The thing I'm sure of is that they'll not so much focus on keeping the lead on the desktop CPU, but much more on mobile/ultramobile and server CPUs. And I believe they are already trying to derail the server part cold-war-style:
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/ne...ical-security-flaws-in-amds-upcoming-zen-cpu/
Someone on [H] pointed out that
Intel sponsors security courses on that same university the two people attend who made the previous article. They're also basing their findings on the documentation AMD has released, negating any platform security features it might have. This looks an awful lot like stirring the pot, to put doubt on AMD before it hits the ground running, so that the server industry will just not trust AMD CPUs, even though they might be as stable or as fast as Intel for a much lower price.
And on mobile, I'm pretty sure AMD has way too much work to do to get anything competitive. Intel is already in full "manifested monopoly snooze mode", looking at their 7th gen series for laptop with the
i3-7100U,
i5-7200U and
i7-7500U. They are all dual-core with HyperThreading limited to 15W TDP, ranging between roughly $300 and $400. Their clocks range from 2.4 GHz without Turbo to 2.7 GHz with 3.4 GHz Turbo. All have the HD Graphics 620 with performance ranging between 1.00 GHz and 1.05 GHz. Cache between 3MB and 4MB.
To me this seems like the same effing processor with binning, only now it's the entire notebook lineup. I'm amazed this hasn't happened on desktop yet, I was expecting it to with Sky Lake.