Virtualization: Intel i5-7500 vs AMD Ryzen-1500X (AMD-V vs VT-x)

[Blazter007]

Yep. There are a lot of threads discussing about gaming and rendering benchmarks. But what about Virtualization?

I have been running an AMD processor for a long time (AMD A10-5750m), and I had a lot of problems with Virtualization (more specific: Android Device Manager in Android Studio, VMs just run fine) using AMD-V (CPU / ABI: ARM). I can not run a android device because it is slow and the OS never start. I have enabled the Virtualization in the BIOS.

So... do you have some information about what is better in this Gen? AMD or Intel??

I want to upgrade to one of these processors, btw.

 

[bboiprfsr]

you'd probably get more support out of intel's virtualization (including guides, forum responses, tutorials, etc) than AMD's since they Ryzen platform isn't only new but also AMD's driver/software support isn't always up to par against Intel's. I may be wrong though. Just my two cents.

disclaimer: i use both intel and amd. It's just that Ryzen's recent launch means immature driver support (not a 100% stable platform yet). Still needs more tests, patching and general support.

 

[kgt1182]

The Ryzen 5 1500X is faster than the i5 7500 for this purpose.
I assume you want to emulate Android to test software on. In this case you want up to 8 threads to see scaling as most Android phones have 8 cores, or 4+4 using the ARM big-LITTLE architecture.
For raw performance,
Single thread Passmark
Core i5 7500: 2061 (+10.1%)
Ryzen 5 1500X: 1872
Multithread Passmark
Ryzen 5 1500X: 10421 (+30.8%)
Core i5 7500: 7966
For heavily threaded workloads such as virtualisation the AMD Ryzen is better.

However, since AMD has a small user base compared to Intel, more optimisation is done with consideration to the larger Intel user base.
Revenue in 2016:
Intel: US$59.38 B (+1,290%)
AMD: US$4.27 B
PC Market Share:
Intel ~80% (+300%)
AMD ~20%
So by that perspective, there are far more PCs using Intel and from the large disrepancy in revenue, there are even more servers using Intel and servers usually run VMs even more, hence it is expected that software developers optimise for the Intel majority.

In this case, even though I advocate for AMD bringing competition to the market with Ryzen (I have a Phenom II, FX 4350 and Ryzen 1800X), and Ryzen 1500X has better performance, in this case I would recommend you to go for the Core i5 7500.

This is simply because it is not worth the potential risk in being unable to do your mission critical work just for the sake of performance and price.

EDIT: if its just your hobby get the 1500X, better yet, get the 6 core 12 thread 1600 which also comes with a good stock cooler which performs as well as an i7 7700 multithreaded. And overclock it to 4 GHz!