[orev]

This is a short term loss for Intel, but could end up being a long term win as an attack on AMD. Making this announcement forced AMD to advance their plans for the 32-core, possibly faster than they really wanted to right now. That depletes their product pipeline faster, making it more difficult to keep pace with future advances.

Edit: initial reports said that AMD was only planning to announce the 24-core CPU, and may have advanced the announcement of the 32-core chip due to Intel’a stunt. TFA doesn’t mention that, so possibly the initial reports were not accurate.

[BlackMonday]

They maxed out the number of cores they can ship in a single CPU for now but that doesn't seem like a problem.

AMD will already launch their 7nm EPYC processor based on Zen 2 in 2019 (skipping Zen+ used by the new Threadripper and Ryzen 2xxx) which is expected to have 48 cores (some rumors even suggest 64 cores but that seems more likely for 7nm EUV instead of the first 7nm processes). So they will have no problem releasing more cores with Threadripper 3 next year (if they keep the yearly releases).

On top of that, in my layman eyes AMDs aproach of using infinity fabric to connect dies seems better suited to react to changes compared to Intels monolithic design.