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an i7 6900k costs more than 1000 dollars. The top spec AMD chip which is supposed to be within spitting distance, also 8/16, is less than half that price. It's

an i7 6900k costs more than 1000 dollars. The top spec AMD chip which is supposed to be within spitting distance, also 8/16, is less than half that price. It's going to take a real benchmark letdown for these AMD chips not to fly out the door. The floating point (AVX-256) will not be competitive, but the rest of the chip will have a tough time NOT being a success at the leaked prices, even if it proves to be 20% or so slower. Recall that for one of the huge markets, gaming, the Vulkan and DX12 APIs make much better use of multithreaded code so core counts suddenly matter much more. Anyway I think the Internet is already primed for Intel still to have the edge on single core perf. Not a single AMD-controlled benchmark has not been amply caveated as such by the coverage so far, with good doses of scepticism, just like your post. Nobody's expecting parity IMO, they're just expecting something competitive, at the right price. And the price is half.

oliwarner 10y ago
Sorry, I confused myself with all these benchmarks. I meant i7 7700K @ £340. That's the mainstream performance option at the moment that's what they have to compete against at that end of the market. The Intel's -E line CPUs are in a world of their own. Either which way, that's not neccessarily the point, it's that we shouldn't still be guessing how these CPUs are actually going to perform at this point. This much hype won't end well if this isn't the second coming.
- vegabook 10y ago
  7700k is a 4 core / 8 thread. AMD appears to be pricing its 8 core / 16 thread chip at 480 USD which is about 390 GBP. So if the leaked pricing is anywhere near reality (and I'll admit that's contentious), then it's a no brainer in favour of AMD. On the leaked pricing, some are expressing cynicism, but remember that AMD pays big penalty fees to Global Foundries if it doesn't meet long term contractual volume requirements. So it is perfectly feasible that it might favour volume over margins, since the end-result P&L to the company might be similar, but with the former strategy it gets market share for "free". I'll give you that hype is at fever pitch though.
  - brandmeyer 10y ago
    If the pricing leak is true, then I think we can expect a price drop on Intel processors on the release date. We'll have to wait for a true price/performance comparison until after then.
  - vbezhenar 10y ago
    I would chose superior performance with 4 core, because I expect my workload to be mostly single-core, so 4 more cores won't make me that happy. But for those, who can load those 8 cores, it's awesome deal.

oliwarner 10y ago

Sorry, I confused myself with all these benchmarks. I meant i7 7700K @ £340. That's the mainstream performance option at the moment that's what they have to compete against at that end of the market. The Intel's -E line CPUs are in a world of their own. Either which way, that's not neccessarily the point, it's that we shouldn't still be guessing how these CPUs are actually going to perform at this point. This much hype won't end well if this isn't the second coming.

vegabook 10y ago
7700k is a 4 core / 8 thread. AMD appears to be pricing its 8 core / 16 thread chip at 480 USD which is about 390 GBP. So if the leaked pricing is anywhere near reality (and I'll admit that's contentious), then it's a no brainer in favour of AMD. On the leaked pricing, some are expressing cynicism, but remember that AMD pays big penalty fees to Global Foundries if it doesn't meet long term contractual volume requirements. So it is perfectly feasible that it might favour volume over margins, since the end-result P&L to the company might be similar, but with the former strategy it gets market share for "free". I'll give you that hype is at fever pitch though.
- brandmeyer 10y ago
  If the pricing leak is true, then I think we can expect a price drop on Intel processors on the release date. We'll have to wait for a true price/performance comparison until after then.
- vbezhenar 10y ago
  I would chose superior performance with 4 core, because I expect my workload to be mostly single-core, so 4 more cores won't make me that happy. But for those, who can load those 8 cores, it's awesome deal.