Who asked for it? The general PC using population didn't ask for, want, or need it (more cores and threads)...quads have been out for nearly a decade and just now people are saying a quad with HT (for a gamer) would be the low end.
But this what happens when there is little competition. AMD lulled Intel to sleep for the better part of a decade with their sub-par performing architectures until Ryzen. This caused Intel to put out more incremental updates in IPC and clock speed performance. Since AMD went wide because they can't compete in clock speeds or overclocking headroom, this forced big blue to react and throw more cores/threads on their incremental updates.
My justification and POV includes more than just that talking point (but again, this isn't the time and place for a deep dive). What is myopic is seemingly ignoring the fact that it doubled the amount of c/t with faster boost speeds and overclocking headroom. AMD shines in situations where it can use more threads for the same price. But falls to second place, of two, situations outside of that. Both processors (and GPUs, LOL) have a place in the market. Just be sure the measuring stick is the same size for each thing that is measured.
Cheers.
This is getting too OT even for me, but I'll give one last reply: I can't answer for anyone else here, but I'm certainly not ignoring the doubling of cores/threads. My view on this is simple: it's about d**n time. Intel deserves zero credit for this, given that they've been dragging their feet on increasing this for a full decade. As for who has been asking for it, I'd say most of the enthusiast community for the past 3-4 years? People have been begging Intel to increase core/thread counts outside of HEDT for ages, as the increases in IPC/per-thread perf have been minimal, giving people no reason to upgrade and forcing game developers to halt any CPU-demanding new features as there wouldn't be an install base capable of running it. Heck, we still have people running overclocked Sandy Bridge chips and doing fine, as the de-facto standard of 4c8t being the high end and 4c4t being common has caused utter stagnation in game CPU loads.
Where the core count increase does matter is in the doubling of silicon area required by the cores, which of course costs money - but CFL-R is still smaller than SB or IVB. Due to per-area cost increasing on denser nodes, the total die cost is likely higher than these, but nowhere near enough to justify a 50% price increase. Why? Because prices up until then had remained static, despite production becoming cheaper. In other words, Intel came into this with already padded margins, and decided to maintain these rather than do the sensible thing and bring price and production cost back into relation. That is quite explicitly screwing over end-users. Personally, I don't like that.
Also, what
I find myopic is how you seemingly treat corporate greed as a law of nature rather than what it is: corporate greed. There is no necessity whatsoever in Intel ceasing innovation and padding margins when competition disappeared. Heck, you go one step further and blame Intel's greed on AMD, which is quite absurd. Here's a shocker: Intel could very well have kept innovating (i.e. maintained the status quo) or dropped prices as production got cheaper, no matter whether they had competition or not. That would sure have increased sales, at least. Instead, they chose to be greedy, and you're acting like that's not a choice. It is. And please don't come dragging the "fiduciary duty" crap, as there's nothing in that saying that you have to put your customers' wallets through a blender to fulfill that.
Nobody here is judging different products by different standards; quite the opposite, we're taking the whole context into account. AMD's recent rebound is more impressive due to how far behind they are - but in pure numbers, they're still slightly behind. However, they crush Intel on price/perf across loads, and roughly match them for price/perf in gaming. That's not bad. I judge Intel more harshly, as they're in a massively advantageous position, and yet have managed to completely screw this up. They're barely clinging to their lead despite having nearly a decade to cement it. That's disappointing, to say the least, but not surprising when they've prioritized squeezing money out of their customers rather than innovation. And again, that's their choice, and they'll have to live with it.
And I suppose that's how this all ties back into the RTX debacle - hiking up prices for barely-tangible performance increases and the (so far quite empty) promise of future gains, seemingly mostly to pad out corporate margins as much as possible.
