The problem is a lot of tasks that people want their CPU to be fast at is exactly stuff that parallelizes almost embarrassingly well. Compiling code, video rendering, compressing files. People buying CPUs for this are not as concerned about how many cycles it takes to jump through a vtable as long as its not slow.
Meanwhile, pointing at memory latency as the flaw in Ryzen has been a popular misdirection for a while now. People warned me about it being a performance pitfall since before I bought my first Ryzen processor. In practice it doesn’t show up in even the most complexity intensive workloads as a serious issue. For example, Zen 2 performs very well on hardware emulation. This is possibly because where it takes a hit in memory latency it makes up in caching and prefetching, but honestly I don’t know and I am not sure how to measure. In any case it’s certainly favorably comparable to Intel’s best chipsets in single core workloads even if not on top. Factor in price and multicore workloads and you now have the exact reasons why people like me have been singing the praises... Intel’s single core lead may exist in some form but it is not what it once was, it is not an unconditional lead where an Intel core beats an AMD core. Not even close.
None of this means Intel’s dead of course, but IMO thats mostly because they have a lot more going on than just being the best CPU. They’ve got their dedicated GPU coming out, and plenty of ancillary technology as well. It does seem like for a company like Intel having to take a backseat in CPUs for a while will be painful; unlike AMD, this is a new position for Intel and maybe not one they will handle well.
Meanwhile, pointing at memory latency as the flaw in Ryzen has been a popular misdirection for a while now. People warned me about it being a performance pitfall since before I bought my first Ryzen processor. In practice it doesn’t show up in even the most complexity intensive workloads as a serious issue. For example, Zen 2 performs very well on hardware emulation. This is possibly because where it takes a hit in memory latency it makes up in caching and prefetching, but honestly I don’t know and I am not sure how to measure. In any case it’s certainly favorably comparable to Intel’s best chipsets in single core workloads even if not on top. Factor in price and multicore workloads and you now have the exact reasons why people like me have been singing the praises... Intel’s single core lead may exist in some form but it is not what it once was, it is not an unconditional lead where an Intel core beats an AMD core. Not even close.
None of this means Intel’s dead of course, but IMO thats mostly because they have a lot more going on than just being the best CPU. They’ve got their dedicated GPU coming out, and plenty of ancillary technology as well. It does seem like for a company like Intel having to take a backseat in CPUs for a while will be painful; unlike AMD, this is a new position for Intel and maybe not one they will handle well.