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AMD Launches Ryzen, Claims To Beat Intel's Core i7 Offering At Half the Price (hothardware.com)
Reader MojoKid writes: AMD CEO, Dr. Lisu Su took to the stage at AMD's Ryzen tech day yesterday and opened the event with official speeds, feeds, pricing, and benchmark scores for the company's upcoming Ryzen series processors. AMD's goal with Ryzen, which is based on its Zen microarchitecture, was a 40% IPC (instructions per clock) uplift. As it turns out, AMD was actually able to increase IPC by approximately 52% with the final shipping product, sometimes more depending on workload type. Dr. Su also showed the first die shot of an 8-core Ryzen processor, disclosing that it consists of approximately 4.8 billion transistors. AMD's flagship Ryzen 7 1800X 8-core/16 thread CPU will have a base clock speed of 3.6GHz, a boost clock of 4.0GHz, and a 95 watt TDP. AMD claims the Ryzen 7 1800X will be the fastest 8-core desktop processor on the market when it arrives. The next member of the line-up is the Ryzen 7 1700X with a base clock of 3.4GHz and a boost clock of 3.8GHz, also with 8 cores and a 95 watt TDP. Finally, the Ryzen 7 1700 – sans X – is also an 8-core / 16-thread CPU, but it has lower 3.0GHz base and 3.7GHz boost clocks, along with a lower 65 watt TDP. AMD took the opportunity to demo the Ryzen 7 1800X and it was approximately 9% faster than the Core i7-6900K running Cinebench R15's multi-threaded test, at about half the cost. And in another comparison, Dr. Su put the 8-core 7 1700 up against the quad-core Core i7-7700K, converting a 4K 60 FPS video down to 1080P and the Ryzen CPU outpaces the Core i7 by 10 full seconds. Pricing for the three initial Ryzen 7 series processors will undercut competing Intel processors significantly. AMD's Ryzen 7 1800X will arrive at $499, Ryzen 7 1700X at $399, and Ryzen 7 1700 at $329. Based on current street prices, Ryzen will be between 20% — 50% lower priced but AMD is claiming performance that's better than Intel at those price points.
That's the way it looks to enthusiasts, but that's not what Intel has been doing. About a decade ago, we hit the point where processors were "fast enough" for mainstream tasks. People stopped buying i5 and i7 processors, in favor of i3, Celeron, and Pentium. For the last 10 years, only enthusiasts and gamers have cared about improved performance. The vast majority of the market cared more about power consumption. Intel hasn't been worried about AMD, but they were scared to death of ARM. They rushed to bring Atom to market to keep the low-end on x86/x64, instead of moving to ARM.
So they haven't been resting on their laurels. They've been working hard at reducing power consumption. That's what really hurt AMD after they lost their performance lead. For a few years AMD still offered more performance per Watt, making AMD the natural choice for moderate-load servers and systems meant to be left on 24/7. But Intel soon beat AMD there, taking away AMD's only advantage. (That's when AMD used their ATI acquisition to integrate a GPU which could beat Intel's integrated GPU - essentially carving out a spot in the low-price gamer market.)
A Core 2 Duo system would use about 70 Watts idle, 150 Watts under load. A Sandy Bridge system would use about 45 Watts idle, 120 Watts under load. A modern Skylake system uses about 35 Watts idle, 80 Watts under load. Subtract the 20-30 Watts consumed by components other than the CPU, and the reduction in CPU power consumption over the last 10 years has been remarkable.
AMD showcased 80+ motherboards available from partners for launch.
....AMD mainboards are noticeably less expensive. Intel is the synonym for overpriced.