20 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2020NEWS WHAT’S WRONG WITH INTEL?
Athlon 64 and we
were basically trying
to catch up with
Pentium 4 to
Conroe.”
Indeed, AMD
had made a
massive dent in
Intel’s performance
lead when the
Pentium 4 and its
Netburst
architecture just
never closed the
door on AMD. For
a few years, AMD’s chips were the must-
have CPUs, while Pentium 4 was shunned.
With Intel’s original “Conroe” or Core 2
CPUs in 2006, Intel regained the
performance crown and literally hadn’t lost
it until AMD’s resurgence with Ryzen (go.
pcworld.com/rsrz) in 2017. Intel’s
forthcoming Tiger Lake chips (go.pcworld.
com/4thc) will delay the pain, but won’t
stop it completely, Piednoël said.RYZEN’S “HYPER-
THREADING” LOOKED
GOOD BECAUSE OF POOR
SINGLE-THREADED
PERFORMANCE
During his video, Piednoël gets into the
technical nitty-gritty of Intel’s Skylake-based
core roots, saying the architecture wasessentially designed for single-threaded
performance and has been enhanced to
improve multi-core over the generations.
Although Piednoël does compliment
AMD for having more throughput, he does
say the company’s Zen cores have their own
issues. For example, the original Ryzen CPU
appeared to offer far more efficiency with its
Symmetrical Multi-Threading turned on than
you saw with Hyper-Threading enabled on
Intel chips.
“What people didn’t understand then was
that the opportunity for the SMT to gain
performance is only as good, or as bad, as
your out of order (performance).” Piednoël
said. If the out of order performance were as
efficient as it is on Intel, there wouldn’t be as
much work left for the virtual SMT or
Hyper-Threading.Piednoël said the original Zen core was praised for SMT performance when in
reality, it was just masking poor single-threaded performance.