re: PC Discussion - Gaming, Performance and Enthusiasts

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U ducking me fam?

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This morning I felt a little bit bad for Intel. The Core X-series chips are the most interesting thing they’ve done in the high-end desktop space since the glory days of the Skulltrail platform. It’s good to see that they are responding to competitive pressure and that they are willing to adjust their strategy as necessary. Perhaps Charlie came down a shade too hard when he declared that, “Kaby-X is not only a bad product it is a marketing disaster.” But then AMD committed offering all 64 PCI-E lanes and 4 DDR4 memory channels on every ThreadRipper SKU regardless of price, clockspeed, or core count. These Core X-series chips haven’t even been publicly announced for a full 24 hours and already its clear that AMD’s offering the better chip.

Once again Intel’s mindless up-selling strategy has given AMD a very valuable window of opportunity to exploit. Even Intel’s best Core X-Series chips will only offer 44 PCI-E lanes, 20 fewer lanes than AMD’s cheapest Ryzen ThreadRipper part. The midrange parts are where the competition will be the most fierce, but even there AMD appears set to offer more cores per dollar and more than double the 28 PCI-E lanes of six and eight core Intel parts. The comparison gets even more silly when we think about the entry-level Core X-series CPUs which are based not on server chips but rather mainstream desktop chips.

These Kabylake-X parts offer a mere 16 PCI-E lanes and dual channel memory. Worse yet they are saddled with the complex and expensive socket LGA 2066 socket and X299 chipset. Buying one of these Kabylake-X chips in place of a standard Kabylake chip is absolutely a mistake. You’ll be paying more money for a very limited performance improvement compared to a Z270-based alternative and gaining the privilege of plunking down 2 to 10 times as much money as you paid for your initial Kabylake-X chip at some point in the future if you decide that you need moar cores.

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Thanks to Threadripper's 64 PCIe-lanes, new systems are possible, such as this 6 GPU compute system

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