lower end like in mobile phones? I doubt it's about ISA.
I find interesting that despite many years of being reminded that DYI market doesn't represent a significant portion of these sales... we are still thinking that individual customers are the one driving the consumption. The one driving this are big OEMs like Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc.
I'd love to see a market share chart going back far far more. At least to the middle of the 90s or so.

I'm very impressed though. I had no idea there were near 1/3 of the desktop market. Good for them.

How's AMD's engineering support these days? I've heard through the grapevine that many laptops were mostly engineered by intel engineers, creating a natural moat because the laptop brands are used to not having to do much PCB layout or thermals.

AMD, I heard, seemed less capable, or less interested, or couldn't justify at their quantities, to do the same, which meant their engineering support packages were good for atx mainboards only, and maybe the occasional console.

This must have changed a while ago, does anyone have the tea?

Nova lake looks potentially pretty good, AVX512/APX and very very high core count, so maybe we will see AMD have some competition next year.
I had to buy two laptops recently, so I got Intel's 9 ultra 285k and Ryzen AI 9. The latter on paper should be slower, but it's a night and day difference. Intel's laptop sounds like a hairdryer when opening a browser tab. Ryzen's fans are far gentler on the ears and trigger less often. Still both laptops are league below even my old M1.
Intel has better and more developed virtualization, security features, and other hardware features. AMD seems to make what feels like an MVP that can do the core functionality, but lacks the extra 20% that makes the better product.
I imagine it would be kind of hard to switch away from Intel in the workstation/cluster space.

Like you have to replace OneAPI, which sounds easy because it’s just one thing, but like do you really want to replace BLAS, LAPACK, MPI, ifort/icc… and then you still need to find a sparse matrix solver…

Here's one nice thing about AMD is that there is znver4 and znver5 support baked in from CachyOS, so any Zen 4 laptop (7000, 8000 series) and Zen 5 (Strix Halo AI Max) would get good performance early on. I got a 8745HS laptop for just $400 and I swapped the 1T and 32GB RAM for 2x2T and 64GB RAM, and switched to CachyOS. Except for a weird keyboard issue when resuming from sleep, and some Arch kernel shenanigans, I got no problem so far.
This is not the first time I criticise AMD haven't been doing enough to steal market share. If Intel is doing so bad right now and has been so for 5 years, and AMD could only take 20 - 30% market share. AMD really needs to think about their execution..