JAMES GORBOLD / HARDWARE ACCELERATED
James Gorbold has been building, tweaking and overclocking PCs ever since the 1980s. He now helps Scan Computers to develop new systems.
OPINION
I
f you only ever read product reviews it would easy
to believe that AMD is currently giving Intel a thrashing
in the desktop CPU market. However, while AMD’s
Ryzen CPUs do lead the way in most benchmarks, there’s a lot
more to success and failure than simple benchmark results.
Price is a major factor, and a tricky one. Right now, there’s
an approximate £100 price difference between the two best-
selling high-end CPUs, the Ryzen 9 5900X and Core i9-10900K.
On paper, the 5900X, with its two extra cores and outstanding
multithreaded performance offers far better
value for money.
For gaming, however, the GPU is far more
important when it comes to performance –
you’d arguably be better off putting that £100
towards a faster GPU. The 5900X’s ongoing
supply problems don’t help either. As such,
it’s no surprise to me that many gamers are
still opting for a Core i9 over a Ryzen 9.
Looking forward, it won’t be long until Intel’s next-gen Rocket
Lake processors hit the market. I’ve seen lots of speculative
press coverage dismissing these upcoming processors for
having two fewer cores than the current flagship Comet Lake
CPUs, but this could turn out to be a smart move by Intel for
the gaming market.
After all, how many games really need more than 8 cores
and 16 threads? I’m not arguing that Rocket Lake will be a
game changer, but I don’t think its right to count it out of the
fight simply based on its core count. CPUs need to be smart
to win, not just packed full of largely idle cores.
Later this year Intel has an even bigger roll of the dice planned
with Alder Lake. With a combination of high-performance and
low-power cores, and potentially with PCI-E 5 and DDR5 along
to help, Alder Lake could prove very potent if it’s done right.
However, I suspect Alder Lake may sink or swim depending
how the Windows Task Scheduler divides up threads between
the two types of core. Because of this challenge, I suspect
Alder Lake might turn out to be an evolutionary dead end,
or at least a shaky start that needs more time for software to
take advantage of it, or another CPU generation to get right.
Whether Alder Lake is successful or not, I welcome the fact
that no one company has a clear-cut lead
in the processor market. The situation now,
where Intel is leading one generation and
AMD leads the next, is reminiscent of the PC
industry in the 1990s. Many people are used
to thinking one company is all-conquering, as
has been the way the past decade, but back
then, fierce competition led to each company
putting a real focus on R&D and innovation in an attempt to
leapfrog the other.
While not every gambit paid off, such as Intel NetBurst (see
p106) and AMD Bulldozer, for each of these failures, there
were also successes, such as Intel Core and AMD Athlon 64.
And while AMD has hit hard with Zen and its successors,
the next few years could see a resurgence in processor
innovation from both Intel and AMD. Nvidia could even make
something really interesting if it gets the keys to ARM – it’s
already announced a range of DPUs, an interesting new type
of smart NIC with an on-board processor. And now that Intel
has the extremely experienced Pat Gelsinger at the helm, I
really wouldn’t count it out yet. The next few years will be
bumpy, but certainly fun to watch.It’s no surprise to me that
many gamers are still
opting for a Core i9 over
a Ryzen 9DON’T COUNT OUT
INTEL YET
James Gorbold discusses how Intel’s road map to success
is full of potential pitfalls and opportunities