|
Price and feature availability had a lot to do with it. Up until Ryzen came out, a 4 core CPU was the largest core count available in an Intel "consumer" CPU. I had a 6 core Ivy Bridge CPU at one point (i7-4930k) and it cost me ~$550. The motherboard was another $300. Despite the premium, it was still considered a desktop CPU, so ECC was unavailable. And since it was a niche product, I was unable to find a replacement motherboard when I inadvertently damaged mine. Moreover, since the chipsets changed seemingly every new CPU release cycle, I couldn't upgrade either my CPU or my motherboard without replacing both. AMD released the Ryzen 1700x, with 8 cores, for cheaper than what I paid for my 6 core, and something like half the price of Intel's 8 core offering. AMD made 4 core the baseline, while Intel was still selling 2 core i3s, and they made 6 cores the middle of the road. All of them had hardware threading enabled, whereas Intel had disabled hyper-threading in its i5 line. AMD also committed to supporting the AM4 socket for multiple release cycles. With BIOS updates, motherboards that launched with with the 1XXX series can run the newest 5XXX series (subject to being able to power them). And the Ryzen motherboards came in two flavors: one that was very affordable (the BX50 series) and one that was more expensive, but had features enthusiasts want (the XY70 series). I don't want to sound like I'm gushing, but AMD came out swinging with Ryzen. I'm probably misremembering, but looking back, I think the only advantage Intel really had at the time was single core performance (and for a niche audience, AVX512). Subsequent Ryzen releases have really closed the performance gap and there the TSMC process improvements help. AMD has garnered a lot of good will at this point. They shook up the stagnant CPU market with both features and price. |