Intel to AMD: “We Challenge you to Meet us in Real World Gaming”

AMD’s Next Horizon Gaming Event is less than ten hours away now, and E3 is going on in full swing. We expect AMD to release its 7nm Radeon RX 5000 graphics cards as well as the 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X CPU during its E3 show. The former leverages the brand new RDNA architecture designed from the ground up for gamers, while the latter uses the Zen 2 cores, and has sent shockwaves across Intel’s dated 14nm Coffee Lake lineup. So much so that for the first time, they are seeing AMD’s CPUs as equals and are challenging team red to “meet them in real-world gaming”.

So you’re going to hear a lot about gaming CPUs this week. They may or may not come from certain three letter acronyms. That said, here’s what I want to challenge you. I want to challenge you to challenge them. If they want this crown come beat us in in real-world gaming, real-world gaming should be the defining criteria that we use to assess the world’s best gaming CPU. I challenge you to challenge anyone that wants to compete for this crown to come meet us in real-world gaming. That’s the measure that we’re going to stand by.

Jon Carvill, VP of marketing, Intel

The timing of this little challenge is a bit more than suspicious. Just a year back, Intel was content with using Cinebench and the traditional benchmarking applications to measure CPU performance, and now that AMD’s Ryzen 3000 CPUs trumped the 9th Gen lineup in the former, BAM! They are not legit anymore. You see where I’m going with this?

At present, Intel’s ridiculously priced Core i9-9900K and the newly announced i9 9900KS (9900K on Steroids) form the company’s gaming flagships. AMD has already announced an 8-core Ryzen 7 and a 10-core Ryzen 9 that as per the first-party benchmarks are faster than Intel’s offerings. Dr. Lisa Su is also expected to launch the 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X in a few hours, with 16-cores and a boost clock of almost 5GHz. I wonder if these Zen 2 chips beat the Core i9-9900K in gaming benchmarks, what Intel’s response is going to be, especially when you consider the price gap between camp red and blue’s CPUs.

Intel’s next major desktop architecture, Ice Lake featuring the Sunny Cove cores is slated for a Q2-2020 reveal, but from what we’ve already seen, it doesn’t seem fast enough to make that much of a difference. We’ll have to wait and see.

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