> it's rare these days for Intel to talk more than a generation ahead in CPU architectures.

This, to me, looks like the PS2 vs Dreamcast move, where Sony blocked Dreamcast sales with PS2 hype. We've been waiting for 10nm for a while now, and now Intel is essentially confirming "yes, it's really coming this time" where they might not have otherwise--it's hard to not see that as a reaction to Threadripper. At least on the surface, increased competition has led to increased transparency, which is good for consumers...or at least I'm happy knowing I have the option to avoid a big, hot, power-hungry chip if I want to.

The Osborne effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect

Although it has been deliberately deployed many times now, as you note one example of.

seems like Intel is willing to cannibalize Skylake-X to hurt Threadripper. I think that means Threadripper must be looming large at Intel.

Honestly The revision-x's are forgettable to begin with, unless you need that many cores (No ECC either).

And people keep falling for it

See:Itanium

Never compare an existing product to one that is not yet being sold. Never

Itanium was such a strange ... event. A complete outlier, it is even from today's perspective not easy to see why it happened.

Most people buying a laptop don't really care or know what generation of the CPU they have. Not convinced it hugely impacts sales

It's the bulk enterprise purchases that they're worried about, not individuals. That may include bulk purchases to build laptops, but it's probably more datacenters and high-performance computing they're worried about.

I didn't wait even though I'm excited for what Ryzen mobile chips might bring and frankly an i7-7700HQ is enough for a laptop, if I need more grunt than that I'll switch to a desktop.

Nice, I never knew what it was called. Thanks!

I like that idea. It would mean intel had to show its hand a bit early with large promises in the near future. I admit i am a bit nostalgic for the crazy days of cpu clockspeed doubling every year. Then the early Gpu wars.

The most obvious/shameless situation like this was when they "launched" their Core i9 processors.

We never had a date for Ice Lake. I think we only started hearing about it this year.

It's Cannon Lake (Intel's first 10nm chip) which is supposed to come out this year.