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> Why is there this claim that they had or have any aces in the first place, Zen or no Zen?

I'm not a big hardware person, but from what I've heard the speed they released 6 core processors after Ryzen makes it likely they were capable of producing 6 core (consumer) designs earlier.

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The original hexacore Xeon is almost eight years old (March 2010 release). Intel released a consumer hexacore in response to Ryzen. Intel's artificial market segmentation is ridiculous, but so is the typical AMD watcher's near total ignorance if what is happening in the Xeon line.

That may be overstating AMD's ignorance by quite a bit. The big marketing push with the zen launch was that Intel had a chip with a lot of cores, but it was 2x the price for with slightly worse performance.

They produce Xeon chips with dozens of cores forked off the same architecture, so that wasn't too surprising. Sticking to four cores was probably just market segmentation, like not supporting ECC memory in the consumer line, to protect Xeon sales.

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