I shouldn't surprise anyone, this is standard practice from both vendors when it comes to new releases. Vendor X releases new product, Vendor Y sends note saying "call us before publication to get a statement from us". If you commit the heinous offence of not calling them... you don't get a statement to include. Oh no.
Power consumption numbers seem off, it may well be due to an immature bios, but it looks like Ryzen isn't downclocking and undervolting properly, over 57.3% more power used at idle but only 3.15% at full tilt...
It will be interesting to see what happens to the Broadwell-E prices. The 6900k is currently £997 at ebuyer, or £1047 at Overclockers. Is it that Intel cannot afford to sell them cheaper, or that they like to get high margins by tearing the **** out of their consumer base. Likely the latter, so more power to AMD. Sad for anyone who has invested £600 - £1k in an Intel enthusiast CPU. [Review results dependent]
I don't believe the "Can't afford to sell cheaper" malarkey. Intel make their own CPUs at their own factories which means they probably get the actual CPU cheaper than AMD does. Now sure, there's the money involved to make those factories but didn't they lay off a load of people and close one/some recently? Sandybridge released at a great price. Ivybridge remained pretty much the same. That is how it should have stayed, if you A. Want people to upgrade to them and B. Must keep mashing out 5% CPUs with a new board each time. Personally I think they have just broken the "take the urine" meter. It's like anything else really. Shrinking chocolate bars, shrinking food. They will sell the absolute minimum they can at the highest price. You soon find out when you are being too greedy because you stop making sales. That's when the GTX 1080 will drop in price, when sales start to slow.
It can't in the sense that it will destroy its gross income and the entire product stack of its largest income department, its elevated brand establishment/leverage and its stock price will crater. From a business perspective it's commercial suicide.
Yup even when the Athlon came along Intel did not drop their prices. The P4 was more expensive but for that it was hotter and did use far more 'leccy Totally worth it...
I'm with 'im. Sure, Intel'll drop prices - but only by the usual "oh, go on then" 10-15%. They certainly ain't going to cut 'em 50%, whether they can afford to or not. What Intel will do is make sure that it has a chip to beat Ryzen at each level come whichever generation it hasn't locked down yet: for each Ryzen chip, there'll be an Intel chip which is the same speed or faster and only slightly more expensive - or, for the lower-end chips, possibly even cheaper. That's an easier thing to sneak out than suddenly saying "hey, our £1,000 chips are only actually worth £500 after all" - especially if you've still got £1,000 chips which you justify by having extra components (Iris Pro, EDRAM, four times the cache, whatever) compared to new cheaper chips. You mark my words: either Cannonlake or its successor will have 8c/16t parts at Ryzen prices, but Intel will still offer £1,000+ enthusiast chips 'cos it can't not.
Yeah maybe they will finally jump to the "I9", and brand the lower end chips Pentiums or what not. About time we had a new name really Fully expect the LOLprice Extreme Editions though.
According to Hothardware, this has begun in the US. It'll be a cold day in heck before those cuts reach the UK though!
Micro Center is the only shop in the world to regularly deep discount relevant CPUs, unless it spreads to other stores it is not an indication of Intel having lowered prices.
Those aren't Intel cuts, though: those are retailer cuts, and I'm willing to be they're loss-leaders to boot ('cos if you can sell someone a CPU at a loss, you should be able to claw back a healthy profit on a motherboard, ram, case, power supply and so forth to go with it). I'm talking about Intel cutting the price it charges retailers by 10-15%, not the price the retailers charge their customers. Wot 'e said. A bunch of tech sites saw Micro Center drop some prices and turned that into "INTEL IS SLASHING PRICES 'COS RYZEN OMG," when the real headline is "Micro Center has slashed some prices, probably because Ryzen but also possibly just to clear inventory, and almost certainly as a loss-leader."
What Intel can't counter however is the consumer saying f*ck you regardless you've had it your way far to long and buying AMD or people jumping ship for a change in platform - to be fair a lot of enthusiasts have grown tired of the constant socket changes with every other generation of Intel CPU at consumer level.
If I was a retailer I'd be cutting prices temporarily to generate the sort of publicity Micro Center is getting.
IDK how accurate it is but IIRC i read somewhere that us enthusiasts make up a tiny part of their market, something like 8%, the real people they need to win over are OEM's and the like.
For Intel, the big money is in servers where they hold a huge monopoly and a 10% increase in performance is enough for people to replace out for the next generation. Any talks I have been to by some of the OEM's I work with, Intel have been pushing a lot into the enthusiast market with gaming being a big thing for them. Recently I have seen Intel marketing asking reviewers to contact Intel first. It's going to be one of those things where AMD asks to compare X to Y and Intel will say also compare to Z which is closer priced and in this benchmark shows only 2fps less ect. See what happens. I enjoy choice. For a long time as a system builder I have been using Intel as it has been the only choice in most cases. Looking forward to more options.
Intel would not bat a eyelid if we did not buy from them, all there income is from OEMs and server deals, Apple alone gives Intel more money per quarter than AMD earns in a year. AMD was always more popular with enthusaists as we would clock it high and take the cheaper chips. It's only when they fell massively behind that they become a non contender. AMD just has to hope there's enough left that are not on skylake or better systems and can afford to drop the big bucks on its cpus. Think the 4 - 6 core variants later in the year will be better for AMDs market share depending on performance. If the 4 core can overclock well and match the 7600k for less money could be the gamers chip of choice.
I can certainly see the logic in releasing the top tier CPUs first, but as Rollo says it's the mid-tier i5/i7 equivalents that will probably be the big sellers. I'm not sure how big the market is for the R7 stuff, but it's almost certainly smaller than that for the R5s. I also agree that we're unlikely to see Intel significantly discounting their current CPU stack, but I'd not be surprised if future products offered a fair bit more bang-per-buck (either from reduced prices with similar performance or from similar prices but greater performance).
I can see the R7 stuff being both flagship parts and hints towards the coming Naples server parts, which may get Intel all hot and bothered if they come out with the same kinds of performance claims that Ryzen is currently packing. If Intel does decide to play dirty; I hope they get fined Properly for it, none of this 1.2 Billion over 12 years of 40 billion a year profits, hit them for something that will actually make them think twice about trying it again, something like 30% of their recorded income per year for x years would do it.
