I have to say, Zen 2 looks basically excellent overall, whether it be in Ryzen 3000 or in Rome.

It's been a decade since there was a truly worthwhile AMD machine - the combination of a lot of AMD missteps (all the bulldozer etc) and Intel executing well ten years ago made AMD not really all that competitive.

But it really looks like tables have turned, and while I want to wait to see that there aren't any other gotchas (we already had the broken rdrand fiasco), the way things look right now, I'd expect my next workstation to be AMD.

Even if Intel is over the worst hump, their current offerings simply don't look competitive. And almost as interestingly, the official Intel roadmap doesn't even have anything competitive in it in the future either, unless I've missed something.

Of course, roadmaps change, and the AMD system that looks most promising isn't really out yet. But I'm on a i9-9900K right now, and honestly, Ryzen 3950X looks like a very tempting and obvious next upgrade. I can still do a quiet machine with something in the 105W range.

And I'm really really fed up with Intel's ECC policy. I've complained to them for decades. At some point you just have to admit that Intel is no longer executing, and isn't interested in me as a market. I'm just not interested in their insane Xeon differentiation.

Intel seems to be competitive in laptops, and I guess they decided that's their primary consumer target. I'll happily look for a good Ice Lake chip in a laptop next year, but right now it really looks like AMD is doing better everywhere else.

Knock wood.

Intel has had their security bugs, but AMD has had a few really bad system bugs too (early Zen 1 had some odd crashing bug, Zen 2 with the rdrand bug). So it's just as well the 3950X isn't out yet, I'll wait and see a bit more first.

Linus