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Arch-rivals Intel and AMD Team Up on PC Chips To Battle Nvidia (pcworld.com)
Intel and AMD, arch-rivals for decades, are teaming up to thwart a common competitor, Nvidia. On Monday, the two companies said they are co-designing an Intel Core microprocessor with a custom AMD Radeon graphics core inside the processor package. The chip is intended for laptops that are thin and lightweight but powerful enough to run high-end videogames, the companies said. From a report: Executives from both AMD and Intel told PCWorld that the combined AMD-Intel chip will be an "evolution" of Intel's 8th-generation, H-series Core chips, with the ability to power-manage the entire module to preserve battery life. It's scheduled to ship as early as the first quarter of 2018. Though both companies helped engineer the new chip, this is Intel's project -- Intel first approached AMD, both companies confirmed. AMD, for its part, is treating the Radeon core as a single, semi-custom design, in the same vein as the chips it supplies to consoles like the Microsoft Xbox One X and Sony Playstation 4. Some specifics, though, remain undisclosed: Intel refers to it as a single product, though it seems possible that it could eventually be offered at a range of clock speeds. [...] Shaking hands on this partnership represents a rare moment of harmony in an often bitter rivalry that began when AMD reverse-engineered the Intel 8080 microchip in 1975.
This is what Apple should be using in future Macs. Maybe they knew of Intel plans, that's why the MacBook Air and Mac mini haven't really been updated in such a long time. It's the two Macs that will have this new CPU first.
#DeleteFacebook
This is like, "Hell has frozen over" kind of news
Am I the only one who smell this as very "Apple" wanted?
I dont think AMD will be giving up any GFX secret, more likely this is AMD shipping Intel a Mobile Gfx Die to be integrated within the same CPU package.
But in any case, Why not just have Intel ship a Mobile CPU without iGPU and a Separate GPU.
And AMD, why now? When Zen is doing great, has great roadmap and potential, along with much better GFx then Intel. Why?
has frozen over.
The first two words of the article are really "Absolutely Incredible!"? It's news. It's interesting. Incredible? I don't know if I'd say it's absolutely incredible that two companies are working together to bring a product to the market. I think PCWorld might be a bit to excited about this and forgot about actual journalism.
Sent from my TARDIS
I think that's a mis-characterization of their relationship... in the early 90's they were partners, AMD was licensing Intel's tech.
Great story bro.
Asking slashdot: Should I care at the software perfromance level if I have an AMD or an Intel.
it's been over a decade since I bought a big AMD cluster. I regretted that because I found that at that time in history while some code did run equally well on these that in general the software libraries for AMD just weren't tuned as well for these chips. Many optimizations not taken.
the main issue was that make files were just defaulting to x386 (this was pre ia64) and not special instructions. SIMD support wasn't there. And many libraries I had to use were pre-compiled to generic specs rather than optimized.
Likewise the compliers I used were faster with intel.
So I regreted that choice. I made it after carefully considering the benchmarks and raw perfromance stats. But later I understood that these benchmarking programs are the ones that got the attention for tuning and my own code would not achieve that.
Now it's a couple decades later. DOes this matter at all. SHould I not care if I have intel or AMD at the software level and just buy the computer that fits my current use patterns.
these days I'm not doing cluster work or writing much code but instead mainly blender and python and lots and lots of animation renders.
what does slashdot advise: if I see a cost difference should I risk AMD?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
What's next? Sonic on Nintendo consoles? Square-Enix games on computers?
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When a laptop is crap, you don't blame Intel, you blame the crap company that made your crappy laptop.
Maybe you just bought a 7970 from a crappy company.
#DeleteFacebook
wow, here's a counterpoint
I stopped buying nvidia cards for the longest time cause their vrm's would shit the bed and I got tired of having a nice video card in the mail from warranty returns
guess nobody makes a good video card based on these 2 indisputable points, how has the industry survived so long
(ps been running a 7950 since the day it came out, runs rage all day long maxed settings @ 1080p at 60+ fps, maybe you are just a fuckin retard)
Maybe you just bought a 7970 from a crappy company.
Nope. Being unable to run "Rage" on 7970 and AMD processor is well documented problem that never got fixed. Not by AMD. Not by id Software. After my $300 video card went up in smoke, I replaced it with a $60 Nvidia video card and the game just worked.
About 5 years ago INTC tried to buy NVDA. They had enough money to do it, and the offer was going to be reasonable, but there was a sticking point about who would become CEO of the combined company. Paul Otellini of Intel was about to step down, and the assumption from NVIDIA's Jensen Huang was he would become the CEO of the combined Intel-NVIDIA. But Intel's board wasn't going to have it and promoted Brian Krzanich to CEO instead. And that's the story of how Intel managed to lose a ton of money and missed opportunities in 3D graphics and Compute.
The 7970 was widely considered a good card, but you're making decisions based on an experience you had 5-6 years ago. It's entirely possible that the slow framerate was a chipset compatibility issue or your motherboard manufacture screwed up or that you needed to install some updates to your BIOS to fix a well known issue. Most of the cards have thermal sensors that shut off if the fan dies because you won't find a 100% reliable fan on GeForce cards either.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The linchpin of the Intel-AMD agreement is a tiny piece of silicon that Intel began talking up over the past year: the Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridge, or EMIB. Numerous EMIBs can connect silicon dies, routing the electrical traces through the substrate itself. The result is what Intel calls a System-in-Package module. In this case, EMIBs allowed Intel to construct the three-die module, which will tie together Intelâ(TM)s Core chip, the Radeon core, and next-generation high-bandwidth memory, or HBM2.
AMD sell Intel bare dies that talk EMIB. Interesting thing is that Intel could do a deal with NVidia to supply GPU dies which use the same interface. Well except that Intel pays NVidia licence fees whereas the AMD Intel patent licensing agreement is completely one sided - AMD pays Intel but Intel gets IP rights to anything AMD invents for free.
It's not like AMD is selling Intel a synthesizable core or even a hard macro. And Intel being Intel they probably pay people to do competitor analysis on AMD stuff anyway. So getting bare dies doesn't tell them anything that they don't already know.
And as a lot of people have noted Apple use Intel and AMD GPUs but not NVidia ones. Post Itanium I think Intel regards Apple as its non commodity low volume/high margin market.
So it all makes sense. It'll be interesting to see what the chip costs and if EMIB graphics has performance and/or power advantages over PCI Express run chip to chip. With USB you can strip out the analog transceivers for HSIC
https://www.synopsys.com/dw/dw...
Could you do something similar for PCIe? Turns out you can
http://eecatalog.com/pcie/2012...
Meanwhile, modem makers were looking for a suitable interconnect for next-generation LTE networks. These networks will have air interfaces capable of throughputs beyond the 40 MB/s typically possible with HSIC USB. Further, there was a desire to deploy other SuperSpeed applications such as mass storage in a chip-to-chip environment. The SuperSpeed Inter-Chip USB (SSIC USB) group selected M-PHY as the physical layer, and developed a reference model that bridges from the PIPE 3.0 reference model to the M-PHY physical layer. This allows existing USB 3.0 IP to be quickly adapted for SSIC USB use by deleting (or disabling) the legacy USB 2.0 support, replacing the USB PIPE 3.0 implementation with a shim plus an M-PHY implementation, and making minor changes to the link layer of the USB 3.0 IP.
In September 2012, PCI-SIG and the MIPI Alliance announced an initiative to similarly adapt PCIe to run over M-PHY. Because of the work already done by the USB-IF SSIC USB group, the adaptation will likely include a similar reference model based on PIPE 3.0, simplifying early prototyping and architectural verification.
PCIe over M-PHY is likely to be quickly accepted in the Ultrabook and x86-based tablet PC market because it will allow reuse of hardware and software IP while lowering system power requirements. Adoption may be slower in smartphones and ARM-based tablets, because thereâ(TM)s less experience in using PCIe in those systems.
Of course you could do that for PCIe run chip to chip too. Still maybe you could use lower voltages over EMIB.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
You got peanut butter on my chocolate!
I've been using Thinkpads with Debian for quite a while, and for GFX stability nothing beat the Intel driver so far, although the GMA cards as not as fast as dedicated NVIDIA/ATI-AMD.
Soo.. how will this work with Linux? Intel open drivers? Will it be part of the 2018-gen Tx80(s|p) series?
Putting aside AMD's very newest chip for a moment, there are basically three different kinds of use cases:
A) I want the best performance I can get within my $X budget.
B) it's a server serving many clients (lots of threads)
C) It's a single thread and I don't care how much it costs because I'm spending taxpayer money, I want the very fastest single-thread performance, cost be damned
Intel specializes in case C. Raw single-thread performance, cost be damned.
AMD will give you more cores for the dollar, so it competes well in case B, servers running many threads. AMD also traditionally costs significantly less, so it fits case A, getting the best CPU you can within a certain price range.
That's a generalization, though. It's best to compare one CPU model to another, evaluating based on the needs of your specific application and budget.
Makes sense. Intel graphics are still a failure.
Remember when the industry panicked when Intel bought Chips & Technologies and the Real3D patents?
That didn't go so well. Who else had a shoebox full of Intel i740 cards bought at fire-sale prices?
Kriston
I mean, now that they have a real chance of making a good Ryzen based APU they join forces with Intel? That surely doesn't make sense.
I wonder what the price will be like. Will it be Intel like (read: too much) or AMD (eternal underdog) like?
Maybe you just bought a 7970 from a crappy company.
Nope. Being unable to run "Rage" on 7970 and AMD processor is well documented problem that never got fixed. Not by AMD. Not by id Software. After my $300 video card went up in smoke, I replaced it with a $60 Nvidia video card and the game just worked.
A $60 Nvidia Card? Yeah, the game just worked, at about 3 FPS
Didn't see that coming. I can think of a couple other tech companies I would like to see work together on projects. Not quite on topic, but I would still like to see Microsoft buy the BB10 OS, spend a year working with it, NOT fuck up the still awesome interface and bring me a phone I actually want. I use an S8+ now, but the BB Classic is still the best phone I have ever used. I never had the slightest problem running side loaded Android apps. If whatever framework was behind that can be maintained and developed, perhaps MS could write a dev kit for an Android and MS BB11 with options to compile a single code base for Android AND OR MS BB11.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
How do you get rid of all the heat from that one single combined package?
I got a free nVidia GTX 650 that was headed for the scrapyard. Runs my games at 30+ FPS just fine.
#DeleteFacebook
Great story bro.
That's what fuckwits say when they can't come up with anything intelligent. Either that or "protip".
What gen AMP proc?
This is all about Microsoft's W10-on-ARM project.
Once they ship this you will have all the power-saving of an ARM chip with 80% of the GPU performance of a dedicated nVidia chip (since the Intel GPUs are so bad and power-hungry) and Intel won't make a PENNY off of that laptop.
Smacks of Desperation on Intel's part to me.
Qualcomm and Microsoft are going to make a very big splash in 2018 with WoARM and the 845 chip on the new Surface-like devices.
That Intel resurrected the Slot 1 form factor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slot_1
Title erroneously leads one to believe that Intel and AMD are so terrified of PC Chips (now ECS) that some teamwork is in order...
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
Looks great for desktop and server use. Does AMD have a good mobile offering at the moment?
Yes, the recently released Raven Ridge aka Ryzen Mobile.
My personal hope is for AMD to release some low-power APU's that fit between mobile & 'classical' desktop applications. Say, AM4 socket parts with around ~30W TDP to go on affordable mini-ITX boards for SFF PC's, home theatre, all-in-ones and such. Not that I would mind even lower-power mobile parts, but those tend to be thin on the ground in terms of availability for diy builds (eg. separate APU + motherboard purchase). And there's quite some space these days between laptops & the bulky PC's of yesterday.
Clearly defective hardware. There is no possibility that the game software had a bug in it because software is always perfect. /s
Lately, AMD made news for their well received Zen CPUs and lackluster Vega GPUs.
So... let's pair an Intel CPU with an AMD GPU...
The AMD Raven Ridge GPU performance is said to be on the same level as Intel's current offering, which is pretty bad, but the CPU is quite good.
TBH, it kind of makes sense : Intel CPUs have good single thread performance, and dedicated AMD GPUs are better than Intel's offering, combining them can be good for mid-range gaming, but still, weirdest partnership ever...
Wouldn't something like this fall afoul of cartel laws?
It's not like nVidia's putting out desktop processors or anything.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
amd FX4170
what about more pci-e intel???
Except it's not. This really is amazing news to me, and they definitely will blow a big hole in the budget gaming market.
Multi Chip Modules have existed forever in battery powered devices- and Intel has NEVER had a dGPU (discrete graphics processing unit) worth a damn, so usually partnered with an Nvidia chip.
There is nothing new or special in this FAKE NEWS press release. Fake as in something 'new' is being done by Intel and AMD. Anyone with a brain knew Intel was in serious trouble BEFORE the disasterous Larrabee project- when Intel spent more than the combined R_D budgets of Amd and Nvidia, across their entire corporate history, to make the worst GPU in GPU history. After the mega flop of larrabee, Intel bought some more rotten IP to refocus on their existing iGPU (the GPU built into their CPUs). After spending tens of billions of dollars, they got the iGPU good enough for non-critical 2D, Windows Desktop, video and casual basic 3D gaming use.
Intel's last initiative was the mega-disaster, Crystalwell, where Intel first placed special GPU only memory on the same die as the CPU, and then in a second revision made that memory chip L4 cache for both the CPU and GPU clusters. The performance of Crystalwell stank given the insane manufacturing cost, and the solution was still utterly useless for modern gaming.
Anyway, in a desperate attempt to prevent mobile Windows going ARM (as Microsoft wants), Intel has partnered with AMD again to make these MCM modules for high end tablets and the like. They won't challenge high-end gaming laptops that use mobile Nvidia GPUs. And they won't have the low cost of laptops and tabs using Intel's Atoms and similar.
But it gets worse for Intel. AMD can put the same VEGA GPU on the same chip as Ryzen+, AMD's superior x86 CPU architecture. AMD's module solution next year has the integrated CPU and GPU cluster with HBM memory stacks- and will use less power than a TWO chip + memory solution using Intel CPUs.
But it gets even worse for Intel. TSMC (the main place you make the best chips- as used by Apple and Microsoft/AMD and Nvidia) is well ahead of Intel in process tech. AMD currently makes PC parts at Global Foundaries, once a joke but now GF is moving ahead of Intel as well.
Today Intel has a minor clock speed advantage over AMD's Ryzen (5GHz vs 4GHz), but most Intel parts are sold well below max clock so that doesn't apply. AMD is actually faster in IPC (instructions per clock) when non-Intel biased compilers are used. Ryzen is lower power too. Zen+ (zen is the Ryzen internal architecture name) should close the clock gap on Intel. Zen2 will be superior to the best Intel has in every metric- and then Intel is done.
If AMD was using TSMC to make its commercial CPU and GPU parts, Intel would be wiped out in the mid, high-end and server marketplace and AMD GPUs would rival the best from Nvidia. AMD already makes the console parts powering consoles from Sony and Microsoft at TSMC.
That political factors cause AMD to use GF saves both Intel and Nvidia at this moment. Nvida has good tech going into the immediate future, but Intel does not. Intel is the 'Weinstein' of chip making companies, and like Weinstein, has its success down to its connection to a particular powerful minority in the USA. But just as Weinstein is having his true nature exposed today, Intel's long-standing con is coming to an end.
Today, with an 8-core AMD Ryzen in your PC, you can effectively run any number of things at the same time with no slowdown- something that was impossible with even Intel's consumer best a year back. Today Intel begs and pays tech sites to benmchmark a PC with just one thing running on one core to make Intel look good. Not one tech site benches a PC with more than one thing running at once, despite the fact that the average PC user wants to keep many things running at the same time with near zero impact on the most important applications currently in use.
And NO!- Intel does not have some magic 'tech' up its sleeve to be revealed in the near future. We heard this same dribble when Intel announced Larrabee. Shills telling us that now Intel was taking graphic
Plus a placard on the wall for a family members 'i740 - Fastest 1 million units ramp in Intel history.'
Intel supposedly produced an i752 and then i754 that were basically discrete card predecessors to the i810 and i815 onboard graphics, although I never saw either IRL. The Windows XP Intel 8xx driver supposedly supports both i75x variants though. One of the Mesa guys (Adam Jackson, ajax) was even trying to support those as well as writing a 3d driver for the i740, but apparently the 3d register datasheet pdf is impossible to find and Intel isn't won't or can't release a copy of it, even 20 years later. :(
Have any of you seen the validation words when Slashdot doesn't like the 'tone' of your posts here? These dribbling idiots actually try to intimidate posters with the choice of word- using the sad old CIA/NSA psy-op methods.
Nothing could expose the real agenda of Slashdot- and why it demonises Russia daily on behalf of Team Clinton- than a sad and pathetic tactic like this one. Mind you 'name calling' is SOP in all the mainstream media outlets. When a nation is targeted for destruction by the UK and USA, its government is always described as a 'regime'. Of course the infinitely evil Israel and Saudi Arabia have 'governments' and never 'regimes'.
Orwell taught you all in 1984 that the most depraved Deep State thinks that the words that the sheeple (you) hear and use matter. Slashdot, the pathetic little agitprop outlet that it is today, can't help but try to play to the rules of 1984, as it tries to serve its masters.
Two days ago Libya's Comic Con- the same type of event you get in the USA- was raided by the wahhabi thugs Hillary Clinton personally placed into power there after she exterminated the 'regime' of Gadaffi- the strong man who had made Libya one of the most advanced SECULAR nations in Africa. Under Gadaffi women went to university, nerds enjoyed events like Comic Con, and ordinary people had access to first class socialist services. Today Libya lies in ruins, run by extremist islamic criminal gangs who all answer to Saudi Arabia. You moronic dribblers who visit Slashdot thinking it a 'good' place supported the monsters in power in Britain, France and the USA who ruined the lives of every ordinary person in Libya- people just like you.
And then you filty racists justify the horrors by stating that Libyans were always islamic nutcases who hated the freedoms of the West. And you cheer vile news outlets like the BBC and CNN who erase the recent history of Libya, 1984 style- so you can live guilt free lives and vote for the next Clinton/Blair that comes along.
AMD will give you more cores for the dollar, so it competes well in case B, servers running many threads. AMD also traditionally costs significantly less, so it fits case A, getting the best CPU you can within a certain price range.
AMD also gives you ECC memory "for free", whereas with Intel you have to buy their higher end SKUs. It's a small population that is looking for that, but it's nice to have.
If you're no willing to spend a few seconds to think about whether your workload is multithreaded, and you are willing to spend more money than needed, get Ryzen.
A difference between C and D is that in the case of D, whole you're willing to spend 10 times as money as you should, that still doesn't tell you whether you should spend lots of money on 16 AMD cores or on 4 Intel cores.
If your workload is heavily multithreaded (servers), AMD will likely give you tell best performance, at *whatever* your budget is, because AMD will give you more cores. If you want to spend a lot, you can get dual Ryzens, 32 cores running 64 threads simultaneously.
If your workload is single-threaded and CPU-bound, Intel is probably a better bet.
> I don't want got get into a situation where I have to carefully study all the archane nuances to get the best results.
That sucks, because the BEST result does in fact depend on a number of factors. You can get a GOOD result with the newest CPUs from each manufacturer. AMD cpus provide far more different motherboard options, so they are more likely to be the best fit if you want lots of Pcie cards, or a tiny enclosure, or anything unusual.
I jumped back up here from my answers further down in the thread to see if you have any hints about your use case.
You can turn on GPU rendering in Blender, in which case your GPU becomes more important and your CPU becomes less important. This article is about Intel using graphics technology from AMD because AMD is so far ahead in GPUs, but you likely have a separate video card.
Blender uses threads efficiently, meaning CPU cores, so for Blender you want a CPU with at least 8 cores. That favors AMD for Blender work.
You also said â lots and lots of animation renders". What software are you using for those? If it mostly uses the GPU, that's where you should focus your attention (and check for settings for that in your software!). If your renderer uses many threads, AMD is probably going to be the winner for you, especially Ryzen. If your renderer is single-threaded, Intel is likely to be the better choice.
This assumes you're happy with a pretty typical motherboard. There are more chipsets and a wider variety of *different* motherboards available for AMD.
Release your register level specs and get proper Linux kernel support, like a professional product.
Not twice but the A11 is 4 Billion transistors vs 3 bill for Snapdragon. It was Apples MO for years to simply make their chips bigger than the comp. The comp is starting to wise up to this and up their tranny count to compete... as the entire industry loves Trannys and the more the better... cause "Love Wins". :P
Apple's increased tranny count! We're still talking phones right?
Oh wait, it's actually integrated AMD Radeon graphics.
Never mind, Intel integrated graphics are still crummy. No, don't bother telling me how Angry Birds or Plants Vs. Zombies looks good on Intel graphics. I'm not interested in how HD4300 is so much better than HD4200, or how Iris Pro is so much better than HD Anything.
I benchmarked my 3 year old, and last gen 3 years ago Nvidia card against a bog standard current Intel graphics solution. The Nvidia ranged from (as I recall) 16x to 70x better. Intel had a 3+ year head start and that's the best they can do??
No. No thank you very much! Intel has been bragging about how their "new and improved" video solution was so much better than their last gen video solution for something like 25 years now. Not buying it anymore!
What good is a top notch GPU if it shares memory access with the CPU? I would assume it matters in some cases, but I'm not sure to what extent. As I do a lot of iterated render to texture, I feel much safer with a fairly basic discrete GPU with its own fast RAM, than the latest and greatest integrated one.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I personally would like an AMD core (no Intel Management Engine) but with an open-source graphics chipset. This could be great for security-focused laptops.
This is marking a great downfall for amd if they seriously think Intel won't walk away laughing for the easy IP they're going to now have access to and trash the entire graphics market in the same way they're trashing the cpu market right now. AMD bought ATI to remain competitive with Intel now after they've done all the hard and expensive work of integrating ATI they're just giving it all away for a handjob. WTF is wrong with them?
Fuck you creimer, you posted that shit at least a thousand times here.
CREIMIER SAID:
All you need to do is find a website with a permissive TOS, say, Slashdot, create a Python script to scrape your own comments, sprinkle Amazon affiliate links in various posts, and then re-post past links whenever possible. Won't be long before you start making "coffee money" each month.
https://slashdot.org/comments....
Shitposting, Amazon affiliate spam, being fat, and being a general nuisance.
CREIMER SAID:
Only on Slashdot.
https://slashdot.org/comments....
So why hasn't managed to ban this intentionally disruptive user? According to him his "trolls" can't help themselves.. he is the one in control willingly and maliciously creating disruptions. Reasons that slashdot has stated they will ban accounts at their discretion.
Why isn't creimer banned? He degrades the slashdot experience for everyone and attempts to monetize these efforts. This is effectively stealing from Dice.
Just the other day creimer attempted to dox a user by posting her name and ip address. How many chances should he be given?
Danger, Will Robinson, Danger!
Creimy is posting more than 2 posts a day. Hurry! mod down otherwise /. will go to hell again!
Note: you can mod down even if already at -1 to lower karma and to prevent lost /. users to accidentally mod up.
C.D. Reimer is a renowned Slashdot collaborator, as he puts it himself; "Because of the quality of my posts and my article submissions, I'm a highly rated commentator and moderator."
But does anybody ever wondered what "C.D." stands for? Well, it stands for Creimy Dumpty of course!
Creimy Dumpty sat on the wall,
Creimy Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses
And all the king's men
Couldn't put Creimy Dumpty
Together again.
Creimy's siblings video and theme song, very realistic, especially the pants, just like Creimy's:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
With "Vice President Pence Vowing US Astronauts Will Return To the Moon", we are sure they will need miracle workers up there, here is what it would look like. Note that Creimy takes care of bringing a lot of food to the moon as depicted below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Creimy's real pictures:
Before the sex change:
https://ibb.co/cc7Ddw
After the sex change:
https://ibb.co/gVad65
Creimy's "enterprise-level" chair, he talks about it all the time on slashdot:
http://www.keynamics.com/image...
Creimy's head, while his supervisor was talking to him, not with him, since it is impossible to do with Creimy:
https://school.discoveryeducat...
Creimy acting in educational resource document, he actually confirmed himself on Slashdot that he was handled by Special Education for the Santa Clara County Office of Education! He is really a king Dumpty!:
http://www.sccoe.org/depts/stu...
I would agree, I would probably avoid the AliExpress because the GPU is important to you. "Lots of animation renders" sounds like you may want to look at whether the software you use uses GPU rendering and if so, via which API - opengl? If opengl, most of the major brands will have reasonably good support.
Other than that, I'm more of a software guy; I don't stay up on the latest hardware. I just know, from a software perspective, that some software will take full advantage of multiple cores, some will not. Some will use the GPU, some won't, and some has a setting to choose.
If I chose the AMD, I'd probably upgrade to the 8 core for a few dollars more than the 4 core. An AMD processor with 4 cores is, to, me, like a pickup truck with a 4-foot bed - missing the point. So I'd either get lots of cores (Ryzen) or fast cores (Intel). A possible exception would be if you're leaving room to upgrade - Ryzen all use the same socket, so you could get a 4-core now with plans to get an 8-core later after prices drop.
Either way, if you're currently using an old laptop, you'll probably see a major improvement.
I noticed you have both SSD and HD systems on your list. You'll want an SSD for the OS. You may also want a big HD for storing final copies of media, but an SSD will be far better for working files. The very cheapest SSDs use triple-level NAND (tlc). You probably want to avoid that and use double level, known as multilevel or MLC.
Two things:
1) Is it legal to gang-up on another competitor like this? Am I (hearing) merger/take-over plans coming?
2) AMD may want to beware the possible Trojan partnership here!
Just saying...
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
Yeah the M.2 PCIe drives are attractive. I would have bought one two days ago if it weren't for the fact that the machine I was putting the drive only has two PCIe slots. You'll need a $12 adapter to put that drive in a PCIe slot. M.2 has pins for PCIe, USB, and SATA. A particular device may use/require any of those interfaces. That is unless you get a mobo with a M.2 NVMe slot.
You may have a couple second delay at boot while interface is initialized, which doesn't seem like much but it may eat up the entire improvement in boot time over SATA from having a faster transfer. In the 2 seconds that it take4s to initialize the interface, the SATA drive could have transferred a GB of data - all your boot files.