Nope. 6 core 12 thread CPUs came to the mainstream a while ago, AMD brought them. The Ryzen 5 1400 is $160.
Intel is playing catchup.
Intel is playing catchup.
AMD's great revolution was getting the TDP on that core count below 100W, and getting them onto a consumer chipset/socket instead of the enthusiast/server platform. That's it.
We keep saying they forced some revolution in price/performance that Intel has had to respond to. Its 80% hype, 20% truth. Intel was complacent on the desktop, yes. But Ryzen's perf gains over Skylake aren't significantly more than Intel's tick/tock perf gains they push each year; the main difference is that Ryzen focused on the enthusiast, which is something Intel had de-prioritized.
[1] http://ark.intel.com/products/82932/Intel-Core-i7-5820K-Proc...
They are even priced essentially the same as the 4C8T i7s.
I basically had Ryzen performance at Ryzen prices a year ago when I built my 5820K system. Motherboard, processor, and 32 GB of DDR4-3000 CAS15 cost me $600 all together. I hit 4.13 GHz all-core on stock voltage and still run well under the rated TDP.
Ryzen was an incremental improvement at best. 8 core Ryzen is slightly faster (being that it has 33% more cores) but I'm still winning vs the 6-cores.
The real change Intel needs to make is dropping the cost of the 8-core and higher chips, because they're just past any reasonable budget.
You're right on all counts. Ryzen was vastly overhyped. Its highly likely Cannonlake and KabyLake-X will destroy it when they are released in a couple months.
The world needed Ryzen to push Intel to lower prices on their high end chips. But, like most of the times when AMD "pushes ahead", Intel will beat them within a year, and hold that position for another 4 years. And then the cycle repeats.
I don't know how much longer AMD can keep this up. It seems like they're being propped up by their dominance in console tech.
Intel is still sitting on a ~10% lead in per-core performance in real-world applications, and Broadwell-E is handicapped in a number of ways. Skylake-X is going to be a huge step forward. I think the 6C Skylake-X chips are going to come real close to the 8C Ryzen 7s (let's call it within 5-10%). And that leaves the 8C Intel chips with a pretty solid lead.
(Synthetics like Cinebench are definitely tilting AMD - but I don't see a corresponding lead in real-world applications, on a core-for-core basis)
If Intel can maintain premium performance, they can also maintain premium pricing.
No question the race is on, though. Next year is gonna be interesting, when both companies have sized up the other and fully prepared their responses. There's some obvious fixes for AMD (like the interconnect, or just getting memory stability fixed), and Intel could do something like put the L4 eDRAM back on their dies to get minimum framerates up[0].
[0] http://techreport.com/review/28751/intel-core-i7-6700k-skyla...
Either way, I'm happily using a newly built R7-1700 in a Node 202 mini-ITX case with a Geforce 1060 Founders Edition. It's very quiet and having 8 cores and 16 threads is far more useful than I assumed it would be. It's one of those things that you didn't know you needed until you have it. I use it for so much stuff, and it handles it all with ease.
If nothing else, the 16 threads get a workout daily as my Steam Link is set to do CPU encoding and that uses 8 threads. Beautiful image quality on the TV as a result when the fam is doing some gaming. I'm in love with this system, very happy with Ryzen. Thanks to AMD! :)
The Ryzen chip is a third of the cost of the Intel chip and doesn't require the expensive enthusiast X99 platform.
AMD's great achievement is bringing 6 and 8 core chips /to the mainstream/, affordable by pretty much everyone. Intel's X99 enthusiast platform has been around longer but is massively more expensive.
I know it hurts but AMD needs to have ship an almost unreasonable number of units for several consecutive to be considered mainstream. If Ryzen will be anything like the Athlon 64, AMD would fail to capitalize on it and just be behind Intel when it comes to iterations.