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Intel Reacts To AMD Ryzen Apparently Cutting Prices On Core i7 And i5 Processors (hothardware.com)
Less than a week after AMD announced the first line up of Ryzen processors, Intel is apparently fighting back by dropping the price of several of its processors. Rob Williams, writing for HotHardware: So, what we're seeing now are a bunch of Intel processors dropping in price, perhaps as a bit of a preemptive strike against AMD's chips shipping later this week -- though admittedly it's still a bit too early to tell. Over at Amazon, the prices have been slower to fall, but we'd highly recommend that you keep an eye on the following pages, if you are looking for a good deal this week. So far, at Micro Center we've seen the beefy six-core Intel Core i7-6850K (3.60GHz) drop from $700 to $550, and the i7-6800K (3.40GHz) drop down to $360, from $500. Also, some mid-range chips are receiving price cuts as well. Those include the i7-6700K, a 4.0GHz chip dropping from $400 to $260, and the i7-6600K, a 3.50GHz quad-core part dropping from $270 to $180. Even Intel's latest and greatest Kaby Lake-based i7-7700K has experienced a drop, from $380 to $299, with places like Amazon and NewEgg retailing for $349.
But, it's a direct admission that they were basically gouging for want of competition.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
The centerpiece of this 'article' seems to focus on Microcenter, which ALWAYS has priced drops and sales like this going on.
Everybody take a deep breath and see where we're at this time next month.
things were great in the sf bay area - until MC moved away and never came back ;(
pretty sad. I prefer to NOT go to frys and MC was a good alternative.
I really miss MC. wish they'd consider coming back to the bay area. of all places, it makes sense for them to be here, even with 'high priced' real estate (their claimed reason why they sold their only bay area store to wally world..) ;(
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
intel is a cheap company. I used to work for them as a contractor. I saw it first-hand.
they sit on a ton of money but are stingy as hell.
typical american big corp. sigh ;(
maybe if they fired their 'diversity officer' (yes, that's a real job at intel) and hired based on skills and need rather than quota by race and gender (and h1b, of course) they'd be able to lower selling costs.
but of course, any lowering in real cost never makes it to the consumer sales price. the ceo's keep all the booty, again, as usual for US corps.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I suggest everyone buy AMD, until there is a sucessful compeitor to Intel they will continue to price gouge, as evidence by these overpriced chips.
This is great news, especially for people who don't have to have/build the latest and greatest. I am still happily running an intel Core2 Quad Core. But this means that the price of lower end parts, and used parts, should go down accordingly. The top of the line parts of today will be the hand-me-downs of tomorrow. My kids all have hand-me-down computers that are very capable for the things they do.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Way to plug my favorite store!
It does seems as though this chain has really exploded in the last several years. I seem to recall there only being a handful of them. Now there are over 2 dozen nationwide.
Kind of surprising that a brick-and-mortar store is expanding operations in this day and age. Especially with the old-school commission-based sales floor model.
I have one within driving distance. GREAT store for picking up clearance items at about %20 off the going retail on stuff. I've purchased 2 mother boards and CPU's there along with a couple of video cards, mostly on clearance there in the last year. Usually you can haggle a bit on the clearance prices if the item has been sitting there awhile. In fact, on big ticket items you can usually haggle a little on non-clearance items if you try and have similar prices online.
Watch their "price match" though. I hear the policy varies from store to store.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
maybe if they fired their 'diversity officer' (yes, that's a real job at intel) and hired based on skills and need rather than quota by race and gender (and h1b, of course) they'd be able to lower selling costs.
They may have selected some staff poorly but I think a far more important issue is that their 14nm process advantage technique had led to poor yields that they are still tock tock tocking on. Not saying that Intel made bad choices, but they are screwed because poor yields at 14nm means no yields at 10nm. They know it which is why they've just done massive layoffs and they keep talking up their new "cloud strategy."
AMD isnt Intels primary competitor. AMD "catching up" is a symptom of Intels real problem, which is that Intel's vertical branding strategy ultimately isnt competitive against the rant-a-fab conglomerates like TSMC which are being driven by the massive sales of ARM processors and accessory chips, and one by one these rent-a-fab's are beating Intel to 10nm. These Ryzen chips are still just on 14nm like Intel and being made by one of these rent-a-fab's. You ain't seen nuthin' yet. What the hell is Intel going to do when all the rent-a-fab's are shipping mostly 10nm product?
If you have Intel stock.. I highly recommend that you sell now before its too late. Double check your retirement accounts.
"His name was James Damore."
without AMD, the value market would still be a 486
I don't see AMD as inferior. In fact, Intel licenses some tech from AMD.
Cost is the only factor in my opinion. Inching out a couple more CPU cycles for twice as much money is counter productive (again, my opinion). 99% of the market really does not need the performance of a i7-7700K, where an AMD APU from last-gen is probably still overkill.
My 4ish year old AMD FX-8320 does way more than I actually need. I'm upgrading to a Ryzen 1700 (the 65w TDP chip) simply because I want something newer, as in my experience electronics will fail in the next 5 years.
Also, I intend to re-purpose my old workstation for my wife and kids to use. Now that my kids are big enough to start learning computers, they need something that isn't my work computer.
Intel really has no advantage over AMD, and if you're going by benchmarks, you're splitting hairs as real world percieved performance hit it's peak with the general population years ago.
Intel gained their advantage by bribing manufacturers to use their products. Just as Microsoft does. There is no other reason they are in 90% of consumer end products.
I build custom computers for family, friends, and clients of mine. I've almost always gone AMD because it's a better performance:cost ratio, especially in the mid-range arena. It's not just the CPUs price factored in, either. AMD motherboards generally come in at 50-75% the price compared to Intel Motherboards.
The few Intel builds I've done were for performance die hards, spending $4000+ because they believed that Intel was the end-all, be-all, even though the games they play are hitting GPU bottlenecks, and the CPU is sitting there at 50+% idle. Could have saved $500+ to put into a better GPU... but people don't listen when they go by forum posts of evangelists claiming Intel is the best thing since sliced bread, even though their $1200 CPU only bests AMDs $400 CPU by 10%-15% at best.
The parent is correct. Micro Center typically sells CPUs at a discount. It's one of the great things about living near one. But their prices are not representative of Intel's normal MSRPs, and importantly, what you'll pay for their products everywhere else.
Not necessarily.
It costs several billion dollars to build or upgrade a fab. Intel spends about $10 billion each year on upgrading its equipment, and $12 bilion on R&D. In order to survive, they need to have a high gross profit on each unit sold, in order to recover the $50 billion or so they spent getting ready to build a new processor. In other words, they could make $200 per cpu, and still lose money overall.
Let's work through it with smaller numbers to demonstrate the concept.
Suppose you buy a machine for $100,000 in order to make widgets.
You materials cost is $1/widget.
Hoping to make your $100,000 back, you start selling widgets for $5 each.
After selling 10,000 widgets, you've received $50,000, and spent $110,00.
Your currently $60,000 in the hole.
Your neighbor starts selling widgets for $3 each.
Should you match the $3 price in order to keep selling widgets?
Yes, you want to sell more widgets, so you'll need to match the $3 price.
That doesn't mean you were "gouging", or even recovering your costs at $5. It means only that your MARGINAL cost to produce one MORE widget is less than $3. You may still lose money overall, because you haven't got your $100,000 capital expenditure back yet.
I have always bought AMD over Intel for my personal computer builds. I really don't care at all if I have the best FPS in a game. As long as it isn't laggy. AMD has always been able to deliver what I need. It's icing on the cake that they are the underdog as well.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
It's not just that their chips are usually a better value but without AMD you would have a monopolistic Intel charging through the nose with minimal innovation.
What? AMDs are and has always been awesome values. Their FX and APU chips have always been incredible values.
My work computer has 4th gen i7 and at home I have a FX-8320 and for programming tasks I can't really tell any sort of difference. The AMD is half the price.
The performance improvements for AMD are mainly due to Global Foundries opening up a 14nm fab.
This is pretty incorrect. You don't get 52% IPC uplift just from a process node shrink. The Bulldozer family was a double whammy of bad for AMD because it was a bad design choice as well as them being stuck on an older, less power efficient node.
Had they released Zen chips on their old node sizes, they would have still realized the IPC gain, but would have had to work with lower clocks and higher power consumption. They're now competitive with Intel on performance/watt, that comes from the node shrink, but they're also competitive on performance/clock, which comes from the new architecture which doesn't have such boneheaded decisions baked in like a shared FPU between two Bulldozer "cores"
AMD hasnt really designed any bonehead chips. Ever. They just havent had access to parity FAB's.
Bulldozer was AMD's Netburst moment. It failed hard vs Intel on everything except specific multithreaded integer workloads, and even then only beat Intel at much higher power consumption. Every tech reviewer on the planet who knows what they're talking about has shouted it from the rooftops. The Core architecture pulled ahead of AMD's Phenoms and they never recovered till Zen.
Does AMD have anything like the dreaded Intel Management Engine hardware Trojan? It would be nice if my next PC was reasonably secure.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Everything we've seen about Ryzen indicates that it'll deliver amazing performance per dollar.
We need official street pricing, more benchmarks, and OEM offerings. Most desktops and virtually all laptops are prebuilt. It's up to the OEMs to not take bribes from Intel and build products around Ryzen. With the support we've seen for Polaris in laptops, I think the outlook is good.
We've got no idea what they've got planned for servers. I hope we see something soon, because it takes much longer for vendors to build a server around a new CPU and socket than a desktop or laptop. Intel's desktop CPU prices are grossly inflated, but their Xeon prices are barbaric. If Ryzen can offer a similar value proposition in the server market as it seems to in the desktop market, then that means I can go with AMD and lose some single-threaded performance, gain multi-threaded performance (as I'll have more cores), and save a bunch of cash. I can use that cash to get more RAM and more/better flash.
If AMD can get some mindshare back, then Intel is going to be forced to compete or at least slash prices. I do believe that mindshare still starts with the nerds building their own PCs. If AMD can get an average Joe to hear about "Ryzen", then when OEMs do put out their offerings they stand to claw back a lot of marketshare.
We've also got Vega on the GPU side. Polaris is an amazing performance/$ architecture, but we've seen very little of Vega. Nvidia is poised to release the (almost) full size Pascal chip soon too (presumably as a new Titan or 1080 Ti SKU). What we've seen of Vega has it beating out the 1080 by a moderate margin. Going purely based on die sizes from the full GP100 Pascal chip from the Tesla products, we can forecast that a 1080 Ti / Titan Whatever will blow the existing 1080 out of the water. Vega will either have to be a huge surprise in terms of performance or as great a value as Polaris to claw some desktop GPU marketshare back.
If the next Xbox and Playstation ever materialize they'll likely stick with AMD for both the GPU and CPU for ease of backwards compatibility, and they will almost certainly be running Ryzen & Vega. AMD lost Nintendo this time around, with Nvidia powering the Switch. Even before it releases there are rumors of a "Pro" or upgraded model running on the Tegra X2 platform instead of the Tegra X1. I doubt we'll see such a thing for at least a full year. (At which point Tegra X3 will be out.) AMD still has at least one unannounced contract for a custom design. It's almost certainly for the Xbox Scorpio, and we'll get the reveal at E3.
If what we've seen of Ryzen holds true, and if Vega is competitive, AMD is going to have a great 12-18 months.
Ryzen seems to be quite competitive as it stands looking at the glossy PR ads. The question is really about durability. AMD has a history of running things a bit hot and not achieving the same reliability as Intel.
Then you'll be pleased to look at the TDP column in side by side comparisons of Ryzen and (especially) i7s. Ryzen is 95W TDP. i7 with exactly the same single-thread performance (to within the margin of error) and worse multi-thread performance is 140W TDP.
That's right, Intel has been faffing about with their failed 10nm process node for so long that they're now the ones selling the slower, much hotter chips. A complete role reversal. It is quite amusing for those of us who remember the AMD of the '90s.
Unfortunately for AMD, history is not repeating. Intel is not floundering in a Netburst culdesac. Ryzen has achieved only parity. It is not giving the Core architecture the single-threaded performance spanking that Netburst suffered. Zen cores with HBM2 laminated on top of them might be able to give Core chips a spanking, but that remains to be seen, and rumor has it that Intel has been paying attention and will be ready to answer with HBM2-inclusive Core chips. So while AMD is once again enjoying a performance/watt advantage over Intel, it won't last nearly as long as the last one.
Still, AMD's advantage is there now. If you're building a new desktop system this year, you're going to need a really specific benchmark-backed reason not to build a Ryzen system. Or just be an Intel fanboy who is made of money. That works too.
Does AMD have anything like the dreaded Intel Management Engine hardware Trojan?
Yes. AMD Platform Security Processor.
The Platform Security Processor (PSP) is built in on all Family 16h + systems (basically anything post-2013), and controls the main x86 core startup. PSP firmware is cryptographically signed with a strong key similar to the Intel ME. If the PSP firmware is not present, or if the AMD signing key is not present, the x86 cores will not be released from reset, rendering the system inoperable.
The PSP is an ARM core with TrustZone technology, built onto the main CPU die. As such, it has the ability to hide its own program code, scratch RAM, and any data it may have taken and stored from the lesser-privileged x86 system RAM (kernel encryption keys, login data, browsing history, keystrokes, who knows!).
Personally I think IME/PSP would be great things to have: if I could set a jumper and burn my own firmware image and signature verification key, then unset the jumper.
Too bad that's not happening...