So you agree with his statements about Intel products being "hot garbage" and "trash heaps."? That doesn't need addressing? Just ask the mods to get rid of the report button if it serves no purpose. If it's okay too, then let's be consistent.
In light of recent events (2018 and later)... they are.
First, the hot part.
What do you think is the result of Intel rehashing Skylake on improved 14nm iterations all these past years due to the 10nm debacle? The 9900k is a furnace because of only being able to push clock speeds higher to increase performance. 5GHz ST turbo is nice, but if you want that juicy MCE all core 5GHz turbo or a manual 5GHz all core OC, then you'd better be prepared to cool that thing down. You get FX9590 power consumption, and the performance to go along with it.
Now, let's go to the trash part which is about the glaring hardware vulnerabilities.
If you've been paying attention since the start of 2018, Intel's products all the way back to P6/Pentium Pro are designed in a way that can be exploited (save for the most secure modern x86 design, 1st gen in-order Atom Bonnell). They are in the process of dying from a thousand cuts, mitigations. Once you apply all of them for all known (stress in
KNOWN as there will probably be even more ways to exploit the hardware since it's the problem) you're already taking a ~ -15% performance hit. If you need to go as far as disabling HT for your security needs, then you get another significant hit on top.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=mds-zombieload-mit&num=1
If looking at the geometric mean for the tests run today, the Intel systems all saw about 16% lower performance out-of-the-box now with these default mitigations and obviously even lower if disabling Hyper Threading for maximum security. The two AMD systems tested saw a 3% performance hit with the default mitigations. While there are minor differences between the systems to consider, the mitigation impact is enough to draw the Core i7 8700K much closer to the Ryzen 7 2700X and the Core i9 7980XE to the Threadripper 2990WX.
Some vulnerabilities like SPOILER
can't be mitigated by software. Yeah...
Mom and pop browsing facebook won't notice the slowdown, but everyone else doing productive work (from individuals to datacenters) with their machines is bound to be... angry, by the result. That number is for Skylake... if you go back to Sandy/Ivy well, it gets ugly since they lack the INVPCID instruction that Haswell/Broadwell and above have to speed up one of the mitigations. Nehalem and earlier, even uglier.
The effective IPC/performance per clock gap after mitigations between Zen+ and Skylake has disappeared or outright turned into AMD's favor... and that brings us to AMD's handling of these vulnerabilites. Out of all known so far, AMD only gets hit by parts of Spectre and it's been patched.
No, the hit piece done by CTS labs on AMD doesn't count as these "vulnerabilities" required root access on the system to exploit. Yeah, nice try. On the other hand, if you ask Intel hardware nicely for the keys to the kingdom, it'll hand them over.
So, Intel's only way to power through the performance hit right now is thanks to clock speeds, and that's alright... but that doesn't cover all the locked parts out there and previous, still completely viable generations that got a significant downgrade.
I'm pretty sure whatever they have in the pipeline ready to come out (Icelake) thanks to the 10nm train wreck is a nice product and probably has fixed many or all of these vulnerabilities without the associated performance loss... but that is still far, far away, and Zen2 launches or is revealed on Monday. Willow Cove with its
redesigned cache and security features (complete Spectre fix?) is even further away.
To put things in perspective, if AMD still were competing with faildozer derivatives (or even somehow not gone bankrupt), then it wouldn't be fair to call Intel's product hot garbage even in this mess. When you have competition as good as what Ryzen is right now and will be shortly, also a product that is clearly not vulnerable to the same attacks, well, yeah. You get the point.
If the +~10-15% IPC increase over Zen+ is real (seems to be according to leaks) apart from the confirmed improved SIMD performance AND that performance is gained without any hardware vulnerabilities (why would they start cutting corners now?) AND the rumors of 4.5-5GHz operation are confirmed too, then we can completely dismiss Intel parts as complete, total hot garbage until Icelake comes out.