When AMD offered a free Threadripper 1950X to winners of Intel's Anniversary Edition 8086 CPU as a trade in, Intel could well have made some sort of snarky response. It could have doubled down and offered an even better chip for trade, or suggested that the AMD alternative was worse (it's actually much better, though the Intel chip is faster in single threaded tasks) but it didn't. Instead, it's taken the high road and been rather pleasant about the whole thing.
.@AMDRyzen, if you wanted an Intel Core i7-8086K processor too, you could have just asked us. :) Thanks for helping us celebrate the 8086! pic.twitter.com/ZKKayaws7u
— Intel Gaming (@IntelGaming) June 18, 2018
As Intel points out, today is very much a time worth celebrating in the PC industry. CPUs have come a long way in 40 years and they've come a long way in the last year and a half too. AMD and Intel are more competitive today than they've been in a long time and that means better hardware and better prices for gamers and hardware enthusiasts.
The last time AMD was able to offer credible top-tier competition to Intel was in the days of the Athlon 64 chips. They were the first 64 bit CPUs and including a memory controller on-die meant that they had a serious advantage over the Intel competition. AMD 64 chips (including the beautifully overclockable Opertons) blew the Pentium 4 out of the water.
But what did Intel come back with? The Core 2 Duo range. Conroes were an even bigger leap and that's why we should be excited about the CPU industry today.
