[dhruvdh]

> Performance per watt was better for Intel

No, not its not even close. AMD is miles ahead.

This is a Phoronix review for Turin (current generation): https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-epyc-9965-9755-benchmark...

You can similarly search for phoronix reviews for the Genoa, Bergamo, and Milan generations (the last two generations).

[pclmulqdq]

You're thinking strictly about core performance per watt. Intel has been offering a number of accelerators and other features that make perf/watt look at lot better when you can take advantage of them.

AMD is still going to win a lot of the time, but Intel is better than it seems.

[adrian_b]

That is true, but the accelerators are disabled in all cheap SKUs and they are enabled only in very expensive Xeons.

For most users it is like the accelerators do not exist, even if they increase the area and the cost of all Intel Xeon CPUs.

This market segmentation policy is exactly as stupid as the removal of AVX-512 from the Intel consumer CPUs.

All users hate market segmentation and it is an important reason for preferring AMD CPUs, which are differentiated only on quantitative features, like number of cores, clock frequency or cache size, not on qualitative features, like the Intel CPUs, for which you must deploy different program variants, depending on the cost of the CPU, which may provide or not provide the features required for running the program.

The Intel marketing has always hoped that by showing nice features available only in expensive SKUs they will trick the customers into spending more for the top models. However any wise customer has preferred to buy from the competition instead of choosing between cheap crippled SKUs and complete but too expensive SKUs.

[andyferris]

Are generic web server workloads going to use these features? I would assume the bulk of e.g. EC2 spent its time doing boring non-accelerated “stuff”.

[kimixa]

But those accelerators are also available for AMD platforms - even if how they're provided is a bit different (often on add-in cards instead of a CPU "tile").

And things like the MI300A mean that isn't really a requirement now either.