Now it's an interesting battle. I want to build new workstation, probably in 2020. I was going to go to Threadripper route, but now I have a choice and that's awesome.
It's only a choice if you're willing to settle for:
- a long list of security vulnerabilities which, when fully patched and recommended features (including HyperThreading) are disabled, results in a huge loss in performance(~25% in some reports)
- lower power efficiency due to still using 14nm process
- platform uncertainty, i.e. will upgrading mean buying a new motherboard?
AFAIK Intel patches many of those security issues in new CPUs, so performance loss won't be as severe. I don't care about power efficiency, as electricity is cheap enough for me and I'm buying computer for many years, so I'm unlikely to benefit from CPU upgrading in 7 years anyway.
Basically for me it's about:
* Security issues. They are real for Intel and performance loss is real.
* Inter-core communication latency. I don't particularly like this chiplet design for AMD, when some cores have a long time to talk to other cores. Intel seems like a safer play here. But I did not research about their HEDT CPUs, may be it's the same for Intel.
* Balance of frequency/cores. While more cores is better, I think that after 12 cores I don't really need more. And single-thread performance is always important.
* Other issues. I don't like that AMD had multiple issues with its Zen CPUs, especially with Linux. Crashes, RNG bug, overall Linux compatibility. I'm feeling like Intel takes Linux compatibility much more seriously and Intel overall seems like a safer bet for stable system.
I think a lot of the issues you've brought up regarding AMD CPUs are no longer relevant with Zen 3.
Inter-core communication latency has been much improved with the larger caches and architecture improvements in Zen 3. Single threaded performance has always been within a stone's throw of Intel CPUs with Zen and Zen 2 and now the gap isn't even worth talking about with Zen 3 since you get more cores for less money.
I'm not sure about the Linux story, but this is the first I've heard of issues with Zen on Linux.
AMD's entire chiplet architecture is aimed squarely at cheaper server chips. All of their biggest wins have been with cloud providers like Google and Amazon. If their target was the consumer market, they would have launched 7nm mobile chips first. Given that the overwhelming majority of servers run Linux, I doubt they neglected to focus on that OS.
Zen 1 didn't have an especially large list of issues for being a ground-up new architecture. Launching to enthusiast desktops so you can revise things for the server market seems like a great strategy for them overall.
TR4 will likely support PCIe 4.0. It seems to make sense to me to pick Threadripper because of this. Ignoring costs the future-proof of having tomorrow's IO interconnect is probably worth a few bucks for a work machine.
I can't imagine scenario where PCIe 3.0 is not enough for me. Even for storage it only matters for a linear I/O and I don't care about it that much. Random I/O won't saturate PCIe interface, it's not fast enough on any disk.
It might not be useful now but in terms of future proofing a system it might become more of a deciding factor. The ability to make use of drives, graphics cards, network interfaces, or anything that can connect via PCIe for a few years to come might be beneficial.
PCIe 4 is only really worth it for enhanced storage drives... and they do come with some heat and related performance penalties if the case airflow is insufficient.
Depending on your workloads, it may well be worth it for you though.
