Hold That Upgrade!

Both AMD and Intel have a few tricks up their sleeves in the near future.

Of late, I’ve seen a lot of folks wondering if they should move to AMD since there’s a lot more cores and threads on offer for a much lower price. And then there has been a slew of announcements around not only CPUs but also GPUs primarily thanks to AMD because they’ve finally got great CPUs and GPUs out. Both Intel and NVIDIA have started proactively making changes to their product lines and schedules to combat the red thread. NVIDIA recently released the GT 1030 and that too without any fanfare to combat the RX 550 that AMD released. Intel dropped prices across the board when the Ryzen 7 was announced and did so again when Ryzen 5 was announced. Not only that, but there’s also a Hyper-Threaded Core i5 processor that’s supposed to come out soon. Traditionally, Hyper-Threading wasn’t seen in Core i5 SKUs but that’s set to change as the Ryzen 5 1400 and 1500X both pack 4 cores and 8 threads thanks to SMT (generic term for having multiple threads for one physical core). However, these aren’t the exciting announcements.