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Preview of AMD Ryzen Threadripper Shows Chip Handily Out-Pacing Intel Core i9 (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: AMD is still days away from the formal launch of their Ryzen Threadripper family of 12 and 16-core processors but OEM system builder Dell and its Alienware gaming PC division had an inside track on first silicon in the channel. The Alienware Area-51 Threadripper Edition sports a 16-core Ryzen Threadripper 1950X processor that boosts to 4GHz with a base clock of 3.4GHz and an all-core boost at 3.6GHz. From a price standpoint, the 16-core Threadripper chip goes head-to-head with Intel's 10-core Core i9-7900X at a $999 MSRP. In early benchmark runs of the Alienware system, AMD's Ryzen Threadripper is showing as much as a 37% percent performance advantage over the Intel Core i9 Skylake-X chip, in highly threaded general compute workload benchmarks like Cinebench and Blender. In gaming, Threadripper is showing roughly performance parity with the Core i9 chip in some tests, but trailing by as much as 20% in lower resolution 1080p gaming, as is characteristic for many Ryzen CPUs currently, in certain games. Regardless, when you consider the general performance upside with Ryzen Threadripper versus Intel's current fastest desktop chip, along with its more aggressive per-core pricing (12-core Threadripper at $799), AMD's new flagship enthusiast/performance workstation desktop chips are lining up pretty well versus Intel's.
I suppose that is great news for people who are desperate for Intel to suffer some competition, but AMD is doing it at the continued cost of a significantly larger chunk of electricity. The contrast in power consumption is less stark than the Ivy Bridge days - which is when I gave up on AMD - but still significant. It matters less if you're addicted to FPS games that demand cutting edge graphics performance, since GPUs these days can easily consume three time more power than the alleged central processor. I consider myself a gamer, but I WILL NOT burn through the power that a GTX 1080 consumes. Still, even in GPUs AMD/ATI has become and continues to be the loser in terms of work done per Watt. There too, I abandoned AMD because its graphics cards gobble significantly more energy resource than the competition (Nvidia).
There is lengthening history at AMD of ignoring the power envelope or at least sacrificing it for the sake of barely remaining competitive, across the board. If the focus changed from raw performance to work done per unit of energy, the veil would be lifted and their charade exposed.