Comment by cornholio | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cornholio | Hacker News Reader

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It's a PR hit but certainly not a disaster. Everybody and their grandmother knew that a chip demoed to run at 5GHz is an overclocked hand picked engineering sample, Intel has been pulling the supercooled CPU stunt for decades.

At 250W thermal, the 4 die, 7nm Threadripper AMD announced will have similar cooling issues, a dead give away was that Lisa Su completely omitted Cinebench results - despite those being prominently featured before.

Bottom line is that AMD and Intel have roughly similar products and can easily cover for any performance differences using the large financial margins high end CPUs enjoy. The game then becomes a marketing one, who can keep more of that margin by convincing it's fan base they have decisively won the match.

At 250W you won’t see anywhere near the thermal output of that 2.7->5Ghz overclock on 28c/56T. There have been gpus with higher thermal output than 250W of the Amd’s cooled on air.

That CPU draws over 250W when running stock.

They had a separate 20+ phase power delivery board that could pump up to 2000W into that cpu...

Nonsense. We know the new Threadripper was running on air cooling. We know whatever Intel showed needed more than one horsepower of phase change cooling. They're both monstrous chips, but not even in the same ballpark.

250W << 2 horsepower

Before calling what you read 'nonsense', please follow the argument. We have a massively overclocked and unrealistically chilled chip from Intel, with massive results. And we have a cool chip sitting in Lisa Su's hand, that claims no performance numbers. Both use comparable technology, have comparable number of cores and per core performance and, we expect, comparable real life frequencies and dissipation when air cooled.

My conclusion is that the chips are roughly comparable in performance and we are witnessing a marketing war, not a performance showdown. Nothing you said seems to disprove that or even address that conclusion.

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