Intel's next-gen CPUs arriving two months early

AMD never needed to knock Intel off its CPU leadership position to win, it just needed to disrupt the market enough so that it forced their main competitor out of a zombie-like dominant state. Intel has been winning for far too long, and within weeks of AMD's launch of the Ryzen CPU family - now available in Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 5, Intel has reacted in multiple ways. The 52% IPC improvement in the Zen architecture must have taken Intel by surprise, with some amazing value for money in the Ryzen 7 1800X as it's a 8C/16T part on the cheap.

First, were the rumors of the next-gen X299 platform - and then the news of the weirdly-placed Core i7-7740K, a HEDT part on LGA2011, but with 4C/8T. Intel launching an 8-threaded CPU, a little faster than the much cheaper LGA1151-based Core i7-7700K, but on the more expensive LGA2011 platform, strange. Then the news of Intel cancelling its IDF (Intel Developer Forum) convention, after nearly 20 years in operation. IDF17 was cancelled in the process.

Now there is news that continues this strange Bizarro world that we're living in, with Team Blue now rumored to be bringing the launch of its Basin Falls platform by two months, with the new family bringing us the Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X processors. The new Basin Falls platform will arrive with the new X299 chipset, while the 'accelerated launch' of the next-gen Coffee Lake architecture is reportedly primed for an August 2017 release, pulled up 5 months from January 2018.

I think Intel is definitely acting differently since the launch of Ryzen, and that a big show at Computex 2017 next month will be an interesting time, if the once almost too confident Intel is pushed in to a corner. It'll only see them drop prices and compete in a way we have probably never seen before from the company, and now that AMD has shown us some massive IPC improvements from Ryzen, AMD are only going to fight back with 12C/24T, 16C/32T at a rumored $999, and even 32C/64T variants of its next-gen processors.

We're in for the wildest ride in consumer technology in a very long time, and it is beyond exciting.