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Shots Fired Again Between CPU Vendors AMD and Intel (tomshardware.com)

Highdude702 shares a report from Tom's Hardware: 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. 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.

AMD has a list of the complete terms and conditions on its site. But it is also noteworthy that "winners" of AMD's competing sweepstakes will have to pony up for a much more expensive X399 motherboard with the TR4 socket, which currently retail for more than $300, instead of Intel's less-expensive 300-series motherboards. Regardless, those who do swap their Intel Core silicon for an AMD Threadripper chip will gain 10 cores and quad-channel memory, not to mention quite a bit of resale value.
In response, Slashdot reader Highdude702 said: "AMD is shooting back at Intel like its easy for them, even though 40 out of 8086 is kind of stingy. They are acting like they have the horsepower now. I believe it is going to be an interesting time for consumers and enthusiasts coming soon. Maybe we will even get better prices."

Intel responded via its official verified "Intel Gaming" Twitter account, tweeting: ".@AMDRyzen, if you wanted an Intel Core i7-8086K processor too, you could have just asked us. :) Thanks for helping us celebrate the 8086!"

24 of 146 comments (clear)

  1. So no mass shooting? by schure · · Score: 5, Funny

    No mass shooting? Thank god! Horrible title though.

  2. Blablabla... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Give me a SECURE CPU without your fucking backdoors and incompetent bullshit instead of talking shit constantly, you fucking retards.

    1. Re:Blablabla... by AmiMoJo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      AMD has you covered. As well as being more secure than Intel out of the box, they do timely updates when required and support a number of security enhancing features that Intel does not. For example, encrypted RAM.

      Unfortunately they still have closed source microcode and the like, but even that is much more minimal than Intel's.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  3. Re:Core fail.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's you who's missing the point. Intel makes fun of AMD by saying they wanted the Intel CPUs so badly... it's PR and the whole world is watching. They can't talk crap about their competition. Making lighthearted fun of them is the way to go.

  4. Wouldn't be the first time by dunkelfalke · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Back in the day when AMD first released their Opteron CPU (Codename Sledgehammer), they had some demo motherboards called AMD Melody. On the silkscreen of that motherboards there was indeed a melody - actually the "Intel inside" jingle score with a sledgehammer hanging over it.

    And now, still remembering this, I feel really old.

    --
    "It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
  5. Re:Core fail.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Dude, Intel intel isn't in a position to talk crap. Or rather that's all they can do because they have squat to compete with, and everyone but the terminally stupid knows it.

    Did you see that ridiculous "5 GHz" demo they made at Computex? Allegedly coming "soon" to market. Oh wait it's not, they "forgot" to tell it was a 1kW+ overclocked abortion on a custom 28 phase VRM, with an industrial 1kW water-cooler keeping the coolant at sub-ambient, most probably -10 C. A several years old CPU at that which normally sells for 10k+ USD?

    That's desperation right there. Intel have emptied the cupboards, they have nothing left. Anything new will take years to come to market.

  6. Incoherent by 110010001000 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The entire summary is incoherent. Was it written by some dude that was high or something?

    1. Re:Incoherent by Highdude702 · · Score: 2

      And drunk!

    2. Re:Incoherent by thegarbz · · Score: 2

      And in Marketing!

  7. Re: Core fail.... by Bing+Tsher+E · · Score: 3, Insightful

    All Intel has to do is rest on the laurels of their market share. It doesn't cost them much to let their salescritters tussle with the AMD salescritters.

  8. Re:Core fail.... by bloodhawk · · Score: 5, Insightful

    No I think they got the point perfectly. I am no Intel fan but if I was them this is exactly how I would be spinning it too. "Our CPU's are so good even our competitor is giving away its top end CPU's to get ahold of them"

  9. Re:Core fail.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    As much as I love AMD, it was actually a really dumb move on the part of AMD, as long as Intel are smart and humerous about their responses AMD can only lose from this or at best break even.
    INTEL responses "our CPU's so great even our competitors will throw away their own to get one"
    If AMD destroy the CPU's "wow what a waste, those could have been used for charity, don't worry though we will donate additional CPU's to a childrens hospital to cover what AMD were too tight arsed to do"
    AMD give them away "Not even AMD is willing to use AMD cpu's in their prizes"
    AMD keep them for testing "AMD so desperate to keep up they had to bribe prize winners to get ahold of one of these"
    etc etc, the cheap easy marketing points AMD get in the short term may come back to bite them hard if Intel is smart.

  10. Re: Intel winning on price according to author? by Entrope · · Score: 5, Insightful

    We look at combined price of CPU and motherboard because almost everyone buys those two together. Who cares if AMD's high end $800 processor needs a $300 motherboard if Intel's high end desktop processor costs $2000 sans motherboard?

  11. Re:Core fail.... by azcoyote · · Score: 3, Insightful

    haha, yeah, exactly. The best way to respond to a direct attack is typically to deflect it in some way. If Intel gets angry, then it only validates AMD's attack. But if they laugh it off, it belittles AMD.

    --
    Incipiamus, fratres, servire Domino Deo, quia hucusque vix vel parum in nullo profecimus.
  12. Re: Intel winning on price according to author? by AmiMoJo · · Score: 3, Informative

    Even better, look at TCO. AMD's sockets and motherboards have historically lasted a lot, lot longer than Intel's. This generation is looking no different.

    Also, AMD give you more PCIe lanes, so if/when USB 4.0 or Thunderfart X comes out you should be able to slap a card in and get decent performance without having to replace the motherboard just to get enough lanes for full performance.

    --
    const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
    SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  13. Re:Not all true by sanosuke001 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The 8086K one being a 40th anniversary one, yeah. If I had won I'd have kept it in the box and never used it. I already have an AMD system but if I wanted a new threadripper I'd just go buy it. Holding the 8086K as a collector's item seem more interesting. Though, the lighthearted jabs are entertaining from both sides!

    --
    -SaNo
  14. 40 years of crap by Misagon · · Score: 2

    The i7-8086K is a 40 year anniversary of the 8086 CPU.
    40 years of only incremental upgrades to a crap ISA. It is still what is holding the x86-64 platform back.

    I can't wait for AArch64, or even RISC-V, to become mainstream.

    (posted from a PC with an intel i7 :-P )

    --
    "We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
  15. Re: Core fail.... by PixetaledPikachu · · Score: 3, Informative

    Businesses are already beginning to switch over to EPYC.

    No they really aren't. At least not in any significant way, it takes multiple generations of hardware to win over larger enterprises and AMD still have to prove themselves in the longhaul, enterprises don't switch just because one gen happens to be better. I hope AMD are on a winning streak but it will take at least a 2-3 more years of them maintaining a significant advantage to have a real market impact.

    I just checked that the L8s_v2 and L16s_v2 (L series v2) has popped up on my VM size selection on my Azure dashboard. Those specifically use AMD EPYC 7551 processors. So yeah, EPYC has already entered production environment in Azure

  16. Re:Wake me when . . . by Immerman · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How on Earth do you figure that? You've got he same number of operations per second either way, and a single core is much more versatile - anything you can do on a multi-core processor, you can do sequentially on a single core, and there's a LOT of things that can't be efficiently decomposed into parallel tasks, in which case the single core wins hands down.

    The only potential performance advantages for the multi-core are in cache and memory bus size - but you can easily give a single core as much cache as the combined multi-core, and unless things have changed recently the memory itself is usually slower than the bus.

    Now, power consumption may be a legitimate advantage with slower processors, so if you're running a massively parallel task where the performance per watt is more important than the absolute performance of any node, then yes - more boxes with slower, more power-efficient multi-core processors will quite possibly win.

    --
    --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
  17. Re: Core fail.... by PixetaledPikachu · · Score: 4, Informative

    Microsoft specifically announced the L series as INTEL XEON E5 v3's. So either they got their own announcement wrong or you got your information confused.

    L Series yes, L Series v2 uses EPYC

  18. Re: Core fail.... by oh_my_080980980 · · Score: 2

    Corporation don't care about hardware and certainly don't wait for generations. Corporations focus on cost. They swap servers and swap vendors on a regular basis. So if AMD has the product they need, they'll drop Intel.

  19. Re:Sign of the times. by thegarbz · · Score: 4, Funny

    From the title, did anyone else think some employee went on a shooting spree at their competitor?

    No, not all of us live in the USA.

  20. And no Meltdown by pak9rabid · · Score: 2

    Regardless, those who do swap their Intel Core silicon for an AMD Threadripper chip will gain 10 cores and quad-channel memory, not to mention quite a bit of resale value.

    Not to mention the lack of Meltdown.

  21. Re: Intel winning on price according to author? by Highdude702 · · Score: 2

    Am3 is over a decade old. You can still buy a cpu today for it that is only a few years old. And you can pop it into a 10 year old motherboard without worries. Try that on Intel. I suggest trying to spread your disinformation campaign someplace else. Intel has gone as far as releasing the SAME cpu and making you buy a new socket for it.