Linus Torvalds has been using Intel processors for over 15 years now. He shifted recently to AMD processors since he felt the yields are better with the latter. Now, in the Real World Technology forum, he once again blasted Intel for being inefficient, while praising AMD for the best value of money.
I’m personally very happy with AMD these days. I used to absolutely despise their horrible bulldozer cores, but I think they’ve had a home run with their Ryzen series and their chiplet approach. Not just because they fixed their cores, but because their chiplets made it so much easier to do the scaling they do and offer close to that “twice the cores for twice the price model.
Talking about the price comparisons between Xeon and AMD Threadripper he said,
I used to look at the Xeon CPU’s, and I could never really make the math work. The Intel math was basically that you get twice the CPU for five times the price. So for my personal workstations, I ended up using Intel consumer CPU’s.
Justifying his choice of opting the AMD Threadripper, he mentions,
The AMD Threadripper pricing is much closer to “twice the price for twice the CPU”. Yes, you end up paying more for the accoutrements (MB and cooling), but that’s pretty much in line too. So yes, it ends up being more expensive, but if CPU power is what you want and need, the expense is pretty much in line with what you get.
Would Torvalds consider going back to Intel-chip based workstations? That would be not just no, but hell no. Torvalds concluded,
Intel with their HEDT and Xeon chips that required different boutique silicon (and thus the excessive pricing) is dead to me unless they seriously fix their sh*t.
He equally blamed memory manufacturers too, for evading it saying for economics and lower power, but put major blame on Intel. This reaches a conclusion that Linus is much happier with AMD chips, and not going back to Intel anytime soon.
