Unboxing Coverage Boosts AMD Ryzen Threadripper Rank On Amazon's Best Sellers List

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kinggremlin

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This is why I visit this site. For hard hitting informational content like this. Advertising a highly anticipated product can increase interest. Story at 11. Additionally, backed up with rock solid data like Amazon's best seller list. Well done THG.
 

semitope

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not unboxing content. Any content. it could have been previews, popular user content on social media etc. the unboxing videos and installation videos were just the only things really possible.
 
So basically make incredible amounts of hype about Threadripper then don't let anyone review or even open the product on camera in case some critical design oversight was overlooked ensuring that uninformed people who are on the hype train will pre-order the product without knowing how it compares to other processors.

I'm sure Threadripper will be great, they don't need use marketing scams to get orders.
 

FritzEiv

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Your sarcasm is duly noted. I do think the point of the piece went beyond that, don't you? Buying/pre-ordering something (especially at these price points) goes a bit beyond "interest," doesn't it? Further, when it's a high-end and expensive product like this, we'd have thought people might want to see some performance data (ie, reviews) first. So the fact that AMD cranks up the hype machine and it works to the tune of people taking a plunk-down-my money action, without reviews, propelling that $999 product into a high spot on a best-seller list for a while, seems newsworthy and noteworthy to me.
 

kinggremlin

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Going by the title of the article, no, I don't think the point was as deep as you are trying to make it out to be.

If Threadripper had been released before Ryzen, you would have a point about buying unseen. With the established performance of 8 core Ryzen 7, what kind of surprise performance (good or bad) are you expecting from 12/16 core Threadripper?

I stand by my point that this article is just poor and misleading journalism. As semitope pointed out, the unboxing was not some cunning marketing choice by AMD. It could have been anything at all and it would have increased exposure for the CPU line. Do you really think anyone watched the unboxing and placed a preorder for a $1000 CPU based on the box? If AMD had released anything of substance, ie. benchmarks, it may have rebounded much higher than #8.
 

I personally think you're being a bit harsh. This is a relatively brief news article, a quick 2 minute read that I found interesting... I'd say it's noteworthy. It's not, nor is it claiming to be a full or extensive review, that's coming on Thursday.

AMD have gone all-out with the unboxing content with Threadripper. I believe their extensive and personalised press packages with the hard case, massive retail boxing and the etched CPU paper weights are unprecedented. Those press kits would have been funded by AMD's marketing department as a conscious marketing tactic and that's noteworthy IMHO. I don't find it difficult at all to believe that some people placed pre-orders based on the hype-train boost from the unboxing content.

RE performance: we won't really know until reviews lift what the performance implications of the dual Zen die are going to be. The memory controllers, L3 cahce and PCIe lanes are connected to a single die only. We've already seen a performance hit on Ryzen when data has to frequently traverse the two CCXs. Most people believe that's why Ryzen's IPC looks worse in gaming relative to other workloads. Ryzen's Threadripper has two dies and four CCXs. We can pretty safely say that highly threaded workloads where threads generally run independently of one another (like Cinebench, Blender, etc), will be phenomenal on Threadripper. Gaming, on the other hand, is a different beast entirely. Quite why anyone would buy a 12 or 16 core CPU for gaming I don't know, but I've seen loads of comment threads full of people just assuming that Threadripper's gaming and lightly threaded workload performance will be identical clock-for-clock to Ryzen. That remains to be seen.
 

rwinches

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I am impressed that a $1000 CPU was at the top of the sales list.
Here is some pre-embargo lift teases. One OC'd.

http://wccftech.com/amd-threadripper-1950x-oced-tested-otherworldly-performance/

http://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-threadripper-1950x-benchmarks-leaked-42-faster-competition/
 
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