Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Intel slashes prices in face of AMD competition

anandtech.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 167 posts

Re: Intel slashes prices in face of AMD competition

#131

Post by BoorishBears »

Someone1234 wrote: post #94
BoorishBears wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it with every AMD sales-related submission I see, the level of discourse in the comments is barely one step above name calling? My pet theory is that there's just a ton of casual investors who have also become emotionally invested in AMD...

They called Intel's old price "pathetic." That's hardly a low level of discourse, and not really tantamount to name calling. It isn't a particularly insightful comment, I'll acknowledge that, but this response seems like it lowers the quality of the thread more than the comment it is replying to (and arguably breaks the sites rules by suggesting the other poster have ulterior motives for posting what they posted). >…

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

Yet you assume my comment is referring to one comment and unfairly attacking it?

This entire page is uncharacteristically rife with misinformed comments and people oddly invested in shutting down anyone with anything positive to say about Intel

And:

Please don't put words in my mouth.

I didn't accuse AMD of astroturfing. If anything I literally implied the opposite, an organic reason why there's a movement to emphasize "AMD bad Intel Good".

My point is it's to the detriment of having real discussions about either when they come up on HN.

Re: Intel slashes prices in face of AMD competition

#132

Post by [deleted] »

mpol wrote: post #45
Grangar wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At risk of missing sarcasm, a large reason all these vulnerabilities in Intel are found is their market share. Same as when OSX was considered "unhackable" - it just wasn't worth the effort. AMD is likely just as bad, but it's not uncovered (yet). Supporting the underdog is a good idea nonetheless, but not for this reason per se.

Or it is the other way around. Intel had cut corners to be able to make the fastest processors, and that is how they got their marketshare. They have been called out on it in the last two years and updates have made their processors slower. Also AMD improved massively with Zen.

[deleted]

Re: Intel slashes prices in face of AMD competition

#133

Post by parsimo2010 »

Grangar wrote: post #34
zecg wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing out on a host of vulnerabilities.

At risk of missing sarcasm, a large reason all these vulnerabilities in Intel are found is their market share. Same as when OSX was considered "unhackable" - it just wasn't worth the effort. AMD is likely just as bad, but it's not uncovered (yet). Supporting the underdog is a good idea nonetheless, but not for this reason per se.

Maybe, but maybe not. The fact that AMD has implemented a similar instruction set but is not vulnerable to many of the existing speculative attacks that plague Intel suggest that they could just have made more secure design decisions, whether it was intentional or not.

Re: Intel slashes prices in face of AMD competition

#134

Post by BoorishBears »

armitron wrote: post #113
BoorishBears wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> CPU architecture between Intel and AMD can't vary much since they both target x86. Completely and utterly false. The exploits being found exist at a point much lower than the x86 instruction set. ARM processors were also hit with speculative execution exploits.

You're focusing on something that doesn't really matter in the context of what he was saying, and ignoring the bigger truth which is that security researchers DID look at AMD processors and they DID find that they do not suffer from the vulnerabilities that plague Intel.

You're doing exactly what you wrongly accuse me of...

The original rebuttal was AMD gets less researcher eyeballs because there are more Intel devices in the wild so it's expected that Intel has more vulnerabilities found.

This was fully correct, yet the GP and you apparently are fixated on the idea that AMD didn't have certain vulnerabilities that were originally found _by studying Intel CPUs_. Yet no big surprise most don't apply to AMD in that case... because they were found by studying Intel CPUs first.

Re: Intel slashes prices in face of AMD competition

#135

Post by jumpingmice »

xbmcuser wrote: post #123
jumpingmice wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he means relevant buyers, like Google and Apple etc. People who order their CPUs by the cubic meter.

Google is also looking at AMD for it servers. As AMD is beating Intel with the current generation so badly in all cost metrics that using Intel is wasting money.

Google has been "looking at" AMD for decades, including rolling out an enormous fleet of AMD machines spanning several generations. They have a big platforms group and plenty of engineers to dedicate to trying to make the TCO pencil for any platform, even POWER and ARM. The existence of a new AMD part that could actually work is not a new development in the relationship between Google and Intel.

Re: Intel slashes prices in face of AMD competition

#136

Post by TomVDB »

zozbot234 wrote: post #91
TomVDB wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CUDA is result of being the first mover in an emerging field over a decade ago. It’s a lock in scheme the way Excel is a lock in scheme for Microsoft: a product that provides value which is used to generate revenue. Using Vulkan(?) or OpenCL for deep learning is fine if your goal is helping get out the word that it’s at least possible to do so. It’s not a great idea if you simply want to get your work done with a min…

"The prominent packages" for deep learning are all open source. If they don't support OpenCL or Vulkan yet, you can work on it and contribute the feature upstream. It's a matter of getting the ball rolling to start with, nothing more than that.

cuDNN isn’t open source.

> If they don't support OpenCL or Vulkan yet, you can work on it and contribute the feature upstream. It's a matter of getting the ball rolling to start with, nothing more than that.

And that’s exactly what I mean with the choice that you have to make.

You could do that, and win brownie points with some crowd, but let’s not pretend that doing so wouldn’t have an impact on your work as an AI researcher.

“Nothing more than that” is more than a little bit disingenuous when you take into account the actual work that involved, don’t you think?

It’s something a company like AMD could (and does?) sponsor by throwing paid employees at it. Or big companies like Alibaba who buy enough HW to trade off HW cost vs R&D spending.

But if your goal is to be a deep learning specialist (it’s where the money is today), spending time on these kind of infrastructure issues is a complete waste.

Re: Intel slashes prices in face of AMD competition

#137

Post by okcando »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #68
madrix999 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like this, intel has cut a lot of corners for a long time in their x86 processors, mostly to have better performance, which ended up with all these vulnerabilites we keep hearing about every couple of months. They're just now suffering the consequences of all the shady things they've done to try and establish a monopoly in the CPU market

A more generous interpretation: Intel made decisions that favored actual measurable performance today at the expensive of theoretically known vulnerabilities that might be exploited in some hypothetical future . They gave the market what the market demanded at a cost they tolerated. And even now, after said theoretical vulnerabilities have been reified, there is very little cause to be concerned about the vulnerabili…

> They gave the market what the market demanded at a cost they tolerated.

This suggests a level of informed consent that I don't think existed. It implies that "the market" (who?) knew of, understood, and agreed to the risks.

And anyway, "the market" does a poor job of representing some of its stakeholders, notably the disorganized group known as users, and immediate competitive advantage may be the only metric driving decision-making.

Re: Intel slashes prices in face of AMD competition

#138

Post by bwat49 »

coldpie wrote: post #47
zozbot234 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia's Linux support? AMD actually has open source drivers these days, just like Intel, Nvidia just gives you a binary module, which means in order to make use of that hardware you have to taint your kernel and aren't free to update it if the in-kernel ABI changes. It's basically on par with the vendors of all those "useless ARM devices out there", none of them with "usable Linux support".

AMD is finally approaching parity in the past year or two, but Nvidia is still ahead in terms of day-to-day usability. It sucks that they're closed, but if you just want to install a driver and have your system work, Nvidia is ahead. Look at this mess: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xorg#AMD Do you want AMDGPU, AMDGPU PRO, ATI, or Catalyst? How do you choose? Let's assume you want open source and recent, so pro…

> but if you just want to install a driver and have your system work, Nvidia is ahead.

But if you want your driver to not break horribly whenever there's a xorg or kernel update, nvidia is behind

Or if you want your driver to just work 'out of the box' without needing to go out and install a binary driver nvidia is behind

Or if you want your driver to support newer technologies like DRI3 and wayland nvidia is behind

Re: Intel slashes prices in face of AMD competition

#139

Post by wahern »

j8014 wrote: post #129
Filligree wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a food processor that my parents bought nearly fifty years ago. They had to replace the motor once, and then I replaced the wiring on the motor coil four years ago, but it's still ticking. Stainless steel, no plastic components. (The buttons used to be plastic. Now they're wood.) That's durable. It also does a much better job than any modern food processor, possibly because the motor is four times the size of…

I wouldn't consider that durable, just repairable. After all, that's like saying an old classic car is durable because it exists and only had its motor replaced once.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durable_good

Re: Intel slashes prices in face of AMD competition

#140

Post by llampx »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #83
sixothree wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This incompatible socket thing is driving me crazy. I "just" bought a new motherboard and now I can't use any current products.

I've never even considered that a problem - my time between upgrades is so long that the last motherboard had DDR3, and the one before that DDR2. If you're a once a year upgrader I could see it, but given the slow progression of CPU performance as of the last half decade (AMD's rapid jump to parity not withstanding), I can't see a real reason why to upgrade that often.

With a motherboard bought with a Ryzen 1200 quad-core you could upgrade to a Ryzen 3900 12-core. In the same time frame you would have had two or three Intel sockets and chipsets.
Post reply on HN