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AMD Trolls Intel: Offers 16-Core Chip to Winners of Six-Core 8086K
AMD's feud with Intel took an interesting turn today as the company announced that it would swap 40 Core i7-8086K's won from Intel's sweepstakes with a much beefier Threadripper 1950X CPU.
At Computex 2018, Intel officially announced it was releasing the Core i7-8086K, a special edition processor that commemorates the 40th anniversary of the 8086, which debuted as the first x86 processor on June 8, 1978. As part of the special-edition release, Intel opened up a sweepstakes to give away 8,086 of the six-core 12-thread processors. Intel also made the processors available at retail, and though the company doesn't have an official MSRP, you can find the chips at several retailers for ~$425.
Now AMD is offering to replace 40 of the winners' chips with its own 16-core 32-thread $799 Threadripper processors, thus throwing a marketing wrench into Intel's 40th-anniversary celebration.
See also: The Intel Core i7-8086K Review
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 19 2018, @12:09AM (9 children)
First, this is a great headline grabbing (and marketing) opportunity. It takes a lot of swagger, and wow.
Secondly, this is really shortsighted. Companies typically don't do this kind of undermining because it's easy to backfire. What's to stop Intel from undermining the next AMD event... or indeed all of them. Intel has FAR deeper money pockets than AMD does (case in point: AMD is offering 40 replacements, as opposed to Intel's 8086 give-aways). If they wanted to, they could seriously hurt AMD.
I'm really wondering which executive signed off on this, and what their long term plan is (assuming they have one). Maybe they are relying on the "if Intel retaliates, it puts them on an even level to AMD and thus raises AMD's profile" idea?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by exaeta on Tuesday June 19 2018, @12:26AM (3 children)
I agree this could be the case that intel might retaliate. But Intel doing so wouldn't really damage AMD's rising market share. For me, AMD finally delivers a better CPU than intel. Not just a better value, but a better cpu. I mean, technically, there are some better intel cpus, but they all cost waaaaay too much for me to justify spending on my desktop... (why would I spend $2000 for a cpu that's 10% faster than my $320 CPU?) I just feel like the AMD CPU is in a really nice spot right now. Especially since I don't need to upgrade motherboards to upgrade CPU anymore. I did that once (from Ryzen 1600X to Ryzen 2700X) and I plan to do it again in the future! AMD has also reached the point where the single core performance is comfortable at running games that I like. Yeah, it's not as good as intel, but as soon as you start streaming, all those extra cores are excellent. No framerate drops, and I don't have to close firefox, and other programs I have up in the background for max FPS. Intel can't beat AMD right now, as soon as 32-core Threadripper 2 comes out, Intel is toast (temporarily). Intel doesn't have any multi-die CPU solution, and if they don't develop one soon after Threadripper 2 comes out, they are going to go bankrupt (ok maybe not, but they will still lose a lot of market share).
The Government is a Bird
(Score: 5, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday June 19 2018, @01:08AM
Umm, they have a little something called EMIB. Also known as Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridge. And they are using it to put AMD's own graphics and High Bandwidth Memory on new chips:
Intel to Create new 8th Generation CPUs with AMD Radeon Graphics with HBM2 using EMIB [anandtech.com]
They are likely to use it to make large core count chips soon:
Intel’s 28-Core 5 GHz CPU: Coming in Q4 [anandtech.com] (yes, it's THAT one, but the article discusses Intel's options)
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Tuesday June 19 2018, @12:05PM (1 child)
Single threaded performance still matters in a lot of applications. Not every program has been rewritten to scale seamlessly to three or more cores. So if, for example, you do PC gaming then depending upon the games you prefer an Intel i5 or i7 may be a better choice than any AMD processor.
Don't get me wrong, I have three desktops in the house and all three run AMD CPUs. I'm not much of a gamer, so my computers all have their game performance bottlenecked by cheap GPUs long before the differences between CPU matter. I would bet that for most well-informed CPU shoppers, AMD is the better value for their dollar and Intel's single-threaded advantage isn't important. But I think it's a little misleading to say "why would I spend $2000 for a cpu that's 10% faster than my $320 CPU?" when - again, depending upon the application - Intel has $200 options that can outperform that $320 AMD part.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by exaeta on Tuesday June 19 2018, @10:57PM
I'm sorry. But I think you missed something. Let's compare the Ryzen 2700X to the Intel i7-8700k. The i7-8700k is only 20% faster in single-core performance and the Ryzen 2700X is 20% faster in multicore performance.
An intel i5-8600 is a whimpy 5% faster in single core performance, and the Ryzen 2700X is 80% faster than it in multi-core performance. Ryzen 5 performance is about the same.
So which matters more? Getting more total CPU power? Then pick AMD. More single threaded performance? You could pick Intel, but I think it's dumb. AMD processors will still run single threaded applications faster in practice unless you dedicate your PC to a single purpose and only ever have 1 window open. Firefox eating your CPU? Performance drops. Running multiple single core applications at the same time? Guess what, that can take advantage of multi-core performance!
Why would you cripple your entire computer so it can run some badly programmed games faster, when it only gets that small benefit while you don't have any other apps open at the same time? (Forget screen recording/streaming, as soon as you start recording/streaming the AMD chips yield better FPS)
Serious gamers use AMD if for no other reason than the fact it allows their game to not lag nearly as much when they boot up recording software.
The Government is a Bird
(Score: -1, Troll) by realDonaldTrump on Tuesday June 19 2018, @12:30AM
Crooked Hillary's campaign spent much more money than mine did. But I won OVERWHELMINGLY. With very smart & cheap ads on Social Media. And lots of FREE COVERAGE!!!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Spamalope on Tuesday June 19 2018, @12:31AM
I took this as a dig at Intel trying to upstage them with the 28 core computex system that they 'forgot' to mention was overclocked... with an industrial chiller... etc.
aka Intel took a swipe and this is the response...
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday June 19 2018, @01:02AM
They tried to do that last time, and they ended up being broadly mocked across the tech press, despite their close ties with a lot of the outlets.
Intel Teases 28 Core Chip, AMD Announces Threadripper 2 With Up to 32 Cores [soylentnews.org]
AMD Ratcheting Up the Pressure on Intel [soylentnews.org]
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-cpu-28-core-5-ghz,37201.html [tomshardware.com]
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-28-core-processor-5ghz-motherboard,37213.html [tomshardware.com]
https://www.pcmag.com/news/361855/amds-32-core-threadripper-2-is-making-intel-sweat [pcmag.com]
https://www.semiaccurate.com/2018/06/14/intel-forgets-a-lot-at-their-computex-keynote/ [semiaccurate.com]
Intel can't do any more damage to AMD than AMD could self-inflict by fouling up its momentum (or messing up on the graphics side vs. Nvidia). Unless you believe Intel is being very gentle to AMD to avoid antitrust issues, and they are going to pull out some 3D/SiGe 100 GHz monster out of their back pockets.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 19 2018, @01:03AM
8086k has no ecc support for instance. Other than the 4ghz/5ghz turbo, it has unusual features compared to the stock i7 chips.
Threadripper on the other hand supports unregistered ECC, plus overclocking (likely not at the same time, but if someone produced higher spec ecc unregistered memory in the future, you could overclock your memory bus and run it up to the memory controller's limits thanks to AMD's ECC support.) Intel on the other hand is still using that as a consumer/pro level differentiator, even though their lower end chips DO have ECC support for use in cheap hosting solutions but no overclocking support.
(Score: 2) by The Shire on Tuesday June 19 2018, @01:48AM
Intel currently has nothing much in the pipeline until next year - AMD knows this and they're working to leverage this short term edge they have. I love it, open competition like this is fantastic for the end user.