Intel is losing its control over the desktop CPU market for over a year now and that includes a lot of reasons. With specific to the newly launched 10th Gen Comet Lake-S desktop CPUs, I would discuss the bitter truths of the blue team’s platform off lately.
Some of its pros remain as Intel has been the champion in making CPUs for ages now but with technological advancements it has lost some of its grounds to its arch rival AMD.
I will not directly do a face off between the two but lay some general reasons why Intel is making things harder for general users to prefer its CPUs:
It’s 2020, still the same old 14 nm archiecture?
One of the biggest frustrations with Intel you might have is it’s still using the age-old 14 nm process when the whole industry is shifting to 10 nm or 7 nm process, even 5 nm process will make its way next year if everything goes fine.
In this scenario, Intel is still clinging on to its old tech and just using its ‘tic-toe’ scheme to making newer generations of CPUs. Obviously using an older node will not increase efficiency or power draw and will bring no “significant” performance uplift.
Also older architectures increases power consumption, gives rise to many security flaws, AMD jumped off in 2017 with 14 nm and shifted its gear to newer nodes every year. The switch to 7 nm changed its fortune overnight and the industry is widely adapting its tech, its revolutionary Zen 2 architecture is making the sole difference.
Intel is missing on this front, they are not doing anything “revolutionary”, fans gave choices these days to switch between so people understand what’s trending and what’s not. Even mobile SoCs are adapting to lower process nodes to achieve better results.
Another generation, another new socket
The biggest flaw Intel is forcing to its users is adapting to newer sockets with every generation of motherboards. This increase costs to upgrade your CPU with each generation which Intel does never understand, this year too they’ve announced the new LGA 1200 socket.
All of the new 10th Generation Intel chips require new motherboards like the Z490 for high-end, B460 for mainstream, and H410 for budget users. The costlier Z490 boards will launch first with the cheaper motherboards to follow soon.
So if you want to upgrade your Core i7-9700K powered PC to achieve an average performance boost of around 15% by getting hold of the Core i7-10700K, you have to spend half of the cost of upgrading your machine to get some more frames per second.
I am not saying bringing newer tech is bad but keeping cross-compatibility with the previous generation of motherboards help users to easily upgrade its CPUs later, people cannot just make new PC builds every year? People are not billionaires Intel, think logically.
Why the focus remains only on gaming?
Intel has been pushing its limits on single-core frequency just to improve its gaming performance. But until now they were putting limits to their cores and threads and as we know most of the creative applications use more cores and threads, professional workloads require high performance CPUs.
Here’s where AMD’s cheaper solutions with more cores and threads are making the difference, games only use max four cores at a time whereas professional works like video encoding, rendering, editing, developing complex applications and games require more horsepower.
I genuinely appreciate Intel’s approach of adding more cores and threads but in this case AMD’s beefier chips like Ryzen 9 3900X or Ryzen 9 3950X with huge amount of compute performance give extra benefits to users who require it. Until now, no one could have think get so much horsepower all at once but yes they can do on desktop these days.
AMD’s Threadripper CPUs perform even better for humoungous workloads at suitable price points. Even though Intel claims to provide better professional performance this time, but still AMD’s extra cores and threads along with efficient 7 nm process and PCIe Gen 4 advantage will tempt users to opt for the Red team.
Pricing still favours AMD
Intel’s pricing of the new 10th Gen Comet Lake-S desktop CPUs are just but its motherboard and cooler disadvantages make things even worse. AMD’s commitment to AM4 socket is driving more and more users to them with no hassle during the upgrade and Intel should think likewise.
The blue team might say they’ve reduced the price significantly, like the Core i9-9900K successor, the Core i9-10900K is $11 less than the predecessor with 2 more cores and threads. Intel is going head-to-head with AMD after a year with similar price points but the downside is the AMD Ryzen 3000 prices will decrease even more.
AMD’s new Ryzen 3 3100 and 3300X are just superb for the entry-level enthusiasts so in coming days the cheaper B550 motherboards will arrive and so will the Zen 3 based Ryzen 4000 desktop processors at Q4 of this year most likely.
So even if Intel has a few months, where people are struggling in lockdown across the globe, to be happy soon AMD will bounce back.
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