If you happen to be one of the 8,086 winners of Intel's special edition Core i7-8086 (binned 8700k) CPUs, you're very lucky indeed, as those chips are fantastically powerful and offer great gaming and multithreading performance. They're worth around $400 and unless you want to spend a couple of thousand, you aren't going to find much in the way of Intel chips that are better than it.
But AMD thinks it can offer something a bit better. In an attempt to steal Intel's thunder, it's offering 40 winners of the Intel CPUs in North America, the option to trade them in for an AMD Ryzen Threadripper x1950. That's a $1,000 CPU and though a little weaker in single threaded scenarios than the Intel chip, is massively more powerful in multithreaded settings thanks to its 16 cores and 32 threads.
"We appreciate the advancements they [Intel] have helped drive with the x86 architecture over the last four decades," AMD says in a press release. "But, we’re ready to take it from here.
"That’s why we’re giving 40 performance-hungry enthusiasts in the U.S. an opportunity to celebrate the next 40 years of high-performance computing by trading in their commemorative processor prize for our CPU that enables you to work, play, and create with heavy metal."
Celebrating the past is neat, but here at AMD we are focused on the future and the next 40 years of high-performance computing. Exchange your prize for a Threadripper 1950X processor!
First 40 qualify. 18+ & 50 U.S./D.C. only. Learn more at: https://t.co/1Czuo4B4Zf pic.twitter.com/TSgImTwPeO— AMD Ryzen (@AMDRyzen) June 18, 2018
While you would need a new motherboard to take advantage of AMD's high-end offering, unless you already have an Intel 8th-generation processor and compatible motherboard, you'd need to do the same there too.
This is the second time AMD has one-upped Intel in recent months. During Computex where Intel tried to steal the show with a somewhat mythical 28-core CPU (that needed extreme cooling to run at its rated 5GHz clock speed) AMD swiftly followed it up by showing off its new Threadripper 2 chips, which will go up to 32 cores and 64 threads.