>AMD said its upcoming Zen x86 core fits into a 10 percent smaller die area than Intel’s currently shipping second-generation 14nm processor.
Sounds totally irrelevant.
Sounds totally irrelevant.
Here's what this means. Intel has about 10% advantage in process technology. Yet despite that, AMD's chip is still 10% smaller than Intel's chip. That gives AMD an effective 20% architectural advantage over Intel for similar performance. This is why Intel is now scrambling to "streamline" its architecture as soon as possible (but won't be able to do it for the next 3 years or so).
A smaller, more "efficient" chip (in terms of performance/die area) means AMD can sell it significantly cheaper and still make as much profit as Intel does on that chip. But from the looks of it, AMD is going to price its equivalent chips at around half or less of Intel's chips, which will make AMD chips a complete no-brainer.
Add to this the fact that Intel will begin to make Xeons rather than its mainstream chips on new process nodes, at first, which means a delay of 6-12 months for the mainstream chips using Intel's latest process technology, and AMD looks to have a tremendous opportunity to steal a ton of market share from Intel over the next few years.
The key is the "similar performance" part.
Intel can just as well sacrifice 10% of their die too and get the same, or better, performance as AMD.
Does it make sense? No. Does it make AMD's chip in any way better? Only if it's smaller AND faster / more efficient (which it is not). And even if it was, it would only matter if AMD could sustain it -- which it hasn't proven it can.
No, the conclusion you should be drawing is "AMD is using ~20% less transistors per core. What did AMD not implement that Intel did and how badly does that hurt Ryzen's performance?"
It is probably a good call on AMD part though, as applications that are sensitive to AVX performance are still rare and if they can get a cheaper core which is faster on integer loads it is a good tradeoff.
Besides that, a smaller area is also good for yield (% of chips that test out OK out of all fab'ed, in case random defects occur in any of the many processing steps.)