Big trouble in Bluetown
Seeing Red
When they launched on November 26th, Intel’s 10th-gen HEDT CPUs reigned supreme… for half a day. Six hours, actually. I can’t recall ever seeing AMD and Intel launch new CPUs on the same day, but that’s what happened. Intel first announced the embargo-lift time and date for 10th-gen Cascade Lake X – AMD then matched it exactly for Threadripper 3rd-gen. Same day. Same time. Shennigans were at play, the game was afoot. After AMD’s launch date announcement, Intel, in a widely derided decision, then shifted its launch to six hours earlier in the day in a poorly judged decision to try get some nice quotes from sites and Youtubers who wouldn’t be permitted to compare CLx to TR3 in the initial reviews. It backfired badly, with all the big name ‘Tubers (Linus, Hardware Unboxed, Paul’s Hardware, Gamer’s Nexus, etc) laughing it off and slamming Intel for its antics.
Now that both side’s cats are out of the bag, it’s clear that with AMD TR3, HEDT dominance no longer belongs to Intel. And this follows just a few days after AMD’s desktop 3950X obliterated anything Intel offers in that space. Only in mobile CPUs do Intel still maintain a slight performance edge, and there’s not much in it.
Intel will very likely resort to its tried and tested market tactic of offering incentives, discounts and rebates. Its war chest is massive and it can keep that game up for a long time.
This is all Intel has left in the playbook to buy time for its engineers to come up with something competitive in terms of what matters – performance and value. That could take years. Meanwhile, AMD has its Zen 3-core products coming in the first half of 2020 – assuming it keeps to its schedule.
Intel has nothing left to compete. Unless you want to shine a spotlight on its Xeon Platinum 9282, with 56 cores. Though that one runs at a relatively low base clock (2.6GHz), is for servers, and, sells for around US$35,000. So, there’s no game there.
In any case, Intel’s 56-core engineering achievement with that CPU is about to be surpassed. AMD has also just lifted the lid on on the 64-core/128-thread (!!) Threadripper 3990X, which will hit the market by mid 2020, if not sooner. That one is interesting. AMD has taken its highfrequency variant of the 280 W Epyc 7H12 server CPU and will tailor it for the desktop market. Based on the price of that Epyc (US$6,950) the Threadripper version will likely be at least twice the price of the newly announced 32-core Threadripper, but still super-competitive compared to Intel offerings.
Intel’s very public issues with achieving a functional CPU process below 14nm now take a backseat. AMD has capitalised fully on the 7nm process and is running with it. The debates are no longer academic. With TR3, AMD is now ahead on core count and high frequencies, its fast memory support is at least as good as Intel and in the ultimate apples-to-apples metric, IPC, it’s also ahead.
Intel needs to catch up as much as AMD needs to maintain this momentum. I’m a tech fan, not a company vs. company fanboi, and these are incredibly interesting times. We all want performance and value, and now, after a long wait, the big guns are engaged in a fair fight that we will win.
“Intel will very likely resort to its tried and tested market tactic of offering incentives, discounts and rebates. Its war chest is massive and it can keep that game up for a long time. ”