Apparently, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is looking to strike while the iron is hot, as the company is now taking advantage of the fact that Intel processors were recently under controversy and that the only fix reduces their advertised performance.
Intel's rival on the central processing unit (CPU) front just got more appealing not only to consumers but also on the market. It seems that the recent security leak discovered by Google only primarily affected Intel CPUs, while AMD has repeatedly claimed that the impact to their processors was not as dire as Intel's.
A similar statement was then released by Linux operating system (OS) creator Linus Torvalds, where the open-source OS proprietor even favored AMD instead of Intel due to how much more secure it was. To some degree, AMD's chips were still affected by the security flaws, named Meltdown and Spectre, but not enough to be significant and to warrant a performance hobbling fix.
"I think somebody inside of Intel needs to really take a long hard look at their CPU's, and actually admit that they have issues instead of writing PR blurbs that say that everything works as designed... and that really means that all these mitigation patches should be written with 'not all CPU's are crap' in mind," said Torvalds in criticism towards Intel.
Apart from that, Intel is now currently facing several class-action lawsuits, from the state of Indiana, Oregon, and California. All three cite how Intel failed to disclose the crucial information in a timely fashion, as well as the slowdown of the CPUs due to the security fix, which a lot of people have bought with the advertised performance in mind.
Meanwhile, AMD is set to release its next line of Ryzen generation of processors called Ryzen 2 during the first quarter of this year. As such, they have also brought down the prices of the previous Ryzen generation CPUs, where one can now purchase a top-of-the-line Ryzen 7 1800X for just $349 from $499. Other tiers of Ryzen processors and mobile Ryzen CPUs have also been lowered to make them more appealing than the competition.
