The issue with the press backlash was that originally the press embargoes for both the AMD and Intel HEDT parts were both set for the same day and time (Mon Nov 25 @ 9AM Eastern) but then a few days before embargo lift, Intel shifted their embargo time a few hours earlier (3AM Eastern), presumably in a bid to get press to publish their Intel 10980XE reviews without being able to compare to the new (3970X/3970X) Threadrippers (which, incidentally, by and large crush the Intel chip's performance).
This only partly worked - due to how late they changed the times, I saw a bunch of publications just waited until the original embargo time anyway rather than redoing all their comparison slides, and of course, it got everyone to talk about how badly the Intel chips fare, but that was somewhat inevitable no matter what embargo shenanigans they did.
More interesting I think is that in some of the workloads where Intel did fare well, this was via some pretty questionable means (suggesting to reviewers to use MKL-apps that specifically cripple AMD chips without mentioning that): https://www.extremetech.com/computing/302650-how-to-bypass-m... - at least in the case of Matlab, this can be worked around via an environment setting.
The best part is that he didn't wait out the embargo, and published graphs that still included AMD's Threadrippers at the top, just blurred out and unmarked, making it painfully clear that Intel is just beat and a very sore loser: https://i.imgur.com/RleR7Ou.png.
This only partly worked - due to how late they changed the times, I saw a bunch of publications just waited until the original embargo time anyway rather than redoing all their comparison slides, and of course, it got everyone to talk about how badly the Intel chips fare, but that was somewhat inevitable no matter what embargo shenanigans they did.
More interesting I think is that in some of the workloads where Intel did fare well, this was via some pretty questionable means (suggesting to reviewers to use MKL-apps that specifically cripple AMD chips without mentioning that): https://www.extremetech.com/computing/302650-how-to-bypass-m... - at least in the case of Matlab, this can be worked around via an environment setting.
Interestingly, someone pointed out today that the FTC specifically called out the MKL and ordered them to stop doing this back in 2009-2010: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/e4klj0/intel_is_still_...