Not to mention AMD's commitment to long term support for their flagship socket, AM4. While Intel might squeeze two generations out of a socket before forcing the market into yet another revision and retooling, AMD seems likely to go four or more generations of Zen processors for their desktop socket.

This may not mean much to the average user buying off the shelf complete PCs and laptops, but for those who want to maximize the lifetime they get out of a custom build, it paints a prettier picture than sticking with Intel and buying a new motherboard every CPU revision or two.

For those of us who only occasionally upgrade our hardware, its not a huge advantage either way.

In the early 2000s it was really nice being able to replace a dead Socket A motherboard (bad capacitors) with one that was several years newer, not only bringing a system back to life but adding new capabilities and improving performance, and for competitive retail prices instead the premiums you pay for new-in-box EOL hardware.

>There cannot be more disruption to Intel than this

Yes there is and it is called server chips.

The AMD chips in question are also being sold into the server market, packaged as four dies per socket. Server product cycles and validation cycles are slow. HP and Dell and several ODMs are selling servers with AMD EPYC CPUs, they can be rented on Microsoft Azure, they're being deployed by Baidu. They're having about as much impact as could be expected from a CPU platform that's less than a year old.

I hope AMD are able to stay afloat. My main concern is that their pattern seems to heavily revolve around hiring Jim Keller repeatedly, putting the hurt on a stagnating Intel for one generation, and then fading into mediocrity as Intel are able to leverage their billions of dollars and larger, parallel tick-tock US/Israel teams to snap back. If AMD can secure a coup like Zen or K8 without him I could see this being a sustainable approach, but I'm skeptical.

Yep, on the desktop Intel managed to only offer 4 core mainstream chips all the way from the Core 2 days up until Kaby Lake I think? Finally they've had to start releasing 6 core parts, that's a 50% bump.