Subj : Intel: Once mighty, now falling?
To   : tenser
From : Accession
Date : Thu May 22 2025 18:17:24

Hey tenser!

On Fri, 23 May 2025 02:38:14 +1200, you wrote:

 > Yeah,the intertubes are pretty much all wrong, there.  Current
 > generation AMD microarchitectures are Zen 4 and Zen 5; the "code
 > base" in question might be AGESA, but mention of Zen 2 in there
 > is pretty sparse; Zen 2 is really ancient.  I can tell you that,
 > in particular, Turin is pretty zippy.

Well, that's good to know. I had just recently got a Google pop-up on my phone that mentioned AMD's latest CPUs were suffering from some of the same woes as Intel, so I mentioned it here since the Intel side of it was already brought up. Either way, not a great time to be in the market, and I'm glad I'm currently not. ;)

 > Homelabs aren't really something I'm super up on, but that sounds
 > like Sandy Bridge; basically anything is going to be ok.

Now you see where my price point was. ~$500 for the whole setup, which included 32gb RAM, and me buying 4 2TB 10k HDDs.

 > On the AMD side, you can probably get a Milan-based server, or even
 > something based on Genoa, pretty reasonably.  Personally, I'd go for
 > that.  You can probably get 16 cores/32 threads for under $2k, but
 > I'm speculating.  (Our machines are rack-scale, and go for about a
 > million dollars a pop; but you get 32 compute sleds with 128 HW threads
 > and 1TiB of RAM each, plus about 48 TiB of disk and 100 Gbps to a
 > custom switch).

Even 8 cores/16 threads would probably be fine. I'm definitely not looking to spend upwards of $2k on BBSing and at home tinkering. At the moment I'm running 3 VMs, with 2 cores and 4gb RAM dedicated for each. I have plenty of RAM and HDD space left over currently. I was just wondering if there was any AMD CPUs that were preferred over others for this kind of task, I guess.

 > But for day-to-day consumer use, is a desktop machine even that
 > useful?  Probably not.  Most end users are probably better off with
 > a laptop and an external monitor+keyboard/mouse.

I do some gaming, yet I don't usually bother with 4k as it all looks the same after 1080p (lol) when FPS is concerned. I had a laptop once, and it always seemed hot to the point I got one of those fan pads you put under it. I'm not really interested in the portability or anything, which is why I stick with desktops (and build them myself).

 > I remember when DEC was failing; they were selling off successful
 > business units to try and preserve their high-margin server
 > business, selling their big VAXen and Alpha boxes running VMS.
 > They gave away almost everything: Alpha, the networking division,
 > etc.  I see Intel making similar mistakes to try and preserve the
 > x86 business.

I guess I'm glad I don't see or pay attention to any of that from the userland. But, whenever I'm in the market to upgrade one of my PCs, I may end up doing an AMD build next. That probably won't be for another few years, though, as what I have now is still kickin' strong.. and they aren't creating any new games that demand anything more these days that I'm actually interested in playing.

Regards,
Nick

.... Sarcasm: because beating people up is illegal.
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