Intel Corp (INTC)

[morrowinder]

Elmer: In marketing, it's what they don't say that really is key...

And they haven't really said much.

If Zen was a fully baked product and had total dominance, all they would have had to do is post SPEC INT and SPEC FP scores. There is no doubt that AMD will be more competitive with Zen. But AMD fans are overlooking a lot. AMD is going to have to get design wins in places they have been absent for years. That takes time. Additionally, it is a big question mark about how much volume they can pump out. Finally, the desktop market is more than just HEDT. It will be well into 2017 before they can even try to compete in all in ones which are actually a reasonably large segment now. And laptops appear to be a ways out there too. And we have no idea how Zen will fare in lower TDP. All in all it just reveals that the architecture is in fact more sound than DullBozer. But it remains to be seen exactly how competitive AMD will be. And in the end, they still are a value brand. It will be hard to overcome being the "cheap cpu" reputation AMD has cultivated over decades. And in servers it will be difficult because AMD has been absent from there for so long.