Close to the Metal Ep. 45: Computex 2017 reignites the fight between AMD and Intel

By Matthew S. Smith May 30, 2017

Computex, the annual hardware trade show hosted in Taipei, is in full swing, which means there’s plenty of news showing up just after midnight on North America.

Surprisingly, processors are hogging the news this year. Intel’s Core X-Series is the big announcement. The new line of chips includes models that cost up to $2,000, boasting 18 cores and 36 threads. That chip, the Core i9-7890XE, has more cores and threads than any other consumer processor, including AMD’s announced buy unreleased Threadripper.

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Not all the X-Series chips are expensive monsters, however. Some of them are much more affordable, including a Core i5 model with only four cores and four threads. What, then, makes it an X-Series processor? Two things. It can be overclocked, and it runs on the new X299 platform, which supports all Intel’s latest features.

AMD’s press conference has not yet happened, but there’s already been some important news about Intel’s rival. Dell has announced Ryzen availability in its new Inspiron Gaming Desktop, as well as the Dell XPS 27 all-in-one. These are important wins for AMD, as they place Ryzen in the spotlight. The Inspiron Gaming Desktop isn’t available with Intel chips at all, and budget gamers will likely applaud that decision.

We’ll discuss all this, and much more, on episode 45.

Close to the Metal is a podcast from Digital Trends that takes a deep dive into computing and PC gaming topics. Each show, we’ll focus in on one topic, and leave no stone unturned as we show off the latest in hardware and software. Whether it’s the latest GPU, supercomputers, or which 2-in-1 you should buy, we break down the complicated jargon and talk about how user experience is affected in the real world. Please subscribe, share, and send your questions to podcast@digitaltrends.com. We broadcast the show live on YouTube every Tuesday at 1pm EST/10am PST.

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Matthew S. Smith

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Matthew S. Smith is the former Lead Editor, Reviews at Digital Trends. He previously guided the Products Team, which dives…

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