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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.
Finally competition from AMD! Stop this stagnation madness!
Intel has had >4 core CPUs but the affordable stuff for consumers has all been 4 core / 8 thread with the rest of the die given over to GPUs that nobody who needs high performance graphics wants anyway.
I'd be nice to see AMD back in the game to provide some competition for Intel. Lots of workloads can benefit from more cores: compilation, video processing, simulations, many kinds of "embarrassingly parallel" tasks. Anything you might do with xargs -P.
If AMD supplies some competitive pressure to push larger core counts down into the affordable price ranges for average buyers, that'll be a good thing. It's been an artificial restriction anyway. Plus it is good for the health of the market to have competition.
I built myself a gaming PC about two years ago. I've been an AMD supported for decades, so I went with the best CPU AMD was offering at the time. Two years later, it's still the best CPU AMD offers.
I remember the heyday where AMD actually overtook Intel. Their CPUs were actually better and cheaper. That's no longer the case, but (at least when I built my gaming rig) I was not willing to pay 50%+ more for maybe 10% higher performance, so it was still AMD for me.
The important thing, though, is that we need competition in order to spur innovation. Before AMD started nipping at Intel's heels, it was all about the MHz (and who could get to GHz first). After that, we started seeing CPUs with more cores and better threading and all the good stuff. I hope Ryzen makes Intel very worried - worried enough that they innovate the hell out of their CPUs. I also hope Ryzen makes AMD enough money that they can continue to innovate, and continue to compete with Intel. Because when that happens, it is we the consumers who win.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
It seems that every time Intel gets a significant pile of laurels, they like to rest on them. Then someone comes up from behind to kick them in the ass. AMD has done it before, perhaps with this generation they can do it again.
And who wins? We all do. Last time, Intel got off their ass and created the Core-series that has expanded PC processing power to the point where upgrade cycles have gone from 3 years to 6+. Let's hope that this shot across the bow ushers in a new era of chip design that brings features we want, rather than the features that they think we want.
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