Intel appears to have given in to the pressure triggered by AMD and has offered a huge 40 to 50 percent price on its upcoming Core i9 desktop processors.
The new 10th-generation Core i9 chips will come in four variants this November, with prices starting at $590 up to $979. The pricing still looks expensive but compared to the 9th generation line last year, the cheapest variant costs $1000, and it goes all the way up to a whopping $2000. For example, last year's top-end Core i9-9980XE processor costing $1,990 at retail is replaced by the $979 Core i9-10980XE.
According to CNET, Intel is also slashing the prices of the chips in workstations used in the related but more corporate high-end market.
The consumer electronics media website spoke with Frank Soqui, vice president of Intel's Client Computing Group, who said that more people were giving up on the idea of paying more money for a performance upgrade.
"People were stuck in the top part of the mainstream," Soqui said.
Interestingly, the upcoming 10th-gen i9 processors still based on Skylake, but Intel has managed to improve the chips' performance each year. Meanwhile, the newer Ice-Lake based designs have only just arrived, but they're reserved for premium and power-sensitive laptops.
Long-time market leader Intel is in the midst of tough competition in the chip market as people have grown more and more reliant on smartphones, which run on the Arm family of processors from companies like Samsung, Qualcomm, and Apple.
However, it's clear that Arm couldn't possibly compete with Intel when it comes to powering a huge computer that you need not unplug from an electric power outlet.
That's where AMD, Intel's close rival, comes into play. The company's Ryzen Threadripper chips are capable of powering high-end processes, particularly those with jobs that can run in parallel. Even long-time programmer James Willcox expressed his awe for AMD's chips:
Yup, love my Threadripper. 64 cores and didn't even need to sell a kidney. — James Willcox (@snorp) October 2, 2019
As for those who use tower PCs, whether you're a content creator or a gamer, Intel processors will get another amplification this year out of the 10-generation i9 models.
It might have taken some two years to get to this point, but it appears Intel has finally admitted that AMD is one rival that can rob them off of its throne.
