Just What does Intel Have up Its Sleeve in Response to Ryzen?

My 2500K lasted 5 years and was still relevant when I gave it to my Dad over a year ago.
He wont need anything better for at least another 5 years.

I've had Skylake for 1.5 years now and its still entirely relevant for performance.
Its only missing one feature which is the ability to decrypt some new 4K protected streams.

I want to feel there is more reason to upgrade my CPU but it just doesnt happen atm.
Hopefully the new competition from AMD will promote better use of high core count CPUs in gaming. It would be nice if there are more CPU dependent options/switches to improve game quality.
I upgrade my GPU approx every 2 years because there is a great need, I want to feel this need for my CPU.
There are some great arguments against this kind of progression, mainly cost of running a cutting edge system or getting/feeling left behind.
It remains to be seen how devs implement the use of more cores. Hopefully with options that arent game changers, just quality.
 
The K7 days were glorious, still have my circuit trace pen. Yes intel fucked amd. amd should have done a better job with marketing. Its good to see them back.

and Athlon was one of the coolest processor names of all time.
 
Last AMD processor I had was an Athlon. I'll upgrade in a year or 2 (4670k is still working for me). If AMD is still competitive price and performance wise they will get my money.

You think Intel would drop prices or try to be more competitive without AMD? In several years when I get a new GPU I'll do the same if Radeon is competitive with Nvidia.
 
In the server market, where the real bread and butter is these days, Ryzen smashes just about everything Intel has to offer in terms of price/performance. If they start offering custom chips like Intel does, Intel will see some serious pricing pressure.

I wonder if it will be on the various HCL's though? Also, don't underestimate the PITA task of migrating machines from one CPU architecture to another, even in a virtual environment. Even migrating between Intel CPU's of a different era can be a ball-ache.

I just bought a 6850 for my dual 1080's. So I'll be pretty pissed off if Intel decide to drop their pants on price at the slightest notice since it would mean they were gouging previously (which they clearly were)

I note the Ryzen still only has 24 lanes. I know a thousand people will come out and say SLI is a waste of time and PCI lanes don't really matter in real world, but I don't like any limitations in that respect. I might get one, just to see how it goes, and plan to use it as a vmhost for scratch machines in the lab.
 
People are missing something when they say that Intel could just drop prices and crush AMD. While it's technically possible for Intel to do that, Intel will not do anything like that anytime soon. The first reason is because it helps Intel to have AMD around with regards to monopolies and such. A much bigger reason is because Intel always promotes its hardware as premium. That requires having premium prices no matter what. Intel cannot afford to respond to AMD with massive price cuts on their CPUs. It would destroy the premium branding and in effect tell the world that Intel is no better and very possibly worse than AMD no matter if it is true or not. That is simply something Intel cannot do.

I don't expect to see any price drops from Intel and even if there are any they will be small and most likely only happen if something new is released. Intel cannot afford to give credibility to the possibility that AMD is possibly on par with them in any way. Dropping prices due to the release of Ryzen would signal just that. Besides, Intel can easily afford to lose some market share and have no real issues from it.
 
If Ryzen is as good as it seems I think Intel will be in a tough position but I dont mean it will ruin them or anything.
They've lowered prices but they really cant price match or undercut Ryzen without saying "We've been overpricing our CPUs because f**k you".
They could release an updated budget/Celeron line but it would seriously eat into their sales of existing CPUs.
In the past they relied heavily on the "Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM/Intel/Microsoft" FUD but I really doubt that would work today considering how
ubiquitous non-Intel processors (ARM) are in everyday life.

Despite the risks involved it wouldn't surprise me if they go back to their old tricks of underhanded & illegal methods to stop people buying AMD. I'm sure they have a
few schemes they could try that are different enough to what they've done in the past. Even if they're caught it would take 5 years or more after appeals and I doubt
AMD could survive that long.
 
I wish Intel would panic and kick out a few more Extreme Edition CPUs for the X99 as the platform still has life and room to grow, heck I can run Intel's E7-8894 24/48T CPU in my rig but its $10K.... If they came out with a 16+ Core unlocked CPU that would be awesome. One can dream. May just pick up the E7-8894 in a few years when its like $89 lol
 
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People are missing something when they say that Intel could just drop prices and crush AMD. While it's technically possible for Intel to do that, Intel will not do anything like that anytime soon. The first reason is because it helps Intel to have AMD around with regards to monopolies and such. A much bigger reason is because Intel always promotes its hardware as premium. That requires having premium prices no matter what. Intel cannot afford to respond to AMD with massive price cuts on their CPUs. It would destroy the premium branding and in effect tell the world that Intel is no better and very possibly worse than AMD no matter if it is true or not. That is simply something Intel cannot do.

I don't expect to see any price drops from Intel and even if there are any they will be small and most likely only happen if something new is released. Intel cannot afford to give credibility to the possibility that AMD is possibly on par with them in any way. Dropping prices due to the release of Ryzen would signal just that. Besides, Intel can easily afford to lose some market share and have no real issues from it.

It will be harder to do this time. As I understand it AMD, while using a larger node, comes out with a smaller die than intel's 8 physical core offerings. So that gives AMD a pricing advantage...unless Intel price dumps and sells at a loss to lock AMD out. That kind of behavior is anti-competitive and what causes a lot of monopolies to be broken up or get regulated. That's risky behavior for intel.

Intel granting credibility and maintaining pride doesn't mean squat if their sales plummet. When it comes to pride and starvation versus admitting default, I'll admit defeat.
 
When Ryzen starts being available, either it will be awesome, or it will be "meh".

This useless piece of non-news (not even fake news) brought to you by....

(waiting. IMHO, AMD should make clocks)
 
mmm

I don't think Intel has to

6 core i7 is coming to mainstream desktop
not anytime soon, but next year January or so

until then it's going to be close enough in performance, at least in gaming

some games scale better with more cores/threads, some don't
it's a great time to upgrade for those holding on to the same rig for 5 years


if anything I'm warming up to the idea that if I want to replace a Ryzen with a Ryzen 2 I don't have to buy a new platform again


but then coffee lake is a rehash of the same architecture, again
so maybe I can pop one of those 6 core i7 into my z170

also gonna be interesting to see how much improvement binned Ryzen CPU's from silicon lottery will be clockwise
 
There's more risk to Intel if they try to bury a superior AMD product than just the court system...

AMD has been a buyout rumor target for years. If they actually have a superior product/architecture/IP, and Intel manages to wrangle their PR and dirty tricks department to suppress the effects of Ryzen on the market, than a company with bigger pockets than Intel can swoop in and throw their weight behind a superior product. Intel has money, but they don't have Apple or Microsoft money. And both of those companies could benefit huge from controlling their own x86 chip design and become independent of Intel for every Macbook and SurfacePro.

As someone else pointed out...it's in Intel's best long-term interest to have their competition be a scrappy, small underdog company that occasionally sneaks up and bites them on the ass instead of their competition being rolled into another tech behemoth that can compete with them in the R&D and marketing department.
 
Agreed. If amd was 3x faster than Intel it would not matter from Intels cash and market share pov. And we all know ryzen isn't 3x faster, amd isn't where it was back then, and Intel could simply win in a price war.
...
Go amd, but be aware that waking the sleeping giant would be bad. Just steal some of its stuff, don't try and move in.

I don't think Intel will "wake up" and do anything amazing. Here's the rub: Ryzen is 1st Gen of this architecture. Intel is currently in the 6th generation of their architecture (I am starting from Sandy Bridge, as it was such a huge leap over original "i" series). With as performance competitive as Ryzen appears to be by early indications, 2nd and 3rd generation should give AMD a good shot at overtaking Intel completely in the performance metric. Intel needs a good redesign, and I don't think they have anything on the current roadmap other than the incremental updates they've been doing for the past 6-7 years.

Giant stacks of money for one. Even if AMD hits 90% of the performance of an Intel CPU for half the price, all Intel has to do is cut prices. If they dont have an engineering solution immediately available they have enough money to burn to buy time to come up with one.

AMD is way too far behind to leapfrog Intel and even if they did it wont matter. It will help consumers though by driving down prices.

I just don't see Intel dropping prices, as their business model requires them to maintain high margins. If you see Intel dropping prices, you know they are feeling serious pressure, and the situation is much worse for Intel than anyone would have suspected.
 
There's more risk to Intel if they try to bury a superior AMD product than just the court system...

AMD has been a buyout rumor target for years. If they actually have a superior product/architecture/IP, and Intel manages to wrangle their PR and dirty tricks department to suppress the effects of Ryzen on the market, than a company with bigger pockets than Intel can swoop in and throw their weight behind a superior product. Intel has money, but they don't have Apple or Microsoft money. And both of those companies could benefit huge from controlling their own x86 chip design and become independent of Intel for every Macbook and SurfacePro.

As someone else pointed out...it's in Intel's best long-term interest to have their competition be a scrappy, small underdog company that occasionally sneaks up and bites them on the ass instead of their competition being rolled into another tech behemoth that can compete with them in the R&D and marketing department.

heard this for like 15 years.... still waiting on SAMSUNG to purchase AMD and throw sever money behind them
 
On a serious note, anyone know if the DRM needed to play UHD Blu-Rays and 4K Netflix will be available via the Ryzen?
 
I'm going to be honest, AMD has been such a non contender for so long that I firmly believe it is going to require more than 1 good chip. Sure this will be a huge boost for AMD, but I don't see Intel really taking much of a hit unless AMD manages to repeat this.
 
I wouldn't be surprised that Intel doesn't have anything to compete against Ryzen for at least a year or two. I also don't think they'll stay behind either. Isn't this exactly what we're looking for? An actual competition?

I really want to upgrade. I'm waiting for a chip that makes me really want to buy it so I can see some big improvement. Without using the extra chipset features and going by raw CPU performance with my games and other things - my overclocked 2600K is handling itself just fine. If Ryzen gets Intel to up it's game a bit and release a faster, more core, CPU - then I'm all for it. If I could get a 8700K (or whatever) that can hit 5GHz with 6-8 cores (12-16 with HT), without the $1000 premium, I'd buy it. In a heartbeat. I'd be pulling out my wallet right now. I just don't want to pay $1000 for the CPU privilege (even then, I'd get the cores but not the speed). If AMD can bring the Intel Extreme CPU's to the mainstream market, then I'll take that as a win.

I'll be interested to see how many people will actually buy AMD (AMD makes money, which keeps competition going) or just buy Intel once they cut prices (AMD makes no money, which kills competition when AMD goes under).

Depends on how Intel reacts. The price is a big one. Performance + price, bang for the buck. If Intel can match AMD's performance at the same price point, I'd go with Intel. If AMD offers the best performance at a certain price point, and spending another $150 for Intel's similar performing option, I'll go with AMD.

For me, it's a waiting game. Ryzen looks good. If I were building a NEW computer, I would consider it. If I'm upgrading, which I am, I probably won't. Just not going to see the gains I want to see for the price of an upgrade. So, I'm waiting until next release of CPU's. If Intel doubles down and brings out the goods, that's excellent. If AMD can release a follow up to Ryzen that blows away this gen, I may go for that.

My current PC may have a lot of miles on it, but it still purrs like a kitten.
 
heard this for like 15 years.... still waiting on SAMSUNG to purchase AMD and throw sever money behind them

I think when they were going toe to toe years ago they were too expensive to be worth it for the other companies, but now is an ideal price point. Plus, AMD didn't have the ATI intellectual property then. AMD is the only company playing in both the x86 and GPU markets, their intellectual property value is immense, and could be incredibly disruptive if it got dropped into the lap of someone with $$.

I think a lot of these buy-out players were waiting to see what happened....over the last 6-7 years I think most of them were just waiting in the wings figuring they could snatch up the bits they wanted when they inevitably went belly up. Now they might actually have competitive products on two fronts, and with the right capital behind it....yeesh. Look out.
 
I'm waiting for the For-Sale forum to start raining Intel CPU's so I can snag a 6700k/7700k before the Ryzen blind-preorder suckers get buyer's remorse.
 
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I think intels in for some trouble ahead due to the fact they dont have any 6-8 core cpu's out and if they do WAY overpriced\performance ratio going on. Then comes the Price factor again and how quickly can they make and sell of the 6-8 cores if intel chooses to do so. Intel has the lead for so long they got slack and bored and never really pushed harder to keep there edge up with at that time no competition from amd until now again.

So the new standard will be 6-8 core 16 threads 3-4 ghz stock speeds at 300-400 bucks thanks to amd Basically
 
Does anyone really believe that Ryzen is going to break Intel somehow? Man...I mean, great for AMD for getting back in the race - we all need them to be competitive - but this does not equate to Intel hurting in some way. Intel have gotten complacent and it might be easy to argue they have been price gouging, but it would be crazy to think they won't respond easily.

It took AMD 4 years to respond once they realized Bulldozer was a dead end. If they don't already have something planned expect it to take as long. People kind of forget Intel kind of lucked out that their Israel team was able to scale the P6 architecture like they did as the main team was still focusing on Netburst and how to cool it down. And that was during a string of other disasters, such as Itanium failing and having to support x86-64. In no way am I saying this is going to be their downfall but it is coming at a similar time where designs and lines aren't working out as planned. The next year is going to be crucial.
 
I'm still reserving judgement until real-world benchmarks come out, and we have a couple months in the wild to see how the new AMD stuff performs.

If AMD performs as people seem to predict, Intel will HAVE to make some big changes. You can be the "premium" brand, but you can't hold on to that title if another company is selling a platform with 95% of the performance/features at 50% of the price. So Intel will either have to produce some much faster parts in a hurry, or they'll have to make some big price cuts.

Either way, the consumers win!
 
Intel will HAVE to make some big changes

I expect Intel to proceed with its plan as usual pretty much ignoring AMD. The gen 8 mainstream i7s will have 6C and 12T and that will be a ~$350 CPU. This has been in on the roadmap for some time. At most I can see the price point coming down to $300 for this.
 
I expect Intel to proceed with its plan as usual pretty much ignoring AMD. The gen 8 mainstream i7s will have 6C and 12T and that will be a ~$350 CPU. This has been in on the roadmap for some time.

Basically this, mainstream I7 becomes 6C/12T, I5 becomes 4C/8T, I3 becomes 4C/4T. Sounds like Intel will not abandon the $1500 price point for the extreme editions but rather release a 12C/24T. I imagine this will push the 10C/20T to the $1000 dollar mark with 8C/16T going in the $400-600 range. That is in the short-term. Longer term we will see what Intel comes back with in late 2018 with Ice Lake.
 
I think a lot of these buy-out players were waiting to see what happened....over the last 6-7 years I think most of them were just waiting in the wings figuring they could snatch up the bits they wanted when they inevitably went belly up. Now they might actually have competitive products on two fronts, and with the right capital behind it....yeesh. Look out.

3dFX comes back from the dead via Kickstarter, buying AMD's GPU assets (old ATI stuff) and resurrects the Voodoo brand! I'll put in $5. I'm sure we can get this done in no time at all! :D
 
Basically this, mainstream I7 becomes 6C/12T, I5 becomes 4C/8T, I3 becomes 4C/4T. Sounds like Intel will not abandon the $1500 price point for the extreme editions but rather release a 12C/24T. I imagine this will push the 10C/20T to the $1000 dollar mark with 8C/16T going in the $400-600 range. That is in the short-term. Longer term we will see what Intel comes back with in late 2018 with Ice Lake.

I love more cores, but they come with a lower speed as far as I can tell. If they could get the 4.5+GHz with that 8C/16T CPU at 400-500, or overclock it close to 5GHz, I'd be all over it. But, at 4GHz or so? I'll go with fewer cores but higher clock speed. At least for right now.
 
heard this for like 15 years.... still waiting on SAMSUNG to purchase AMD and throw sever money behind them

No one can buy AMD due to license restrictions with x86 and Intel. If AMD ever loses control they lose the x86 license as I understand it.
 
I love more cores, but they come with a lower speed as far as I can tell. If they could get the 4.5+GHz with that 8C/16T CPU at 400-500, or overclock it close to 5GHz, I'd be all over it. But, at 4GHz or so? I'll go with fewer cores but higher clock speed. At least for right now.

Most of the games I play is very multi threaded and at least 3 cores are used meaning a quad got one real core to do the rest.
Hence my opinion of 6 core should be gaming choice.
I think buying quads is a bit backwards in 2017 as 6 cores is at least where you want to be next year.
 
It is impressive how fast people forget what happened or stay in denial due to company loyalty. So many people don't understand the consequences of what happened and how them breaking the law as extensively as they did basically changed the course of technology history. Anyway, watch, I bet somebody will rush to their defense and say none of this mattered because AMD made mistakes (which it did), completely ignoring the fact that Intel broke the law repeatedly on a global scale. People should have gone to jail for what they did, instead, it solidified market dominance. As for them being evil, it's debatable. For me, a company being evil has to willfully or through negligence get people killed or else ruin peoples' lives irreparably. By that metric, I don't know if Intel is evil, just unethical and law-breaking.

I agree with you.

I suppose though that it all depends on what we understand under evil. A bully at school for me is evil behaviour, even if the bully has his or her reasons. Those reasons are also evil. It is not only murder or extreme that is evil. Just having an evil intent is evil to me, even if you do nothing.

But yes, people will defend Intel, who have been like this since the 1980's.
 
Intel has enough deep contracts and business connections to keep them fine for a decade even if they sold CPUs that gave you herpes....at issue is how much this harms Intel's growth and how much AMD can gain. I mean even when AMD was selling a FAR superior product they only barely sniffed at 50% consumer market share, and usually have hovered at 25% even in the good times. So Intel will be fine regardless.

AMD has TONS of growth to do, though...they have 2 big markets they play in and every step forward is money to put towards new R&D. They really haven't been terribly well off financially since acquiring ATI, so the idea of them getting back to being a financially solvent company AND having some real money to throw behind things like the APU line is very exciting.
 
At this point, it's still largely a non-issue for Intel for a couple of reasons:

1) The Ryzen chips atm compete against Intel's Extreme Edition chips, which are not in any stretch of the imagination, mainstream chips. Effectively both are being marketed to enthusiasts.
2) The cheapest Ryzen chip is cost competitive with the most expensive mainstream chip (i7-7700k), but outside of the Cinebench score (multithread), we're not sure (and based on clock speeds and the other i7-68/69xx chips it's unlikely) that on applications utilizing less than 8 threads (which is pretty much everything outside of rendering applications and a small handful of video apps) the Ryzen chip will not be speed competitive with the Intel chip. You can argue that in just a few years time we'll have apps that can use the extra cores, but I have a nearly 10 year old quad core Q6600 that says otherwise. I still have trouble finding mainstream apps, even ones that 'could' benefit from additional cores, using them. In just a few years time the market could be very different, so the future really doesn't matter.
3) Amd never left the retail market. They have been steadily been marketed in low/mid range machines right along.
4) There are currently no Extreme Edition chips from any of the major three (HP, Dell, Lenovo) OEMs in any of their machines. It's either a 4C i7 or a higher core Xeon chip. You'll only find the EE chips in boutique builders. Clearly not a focus for Intel.
5) Finally, the big one, AMD is going to have 1 million chips available for sale on the 2nd of March and at this point may of the major retailers are beginning to report being sold out. So, while it's going to be hard launch (probably), the bigger question is when is the resupply going to happen.

Personally, I really hope that AMD has a solid chip on their hands and can offer some real competition to Intel with it. The reality is probably going to be something else though, based on the nature of this release, their past history, where they are pricing them, and Intel's reaction so far. (Seriously? You don't think Intel doesn't have a handful of these chips and MB's already?)

A few more days and we'll see where the chips fall. :)
 
There's more risk to Intel if they try to bury a superior AMD product than just the court system...

AMD has been a buyout rumor target for years. If they actually have a superior product/architecture/IP, and Intel manages to wrangle their PR and dirty tricks department to suppress the effects of Ryzen on the market, than a company with bigger pockets than Intel can swoop in and throw their weight behind a superior product. Intel has money, but they don't have Apple or Microsoft money. And both of those companies could benefit huge from controlling their own x86 chip design and become independent of Intel for every Macbook and SurfacePro.

As someone else pointed out...it's in Intel's best long-term interest to have their competition be a scrappy, small underdog company that occasionally sneaks up and bites them on the ass instead of their competition being rolled into another tech behemoth that can compete with them in the R&D and marketing department.


AMD cannot be bought, because the license agreement prohibits it. If somebody buys AMD, the x86 license expires. That is why AMD sold off all their factories and even their property. That was all that could be sold. Intel also does not want AMD to die, because then monopoly laws step in. They will give AMD some breathing room to recover from bancruptcy and then they will begin to suffocate them again. Very sad world we live in...
 
AMD cannot be bought, because the license agreement prohibits it. If somebody buys AMD, the x86 license expires. That is why AMD sold off all their factories and even their property. That was all that could be sold. Intel also does not want AMD to die, because then monopoly laws step in. They will give AMD some breathing room to recover from bancruptcy and then they will begin to suffocate them again. Very sad world we live in...

It's not quite that simple....AMD licenses x64 back to Intel....so unless Intel wants to try fielding Itanium chips as a consumer product they're between a rock and a hard place when it comes to whether they void the agreement. On the surface there are challenges but contracts can be drawn up that can get around the details of the licensing agreement. Intel lost this battle before when they sued over AMD spinning off Global Foundries.
 
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