SemiAccurate article worth a read: 'It is almost like AMD caught Intel with their pants down'

[captain cactus]

Source is: http://semiaccurate.com/2017/05/30/intel-announces-x-series-without-details/

 

I'll quote a few things, but you should just read the entire article.

 

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This time around Intel is showing they can learn from their mistakes, and by mistakes we mean they allowed the user to get a useful part at a non-painful price. With Sky-E if you look at the stats, the 8-core i7-7820X is the one to buy. Why? At $599 it is far cheaper than the $999 10-core 7900X but clocks 300MHz faster than the 10-core and 100MHz faster than the 6-core 7800X. It is the obvious consumer choice.

 

Or at least it would be if you don’t look at the next few columns. Faced with enthusiasts who might actually understand what they are buying and not just plunk down 4-digit dollars for a slower part, Intel leapt into action and kneecapped the 6 and 8-core parts. How? They castrated the PCIe lanes to 28 vs the 44 on the bigger 10-core variants. Please note that the die in Xeon form has 48 PCIe3 lanes so even the 44 is a crippling.

Well, he's not wrong. That $400 price gap between the 7820X and the 7900X is a big one indeed for what seems to be just two more cores and some more PCIe lanes (the latter being even more crippled than the same die used in Xeons).

 

Then we get to the really good part:

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But just when you think things can’t get dumber we come to the 4-core variants, Kaby lake on Socket 2066. The ‘high’ end 7740X has 4-cores and 8-threads while the lesser 7640X has only 4-threads. Yup they killed HT because, well, there isn’t a good reason other than to jack buyers. They love the enthusiasts, really, they will say so. This is one of those situations your mother taught you about, watch what they do and not what they say.

 

Back to the point whomever greenlighted this Kaby-X line should be fired. Why? The Socket 2066 platform has 4 channel memory and up to 44 PCIe3 lanes. Kaby-X has two memory channels and 16 PCIe3 lanes. Motherboards support both so if you buy a Socket 2066 board and plug a Kaby-X into it, half your memory slots don’t work. 28/44ths of your PCIe channels are likewise MIA which means at least one slot will be dead, likely more. This is a recipe for returns and a very annoyed channel. Even if Intel sells through OEMs they will still have customers who see empty memory slots and go out and buy an upgrade only to find it doesn’t actually work. Kaby-X is not only a bad product, it is a marketing disaster. And it is more expensive than just buying a non-X Kaby part. There is no upside to this turkey.

So essentially Intel just made themselves a PR nightmare by still having a dual channel memory controller on a quad-channel platform with a measly 16 PCIe lanes. Essentially normal Kaby Lake but with a bigger ass to accommodate 2066 pins, most of them useless. Whoopsie.

 

The guy then goes on and talks about the other stuff "announced" at the Intel event, mainly in the Optane department. He's not kind on those either.

 

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The big announcement is that Intel took a P4800X, scrubbed the labeling off of it, and said they were launching a consumer drive based on Xpoint. Sometime. Without specs, capacity, or any details. There is going to be a long lag from Computex until launch but based on the reports SemiAccurate is getting at the moment, Xpoint won’t meet endurance targets by then either. Avoid this one too.

 

He closes with this:

 

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In the end Computex showed us that Intel is reacting to AMD rather than having any new ideas of their own. The messaging shows that marketing is still more important than anything else and the product SKU choices show the heartfelt care they have for their most valued customers. Intel seems lost, devoid of new products or good ideas. At best their offerings are iterative while bearing more than iterative price tags. Not a win for Intel in Taipei this year.S|A

 

So yeah. Purposely gimped i9-X CPUs costing too much all together, a PR/marketing nightmare in the form of Kaby Lake X and a general lack of innovation presented at Computex. Either Intel became very, very, very lazy with overly optimistic management people or they were caught off guard completely by AMD's Ryzen and now Threadripper CPUs. Probably a combination of the two. We'll see where this ends up.

[Majestic]

How is this catching them with their pants down. They answer in mere months, meaning they were simply waiting to release it.

[--Shaw Computing--]

AMD fanboys^^^

[VagabondWraith]

This article is semi accurate.

[Master Disaster]

Well I agree with the PR stuff, what Intel are doing with SKT2066 is dumb but the rest, nah. Intel's had this shit on tap ready and waiting for years, they just needed AMD to actually be competitive before they released any of it.

[GoodBytes]

This sounds to me like a discussion over a Tech News.

Am I missing something? I think I'll move it out of Tech News section.

[Cyracus]

Well, Intel has been cutting personnel for a while, wouldn't surprise me if AMD picked up some good people that Intel cut, the kind of people who would point out these kind of stupid moves

[captain cactus]

Just now, huilun02 said:

Such serious fighting for a segment that vast majority of people have no reason or means to get.

I'd rather AMD put more focus on gaining laptop market share, where Ryzen's excellent efficiency can really shine.

Or just expedite Vega?

But the segment that makes most of the money and where margins can actually be high.

 

Laptop APUs are coming later this year. Asus has a Ryzen 7 1700 in a notebook at the same clocks as the desktop counterpart, so they can tick off the box that says "first 8-core laptop". That usually does well for marketing.

[The Sloth]

3 minutes ago, lots of unexplainable lag said:

But the segment that makes most of the money and where margins can actually be high.

 

Laptop APUs are coming later this year. Asus has a Ryzen 7 1700 in a notebook at the same clocks as the desktop counterpart, so they can tick off the box that says "first 8-core laptop". That usually does well for marketing.

nope, that was the EUROCOM Panther 4.0, with an 8-Core Intel XEON E5-2690

[3DOSH]

8 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

Well I agree with the PR stuff, what Intel are doing with SKT2066 is dumb but the rest, nah. Intel's had this shit on tap ready and waiting for years, they just needed AMD to actually be competitive before they released any of it.

Every company is innovating regardless of the competition but if you look at the new prices thats solely reaction to AMD. Limiting the pci bus and the 12+ cores CPU that we have no details on yet are direct reaction to AMD Ryzen and Threadripper. 

[WereCat]

7 minutes ago, GoodBytes said:

This sounds to me like a discussion over a Tech News.

Am I missing something? I think I'll move it out of Tech News section.

Moderators should just close the entire Computex event to avoid fanboy war.

 

BTW, I semi accurately both agree and disagree with this article