Feature differences and bandwidth can still be a significant issue though, and could become more so as raw single thread general CPU performance increases slow down while the surrounding ecosystem continues to improve. More PCIe lanes, more special purpose instructions, more features like ECC and IOMMU support becoming universal standards would all be nice outcomes to see.
This could represent a real additional long term opportunity to AMD as well, because historically Intel has been pretty fond of creating profitable product line segmentation via only allowing certain features on certain chips. And they've been mediocre about boosting interconnect capacity as well. Perhaps AMD doesn't necessarily need to match them as well in single thread performance if they can get the absolute difference down to a few percent, but be much friendlier then Intel in terms of not artificially restricting useful extra CPU features? I wonder if that becoming an area of competition again could bring some nice energy back to the market?
It's been something that's personally making me reconsider at least. I used to stick to Intel more despite price differences because of their performance advantages, but now I look at the rest of the ecosystem and start to calculate adding a few GPUs, NVMe storage, 10G networking, possibly other accelerator/utility cards and future interconnects, and the PCIe lanes seem to get sucked up a lot faster then they used to. With Ryzen/Epyc AMD is offering a full 64 lanes it looks like vs Intel's 24 here, and even with the latest Xeon I think it's now up to 48 lanes from 32? The difference there isn't nothing if overall system performance starts to depend less on just the CPU then on the overall ability to move data around and keep various more special purpose accelerators fed.
This could represent a real additional long term opportunity to AMD as well, because historically Intel has been pretty fond of creating profitable product line segmentation via only allowing certain features on certain chips. And they've been mediocre about boosting interconnect capacity as well. Perhaps AMD doesn't necessarily need to match them as well in single thread performance if they can get the absolute difference down to a few percent, but be much friendlier then Intel in terms of not artificially restricting useful extra CPU features? I wonder if that becoming an area of competition again could bring some nice energy back to the market?
It's been something that's personally making me reconsider at least. I used to stick to Intel more despite price differences because of their performance advantages, but now I look at the rest of the ecosystem and start to calculate adding a few GPUs, NVMe storage, 10G networking, possibly other accelerator/utility cards and future interconnects, and the PCIe lanes seem to get sucked up a lot faster then they used to. With Ryzen/Epyc AMD is offering a full 64 lanes it looks like vs Intel's 24 here, and even with the latest Xeon I think it's now up to 48 lanes from 32? The difference there isn't nothing if overall system performance starts to depend less on just the CPU then on the overall ability to move data around and keep various more special purpose accelerators fed.