Intel Taunts AMD – Out of nowhere it seems that Intel’s marketing team has pulled a shiv towards AMD claiming that purchasing AMD’s CPU lineups is practically like buying a “snake oil”. Intel has now backpedalled its statement by removing the slides, however, some of its contents are being preserved by Videocardz in its content titled Intel compares AMD Zen2 architecture in Ryzen 7000 series to snake oil.
Looking at its content, the removed slide deck presentation titled “Core Truths” seemed to be targeted towards customers to inform the nuanced technology behind CPU technologies. The presentation takes the perspective of how the latest AMD series CPUs may also include older architectures.
Intel points out how AMD 7520U is still based on Zen2 architecture
The presentation highlights AMD’s supposedly 7000 series mobile CPU, the 7520U, still uses the same architecture as what once 3000 series used back in 2019. AMD’s naming scheme has always been confusing since its second iteration of the Ryzen architecture as starting from Zen+ (the second generation of Zen architectures), AMD has the tendency to make use of its “dated” architecture to power up the lower end market of its next-generation lineups— the entry 3000 series such as 3200G and 3400G for example.
While Intel snake oil claim may carry some good argument to some extent, Intel forgot that AMD themselves are well aware of this naming issue and therefore issued an update in its naming scheme back in September 2022 to help better reflect the CPUs.
In that announcement, AMD explains that the first letter will be the CPU’s generation. Its second letter is for which Ryzen class it’s meant for (such as Ryzen 3, 5, 7 or even Athlon which AMD refers to as 1 and 2 for Athlon Gold) followed by what architecture the CPU is built on.
Which, if we see the 7520U, its naming actually makes sense. The 7 in the first letter indicates its generation, its 5 means the CPU is categorised as the Ryzen 5 class, and the number 2 means the CPU is built on Zen 2 architecture.
Ironically it’s the other way around
The fact that Intel’s AMD snake oil accusation is mainly based on its “deceptive” naming is actually backfiring to its own statement as there are plenty of marks where Intel actually uses older— and even downgrading its lineup specification yet still keeping the original naming. In 2021 Intel launched its Core i9-11900K, a supposedly upgrade and continuation of the previous i9 flagship the 10900K, yet, despite being an upgrade, Intel decided to cut the i9 cores from 10 back to 8, basically rendering the i9 tag useless as it now shares similar specification to its i7 sibling.
Not just that, Intel’s latest 14th generation CPU which is meant to compete directly in Intel vs AMD’s 7000 series actually uses the “refreshed” previous Raptor lake architecture to all its lineups which if it’s not clear enough, is basically what AMD did in the first place but even worse. The only redeeming factor of the 14th gen is that at least Intel does not increase their pricing despite being “new”.
Bottom line
Intel’s marketing team has recently pulled a trigger towards AMD claiming that some of the 7000 series sold by AMD is an attempt by them to sell snake oil. This claim is heavily based on the accusation of AMD trying to scam people by using older-gen architecture for their newer release, seemingly starting an AMD vs Intel war.
This claim, however, is easily debunked because back in 2022 AMD did acknowledge its confusing naming for their CPU therefore they decided to update them starting from the 7000 series to reflect better its products. On the other hand, it seems that it’s Intel who bit its own tail as they are practising the same, if not worse tactics on their branding such as a downgrade of specification for newer generation and “refreshing” their last architecture yet branding them as brand new.
Is Intel better than AMD in this case? Personally, not by miles considering they are doing exactly what they are accusing of and backpedalling by deleting the presentation doesn’t help either.
