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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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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...