Back in November, I put together a parts list for my still hypothetical new home Linux machine. At the time I picked an Intel CPU because Intel is still the top in single-core performance, especially when you throw in TDP; the i7-8700 is clearly superior to the Ryzen 7 1700, which is the last (or first) 65W TDP Ryzen. Then two things happened. The first is my new office workstation turned out to be Ryzen-based and it appears to work fine, run cool (actually cooler than my current machines, and seems quiet from limited testing. The second is Meltdown and to a lesser extent Spectre.

Mitigating Meltdown on Intel CPUs costs a variable and potentially significant amount of performance, depending on what your system is doing; a CPU bound program is only minorly affected, but something that interacts with the OS a lot has a problem. AMD CPUs are unaffected. AMD Zen-based CPUs, including Ryzens, are also partly immune to the branch predictor version of Spectre (from here) and so don't take a performance hit from mitigations for them.

(Currently, current Intel CPUs also cause heartburn for the retpoline Spectre mitigation, because they'll speculate through return instructions. This will apparently be changed in a microcode update, which will likely cost some performance.)

Almost the entire reason I was selecting an Intel CPU over a Ryzen was the better single-core performance; with more cores, everyone agrees that Ryzens are ahead on workloads that parallelize well. But it seems likely that Meltdown will throw away at least part of that advantage on at least some of the workloads that I care about, and anyway things like Firefox are becoming increasingly multi-threaded (although not for a while for me). There still are areas where Intel CPUs are superior to Ryzens, but then Ryzens have advantages themselves, such as supporting ECC (at least to some degree).

All of that is fine and rational, but if I'm being honest I have to admit that it's not the only reason. Another reason is that I plain don't like Intel's behavior. For years, Intel has taken advantage of lack of real competition to do things like not offer ECC in desktop CPUs or limit desktop CPUs to only four cores (it's remarkable how the moment AMD came along with real competition, Intel was able to crank that up to six cores and may go higher in the next generation). Meltdown provides a convenient reason or at least justification to spit in Intel's eye.

With all of that said, I don't know if I'm actually going to go through with this idea. A hypothetical Ryzen build is somewhat more expensive and somewhat more irritating than an Intel one, since it needs a graphics card and has more RAM restrictions, and it's at least possible that Intel will soon come out with new CPUs that do better in the face of Meltdown and Spectre (and have more cores). For the moment I'm probably just going to sit on my hands (again) and see how I like my new work desktop (when I turn the new machine into my work desktop).

(My home machine hasn't started exploding yet, so the path of least resistence and least effort is to do nothing. I'm very good at doing nothing.)