Sunday, February 26th 2017
Following Ryzen's Launch, Intel's CPUs Likely to See Price-Cuts
Let's quietly approach the elephant in the room: Intel's pricing structure will hardly stand the onslaught of AMD's Ryzen, which, if early benchmarks are to be believed, has apparently caught Intel with its pants down. Even purely from the leaks that have been following us non-stop in the last several months, it's obvious that AMD managed to outdo itself in the best way possible, managing to develop an architecture which offers up to 52% more performance than their previous one. Intel, which was enjoying the sun-shaded comfort of carrying a virtual, high-performance x86 monopoly, grew stagnant in innovation, ensuring it would stretch its bottom-line by way of minimal R&D investment - just enough to be able to name their improvements as a "new generation" of processors each year.
This in turn has led to an interesting outlook in the high-performance x86 market: customers aren't blind, and they see when a company is stretching its fingers in their pockets. A stagnant performance increase on Intel's customer processors with almost a decade of single-digit increments and paralyzed core-counts to an (admittedly strong) architecture have taken away a lot of customers' goodwill towards Intel. That Intel still has strong brand cognition is a no-brainer, but it doesn't have as much brand credit these days, on account of the low performance gains, and tick-tock falter, than it did in the days of Athlon 64. AMD has the benefit of being the underdog, of coming up with something new, fresh and performant (with headlines claiming it is the latest revival of a sleeping giant)... and those are all points that put pressure on Intel to reignite interest on its products.
Now, the tides are indeed catching up to Intel, with AMD, this metaphor's proverbial David, striking back at a slumbering Goliath. The promise of a powerful multi-core approach and strong IPC performance (which all leaks point towards), paired with insane, non-consumer-gouging pricing means that AMD has built-up a powerful momentum both in sales and goodwill, with Ryzen pre-orders basically flying off the shelves of several retailers.
All of these serve to point out a simple statement: Intel's product-line and pricing scheme as they are weren't designed to compete. They were designed to usher in an era of lacking competition, to extend Intel's bottom-line to its fullest, with little consideration for consumers' interests and innovation (whether or not we think that that's how businesses should operate is a discussion best left for another day). Make no mistake: Intel Will bring some price-cuts to its product line if Ryzen does live up to expectations (and there is no reason to think it won't). Their product stack just falls flat in the face of Ryzen's pricing scheme, and if Intel wants to keep its current product lines relevant, pricing is the easiest, fastest tool to do so, barring some knee-jerk introduction of new CPUs, though you will, apparently, also have to get a new motherboard to run them.
If you're looking for a good deal on a new processor, but want nothing to do with AMD's upcoming prodigy child of a CPU, the post-Ryzen time-frame will possibly be the best time in years to make such a jump. Intel will be hard-pressed to work the only angle it can - pricing - so as to get some leeway until it can make an extensive revision to its desktop CPU product lines come 8th generation Core "Coffee Lake". This is the best time in years - period - to buy a new processor for all your computational needs. And Intel will probably try and hold you from jumping on the Ryzen bandwagon by throwing some unassuming (yet unavoidable) price-cuts your way.
Oh, and by the way. Here are some discounted Intel CPUs. Let's see if such sales catch up on Newegg and Amazon.
This in turn has led to an interesting outlook in the high-performance x86 market: customers aren't blind, and they see when a company is stretching its fingers in their pockets. A stagnant performance increase on Intel's customer processors with almost a decade of single-digit increments and paralyzed core-counts to an (admittedly strong) architecture have taken away a lot of customers' goodwill towards Intel. That Intel still has strong brand cognition is a no-brainer, but it doesn't have as much brand credit these days, on account of the low performance gains, and tick-tock falter, than it did in the days of Athlon 64. AMD has the benefit of being the underdog, of coming up with something new, fresh and performant (with headlines claiming it is the latest revival of a sleeping giant)... and those are all points that put pressure on Intel to reignite interest on its products.
Now, the tides are indeed catching up to Intel, with AMD, this metaphor's proverbial David, striking back at a slumbering Goliath. The promise of a powerful multi-core approach and strong IPC performance (which all leaks point towards), paired with insane, non-consumer-gouging pricing means that AMD has built-up a powerful momentum both in sales and goodwill, with Ryzen pre-orders basically flying off the shelves of several retailers.
All of these serve to point out a simple statement: Intel's product-line and pricing scheme as they are weren't designed to compete. They were designed to usher in an era of lacking competition, to extend Intel's bottom-line to its fullest, with little consideration for consumers' interests and innovation (whether or not we think that that's how businesses should operate is a discussion best left for another day). Make no mistake: Intel Will bring some price-cuts to its product line if Ryzen does live up to expectations (and there is no reason to think it won't). Their product stack just falls flat in the face of Ryzen's pricing scheme, and if Intel wants to keep its current product lines relevant, pricing is the easiest, fastest tool to do so, barring some knee-jerk introduction of new CPUs, though you will, apparently, also have to get a new motherboard to run them.
If you're looking for a good deal on a new processor, but want nothing to do with AMD's upcoming prodigy child of a CPU, the post-Ryzen time-frame will possibly be the best time in years to make such a jump. Intel will be hard-pressed to work the only angle it can - pricing - so as to get some leeway until it can make an extensive revision to its desktop CPU product lines come 8th generation Core "Coffee Lake". This is the best time in years - period - to buy a new processor for all your computational needs. And Intel will probably try and hold you from jumping on the Ryzen bandwagon by throwing some unassuming (yet unavoidable) price-cuts your way.
Oh, and by the way. Here are some discounted Intel CPUs. Let's see if such sales catch up on Newegg and Amazon.
70 Comments on Following Ryzen's Launch, Intel's CPUs Likely to See Price-Cuts
I would hope that Ryzen would be the start of a second or third coming for the AMD CPU division, where they could eventually expand and grow their business to a point where they could be a serious competitor and threat to Intel on a permanent and ongoing basis.
The active competition from a healthy and thriving AMD would/could spur future technological innovation that won't happen with an unchallenged and at-ease Intel.
AMD should be further investing in R & D, even now, so that they can eventually fully match and outperform FUTURE Intel processors and parts, regularly.
So why are you still going on about it? Oh, that's right. It's because you certainly don't have any stunning AMD CPU victories to speak of in the last decade. Maybe soon. Hopefully soon.
But try not to be so desperate. Relying on corporations for your hate or your love is going to leave you miserable.
And what's that retarded 2nd part? Intel should be bankrupted to show you how dumb you are. No money = highest chance of failure. Vega and Ryzen are almost a miracle given the budget.
Intel paid AMD a pittance compared to the market they robbed from them. As a company AMD had no choice but to accept Intel's offer or go bankrupt. You make it sound like AMD wasn't trying hard enough or that someone it's AMD's fault that Intel threatened OEMs to not buy AMD products. No one can ever be a perfect enough victim for you, can they?
Just look at the cost benefits from Intel's perspective
1. They gain a huge majority of the marketshare
2. They prevent a superior product from even being sold.
3. They gain around 10 years of market dominance (and the capital that comes with a monopoly) and use that money to diversify their business into SSDs, motherboards, and fabs.
4. They gain top of mind branding. In other words, everyone thinks of Intel when they think CPUs.
5. As a result of the others, applications are programmed towards Intel and everyone wants an Intel desktop or laptop, either due to mindshare or the fact that Intel can keep AMD under their Thumb simply due to the sheer size difference between the two companies.
Negatives?
1. They paid AMD what is only A FRACTION OF A SINGLE QUARTERS PROFIT. Not really a negative given they've had 10*4 quarters of amazing profit, not to mention the other benefits.
If Zen competes with Intel it's nothing short of a miracle given the stuff AMD has been through.
Are you aware that NVIDIA was close to ask 500-700$ for similar class as RX 480 very soon.
Gaming with Intel and NVIDIA become very expensive. For now cheapest option for gaming was some mATX board Intel i7 and Radeon RX 480 and to change every 3 years.
Now that could be done with AMD and same performance as i7-6950X after OC.
1800X + C6H + DDR4 and cooler could be bundle for 1000$.
Or 1700 + C6H + DDR4 + RX 480 reference for 1000$.
And customer now for 1000 get serious PC for gaming on 1080p.
Or for 1600$ for 4K but with GTX1080, his real value should be 500$ max, but never mind, NVIDIA is next on AMDs hit ist.
The past is the past. AMD didn't almost die from lack of R&D funding, it died from bad marketing, bad business decisions, huge debt, and badly designed products / rebrands. It also doesn't recover because of Intel, but because right now it is actually releasing solid products that can actually compete. The RX480 is an example, and Ryzen another.
"It was 100% AMD that developed Bulldozer."
Intel robs AMD marketshare and thus funding > AMD comes out with bulldozer
See that cause and effect? Unless you are honestly saying the flood of talent out of AMD after they were essentially blocked out of the market by Intel's illegal practices somehow didn't effect their CPUs. Of course, you must be a genius. Good CPUs don't require good talent.
"It was 100% AMD that chose to stick to GCN"
No, they didn't have enough cash. They didn't even have enough to release of Full lineup of GPUs in the 200, 300, and Polaris series.
Seriously though, I'm not going to bother explaining the obvious connections.
Imagine a monopoly game and one where Intel cheats to get most of the properties, money, ect. Your argument is like "Well AMD, you should have built more houses a few turns back, maybe then you would have been able to get more when I landed on your property". You are completely ignoring the fact that AMD didn't even have the money to buy more houses and in fact had to sell a few of it's properties back to the bank. But yes, according to you Intel's malpractice back in the day has zero impact on the fact that they almost completely own the board today /s.
Some more perspective: the senior management at AMD has radically changed in the past few years, and ever since that was done, the marketing slowly changed, the products started making sense, and we could actually see some form of strategy emerge. All the while AMD was still in the red. Strange...
I know its the easy and popular line of thought, but AMD didn't almost die because of Intel. They suffered a major setback from Intel, and then forgot to adjust their company to a new reality, a major change that Lisa Su finally managed to push through. But this major change was not within AMD, it was within the PC market that was not focusing on multithread, but instead on small form factor, power efficiency and all-in-one. AMD bet on the wrong horse at the wrong time and responded by trying to fill the gap with APU's that they tried to sell on graphics power - a nonexistant market that they hoped would generate some revenue and recoup some of the losses made on Bulldozer.