PC Competition: Innovation or Complacency?
2017. AMD launched Ryzen. Bringing 8-cores of high performance computing definitely put Intel at a big pile of heat. And when AMD unveiled Threadripper, they felt they needed to react and thus bringing Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X CPUs alongside a new chipset: X299. Then Intel launched the 8700K and Coffee Lake CPUs in an attempt to cut off the momentum of their rivals. They kind of did, to a degree. Because 2nd gen Ryzen put the 8700K in terms of productivity, straight up a pile of nothing. But, with all of this, is Intel actually innovating or being, if not competitive, actually complacent?
A Look Back
Ever since AMD’s downfall, the time of Phenom and the widely controversial FX series of CPUs, Intel has been stuck with quad-core processors for consumers and those who need more than 4 cores will pay the Intel tax for as high as $1700 for the Broadwell-X Core i7 6950X 10 core Extreme Edition chip. And because of this, people tend to think that gaming will be more then enough for quad-core processors. But then, early 2017, AMD shocked the industry with their Ryzen CPUs. Offering 8-cores in a consumer chip and positioned against Core i7’s put Intel in a wild scenario. Ryzen, while may not be beating current chips on per thread performance, it completely destroys Intel in multithreaded performance, something that HEDT chips are well-known. AMD brought not only a “still powerful but not as quite” chip for gaming, more importantly it killed Intel in multithreaded performance. It was a better value chip than a consumer Intel CPU and even HEDT since prosumers, if they do not need more than 24 PCIE lanes and Quad-Channel memory and just needs pure CPU horsepower on heavy tasks, AMD delivered.
Intel Killed themselves?
The threat of AMD was real. So real that when AMD launched Ryzen Threadripper, Intel was at a big disadavantage. They were threatened that they would lose their leadership in HEDT, since AMD has also threatened Intel’s Xeon lineup of server CPUs, providing 32 cores and 64 threads on a single socket. And therefore, Intel felt they need to react. Hence, X299 was born. While the top end Core i9’s where good in terms of performance and better value than Broadwell-X, one big confusing release along side Skylake-X was Kaby Lake-X. Essentially, it was a 7700K dropped into an LGA 2166 Socket, added Quad Channel mempry support, and can only dropped in into an X299 motherboard. What? It was basically Kaby Lake consumer ‘glued’ into an LGA 2166 socket supporting X299. The product lineup was so confusing that even Core i5’s have Kaby Lake-X. Then, Intel responded in consumer side of things with the 8700K. Finally, 6 cores in a consumer were the first for Intel. It was straightforward, but not as the 9900K and the 9700K. Not to mention, the 9980XE that is still Skylake-X even though it’s technically a 9th gen chip. The 9900K was the first Core i9 for consumers(8C,16T) while the 9700K loses hyperthreading(8C,8T) which even made the lineup more confusing since Core i7’s for quite some time uses Hyperthreading. And not to mention, Xeon and HEDT are beginning to cannibalize themselves thanks to Intel’s, what I would say is “Cannibalizing Updates.”
Seiji Yuaru 