AMD is killing it this year, almost any casual observer can tell. Whether with the AMD Ryzen 7 3700X outselling Intel's full lineup or the Ryzen 9 3900X outselling all other processors in its territory, Team Red has taken the lead. However, it's not hard to look back four to five years to see AMD processors sitting at the bottom of the stack.
So what has changed? Has AMD just started offering better processors? Or was it a perfect storm of Intel's complacency and AMD's manufacturing breakthrough? At the end of the day, it's essentially a combination of both: a perfect storm of super PC hardware from AMD and a slowdown in major innovations from Intel.
(Image credit: future)
Where did it all start?
In 2017, Intel was at the top of the market. With an Intel Core i7-7700K processor and other Kaby Lake processors, it wasn't up to AMD Ryzen. When the first generation Ryzen hit the streets in March 2017, it delivered incredible performance, especially compared to the seventh generation Kaby Lake processors.
For example, the AMD Ryzen 7 1800X was able to record 1,612 on the Cinebench R15, compared to 970 for the Intel Core i7-7700K. That's 40% more in charge of multitasking work. However, Intel was still able to track single-core performance, scoring 194 points in the single-threaded Cinebench test, where the Ryzen 7 1800X registered 159.
Later, however, Intel released Coffee Lake, which ended up outperforming the first generation Ryzen chips in multithreaded workloads, until AMD released the second generation Ryzen.
Looking back, this type of model started: AMD processors were coming out, erasing the floor with current-gen Intel processors in multi-core workloads, then Intel released another Skylake refinement, and then the process was repeated.
It becomes even more powerful if you look a little further into the past. Before AMD Ryzen, Team Red's processors were based on the Bulldozer architecture, and that hadn't been very successful. For example, the AMD FX 8350 processor was an 8-core processor released in 2012. However, compared to its Intel chip at the time, the Intel Core i7-3770K processor, a processor with half the physical cores, failed. . In the current Cinebench R11.5 test, the AMD FX 8350 scored 6.71, compared to 7.14 for the i7-3770K.
Before Ryzen, AMD was struggling to keep up with Intel, leading to the stagnation of the processor market. So when the first generation Ryzen appeared, she was competing in a market that she hadn't seen in years. AMD Ryzen then reinvigorated the processor market.
(Image credit: Graz University of Technology)
A "spectrum" haunts the processor market
Anyone who's been following the processor scene for a few years knows this is coming. We need to talk about Specter and Meltdown. In January 2018, two critical processor security vulnerabilities appeared: Specter and Meltdown. The former touched all types of processors, from Intel to AMD, even ARM processors were affected.
However, Intel faced a majority of negative reactions on this issue, the exploitation of Meltdown only affects its processors.
These were potentially catastrophic security flaws, in which attackers could run relatively simple code to access everything from passwords to photos that you have since deleted. Here's more information, but these attacks basically benefit from speculative execution, in which a processor essentially guesses your next project, then flushes all bad data into the cache.
Spectrum and Meltdown were essentially able to read this information without creating a log, which was detrimental to security and made it difficult to detect whether or not it was hit. The fixes have been fixed: Intel processors are no longer affected, but performance has also been affected - up to 30% of some workloads.
Since AMD was able to largely avoid liability for these security vulnerabilities, especially when they made headlines, it was able to take advantage of the perception that AMD processors were a more valuable option. sure, even though they were still vulnerable to Specter. attacks.
And, now that a new security hole is hitting Intel processors this week, it looks like this battle for security will continue in earnest.
(Image credit: future)
All about this value
In 2018, AMD released its second generation Ryzen processors, heralded by the Ryzen 7 2700X in the consumer market and the Threadripper 2990WX in the high-end desktop market. Following their release, these processors broke into the computing world, outperforming the Intel Core i7-8700K and i9-7980XE processors respectively.
What's more impressive is that the AMD Ryzen 7 2700X, at least in our tests, achieved a higher core score than the 8700K, while erasing the ground on multithreaded workloads.
Intel finally released a processor that beat the Ryzen 7 2700X in the Intel Core i9-9900K, but at € 479 (€ 469, AU 765), much more expensive than the AMD processor at € 329 (299, AU € 469). In our tests, the Intel Core i9-9900K was 22% faster on GeekBench and only 3% faster on Cinebench, while it cost a whopping 32%. So the Intel chip was much faster, but it was more expensive, and it came about six months later.
In recent years, AMD has consistently delivered excellent performance, while maintaining affordable prices, as it did with the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT, which has duped Nvidia into offering graphics cards. More expensive.
What about the graphics?
Don't forget that AMD makes graphics cards too, even though it hasn't made as many titles for graphics as it does for processors. Unfortunately, AMD has not been able to regain its parity with Nvidia in the same way as with Intel.
In fact, it's not since the AMD Radeon R9 290 and R9 290X since 2013 that AMD has been able to properly negotiate hits with Nvidia's flagship product. This is pretty much the old story when it comes to PC components.
And since then, there has been this split in the GPU market, where AMD made many low-cost graphics cards, leaving Nvidia to dominate the high-end with GPUs like the RTX 2080 Ti. AMD really came close to the AMD Radeon RX Vega 64, but it couldn't compete with the GTX 1080 Ti, but with the GTX 1080.
Things have changed a bit since the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT and RX 5700 cards are on sale, as these cards offer better performance than the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Super and RTX 2060 cards.
However, when launched shortly after CES 2019, AMD's Radeon VII failed to dethrone the RTX 2080, let alone the RTX 2080 Ti, leaving Nvidia once again dominating the high-end. Still, there are signs that AMD will prepare to compete at the higher end, but that doesn't seem to happen until 2020.
(Image credit: AMD)
The future is in the future
Right now, the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X processor is on the rise - not only is it our best processor in its class, it's sold pretty much everywhere. Currently, Intel's closest competitor is the Intel Core i9-9920X, which has more than doubled in price. So where do we go from here?
Well, AMD will release an even more powerful processor in September in the Ryzen 9 3950X, which will further expand this performance delta. Some rumors suggest that a 10-core Intel Comet Lake chip could dethrone the 3900X. However, it is only a possibility.
With its Ryzen 3000 processors, AMD has been able to increase IPC performance by 15%, bringing Intel's single-core performance within reach. If AMD can continue to make progress, while Intel remains stuck in a 14nm manufacturing process, we could see that Team Red definitely takes advantage of the processor market.
AMD has come a long way in recent years in terms of its processors, and it doesn't look like the manufacturer plans to slow down anytime soon.
We've even started to see signs that the graphics card market will approach the same way as the processor market with its Navi graphics cards. The Comparison will continue to track AMD's progress in 2020 and beyond to see where the chips are.