When will Intel make a comeback?
AMD’s dominance this month looks ominous for Intel, but we’ve been here before. Never count out the venerable chip giant
W e had been expecting this moment for years, ever since AMD launched the Ryzen Threadripper. Still, it’s a shock to run a workstation Labs test that doesn’t feature any processors from Intel. It seems like a terminal situation. But anyone who has been in the computing business for a decade or two will know that processor company roadmaps stretch out for years, and although Intel is currently down, it’s very far from out.
We’ve been here before, after all. In 2003, AMD launched the Opteron, and in the consumer space the Athlon 64 soon followed. The company had beaten Intel to a mainstream 64-bit architecture, which was ahead of its time but is now standard. For a while, business customers wanted Opterons and gamers wanted Athlon 64 and FX processors in their machines too. The Pentium 4 was history. Then
Intel dumped its NetBurst microarchitecture that had turned into a dead end, switched to Core, and started to produce multicore CPUs that won the market back from AMD.
Business buyers particularly remember how Opteron came and went. So naturally some were sceptical when AMD launched EPYC back into the same server market. Platform duration isn’t so important for workstation purchasers, but if you buy a fleet of data centre systems, you want a serious progression of long-lasting products to rely on. But this time the AMD roadmap extends further into the future and it has hit all of its milestones and delivered on its promises. In short, AMD has learned from its previous mistakes.
Performance win
The Ryzen Threadripper and EPYC have the clear performanc performance crown over Xeon – there’s no Xeon Xeo with 64 cores, and not even beyond bey 28 cores unless you get into the t OEM-only Cascade Lake-A Lake-AP range, which still maxes o out at 56 cores. Considering that th the 28-core Intel Xeon Platinum 8280L retails for nearly £18,000, one can only imagine how much the 56-core 9280 costs.
The £3,500 price of the 64-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X seems like a bargain in comparison. Even the 64-core thirdgeneration AMD EPYC CPUs start at under £6,000.
The one thing AMD Ryzen Threadripper didn’t have, though, was the same level of enterprisegrade features as Intel Xeon in the workstation space, unless you went for the server-oriented EPYC. The Ryzen Threadripper has quadchannel memory, and although the supported clock speeds are generally higher than Intel processors, Xeons from Bronze upwards enable six-channel memory, so support 1TB compared to the Threadripper’s 256GB.
This is where the AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro comes in. The new CPUs have eight-channel memory support and a maximum capacity of 2TB. They have 128 PCI Express lanes compared to the basic Threadripper’s 88 (although both are considerably more than the second-generation Xeon Scalable’s ble’s 48). They also have the security features of AMD EPYC, including memory encryption and secure booting. The Threadripper Pro CPUs are re more expensive than the e equivalent non-Pro Threadippers, eadippers, but not hideously ously so if you need these features res – the 64-core version is about ut £1,300 more than its non-Pro ro equivalent.
Intel fights back
It seems like AMD has Intel in a fatal headlock and won’t let go. But in April Intel announced the third generation of Xeon Scalable, which (with the Platinum 8380) ups the maximum cores to 40, enables PCI Express 4, increases the maximum memory to 4TB and the number of PCI Express lanes to 64. This still isn’t up there with 64core AMD EPYCs and Ryzen Threadrippers, but it’s a step in the right direction.
Rumours have also started to appear regarding the 12thgeneration Intel “Alder Lake” Core i9-12900K, alleging it will be a
16-core processor with a 3.9GHz base clock and 5.3GHz turbo mode. This processor generation will also allegedly support PCI Express 5 and DDR5 memory. These features would give it the edge over the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X that has been supplied by several manufacturers this month. The 12th-gen Core family is expected to arrive this autumn.
However, Intel needs to do more than just catch up. As AMD’s experience in the professional GPU market has shown, merely matching the performance and features of the incumbent while hoping that a keen price will win over sales is not enough. The reason why we have no Intel-based workstations in this month’s Labs is because AMD’s lead in core density is now clear, and that’s a key feature for content-creation workstations and data centre servers.
The 12th generation of the Core architecture should give Intel back some potential in the sub-£3,000 workstation market. But when you go above this price, the Ryzen Threadripper looks unassailable for content creation for the time being, with the Pro version mopping up further areas where massive amounts of high-bandwidth memory are beneficial and extra security essential. We may have to wait until the 13th generation “Raptor Lake”, or even 14th generation “Meteor Lake” before Intel starts to attack the top of the workstation market again.
“The reason why we have no Intel-based workstations in this month’s Labs is because AMD’s lead in core density is now clear”