LOL, yeah Intel isn't going anywhere. This will put pressure on them to drop prices and innovate for sure though vs this 2-5% BS or in the case of Kaby vs Sky....nada. Maybe they've been holding back the way NVIDIA does to sandbag AMD GPU's upon release. I am wondering what Intel will do as far as price drop, but not enough to wait on ordering.
Wow, calm down bro. Intel has rested on its laurels before and stagnated. That's how AMD caught them with their pants down before. Without that competition from AMD with its Athlon XP & 64 we wouldn't have Core as soon as we did. AMD did the same, drug their feet on releasing a new architecture, then double down on the wrong horse and has been AWOL from competition for a long time after the Core counterpunch that dropped them. We will see Intel innovate and put out processors with much better generation performance now bc they will have to. Competition does best for us the consumer. dickhead
Honestly you gotta do more research here, AMD didn't rest on their laurels. They were crushed by intel's absolutely corrupt business tactics and monopoly abuse when they feared they would be dethroned. The CEO at the time was asked if he regretted what he did after intel lost a court case and said "I'd do it again." because of the market advantage that it net them. Intel has a track record of laziness. They would rather stomp out competition then compete.
I used AMD CPUs up until Sandy Bridge. Intel may have had some shady business practices, but their superior technology is ultimately what won them their current near monopoly of desktop PC CPUs.
Don't discount the shady practices that muc. The reason they gained technological superiority is because of the flush of cash the got from those shady deals, which they poured into research and development while restricting AMD's cash to pour into research and development. Instead of research and development, it forced AMD into survival mode, not grow and expand mode. So they ARE ahead a large part of because of shady business practices.
CORRECTED typos: Don't discount the shady practices that *much*. The large part of the reason they gained technological superiority is because of the flush of cash *they* got from those shady deals, which they poured into research and development while restricting AMD's cash to pour into research and development. Instead of research and development, it forced AMD into survival mode, not grow and expand mode. So they ARE ahead a large part because of shady business practices.
Hmm, superior technology eh... does that include deliberately heat-crippling IB with poor thermal transfer material? (check the YT delidding results and tech site articles, up to 35C load temp drop) How about the two locked-out cores of the 3930K, because AMD couldn't even compete with Intel's 4-core? Or the lack of USB3 or other improvements with X79? Or the lack of more PCIe lanes for multiple generations? Or the crippling of PCIe down to 28 lanes with the 5820K onwards? (the 4-core 4820K can be faster for multi-GPU since it has 40 lanes, higher oc with its greater per-core thermal limit, and no restrictions on GPU vs. storage allocation) Or how about the insane price hikes? The list goes on and on. There was no competition, so Intel sat on its butt for 5 years. Intel had the better tech back in the days of SB, but their monopoly has stagnated the market, as always happens when there is no competition. Year after year with little to encourage users to upgrade, yet sites kept reporting declining PC sales (well duh).
Intel made the 2500K, etc. too good (from their point of view), then spent the next 5 years kicking customers in the face. They could have released an 8-core CPU back then, because in reality that's what the 3930K is; they didn't because there was no need to, the 1100T couldn't even take on the 2600K (*), never mind the 6 allowed cores of the 3930K (much of the time 1100T is slower than the 2500K). Not seeing the implication of "superior technology" when this situation meant the market had to wait a crazy amount of time for a consumer 8-core, and when it finally came out the cost was utterly through the roof (even as I type it's still a whopping 1100 UKP on Scan UK, which was nuts long before we knew how Ryzen was going to be priced).
If Intel ends up in a pickle as a result of a disruptive Ryzen launch, it's nothing less than Intel deserves. They had a lead back with SB to which they were justly entitled, but ever since then it's been one snoozefest after another. The release of the 4770K saw headlines such as, "Haswell Is Faster; Desktop Enthusiasts Yawn" (toms). On Anand's forums, Samus posted this on June 2013 which sums it up nicely: "I'm using an i7-950 (over 4 years old) and its funny seeing how still-competitive it is to Intel's newest chips. It seems Sandy Bridge brought the bang and its just been trickle down performance since..."
I've used a lot of SB/SB-E CPUs, they work very well, but for me the financially worthwhile leaps Intel offered with these products stopped with that generation. The threaded performance gain of the 6950X over the 3930K isn't particularly attractive to a solo pro looking to upgrade (given the cost), while heat/power issues mean the former isn't that much better for single-threaded tasks once both are overclocked, the latter having far greater headroom.
Intel has survived on the back of convincing consumers that dribbling IPC increases are worth the money, while charging far more for CPUs such as the 6700K than was remotely the case for the top-end mainstream CPUs of earlier times (I was amazed at the launch price of the 6700K, found myself wondering who on earth was buying them). X58 really felt like an enthusiast platform, while P55 was cost effective but nonetheless highly potent due to its lower latency, and at least X58 eventually had 6-core options. How long has it been and yet still no fundamental change to the base tech in mainstream chipsets? Still the same old x8/x8 PCIe split, lower max RAM, etc., while mbd makers stopped including features which had previously become standard even on P55, such as LED debug and onboard power/reset buttons (the Asrock P55 Deluxe is a typical example, proof that such features are cheap to include, yet numerous much newer Z97 and later models don't have them; they should be absolutely standard on all boards by now). Likewise, the presence of PLX and other tech wained, and now users have to contend with complex decisions about what mbd features will be active based on what storage devices and GPUs are connected, even more so with crippled 28-lane CPUs.
Here's a revealing thought: if Intel had ever released simple PCIe SATA3/USB3 addin cards using their own chipsets (so they would perform exactly the same as onboard SATA3/USB3, picked up by the same drivers) and mbd makers released BIOS updates to allow older mbds to boot from NVMe, how many users of boards all the way back to P55/X58 would have upgraded? Heck, I know people who'd probably have kept going with E8400 and Q6600/QX96xx rigs if they'd been able to move up in terms of storage and I/O tech. Sure, those who want maximum threaded performance will climb the CPU ladder, but in more general terms we've been in a long period of stagnation. Every tech site agrees that SSDs have made one of the biggest differences to the PC user experience, yet even with the delights at the time of P55/X58, one had to wade through a nightmare of poor-performing 3rd party controllers and often terrible drivers (some Marvell SATA3 driver packages can completely wreck a system). Years later, despite lacking competitive CPUs, AMD often had a significant advantage in native SATA3 provision.
I've built a lot of Intel systems in recent years, but good luck to AMD I say. I'll be ordering a 1700X this evening.
Ian.
(*) Ref: i5 2500K and i7 2600K review on Anandtech, 03/Jan/2011, page 17.
Buddy, you speak about this like you are a member of the management team with insight. Intel is not a room of three gnomes who sit and are evil - it's a multi-bilion dollar company, with strategies, boards of directors, analysts, research, and what they do is a result of what will make them the most money.
I am not disputing any of their business practices being shady, but your rant here insinuating that you knew the "right way", and how Intel "kicked us in the face", you clearly have no idea how a large business is ran.
There is no secret in that intel focuses on User Perceived Benefits, that have publicly said so, and can you blame them? If market research tells you that you are #1, your brand is strong, and you are on the top list as far as all specs, why WOULD you keep pushing a market segment where you are already #1 for the foreseeable future. No one is stopping anyone else from coming up with a processor that does what you want it to do, and tackle over the market - but no one has, so again, what are you on about?
Top that up with that INtel does a hell of a lot more than churn out processors for PC's, so there has been no slowness on their side, it just hasn't been in your narrow focus of products.
IN the end, they are churning out Xeon processors with amazing numbers as far as specs, and everything that comes anew, is usually better and faster than before - More's law still stands, and he worked for Intel.
I'm curious did you ever use an ATI Graphics card before AMD acquired them. If you have then you would know that they never lost it to NVidia, they actually never had it to start with. They have certainly improved the product line and in some cases have surpassed NVidia however you can't lose something you never had. The one really good thing has done for ATI Graphics is provide good drivers. I remember working on computers and the minute I saw an ATI Graphics card I knew what half the problems were. Even if you aren't an AMD fan you have to appreciate them for what they do, without them we probably wouldn't have anywhere near the level of both CPU/GPU performance. Any and all competition is good for the end user. I am glad to see AMD back in the saddle again so to say and hopefully continuing to push the envelope. We the consumer are the ones who come out ahead.
i have used ati card from the 9800 pro, the x1900, 4800 5800 and 7900 series.. maybe even a few others... and never had an issue that was directly related to the video card...
Very simple, it actually takes money to have proper RND. After Intel's deceptive moves, AMD struggled financially for extremely long.
Shoot a dog in both its legs and then expect him go on fighting.
Maybe you have not been in business ever. If you struggle financially, it demoralises the whole company. You not only feel like a looser, you actually become one. The fact that AMD was able to make a comeback is actually remarkable.
What? AMD lost nothing. They still sell more GPUs than Nvidia. There is more than just enthusiast dGPUs. Btw, Vega architecture is ready to join the Zen party. ;)
Intel business practices def had an effect on sales. No doubt about it. Talking about procs designs here. AMD had an absolute hit with their Athlon/64 lines. Problem was Intel responded in kind bc they had to. AMD didn't have an answer that would compete. Top it off their answer came late, underperformed horribly. Shared FP? really? From the get go it was bad. Process technologies no doubt hindered them as well but I don't think it would have helped enough to stay competitive. I'm glad they've come back with performing chip though.
Well I wish people would clarify exactly WHAT intel business practices they are refering to. Beyond that, the fact that their CEO Sanders was completely incompetent and they were in financial trouble for decades. then they lost the only reason they stayed competitive in the first place, Atiq Raza who left right after the K7 was introduced...
Someday Intel will get what they deserve. I remember how I had to buy white box Asus motherboards with zero branding just to be able to get an Athlon motherboard for my customers. Why? Because Intel forced Asus (and everyone else) to not sell AMD boards or loose discounts.
People kept on defending Intel. The court found them guilty and got a slap on the wrist. No justice was done. I have zero respect for Intel. What they have done to AMD is unforgivable. They are an evil company.
I was not even allowed to advertise AMD anywhere near to Intel adds if I as a dealer wanted "special" privilege.
I really hope AMD comes back with this. They might have a chance, but the evil is strong with Intel!
Despite all the shenanigans that Intel did to AMD, AMD was struck by a thunderbolt with the release of Core 2 Duo. I have seen interviews with the senior management in AMD, dismissing the claim that a x64 processor without IMC would beat a "Hammer" processor with IMC. In addition Intel ditched the "Pentium" branding and went with a new "Core" branding which at that time was strange.
No. Intel simply sabotaged themselves. All the cool stuff that they have actually introduced like AVX2 etc they fuse off on lower tier chips so they can sell the same die for more money. So nobody bothers to use them. If they left the features intact, it wouldn't be a problem. They've shot themselves, basically.
Almost everyone here is making the mistake that right now AMD would be the main competitor for Intel. Actually, it's ARM. Sure, 10 years ago it was.
AMD's main problem was its inability deliver good products on time. There's two factors to this - getting good chip designs, and manufacturing them.
AMD failed on both sides. For the first, it missed production cycles, and production targets. For the second, it never ever matched Intel's manufacturing yields.
Manufacturing chips on 28/22/14/10nm is an incredibly hard problem, and Intel still has the best yields on the planet.
@vladpetric: Everyone is assuming AMD is the main competitor to Intel because it is. In what market do Intel and ARM vendors compete head-to-head, after Intel has essentially given up on entering the mobile space? None. Intel sells in volume in the desktop, laptop, and server space. The first two are the PC market, which despite decline YoY is still a multi-billion dollar market. And it's unlikely to decline forever unless a worthy successor comes out of the tablet market (it hasn't). There is no ARM design that's even close to matching intel performance in this market. Apple is probably the closest on IPC, but not frequency. The rest aren't even in the ballpark. ARM server is a long way away from being close to a credible threat to x86 in server (in fact, IBM has a better chance). ARM doesn't even have decent hardware except a few niche players in cavium and AMCC.
@deltaFx2: Intel tried entering the mobile space (phones, tables), and failed spectacularly. They were relegated back to their traditional markets. They did compete with ARM (though not only) and failed.
OK, let me refine my statement (which is an opinion) - within the next couple of years the ARM ecosystem is far more likely to steal sales from Intel than AMD. You are correct in that right now there's no direct competition to x86, but things are likely to change. My prediction.
The problem with scaling frequency is energy and heat (the pipelines are generally pretty fast). For Apple's use cases (tablets, phones), energy and heat matter a lot more than the GHz bragging rights.
@ vladpetric: Fair enough. However, ARM has the same foundry exposure that AMD has. So, if your point is that Intel yields better than AMD, ARM won't change that.
The other issue around ARM is the design point. Any CPU design has a sweet-spot: given an IPC and frequency, there's a point at which it is balanced in terms of perf and power. x86's sweetspot (intel and now AMD) is roughly at 3 GHz, which works for server, desktop and mainstream laptops. Intel and AMD have used economy of scale to push the same design in all these markets. However, in fanless laptop/tablet, the frequency has to be dropped to 1.5GHz, where the deeper pipeline starts to hurt. ARM designs' sweetspot is lower frequencies and much lower TDPs, resulting in short and/or less wide pipelines. These CPUs, designed for phones and scale up to tablets are sub-optimal for laptops, servers, or desktops, so they don't have the economy of scale. They have to design a from-scratch CPU to take Intel on head-on that they cannot sell in mobile, thus losing the cost advantage that intel/AMD have. Unless, of course, ARM becomes a real alternative for a mainstream laptop. The software isn't there yet for this to happen. It could, though, and if it does, my money is on Apple.
Bullshit. ARM A15, A57 for instance has a 19 stage pipeline, A72 has a 16 stage pipeline and A73 has a 15+ stage pipeline. Sandy Bridge, 16 with fetch/retire, 14 without and that has remained consistence even today with Kaby Lake.
Of course, some instructions will not require the full use of the pipeline on both architectures.
@StevoLincolnite: I thought I was clear: "resulting in short and/or less wide pipelines". You can do one or the other to save power. A15 is in-order, A72/73 are 3-wide decode. Haswell/Skylake are 6-wide machines out of the uopCache. As is Apple, so that's a good comparison point. Apple's minimum mispredict penalty (aka front-end pipeline depth) is 9 cycles now. Haswell's minimum mispredict penalty on an uopcache miss I$ hit is ~20 cycles, and I think 16 on a uopcache hit. Apple clocks its parts at 2.3GHz tops, IIRC, in ipad pro.
Also remember that it's not just about pipe stages, but physical design methodology. There are many tricks that you can play to hit high frequency that come at a significant power cost. I'll leave you with one datapoint: AMD, which knows how to do high-frequency design, put out an ARM server part, A1100 that used A57 cores as-is, hookedup with custom un-core. Top frequency? 2.0 GHz.
Few will switch to ARM (or Power) for servers as the x86 software ecosystem is far broader and completely mature. It's far more expensive to switch software than hardware.
Apple's A10 Fusion can already pretty much replace Intel's expensive-for-their-die-size Core m line. That will hurt, especially when general ARM SoC catches up.
But the big growth and profit margin area is currently in server chips. The big cloud providers have no choice at the moment and are being milked. AMD can really make an impact there, for the reasons that @deltaFx2 puts so well.
Intel actually had a higher performance more efficient mobile CPU than ARM. The CPU is not everything. Turned out the platform as a whole, like the chipset, consumed way too much power for Intel.
Arm has had the inverse issue. They can't compete with Intel's CPU performance without becoming horribly inefficient. Arm is still pretty much limit to embedded or many small core CPUs, which is a very niche market.
As someone in the semicon industry who works with many former Intel employees, I can tell you they achieve their goals with a very heavy work demand of their engineers. One of the worst companies for work-life balance in the industry, profit above all. Yields make good news, but employee turnaround can break the bank.
Intel is falling behind in the chip technology race. Chinese firms have processes that are more sophisticated than Intel. They are offering 10 nm process chips while Intel is stuck at 14 nm.
The size of the process technology is one of many that determine how good it is. Only ignorant fools look at what the nanometer scale being used as to making a judgement.
While I do agree there is a bit of marketing going on with 10nm vs 14nm you're grossly incorrect in saying that they are "Just marketing".
You also made a gut check in saying "I believe intel's 14nm process is roughly the same density as competing 10nm processes." What is this based off of? If you have a 1m x1m surface you could fit more 10nm objects on that surface then you could 14nm.
I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm saying you should do research and cite sources to your claims.
"You also made a gut check in saying "I believe intel's 14nm process is roughly the same density as competing 10nm processes." What is this based off of?"
"If you have a 1m x1m surface you could fit more 10nm objects on that surface then you could 14nm."
Sure. But the objects aren't actually 10nm. The 10nm rating is just the dimension of one aspect of the transistor, it doesn't describe the actual density.
Yes, you are right it is just marketing. these are just some "drawbacks" to node shrinkage 1. reduced current use by transistor switching 2. consume less power (kinda same as number 1, P = VI) 3. Increased clocked Headroom 4. decreased heat output 5. lower prices that's some good marketing right there!
Decreased heat output isn't really true because as transistor density goes up the heat is focused in a smaller area with less room for the heat to escape.
Your point is well-taken, but let's not get carried away. - TSMC is Taiwanese (only"Chinese" if you insist on trying to score some strange political point that no-one cares about) and Samsung is South Korean.
- no-one is shipping 10nm in volume yet. The A10X will probably (but rumor) shipping in new iPads (due March 2017, but rumor) be the first.
- there is plenty of room for arguing either way as to whether TSMC's and Samsung's 10nm processes are better or not than Intel's 14nm. The mature analysis is that each is optimized for its target customers. TSMC and Samsung are more flexible and better for mobile, Intel is obsessed with density, cost reduction, and process options that benefit its server chips. (I'd argue that the Intel choices were short-sighted and are already hurting them, the sort of things that happen when a one-time engineering company gets taken over by finance, but that's for another comment.)
Good luck trying to act on that theory ("Taiwan is part of China"). Your Taiwan visa will be ever so helpful trying to get into PRC, likewise your attempt to spend NT dollars in Beijing. India has nuclear weapons and claims all of Kashmir is part of India. Do you also believe that?
If you think that believing political propaganda is a useful way to understand the current and future technological development of both PRC and Taiwan, you're seriously deluded.
Fuck Pakistan! Fuck China! Kashmir is a part of India! Only if our gutless politicians would go ahead and assert the fuck out of this fact!!! Grrr!! BTW registered just to post this comment. Also Fuck China again! Since Arunachal Pradesh is also part of India!!!
China has nuclear weapons is your argument? So does Pakistan, does that make Kashmir part of Pakistan? The US has a defense agreement with Taiwan, does that make Taiwan independent since their major defense partner has superior nuclear weapons to China?
Taiwan is Taiwan. Full stop. Until China can set laws that the people of Taiwan must follow, Taiwan is not a part of mainland China.
You do know that process names have been pure marketing rather than measuring feature sizes for a while now, and Intel's "14nm" is roughly comparable to anyone else's "10nm", right?
Morawka, I don't believe that's the case; GloFo have said that they are skipping 10 nm to concentrate on making 7 nm a full node, which should be comparable to Intel's effort. It's TSMC who are planning to use much larger back end of line, pushing up their effective transistor density.
It's certainly okay to disagree with someone, but is f-bombing really necessary to get your point across? I don't think it makes your thoughts seem more valuable to get so ...um... "NASCAR" about things.
Dont mind that III-V moron..... I am happy to see AMD finally step back into the game. Intel will need to bring better prices and finally show the real advanced they have been holding back since there was no competition. The CPU market has been VERY boring but now there is finally excitement in the air. Let the games begin!!!!!
They better have been holding back. They just got their arse kicked by a company that is still, essentially a node behind.
Their rollout of 14nm has been their most problematic rollout ever.
It is obvious that Intel's massive R&D spend has been heavily tilted towards trying to stay ahead in the node race instead of investing in any material architecture improvements.
Until they spin off the fabs and start putting real effort and money into architecture they are going to remain in a world of hurt. At this point, the evidence suggests that the only way they can beat Ryzen is with higher frequencies (7700K). Then again we haven't officially been introduced to AMD's 4 core CPUs. If they have one in the wings that runs at 4.0 ghz their superior IPC makes the 7700K an also ran.
More food for thought is the fact that in the back half of the year AMD will have seasoned yields on 14nm that will allow for modest bumps in frequencies from where they are now.
Intel's is going to lose margin and sales this year and they did not guide for that in their recent 2017 financial guidance. When the blind loyalist see this there will be a freefall in Intel's share price.
They are called "puts". All of us should be buying them.
Sometime after the Q2 earnings release is when all of this "should" become apparent to the Intel investor base.
Here is one "uneducated fuckwit" that failed to notice it, but noticed a number of other things that lay contrary to that edict....
Intel's brand cache has been eroding for years now, the erosion was accelerated when CEO Krzanich took reign and has forever proclaimed success on Moore's Law..... Things have deteriorated severely at Intel.......
Intel's brand cache has been eroding for years now, the erosion was accelerated when CEO Krzanich took reign and has forever proclaimed success on Moore's Law.....
Things have deteriorated severely at Intel. Internal sources at Intel have stated the climate has been awful and not just due to recent layoffs of 12,000 or 11% of workforce. In light of many recent news headlines and not just Ryzen, Intel is probably in the most delicate situation it has ever had to face.
CEO Brian Krzanich has lead Intel into a slow death spiral and it hurts me to admonish my croation brotheren. Back in 2006 Intel had about a 50% market share with AMD and has watched it increase dramatically every year since to now about 80/20 but years of bad decisions and throwing good money after bad have caught up to the CEO with his pants down. Throwing $8 Billion at Mcafee and $17 Billion at Altera and wasted Billions trying to crack the mobile market with the “contra-revenue” Bay Trail processor where Intel basically tried to bribe tablet makers into using Bay Trail Processors at substantial loss for Intel.
All these casualties has had the CEO reducing costs at the greater cost of unexpected consequences. The delay on 10nm has just increased, worse yet Canon Lake is not expected to feature any significant architectural improvements…. The CEO mistakenly doubled down on the hope that AMD not competing with them - so those that think “Intel has been holding back” are severely mistaken, there is the rumbling of a major earthquake going on right now under Intel’s feet……. Management has been coalescing to get momentum to push CEO out and bring in Murthy Renduchintala. Krzanich has lead a disaster and has basically and systematically undressed Intel, R&D is screwed and has left a void until well into 2019, CEO had completely underestimated the possibility of an AMD comeback while trying to continue with his Moore’s Law mantra which has been basically tossed out window with end of tick/tock procedures followed for almost a decade.
CEO has sat by idly after their 2016 Q4 earnings call from CFO stated product issues have limited profitability mainly due to fault with Atom c2000 family that bricks devices and had to set aside a pot of cash to deal with problems and recently announced Atom C2000 chip line contains a clock flaw and the recently hired COO Kim Stevenson resigned after just taking helm of division that leads PC business in August.
Intel has been in no position to “hold back” recently with all the internal problems and now AMD has just put them way behind the 8-ball. Should expect a plethora of changes at Intel shortly after Ryzen is released, writing has been on wall way before recent revelations of potential AMD comeback….. adding to issues of AMD resurgence is that Intel is also in the crosshairs of sleeping giant Qualcomm.
Kaby Lake brought in “new” PAO process, Process - Architecture – Optimization….. there is no underlying change to the microarchitecture, Intel is not promoting any performance difference with the previous generation, they are however promoting better efficiency and creating a bit more headroom for OC’ing. Moore’s Law has driven Intel computing for a decade and has now forced Intel to dump tick/tock at most inopportune time with CEO not seeing AMD coming and with no immediate recourse at hand and most likely not until into 2019 will Intel be able to do anything but marketing tactics disguised by slashing prices.
Intel has enjoyed their monopoly for years and seems to have rested on it’s laurels and market superiority for too long but they have not been holding back. Anandtech just released article last week about 8th gen continuing on 14nm and 10nm pushed back to late 2017 or 2018….. Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake, Cannonlake, Ice Lake or Tigerlake will not help Intel if the AMD hype comes to fruition next week.
Is Intel holding back? The problem for the Intel faithful is that Intel has released a stream of uninspiring updates and their handling of the 10nm transition has been a clusterfck from beginning to end. So how to explain that? Unpalatable answers are - Intel is incompetent (sub-variants + incompetent at process bringup + incompetent at CPU design now that it has become so advanced + incompetent at project planning) - the x86 architecture puts terrible constraints on how aggressively it can be optimized and Intel has pretty much hit those constraints
So what's left to explain the delay in releasing 10nm, the weird (and constantly shifting) Coffee Lake/Ice Lake/server parts first on 10nm story? The palatable answer is that it's all part of a cunning profit-maximizing plot: Intel doesn't need to introduce 10nm yet because they have no competition, so they've been sitting on it, and dribbling out these lame upgrades, until the moment they really are forced to offer something better.
Make of that theory what you will. But if you dismiss it, you then have to give your explanation for the Coffee Lake/Ice Lake/10nm shuffle.
Certainly something is up with Intel, as they have no published or even rumoured plan to compete in the desktop space with AMD. But maybe sales are so small in that area now, they don't care. It's not as if AMD is rolling out 5W x86 processors.
i pretty much agree with what you said, i just wanted to add that the migration to 10nm is a problem for anyone, having done a little physics and some google reminder searches we see that optical light is in the range of approx 300-700nm, and i believe the smallest feature should be half the wavelength of the light etching the surface/? so you can get down to 150nm with standard light, to get shorter u have to go UV direction into 'EUV' ...otherwise they can do a trick i believe by keep re-exposing the same circuit tracks with overlayed frames shifted a few nanometers to keep slicing down the accuracy to the 10nm range....but every extra 'frame' stencil w/e costs loadssss**** and so they really want shorter wavelength light, but to produce that kinda light ...at a good intensity so you don't have to shine it for days just to etch the pattern you want...i believe is a problem all the equipment manufacturers are facing .... and i think this is one of the reasons others have caught up.... plus 'ya know' greed, lethargy all the other sins along with mis-management are to play :) the fact they are at the top of the industry and had to lay off 15k staff points to some serious issues!
If Intel dropped prices by 40% across its products lines, there would be chaos at Intel. I'd be surprised if they even drop them 20% when Ryzen is out, and even then they'll only do it where AMD is actually competing with them. They won't do it for servers for a while, for instance.
But even with a 20% price drop, Intel will not be competitive. Intel will have to overhaul its own architecture and make it leaner as well, before it can even compete within a 20% margin difference with AMD. And that won't happen for at least another 3 years.
This is AMD's game to lose now. They have all the advantages, even if they raise their prices after a year or two by 20%. AMD chips should be a no-brainer for everyone. If they don't buy AMD, they probably don't know what they're doing, and they're just going with the "trusted brand, Intel", but not for any technical reasons.
You're making an awful lot of assumptions about Ryzen, before you've actually even seen the benchmarks, the energy consumption, etc. This is just PR at this point. While it looks good, and even if it's true, long term stability for workstations running these CPUs has yet to be researched and it will be a few weeks/months to get a more complete picture. Anyone buying machines in the meantime will enjoy discounts on the Intel chips. It's only after sales drop for Intel taht they'll really be pressured into dropping prices.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big AMD fan, matter of fact my livingroom PC still runs an original Phenom, yeah the one with the bug in it... that we only found out after we bought it. I hope the best for AMD, we need the competition badly, but I'll reserve judgment on how good these CPUs really are for the time being.
AMD has hyped Vega up really hard, and the numbers that they have released seemed to live up to it, but a lot is still unclear, and will be for the next few months at least.
As much as I would like to exclaim that,'The hammer has fallen. Intel's fate has been decided.', I cannot. Because as of yet, it hasn't. All we know is that Ryzen is way better than Bulldozer, and that it is going to be, at the very least, competitive with the Kabylake chips, and that Intel is going to be under fire pretty soon for their high prices.
But does AMD really has Intel beat? While I definitely hope so, only time will tell. Fingers crossed for March 2nd.
Intel was always dependent on getting node shrinks fast with the power of money with no so much optimization. FFW to today and no matter the money Intel can't access 10nm on time. Their designs are heavily based on Core Arch, there's no much to squeeze.
Intel past SB is _all_ about optimization. Since opponent is a perpetual noshow, literally all they have shown for years were various design gains in power consumption.
Now, I understand times are hard and AMD is not paying much for such low-grade shilling, but even you must have some modicum of self-respect, right?
I think the best way to judge what Ryzen's potential is outside of retail CPU benchmarks right now is to watch Intel's reaction. Intel has dropped almost every CPU but Core, following AMD with Zen. Intel has announced an additional product refinement at 14nm after early Ryzen leaks. They are going tick, toc, toc, toc. That may be because of issues with 10nm, but Intel seems to react to every AMD move. We never saw that with the Cat cores. Intel is afraid. And even if they have a better process, with AMD potentially skipping 10nm and potentially getting 7nm out two years before Intel, AMD will have an advantage for those two years. If it takes Intel two to three years to catch up on value, we could see Intel in a hole for four or five years. If they have been getting by with incentives and payoffs to keep AMD suppressed, those obligations may start to bleed them with price cuts they will have to make. I believe Intel is afraid because they know they are in trouble. IBM used to be Chipzilla. Companies get complacent and it eventually gets their lunch eaten.
exactly. they look really good right now. but we need real benchmarks and there is so much that could go wrong (like nasty processor errata) that I don't think business critical servers should use them right away. If they are stable and reliable they'll shake up the virtual machines/ec2/azure market for sure but they'll need to prove themselves a bit. They aren't doing anything intel isn't or can't and they aren't giving new performance that intel isn't or can't. That gives intel some time.
You mean apart from ~the same performance for half the price ? Seems you forgot that bit. Intel can't do that because the E-series are actually the highest clocking Xeons they have. Much faster than their equivalent 8/10 core server parts. Which means they probably only get a handful from each wafer that can clock that high. They can't just turn on some magic tap to make more of them. That's probably one of the reasons they're so expensive in the first place.
Right now, I think it is too early to really say "~the same performance for half the price" because AMD is not actually comparing apples to apples when they make that comparison.
The best value in terms of price/performance is in the lower$$ value segment (Celeron/Pentium/Corei3)... After that value drops at a fairly linear rate as price increases to corei5 .... corei7... AMD is comparing a mid-$300 CPU to an enthusiast $1000 CPU when they "CLAIM" roughly the same performance for half-the-price. To me, this is just bad logic (and good marketing). What AMD is really going to compete against is the Corei7-7700K. Their "X" series CPUs automatically overclock, so to get a real apples-to-apples comparison, one would have to determine the maximum achieved frequency of the AMD overclock, attempt to match the same overclock (manually) on the Intel 7700K, and then compare benchmarks and real-world performance (games) in a series of different tests to get an idea of performance.
Right now, I am very skeptical (but hopeful) that AMD will offer equal or better value than Intel at a number of price points. But don't take this the wrong way, but let's wait for the "REAL" tests and benchmarks and not get taken by this "faulty logic" in the marketing war. Right now, that's all this is: marketing.
This entire post assumes all anyone EVER does with their PC is play video games... An 8-core workstation class monster was NEVER intended as a direct i7-7700K competitor, and ALWAYS had the also 8c/16t Broadwell-E as its target. Only an idiot buys an 8-core CPU JUST TO GAME. And the "X" CPU's never automatically overclocked...
Intel doesn't need to drop its prices that fast. They can more than afford to take a wait and see approach. Also remember Intel has a lot of brand cache. Some people just wont buy AMD. For them, Intel is a trusted brand and has earned their loyalty. Just like Apple which has a lot of sheep err.. brand loyalty and some people will not shy away no mater how good the competition is. I have no such loyalty when it comes to tech, and Im willing to take a chance on AMD's new processor and pre-order before all the benchies are released. From leaked benchmarks, the price/performance beats Intel hands down. In pure competition, the ZEN appears to stand on its own. Of course not too long from now we will have confirmation that will tell the whole story. Then of course consumer uptake will indicate to Intel what their next move should be. Also remember, Intel has known that ZEN was incoming for a long while. Well before we were privy to it. They're in the business to make money and stay on top. I don't doubt for one min theyre holding back. How much though, and how much TTM is the question. Either way, great for us consumers.
"Also remember Intel has a lot of brand cache" no they dont - its a "myth" - intel has always, for the most part, had better products. Intel makes semiconductor chips which are a "Commodity" AMD didnt get all of the console business because of their brand - its because Sony and MSFT put them in there. AMD needed a reason for a builder to use them - well now they have and we will see that chips are just a commodity. :)
I think servers will start switching the second these chips show stability. The difference in power consumption and price makes it a no brainer. The 30+% power savings per month alone makes it a win. AMD can simply make insurance contracts on the chips and any short of catastrophic failures beats what Intel can offer.
I'm sorry but I dont see companies switching their servers over unless you can use multiple cpus in a single system, which is not a feature that I have seen announced in the press releases. What company is going to purchase 4-8 AMD servers when they can get a dual or quad CPU Intel server with 16 or 20 cores per CPU? The overhead of needing the extra computers negates any price savings of the cpu.
With contracts switching to "per core" beefier cores may be the route companies end up going. The actual processor price is a minimal cost, it's the energy consumption and software licensing that's the killer.
Edging closer to 70% of the PC market are mobile. Where AMD wont be competing in it for another year, and Intel going mobile first meaning 10nm Intel Mobile CPU wont have any competition in performance /watt until AMD moves to 7nm, late 2018 or likely 2019.
Within the Desktop PC segment, most aren't even in the Ryzen 7 prices range, they are Pentium price range, which AMD's APU compete against, and not coming anytime soon.
So could Intel afford to cut 40% of their desktop line, of course they can. And heck I am sure Intel's brand name is worth some money so even a 20% price drop in the perfect scenario of AMD's launch will still be enough.
^^This. I'm super-pleased AMD are sticking it to Intel in the desktop space... But my next computer purchase is going to be a x86 2-in-1. And that means Core M, quite possibly a Cannon Lake 10 nm part. I'm not aware of a roadmap from AMD for 5W parts. Only desktop CPUs, and I vaguely recall something around APUs. That's great n all... But so few desktops are sold these days.
let's see the 5 parts first, those are the ones that matter, the performance level of these parts is way above what the average computer or even gaming computer features. I'm sure the intel margin is thinner on those and the picture won't be as stark.
Well... it's not that clear cut. Most Intel CPUs have integrated graphics, and while it's nothing to write home about, it isn't terrible either, and will be more than enough for most users. Yes, you could buy a Ryzen 3 instead of an i3, and it will be cheaper (the CPU that is, the motherboards I've seen so far don't seem to be significantly cheaper?), but you'll have to buy a graphics card too. Even a crappy entry level card will eat into the price advantage.
For gamers it's a no-brainer, of course. But if you're a programmer that needs a beefy CPU but couldn't care less about the graphics card? Even in media creation the graphics card is of limited importance (it's getting more and more important, but so far...).
The thing is the R3 has 4 cores, whereas i3 only has 2 plus HT, so the R3 is a lot better. Even if you have to pay for a graphics card, you can buy a cheap graphics card for $20 if graphics performance is unimportant. Obviously AMD will want to get the APUs out to address those who just want a cheap all-in-one processor, but right now a lot of us don't even use the onboard graphics, ever...
"but right now a lot of us don't even use the onboard graphics, ever..." You mean home users, right? Call centres and office workers, the majority use integrated graphics, as they do not need graphics, most are web based programs. Given the power usage scenario is the biggest issue, the issue will be with suppliers, of which Intel still holds the majority by their b*lls! That is where AMD's sales will primarily cone from, but, Intel will go back to their old self and no-obe will dare speak out, for a long time, unless the IT department specifically requests AMD and can't easily get hold of them from their traditional suppliers. So AMD's apu's will have a hard time getting a leg through the door. I have even worked at places that had intel Atom's!! You only neefed to boot up, log in, get your few windows up and bam, ready for work! Nothing else allowed and worked actually ok.
As a programmer and someone who compiles a lot of software, it's pretty clear to me, that the opposite is the case. Yeah, the Intel GPUs certainly are sufficient, but buying the fastest Intel Quadcore with a integrated GPU will give you a _much_ slower CPU than buying a Ryzen (assuming the promises hold up), and sticking in a < USD 50 dGPU with it's own ram means you don't have penalties from the iGPU while still spending a _lot_ less on the whole system. Fair enough, power consumption will be slightly higher, but who cares when the CPU is doing a lot of compiling at full power?
Even more, if you're going up a tier to the 8-core CPUs, which a lot of programmes really love to have, Intel doesn't have the iGPU anymore, and you'll spend about twice the money for twice the same performance.
So yeah, a dGPU will cut in the savings a bit for budget programer systems, but the difference appears to be so large, that you'll still save a lot of money.
So clearly, if you're a programmer wanting a beefy CPU, there is no reason whatsoever to consider Intel if everything holds up as promised. The iGPU certainly isn't one.
And at those, AMD has even cheaper AND faster processors... AMD still hasn't introduced their integrated GPU SKUs. I can vouch for their GPUs over Intel's in both performance and drivers. It's only a matter of time before Intel silicon makes little to no sense.
This isn't only about the desktop. Intel has lost BIG in mobile. With Windows on ARM getting ready for debute, I'm not sure where Intel is going to stand.
It was smart of them to go with the PC lineup first, to show that they can beat "Intel's best".
But with Intel starting to focus on servers first, AMD could make a killing by focusing on laptops first. Next year's generation should really come out on the notebook first and wipe out Intel from the notebook market. But they need to do it soon, before Intel moves to 10nm, because then it will get a bit harder, even if AMD will continue to have the performance/price advantage. And AMD won't switch to 7nm (I think directly from 14nm) until late 2019 probably. But it will be a good time to switch before Intel gets a chance to do it.
I still get my head around the Intel announcement last week or whenever it was. Are the first Intel 10 nm parts going to be server CPUs or mobile CPUs? The latter would presumably be Cannon Lake but it seems most unclear what the former might be; some sort of next-gen Xeon D?
no they won't. Naples is short on several important technologies. No integrated fabric, imbalanced architecture, memory cant take advantage of all the PCIe lanes and they will not have support for AVX512...
We'll have to see what AMD brings. While we now have a idea what Ryzen will be, we still don't really know much about Naples. "Imbalanced architecture" is quite a bold claim, let's see what will come and how people will use it. AVX512 isn't the be-all-end-all and AMD has a lot of things going for them as well. Maybe both won't play in the same niche and there will be use-cases where users will want the one over the other and vice versa.
So Zen has no "integrated fabric" huh... Then what the hell is "Infinity Fabric" then??? O_o. And Naples most DEFINITELY can use / memory can access all 64x on-die PCIe 3.0 lanes.
Not as simple as a price war. Take AMD's 6 core @ 225 USD, what Intel going to do when all it has under i5 and i7 is 4 cores. Laughts in Intel's face, and Intel fanboy's faces
I don't want to get ahead of myself (maybe I did a little), but lets just say they're severely threatened in the consumer market, on all ends, desktop and mobile.
This makes me very happy. Not only am I building a new gaming rig with one of these puppies but my AMD stock buy in of 2.78 is currently sitting at 14/share!
I hate you ;). Might be worth selling some though; it is is buy low *sell* high, after all. There's nothing worse than seeing something tank and then holding on as things get worse and worse while you always hope that maybe it'll recover...
Good. I will probably never put an AMD build together but hopefully this wakes Intel from their medicore tick-tick-tock malaise. I am sure they can do better than 5-10% IPC a year but they just haven't had any reason to until now.
In 25 years, the Wiki article on the demise of AMD will read "…the demise can be attributed to AnandTech users darkfalz and krazyfrog, because they didn’t buy the 2 CPUs that would have helped keep AMD afloat."
Intel can't . End of Moore's law, remember ! AMD's claim of 52% improvement in IPC is even worth looking at because of how low they started . It's GPUs / FPGA and application specific ICs ( ASICs) that have potential to solve the lack of improvement of CPU performance .
This. Intel's bet on Altera will be interesting. There will be diminishing returns on general CPU architecture improvements. But if you lay down your specific application in hardware on an FPGA you might see 100, 200, 300% performance improvement. Creating the hardware development environment and deployment will be the key problems to solve.
You apparently don't know much about how they started so to say. AMD has some of the best engineers in the microprocessor field, they were very smart purchasing the IP of DEC and hiring most of the engineers that designed the DEC Alpha cpu. Back when this happened intel had the Pentium 60 and DEC Alpha processors were hitting close to 1ghz. This was a long time ago but some of those very smart people are still there and many more smart people have been added. AMD didn't start out with the ATI graphics line either they bought the company and actually made it work. ATI used to be worse than S3 video cards. They couldn't produce a driver that was stable. Matrox and 3dfx was the way to go until NVidia came along and changed things. That spelled the end of days for ATI and then AMD bought them and actually made something good out of the rubble. AMD is good for the consumer, good for innovation and really good at taking a turd and polishing it, then dumping it and making something better. I am really looking forward to playing with the RYZEN chips. Should be fun.
Well, AMD are delivering a big IPC gain... once. No guarantee that they'll deliver anything more than ~5% next year. But it certainly looks like they have Intel beat, with a simpler design, on this generation. I reckon that neural net branch predictor might be the key; it seems the only feature distinctly different from anything Intel has.
I'm from the future. AMD has been able to improve Zen's IPC by nearly another +40% beyond the original Zen architecture. Intel otoh? Just +10-15% IPC on desktop vs Skylake (&+19% on mobile/server). Or basically only 1/3rd as much as AMD on desktop & 1/2 as much on mobile/server.
Very excited to finally have some real competition again in the cpu market. I hope all the leaked benchmarks are accurate.
I also hope that Intel does not dump its chips on the market or pull some shady $hit, which it has done in the past to unfairly compete with AMD. If so I hope the DOJ watches closely. We need healthy competition in the microprocessor space.
That's rather lame. Kinda childish to put your name on publicly released promotional materials without being involved in the product or its promotion in any way. Take example from other sites such as TH which didn't do it.
if AMD didn't release this material to everybody on their website, it can make sense to do this to prevent superfast rip-offs, this creates a delay so that it's clear that this article was first.
I think all these congrats are a little premature. Of course we all want to see competition but what we're looking at is still marketing dribble at this time.
There have been several independent benchmarks leaked in the past week already that paint the picture even better than this. I think we will find the numbers here a bit reserved.
At the price point they're offering it only needs to be within spitting distance. Their price/performance ratio will be great comparably. Unless there is some ugly baby in the benchmarks we haven't seen. This should be great for us consumers.
So is the only difference between the 1800X and 1700X is the stock clock speed? Presumably binning? I cant see shelling out an extra $100 if the only difference is just a trip to the BIOS away.
Later in the life of these procs, Id agree with you. Right now, like you said binning. Can't imagine there would be a lot of headroom in those chips for OC. Wait and see though!
The news so far is pretty exicting, but I'm more interested in quad core mobile parts that maybe include a decent Radeon IGP. I'm thinking at 95W TDP, dumping four cores, harvesting the best chips, and clocking down a little to around 2.8GHz should give AMD enough TDP headroom to add in some nice graphics and hang out in the 35W TDP space so laptops can get a little bit more performance. Maybe Intel will be compelled to ship more Iris parts and we'll actually get better graphics performance without the huge, hot running discrete GPUs that end up making for overpriced, gigantic laptops.
Sure, but even Intel doesn't sell a mobile Quad, period, under 45W.
And that's with the non-Iris graphics. You can get an 2/4 + Iris Plus at 15W, though.
If AMD is able to get a 4/8 chip out with a better GPU for 45W, that would be huge for them. Even better if they could hit a lower number. But I'm not holding my breath.
Intel has mobile quads with configurable TDP down to 35W, if that counts. They also make a desktop quad at 35W (the 6700T iirc, and similar).
That said, AMD could make a killing from laptops in the near future. Maybe the biggest barrier would be consumers being unaware, but with the right marketing maybe they'll claw over some market share.
I have had dozens of conversations with people in my office (anecdotal I know) and none of them are even aware of AMD. That said, none of them have any clue what a CPU does or why Intel is good. If the devices are put together properly they will sell like hot cakes.
AMD has some Ryzen based APU's rolling out in the second half of 2017. Or so they say. No word yet on mobile versions. But you're right. Intel needs a good kick in the pants.
" Not everyone here thinks of their computer as primarily a means to play video games."
Exactly. This is going to <i>rock</i> for certain kinds of develepment environments, especially if you don't need absolutely-the-fastest single-core speeds.
SQL Server will bring an i5 to its knees[1]. OTOH, with the 6 and 8-core CPUs, you can just stick it in a VM.
[1] Nothing like watching a 4460 where the disk average response time goes into the tens of seconds when you do ANYTHING (including stuff like "open Notepad".)
DX 11 doesn't benefit as much. However, DX12 and Vulkan can and will benefit from multiple cores. "Vulkan is also able to better distribute work amongst multiple CPU cores." from Wikipedia
Not now. In 2-3 years, it's a different story. DX12 and Vulkan will become mainstream API's. DX12 is Windows 10 only and Microsoft is pushing that OS very hard. The upcoming XBox Scorpio will have full 8 cores. And probably will be DX12 only as well. What do you think game developers will do ?
99% of people's jobs do not benefit much from Ryzen, and the vast majority of people buying it will in fact be gamers. Move out of your mommy's basement and get a real job, because your comment just announces your own stupidity.
And spare me your fake "I'm a graphics artist/software developer/whatever other job that requires huge multitasking" comeback. Your company ain't paying for this, its buying an Intel machine. If you work for yourself and can afford a $500 CPU, guess what? You're part of the 1%.
Spending $500 on a microprocessor for a SOHO computer does not put you in the 1%. That's not, by any stretch of the imagination, a large enough sum of money to use as a measurement of someone's socio-economic ranking. When you get into the top 1% even homes (the average working person's largest asset) are relatively meaningless when net worth is taken into account and I'm not talking about your run-of-the-mill $300k starter home that most middle class types go eyeballs deep into debt for 30 years to occupy.
As usual you are spot on. The 1% doesn't even know how much money they have, they have employees that worry about that sort of thing. The 1% have more money than they could ever spend, they drop $500 on a plate of sushi!
My apologies, I was unclear, I wasn't actually referring to the "1%" rallying cry of Occupy Wall Street days. I meant the 1% of people who really need 8 cores for their jobs enough to justify dropping $500 on a CPU (on their own or their company's dime).
My main point was to respond to Gothmoth's pointless comment -- Ryzen is in fact not for people with jobs. Ryzen is targeted at gamers, as AMD's own marketing will attest.
I get what you mean, I'm not a hater of the successful like some, I just think most people can't even imagine what being that wealthy is like.
Back to the actual topic, AMD has marketed to gamers because their products weren't really competitive in anything else, and value was all they could offer. Most games aren't bottlenecked by the CPU so they made sense there. Hopefully now they can take a slightly more mature posture, and try to win over professionals and businesses. A thriving AMD is good for everyone including Intel. They needed a kick in the pants pretty bad.
Ah, I understand what you mean now! Sorry about my previous post, I tend to get a bit defensive when it comes to wealth. It seems like society in general tends to get pretty aggressive with people that aren't struggling so that makes it easy to assume anytime someone mentions the 1% that they're on the attack.
I REALLY hope you are one of those idiots that actually put their money where their retarded mouth was & bought a 4-core/4-thread i7-7600K in 2017 instead of a 6-core/12-thread Ryzen 5 1600 for their gaming rig. If so, how are those like 1/2 as high framerates & even WORSE frametimes vs the 6c/12t R5 1600 in modern games treating ya??? :P
You know what would be really funny? If these average a 5Ghz OC on air (the 4c/8t model). How long has Intel been all but promising that?
This pricing structure is rather interesting. I remember AMD saying the prices on the Athlon 64 (if I'm remembering this right) would reflect their performance, and it did - the prices were uncharacteristically high for AMD, and with good reason.
I'm thinking that if all this PR hype ends up being BS, no one will ever trust AMD again and that will be the end of their desktop CPU days, if not the end of the company entirely. But what do I know...
On a serious note, pit this against my six year old 2500k@4Ghz. Need to see if the FPS gain would be worth the upgrade. As far as work goes, I'm often bottlenecked to single core performance by the software I use, not sure if I would take the risk to change my specs to save 50% on one part of the workstation.
While multi-threaded performance is impressive for that price-point, the single-threaded performance makes me stop and think still. A 6900K is a multi-threading CPU first and foremost, its clocked relatively low and a consumer 7700K quad core beats it in single or lightly-threaded work any day.
So while this is impressive for AMD to finally catch up, the desktop market is still far more focused on single and lightly-threaded workloads, high multi-threading isn't that common, certainly not to fill 8 cores. Hopefully they can close the ST gap in future Zen generations as well.
If anything, this will prompt Intel to shift focus back to performance instead of the other goals they have been persuing the last couple generations, and lower prices, so thats always good.
That's wonderfully optimistic. Anyway, if EFR does what it's supposed to, you may not need to dabble with overclocking unless you really want to go past acceptable limits (i.e. not on air). :)
AMD has definitely "Ryzen" back to relevancy again!
My god these prices are amazing! Overclockable, Unlocked and Hyperthreading for significantly less...the only thing to be expected is Intel will fire back with a price war. So happy to be the consumer nowadays!
hell there are a lot of moronic intel fanboys out there..... how can people be so stupid and not see that this is good for all of us... such imbeciles.
Competition is great, Intel has been racing against itself since Nehalem. I just don't get the "intel is dead" comments. It's like the fanboys think they will fire everyone and fold the company, game over.
It's just a troll thing, you will also see "Intel rekt" and other such nonsense. It's just trolls trolling other trolls. If you aren't a troll it's best to just ignore it and move onto the next comment.
Wow, way too many fanboys commenting! I'm personally thrilled to see AMD competitive again. I'm a bit surprised, I thought AMD would hit that magic $300 price point with one on of these 7 series chips. I think I need to change my magic numbers to $400 because that seems to be the new bang for buck price point. I'll wait for independant reviews before jumping on this ship.
The product stack (if leaks are to be believed) extend all the way down to $100. What we haven't seen much of is what product differentiation AMD has done aside from cores, threads, and xfr. Intel does a lot to gimp their lower level chips, it will be interesting to see how AMD does it.
Probably. A Ryzen based APU with stacked memory. The damn thing is supposed to offer the same performance as a midrange PC equipped with a GTX 1080. You're not gonna get that with a Bulldozer type CPU.
It might, it might not. A lot will depend on how well AMD handles demand. The console parts are lower margin so I'm sure AMD would rather not use their top end chips if they don't have to. Of course it's possible, but it isn't likely. The flops you are referring to is almost entirely GPU driven. So the better question is, will Microsoft use Vega in Xbox Scorpio?
Interesting, microcenter has them for pre-order but no mention of a cooler being part of "what's in the box". I was quite disappointed actually. For non-gamers you now have to get a cooler and a dgpu, which shifts the cost advantage a bit. I know top end Intel parts don't come with coolers either but the lack of any igpu will hold back some sales.
82+ mobos at launch - I've only heard about a single one being mITX (having one of the "enthusiast" chipsets) - Biostar X370GTN. AMD is being let down by their board partners on this front, and I will predict that whatever Ryzen's merits, the mITX crowd will either sit out the launch or buy Intel due to the lack of options in this form factor.
I have read about AMD having a large focus on mitx so wait and see what happens before writing off that category. AMD is definitely aware of the space and have said they will be catering to it strongly.
Yeah, I noticed that too. The naming convention has an also-ran flavor that I don't personally find appealing. However, if you've ever listed to average people talk about computer processors after they've made a purchase, they usually discuss them in terms of Core i7, i5, i3, etc without regard for or understanding of the underlying technologies or the many iterations of processors that used that naming scheme. They also don't differentiate between dual core i7 laptop parts and quad core i7 desktop parts which are vastly different animals when it comes to performance. AMD might be a copycat with the naming convention, but they're following along after Intel in using a now broad, superficial understanding of relative processor performance.
It's an interesting psychological question. Suppose they instead did something like calling them r11 r15 r19 Same idea, not obviously an Intel copy. Does that give the impression that they are independent of Intel, or does it give the impression that they are well aware that they are copying, and trying to hide it? I honestly don't know.
Remember it's not like intel invented this scheme. They copied it from BMW (kinda sorta, though BMW and Intel are in strong competition for who can come up with the most incomprehensible and needlessly painful naming conventions...)
I actually thought the exact same thing when the I series first came out a decade ago (or 8 years whatever it is), in fact I wondered if they would make a m series be their top performer among each category, which they sort of kind of did with core M.
I always thought of the i-Series naming convention as an Apple ripoff as it followed in the footsteps of the iPhone and iMac. When that was happening, iSomethings were everywhere in media and it was a little annoying.
They were doing a me-too with the overclock-able APUs... stick a 'K' at the end of the number. I liked the "Black Edition" branding from older parts much better.
Not really. I think the price AMD has set is just right. If it does perform similarly or close to Intel, AMD can ask a bit higher and still leave a huge price difference.
We have to wait for the reviews for a proper assessment and not just leaks/hypes available right now. I am certain the AMD is a bargain for multi-threaded workloads
There is always a premium for slightly better performance, with rare exceptions. This might be a terrible analogy but with the Camaro for instance, the standard v8 already provides a huge amount of power, but you can improve performance by a couple tenths by paying for the even higher end engine, which costs a boatload more. Some people are willing to pay 30-50% more for a 10-15% increase, I don't see why this would be any different.
I can see this in my next rig. Current Haswel i7 is performing well, and Intel parts released after it just haven't motivated me to upgrade, considering cost for gained performance... but this, if marketing is close to truth, this is motivating.
Also... in a few years time, I can see Ryzen as very sweet foundation for next-gen consoles APU. Compatibility with Jaguar, vast performance boost on CPU side... throw in good GPU, and it would be quite respectable piece of hardware.
Still skeptical... but this is what I was hoping for. Something that can come close to Intel's raw performance, while offering a much lower price. I am sure they will not beat out Intel on anything other than these few cherry-picked benchmarks... but honestly they don't have to.
I am still rocking my now 6 year old i7 2600, and the reason I have not upgraded is because the only way 'up' is to get a vastly more expensive 6-8 core i7, and an insanely expensive motherboard to go with it. And while I would like to have that, I know I cannot justify spending that kind of money. If I can buy a mobo, cpu, and RAM for ~$800 or less that can offer similar single-thread performance, while giving the option for far more threads (and threads that don't need to be flagged specifically for HT tech) then it would be a much easier purchase decision.
Timely CPU reviews haven't been problematic for Anandtech to publish. Ian's always done a good job getting big meaty reviews done. It's those pesky GPU reviews that need a little help (GTX 1050, RX 460, RX 470) and those aren't Ian's domain.
Considering this is the biggest (in terms of market disruption) CPU release in 5+ years, I have no doubt Ian has had many sleepless nights to have this all done. His Twitter feed suggested his introduction to the article was 1600 words long. Those whining about slow article time frames (I am guilty of this as well) should be pleasantly surprised by Ian's analysis which I have no doubt will be second to none.
So, IPC-wise, taking posted benchmarks at face value, Ryzen 7 1800k@4GHz is equivalent to [email protected]. Which is possibly enough to heat up CPU competition, but does not take Intel's crown for having best architecture :( I wonder how multi-core advantage is achieved then? Let's see all benchmarks though.
We'll have to wait for third party benchmarks. The Core i7 6900K runs at 4 GHz in single threaded applications. (Intel® Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0 Frequency.) So they are direclty comparable in these benchmarks.
It looks like AMD has a better SMT implementation than Intel. Ryzen shows better multi-threaded scaling than Broadwell-E on the benchmarks released so far.
This should be cleared up when the reviews come out and we have more data to look at.
The pretty much ever Intel GMA I've gotten my hands on was a PITA. The 950 started out broken and though it improved dramatically over its lifespan, it was still glitchy. The x3100 was better, but not by much and the 4500MHD was vastly improved. I think the 4500 was the first Intel GPU I thought had a satisfactory launch. The first generation HD was a step backwards and there are still problems with it now (I have one that frustrates me to no end under Terragen). However the HD 2/3000 weren't bad and neither was the HD 4000. My office laptop uses a Haswell with its IGP, but the nature of my work doesn't demand much from it. It displays web browser windows and Word documents just fine under Win10.
The point though, Intel's drivers have had their own problems.
This was 1999. Problems continued throughout the years as AMD didn't make a chipset and relied on 3rd party. And please show me an installation of Intel chipset drivers that caused so many problems. I'm not talking video as I've never used on board video.
As a 6900k owner I am actually rather happy at this news. Since it means that more and more programs will fully support the 16 threads my CPU has, and the next time I upgrade I likely will get to pay less.
The discounts aren't available yet but I did see they plan on giving a $30 discount for a CPU/Mobo combo purchase and $20 off a CPU GPU combo. I expect the discount to increase after the initial preorders are fulfilled but even today if you buy Polaris, am4 and a Ryzen CPU they will knock $50 off. That's not bad for a day 1 release.
One week from release and not a single independent review, and their performance claims are based on a single synthetic benchmark. I'm pulling for AMD to return to the land of the living as much as the next enthusiast, but I remain skeptical. Have these been reviewed and are just under a NDA blackout until next week? I hope so.
Holy fuck you nerds are douches. Just reading your comments is like an elementary school bitch out. You support teams with fantasy and untruths, then convolute facts with misstatements and clouding. Tech isn't like football, where fact and statistics leads to nothing as "Any given Sunday..." Tech shouldn't be shrouded in confusion, but it seems easy to confuse and easier to garner support based upon....nothing? Anyone thinking Ryzen is gonna kick Intel out of bed is beyond stupid, because there are NO facts yet. Just a bunch of silly statements saying "Ryzen" this and "Ryzen" that. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for the competition, I'm no fan of anyone, I just want the best bang for my buck.
For the Cinebench test, it looks like AMD ran the 6900K with Turbo Boost Max turned off. I'm running mine, same set up with it on and with the program in the whitelist and repeatedly get 171-172 for single thread @ 4.0Ghz. I get AMD's number (162-163) with it turned OFF at 3.7 GHz. Might want to check this Ian when you run your numbers.
Why would you run benchmarks so that they depend on the idle temp of your CPU, the case, the room, etc?
"Turbo" isn't a "boost," that's marketing doublespeak, it's the CPU running faster than it's specified TDP, until it throttles to stay within the envelope.
Turbo Boost Max is the equivalent to AMD's XFR. It's 100% opportunistic and dependant on power + thermal headroom being available, & thus is never guaranteed. It also has a strict time limit on its continuous use. If they'd enabled TBM on Intel you'd need to enable XFR on AMD for it to be a fair comparison.
I'm itching to see the superscalar order, size of the reorder buffer, and number of reservation stations. 20 MB of L3 and dedicates L2 is already very nice and enough to bump it into this decade but if they want to squash intel properly they need to have the same amount of instruction level parallelism exploitation.
Lol that's um.. interesting? I can't imagine loving any company enough to pull out my unit for them. Now maybe in the future if that company fan give me a virtual BJ....
Intel is running server Broadwell-E xeons at 4w per core, which is the same or lower than what Arm can do, when you add IPC per core to the mix, or SMT/HT, Intel and x86 is destroying ARM, literally just destroying ARM not only matching them at power usage (4w per core) but having 2-5x the computing potential, more if you count SSE and AVX units.
I mean do we really think dual core ARM chips that get out-performed by chips from 20 years ago such as the Athlon 64 are going to define the future? Gee I wonder how much power an Athlon x2 would use on a modern node? ARM is nothing special.
To be clear, > 64 core/128 thread systems and HUGE memory busses are going to be the way forward into the future as we move from the Information Age of information storage to the AI Age of Turing Passing (not the lambda test, but the "can trick your average low/modest IQ human" test) information processing, and wattage per core is going to be the determining metric.
Lets not forget AMD is using Samsung for their fab. Ryzen is really an AMD/Samsung joint venture, it's Samsung's process that made it possible.
One has to wonder when TSMC will be ready. Cannonlake is coming in Q2 and it will bring with it the first 6 core Desktop i7, complete with a pretty decent GPU borrowing from Radeon technology and 15% IPC gains. 6 core Intels usually retail around 400-500$, lets say the 15% IPC boost lets the 6 core Cannonlake beat the 8 core 6900k and 1700x, and rub on the 1800x with less cores and beterr IPC.
Lets say it retails for 429$ the price of the current 6 core. Remember it's going to have an HSA-like OpenCL 2.0 accelreator, what if there is some killer game /app that uses that for some kind of feature? Who is going to be cutting prices then?
Intel said that Cannonlake would be 15% faster than Kaby Lake, not having 15% more IPC. It's the same statement they used for Kaby Lake compared to Skylake: 15% faster. In reality all the performance gains were coming from frequency bump.
If Cannonlake has not a really enhanced architecture, the only resort for Intel is to push frequencies.
No. The 6C i7 chips will be Coffee Lake parts, coming late this year. They'll be 14 nm parts and will likely have no IPC gain over Skylake, just as Kaby Lake doesn't. Just maybe slightly higher clock speeds for the same power.
Cannon Lake is the 10 nm consumer parts. They will likely launch as Core M parts first, but not in 2017, and not before some unknown kind of datacentre chips using 10 nm have been released. There is no release date, rumoured or otherwise.
It's also not totally clear Intel cores do more work with 4/5W of power than anyone else's. Apple's AnX chips might be better, but as they only run iOS and are only in iPads, they can't be meaningfully compared.
Yes I understand the process is licensed from Samsung. But He is still not correct .
It's also easy to see that AMD are hedging long term that Samsung may FAB future processors . The changes to the WSA with GloFo strongly suggest that is the case
The days of the Athlon and the Athlon 64 have returned; and AMD has been able to do in a single design cycle what Intel has done in many generations of microarchitecture.
Now AMD needs to get Ryzen on mobile with very low TDPs. Intel still has the edge with laptops but they've conceded the tablet and phone space to ARM by killing off Atom. A Ryzen Atom-like SoC would be great.
Ryzen's TDP is astonishingly lower than Intel's, and this suggests that Ryzen has a much higher performance-per-watt than Intel's CPUs, and a better design. Ryzen will also probably do quite well in laptops and so on. Those will likely be APUs.
I want a Ryzen-based APU in a Surface-like tablet with passive cooling, like a beefed up Atom. Oh, and it has to be a lot cheaper than the Surface Pro.
So far the benches are cherry picked to use all cores in parallel work loads. I expect that they processors may fall behind in gaming, and especially games that do not multithread well , but the difference will not be great. The extra cores will be a great help to anyone streaming thats for sure.
Two problems so far as I see it . Where are the hexcores? Where are the mATX boards build for overclocking? May they come soon
HOOfan 1 wrote: > Buh bye like when the Athlon 64 X2 processors were superior to the Pentium 4 D processors?
Years ago I was considering building a new system based on the E8400, but it was expensive and I couldn't find a S775 board that also had proper PCIX. Then AMD did a huge discount the Athlon64 X2, so I bought a 6000+ and a relevant AM2 board to go with it (ASUS M2N32 WS Pro). This was great at the time, but I got burned by the lack of BIOS updates (can't use Ph2, ASUS just wasn't interested, whereas Asrock released a Ph2 update even for its budget AM2 boards).
Sometimes what can seem a good thing because of a pricing issue can end up being a pain in the butt. I hope we don't see this sort of thing happen again. The industry is full of all sorts of niggles like this, especially BIOS issues. I love the ASUS M4E, runs any 2700K at 5GHz no problem, but there's something wrong with the NEC USB3 controller which has never been fixed. Atm I'm trying to get a simple PCI capture card working on a Gigabyte Z68 board; works on an Asrock board, but makes the Gigabyte do an instant power-off. I could list endless examples just from my own experiences, I'm sure anyone else here could do the same.
We as techy consumers get taken in way too much by specs, benchmarks, etc., when in reality all sorts of practical issues can make a right mess of the genuine usefulness of many tech products, from dodgy drivers to hw compatibility problems that shouldn't happen if product makers were complying with official interface specs. And now we have deliberate OS lockout; can I run Win7 on Ryzen? Consumer tech is not tested properly, updates are sketchy, bugs are not dealt with, and even pro items often don't receive the support their pricing should command.
If you want a perfect example of this, ask any tech site to do a comparative review of a new CPU/mbd combo using the mbd fitted with maximum RAM. I had a hell of a time getting an X79 board to work with 64GB when they first came out, the manufacturer just hadn't bothered sorting out the stability issues for such a config, the auto/defaults were just not good enough. Why are they allowed to get away with claiming a board supports some maximum RAM when in reality it simply doesn't work?
There's a lot of talk here about AMD shaking things up, an understandable comments about the potential appeal of Ryzen to professionals. This is true, but don't leap too fast. Before buying an 1800X for any pro task, find a review site that's tested it with max RAM, ie. 64GB.
This is so true, they slap the highest numbers on the box that they can, but it's more similar to someone who has overclocked the bejeesus out of their CPU and are able to get it to post so they think that's their oc. 5 seconds into prime it crashes but they have they cpuz screenshot. I have had boards that couldn't even handle the RAM speed it claimed unless it was less than half of the stated max capacity. I don't want to know what it can do in a 1% edge case I want to know what it can handle day in and day out without artifacting and corrupting.
I have a Kingston DDR3/2GHz kit that simply will not run at its rated speed (tried various boards), whereas a GSkill or Mushkin kit works fine.
And pro tasks are demanding in a way that no tech site review benchmark can convey (not helped by many pro benchmarks being very contrived). In 2013 I built a 4.8GHz 3930K triple-580 system with 64GB/2133 RAM that passed every benchmark and test I could throw at it (toms sent me their test suite), handled all the 3D tests aswell, both gamer and pro (Viewperf, etc.) But trying something for real in After Effects, doing a render that gobbled 40GB RAM (so hammering the entire system), it didn't crash but there were artefacts in the render output (possibly something an ECC setup would prevent); reducing the clock to 4.7 resolved the issue. Even then, to get it stable with 64GB required a lot of info requests to ASUS, specific settings needed to handle the current loading, etc., and I was using a top-end board supposedly specifically designed to cope with such high-end specs (P9X79 WS). Standard oc profiling assumes far less RAM is present.
If the same sort of problems occur with Ryzen, I just hope the mbd vendors will get their BIOS updates out fast, otherwise there's a risk people will blame AMD rather than the market pressures and/or lazy testing that allows imperfect products to come to market. Nobody would tolerate this sort of thing if it was a car (oops, gone over 70mph, the wheels fall off, sorry!), but somehow with computer tech it's become the norm to expect faults. The loss of productivity globally from this must be staggering, both hw and sw related.
Ok, lets face it, kaby-lake still holds a 15% performance advantage, and the intel can boost much higher. But now for the good bits, the TDP is probably the most interesting info (again taken with a grain of salt give AMD's way of measuring TDP), if this holds true then intel may have a serious competition in the server space. As it will allow AMD to ram in much higher number of cores than what intel currently can(22 core's for >5000$). I am looking forward to that because at that point AMD is simply a better buy given intel keeps changing the socket every generation, adding to the cost of everything
Intel is playing the money game they used to before AMD became a treat 10 years ago. That forced them into the Tick Tock model. They are back at it again, since process change costs money, they are stretching the existing node until they are forced to. This is bad for innovation and the tech industry, as most systems are built on it. I wish someone comes up with a high performance ARM core for desktops and servers. And windows moves away from x86, that way you are not tied to Intels management, to move the tech industry forward.
Where is that 15% performance advantage of Kaby Lake? Please show us! Kaby Lake has a 12.5% clock advantage, less with active XFR on Ryzen. Maybe it also has an IPC advantage (0-10%?). BUT it also has a 50% core disadvantage. To sum it up, Kaby Lake is no competition because it will significantly lose in multithreaded apps and only slightly win in single threaded apps. You will have to wait for Skylake / Kaby Lake X to see a 15% or similar advantage to Ryzen. But don't forget, in one year the 2nd Zen generation might also be ready to be launched. ;)
So let me get this straight, AMD will have the processors ready to ship on the release date ! Intel had me wait three months for availability for skylake....Way to go AMD ....and 52% improvement not 40%.....Intel take notes.
I'm thinking the R5 1600X is the hidden gem for gamers. It's the only R5 95W TDP part and with 6C/12T it should mean that it can overclock a fair bit higher than an 8C/16T part on the same TDP.
1600X does look like the hidden gem. I wouldn't count on having a lot of OC headroom, though, I expect the 1600X and 1800X are already running pretty close to their full potential.
Sorry but Ryzen is not faster than Intel counterpart and here is why. Also Ryzen chipset is crippled meaning only allows SLI or Crossfire to run at 8x speed. I am waiting for 2066 socket with competitive price.
Here is why i claim that Ryzen benchmarks are AMD BS where they changed quad to dual channel for Intel and probably crippled 2 x 16x speed to run at 2 x 8x speed.
what are you trying to prove with those benchmarks? You just posted a 10 core 20 thread CPU with the same score as an 8 core 16 thread CPU. Even with a 10-15% clock difference, that's a 25% core difference...
Intel Z170 boards split the graphics lanes into x8/x8 too . What is it you are complaining about?
The intel set ups in these benchmarks AMD released had twice as much RAM configured in 4 channel . They still got beaten by the AMD running dual channel RAM . What is it you are complaining about?
What does one old game show? Not much. Maybe you should post an x264/x265 comparison, or POV-Ray, or Blender, or Handbrake, or 7-zip, etc. ;) Everyone knows that games are often GPU limited and don't show the full potential of a CPU. And even if a 4-core CPU achieves similar fps as an 8-core CPU in many games, the latter one has way more free resources for additional tasks.
GTAV was already ancient in early 2017 and by and large uses only a SINGLE CORE for basically all primary engine processing / CPU work.
Lol anyone that followed your "advice" and bought Kaby Lake over Ryzen 1000 in early 2017, "exclusively for gaming" is feeling like the BIGGEST idiot in the god damn world about now. ESPECIALLY if they got a 4-core/4-thread i5-7600/K over a 6-core/12-thread Ryzen 5 1600/X. Nowadays, Ryzen 1000 absolutely freaking BITCH SLAPS Kaby Lake in modern titles/game engines, and this trend started as recently as mid-late 2018.
so a ryzen 7 1700 at 3.2 GHz is running the game the same as a more expensive CPU clocked at 4.2 GHz. Sounds like a win to me. Overclock the ryzen 7 and it will have identical minimum FPS, and who cares about 2 secs of max FPS being higher lmfao.
For a better comparison, that should have shown the Intel 8 core CPUs as well ;)
The second benchmark slide is slightly misleading. If i7-6800K is the base then the Ryzen 1700X bar should show +39%. If Ryzen 1700X is the base then the i7-6800K bar should show -28%.
Anyway, I think we can say now, AMD is back! Finally their architecture is competitive again. I hope they can significantly improve it with every new generation.
- Ryzen 7 1700X: 8C/16T, 3.4 GHz base, 3.8 GHz turbo, 95W, $400, £390 on Amazon.co.uk - Intel Core i7-7700K: 4C/16T, 4.2 GHz base, 4.5 GHz turbo, 91W, $340, £328 on Amazon.co.uk The question is, will Ryzen 7 perform better in games and other single-threaded tests? Because it sure is more expensive than Kaby Lake.
Core for core, thread for thread the AMD will trail the last two generations of intel socket 1151 in games . Atleast it looks that way in the low resolution poorly threaded games comparisons. But generally it wont matter . So many people just look at a bigger fps number and think its better. Often it is not . And monitor technology is one of the reasons why. A 60 Hz monitor can only ever display 60 fps . If two systems with rival processors are outputting 80 fps and 120 fps respectively then the user experience is identical . Both actually see 60 fps . All the other frames are dropped by the monitor and never displayed at all. This is why even the FX processors already available are almost always a match for the current intel i5's . Yes there are situations where intel have the advantage, but they are rare enough to not bother with too much . And especially not when you are considering optimizing costs.
Ryzen is a clear step up though and those running really high resolution monitors, streaming and encoding will do well with one. For those wanting to push 144 HZ to a 1080p monitor then intel may remain the better choice. The benchmarks are coming ... then we will know
Well yes, this IS a PC~site, but no one I see mentions a fresh major app/market, in the form of autonomous EVs etc.
I hear AMD have a lot going for them as a smart, cheap and powerful platform to base them on.
History is full of examples of booms waiting in the wings for some pre-requisite tech development. electricity begat many inventions, as did oil e.g.
A historic such shift is relatively recent battery tech and economics. Been around since ~2005, but not cheap and mainstream.
At a guess, they have improved by a factor of ~4-10x in each of; weight, cost, dis/charge rate, longevity, ..... This isnt incremental improvement. Its a still evolving revolution.
This is a major paradigm shift in what is doable electrically using batteries.
So I am just saying, in the context of AMDs future?, their appeal to EV makers e.g ought be considered.
maybe auto makers will just put a pc mobo in their cars and be done with inferior proprietary bespoke approaches to increasingly smart cars.
I heard AMD have done well with console makers, as their platform gets their game products to market faster. Its a similar environment to cars ATM.
Predictive adaptive cruise control (ACC) really is a "dealbreaker must have" for many savvy car buyers right now. the rewards are huge for the winner, but they are very slow to make it a mainstream fairly priced option, if at all.
its a tough job to do it right, it takes some AI. maybe its time cars had a PC integrated? If so, does amd have an edge?
Intel's brand cache has been eroding for years now, the erosion was accelerated when CEO Krzanich took reign and has forever proclaimed success on Moore's Law..... Things have deteriorated severely at Intel.......
Intel's brand cache has been eroding for years now, the erosion was accelerated when CEO Krzanich took reign and has forever proclaimed success on Moore's Law.....
Things have deteriorated severely at Intel. Internal sources at Intel have stated the climate has been awful and not just due to recent layoffs of 12,000 or 11% of workforce. In light of many recent news headlines and not just Ryzen, Intel is probably in the most delicate situation it has ever had to face.
CEO Brian Krzanich has lead Intel into a slow death spiral and it hurts me to admonish my croation brotheren. Back in 2006 Intel had about a 50% market share with AMD and has watched it increase dramatically every year since to now about 80/20 but years of bad decisions and throwing good money after bad have caught up to the CEO with his pants down. Throwing $8 Billion at Mcafee and $17 Billion at Altera and wasted Billions trying to crack the mobile market with the “contra-revenue” Bay Trail processor where Intel basically tried to bribe tablet makers into using Bay Trail Processors at substantial loss for Intel.
All these casualties has had the CEO reducing costs at the greater cost of unexpected consequences. The delay on 10nm has just increased, worse yet Canon Lake is not expected to feature any significant architectural improvements…. The CEO mistakenly doubled down on the hope that AMD not competing with them - so those that think “Intel has been holding back” are severely mistaken, there is the rumbling of a major earthquake going on right now under Intel’s feet……. Management has been coalescing to get momentum to push CEO out and bring in Murthy Renduchintala. Krzanich has lead a disaster and has basically and systematically undressed Intel, R&D is screwed and has left a void until well into 2019, CEO had completely underestimated the possibility of an AMD comeback while trying to continue with his Moore’s Law mantra which has been basically tossed out window with end of tick/tock procedures followed for almost a decade.
CEO has sat by idly after their 2016 Q4 earnings call from CFO stated product issues have limited profitability mainly due to fault with Atom c2000 family that bricks devices and had to set aside a pot of cash to deal with problems and recently announced Atom C2000 chip line contains a clock flaw and the recently hired COO Kim Stevenson resigned after just taking helm of division that leads PC business in August.
Intel has been in no position to “hold back” recently with all the internal problems and now AMD has just put them way behind the 8-ball. Should expect a plethora of changes at Intel shortly after Ryzen is released, writing has been on wall way before recent revelations of potential AMD comeback….. adding to issues of AMD resurgence is that Intel is also in the crosshairs of sleeping giant Qualcomm.
Kaby Lake brought in “new” PAO process, Process - Architecture – Optimization….. there is no underlying change to the microarchitecture, Intel is not promoting any performance difference with the previous generation, they are however promoting better efficiency and creating a bit more headroom for OC’ing. Moore’s Law has driven Intel computing for a decade and has now forced Intel to dump tick/tock at most inopportune time with CEO not seeing AMD coming and with no immediate recourse at hand and most likely not until into 2019 will Intel be able to do anything but marketing tactics disguised by slashing prices.
Intel has enjoyed their monopoly for years and seems to have rested on it’s laurels and market superiority for too long but they have not been holding back. Anandtech just released article last week about 8th gen continuing on 14nm and 10nm pushed back to late 2017 or 2018….. Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake, Cannonlake, Ice Lake or Tigerlake will not help Intel if the AMD hype comes to fruition next week.
and the pressure has already hit Intel and AMD hasn't been released yet for independent reviews...... INTEL JUST ANNOUNCE more than a dozen price cuts starting with $300 off 6950X.......
A substantial part of Intel's performance advantage stems from its lead in manufacturing minorization .It still holds a minor manufacturing advantage and will grow that advantage within months.
10nm desktop chips will not be this year. Maybe a few very expensive server ones, or 'premium' ULP SoCs, but not desktop. They are now 1H2018 at the earliest. Please do some research instead of just repeating the rumors you may have heard elsewhere.
I just calculated Ryzen die size at about 200mm2 (4.8B transistors) Broadwell-E is a 256mm2 die with 10 cores and 3.4B transistors. ~200mm2 and 3B working in 6900K.
We need a clarification for WTF is going on. How can it be that AMD has much higher density?
Finally, competition. The more important battle would be against NVIDIA on the GPU front; the kind of money NVIDIA has been charging for GeForce is absurd and has to stop, branding video cards based on mid-sized GPUs as flagships has to stop, a GTX 1080 (mid-sized GPU) costs up to $700, whereas a GTX 560 Ti (same class mid-sized GPU) cost $250 just a few short years ago - this has to stop.
Only good things can come from now on. That being said, the immediate benefit for consumers wouldn't be what AMD is trying to make it seem like - you wouldn't be able to buy an i5-7400, i5-7600, or i7-7700 equivalent for half the price, even if Ryzen is as good as Kaby Lake. Ryzen 3 1200X is $30 less expensive than than i5-7500; Ryzen 5 1400X might end up being slightly slower than i7-7700, but it's also $100 less expensive which might make it a very popular choice, especially if it overclocks well.
It's a bit disappointing that it doesn't seem like AMD would offer a quad-core Ryzen for $100, at least not initially. A CPU to challenge Intel's G4560 (2c/4t, no AVX for $64) would also be nice.
Not everyone can afford or wants to pay for more expensive components. The G4560 has been somewhat of a hit in the budget sector - it's perfectly capable of handling many of the latest games, virtually all of the e-sports-oriented MOBA/MMO/FPS games and it costs $64 - it's hard to convince someone to spend over twice that because it's "always better". AMD does not have an answer for the super-budget sector; it also chose not price the base 4c/4t CPU aggressively at $99, here's hoping that's what happens when Intel inevitably makes the sub-$120 i3 4c/4t.
Because it's affordable and it works, it does what you need it to do with satisfactory results. Why is it so hard to understand that some people just don't want to spend, or cannot afford to, on more expensive components? Many people simply do not upgrade; they buy a configuration and use it for years until it becomes hopelessly obsolete. AMD has a part for the budget conscious *performance* crowd - Ryzen 3 1100 - but it does not have an answer for the low-end sector. A G4560/H110/8GB/GTX1050 combo can play all popular MOBA/MMO/FPS games and many modern triple-As. You don't even need to add a video card if you don't need it for games.
The non-laptop Raven Ridge would likely be a 4c/8t HBM2 SoC; it won't be a $65 CPU. However, if it's fast enough so that you wouldn't need to add a video card, then it just might be something very special.
I think their answer for the ultra low budget sector will be unlocked Carrizo based Athlon x4s. Which should hit ~4GHz, ie- AM4 Bristol Ridge without an iGPU. The locked Athlon x4 845 is only $69, so I'd imagine an unlocked AM4 version would probably be similar.
For a 1050/460 it would be OK. It can run a GTX1080 at nearly 80fps in The Division (http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/amd_athlon_x4... so I don't think a 1050 or 460 would cause it many problems ? And most importantly, from AMDs perspective, get people onto an AMD AM4 platform instead of an Intel one. So they can sell them an R3/R5 in future.
Just wait. I don't think AMD are going to ignore the ultra budget sector. I think they are going to offer unlocked Carrizo Athlon x4s. Which really aren't that bad. Particularly as they *do* have AVX, AVX2 etc.
It does make sense. I've no doubt AMD will address the low-end; I was just hoping it would be with a Zen core and sooner rather than later. If Zen can scale down to 2c/4t, it'd be nice to see an entry part for ~$50.
Don't think it would be economic to cut down an 8 core Ryzen to 2 cores ? Think that's why they said the R3s would be the last ones to be launched. Because they are probably working on a separate 4C/8T die. They also said that there might be some more unannounced SKUs, so who knows ? Later in the year you might get a 2C/4T Ryzen ?
and the pressure has already hit Intel and AMD hasn't been released yet for independent reviews...... INTEL JUST ANNOUNCE more than a dozen price cuts starting with $300 off 6950X.......
Ryzen 7 1800X Beats The World’s Fastest Desktop CPU With A One Click Overclock On Air Cooling, Surpasses 7700K In Single-Thread Performance...... recent testing revealed on youtube
So glad to finally see AMD catching up and hopefully again stopping Intel's market milking as it did with Athlon. First 486/Pentium processors were very expensive and AMD made real difference to the consumer market. There was 10x price difference at best between these two and having the processor as the most expensive single piece of PC stopped many dreams of building a decent, modern PC for gaming and other heavier use. From my point of view after Athlon the whole market made a leap forward. More people could enjoy the new features more capacity brought to the table, software developers could develop more advanced applications as even the cheaper computers could run the new stuff too. I really, really would like to see that the new Vega architecture would do the same with Nvidia's iron grasp on GPU market. Made also rough number investigation of these companies: Intel: ~100 000 employees, 59 billion $ revenue Nvidia: ~10 000 employees, 5 billion $ revenue AMD: ~9000 employees, 1 billion $ revenue To my view it seems that either AMD has very competent jobforce or the two others are really milking the market. Either way, keep up the good work AMD, we need you! :)
All that talk about how seemingly unrealistic getting a 40% increase in IPC is pretty ridiculous as if it isn't already being done. One, if they were trying to get 40% more from Piledriver or Bulldozer, then sure. But we are not, so that's one reason it's ridiculous.
Two, isn't Intel's CPUs already about 40% better than the FX CPUs? And the Phenom's IPC is better than the FX CPUs. So it's already being done. It's ridiculous to say that AMD hasn't had a CPU that's better than the FX, when they have and ridiculus to basically say that ONLY Intel can develop a CPU with higher IPC than the Piledriver and Bulldozer CPUs have.
This release remembers me when the Athlon 64 was the king until the Conroe arrived. It has been about 10 years with Intel as the king. But in this long interval Intel has speculated with its prices just for 15-20% of performance, and in the time being maybe less. Now AMD release a CPU able to compete vs the 6900k for $500! So that I think the times of "fat cows" for Intel is over, at less in the next few years.
So...tell me what is the advantage of buying an 1800x over a 1700? $200 difference, if you factor in the cost of the cpu cooler? A total ripoff. *yawns* if you are going to price a cpu at $500, at least give it 40 pcie3 lanes?
Hopefully when your reviews comes, there won't be any bias or influence from Intel.
Intel Allegedly Playing Dirty To Undercut AMD’s Ryzen
The editors-in-chief of two of America’s top PC hardware and technology publications have confirmed to Wccftech that they have indeed been approached by Intel regarding upcoming Ryzen reviews. Although both said that it was business as usual. Affirming that Intel’s response following AMD’s Ryzen announcement was what they had expected it to be and nothing was particularly unusual about it.
Intel is rattled with AMD Ryzen. Its 10-year old Nehalem CPU architecture that has been shrunk and incrementally updated over the years, is finally coming across as dated in the wake of AMD's "Zen" architecture. What to do when a competitor with 1/50th your R&D budget threatens to wreck your next annual appraisal? Play dirty and arm-twist the media of course! And playing dirty Intel is, according to a TweakTown report.
Apparently, Intel has scrambled its PR department to call in favors with the press in return for "guidelines" on how to review AMD Ryzen. Intel's PR emails allegedly ask reviewers to "call us before you write." The guidelines are worded more to make it sound like Intel wants its chips to be reviewed "fairly" against Ryzen, but the underlying objective is clear.
All the blatantly illegal anti-competitive/anti-competition market manipulation & OEM bribing BS Intel pulled off in-between 1998 & 2008 says you have no freaking clue what the hell you are talking about... Athlon 64 (most ESPECIALLY the A64 Opterons) absolutely scared the freaking SHIT out of Intel!!! So much so they broke just about every anti-monopoly law you can think of trying to prevent its widespread adoption. Also, if they weren't scared of A64/A64x2, how in the HELL do you explain the absurd disaster that was the Pentium-D???
Ryzen looks pretty awesome if you can use all those cores. I think the i7-7700k is generally faster in lightly threaded apps and most games. The 7700 is cheaper as well ($300 at a MC). I'm still on Ivy Bridge and still happy enough so I'll be buying neither. Anyone thinking about a new CPU should take a serious look at their typical workload before deciding.
With Intel firmly grasping the workstation/OEM market, AMD finds itself in a critical situation to sell to their #1 demographic - gamers. Unfortunately, this is where Ryzen looks to fall short. Today's benchmarks from various publishers conclude that Ryzen is in fact behind Intel's Skylake/Kabylake in games. Ouch.
Hahahaha. Intel's "firm grasp" of the workstation market in early 2017 was about as limp, small, & loose as your Grandad's wang. People were FURIOUS at Intel over their price gouging & feature stripping ala PCIe lanes or ECC memory support. Ryzen (& later Threadripper) absolutely cleaned HOUSE in the workstation market.
What nobody says here is the main reason why AMD managed to catch Intel. Being able to cut on 14 nm is the main reason and the future is bright for AMD because even 7 nm cut is in the roadmap for Samsung (and AMD uses GlobalFoundries which is backed up by Samsung). So by 2020 we might see AMD CPUs on 7 nm while Intel might be only at 10 nm by that time. Eitherway the most interesting period will be after ~6 nm because 6 nm is the physical limit for cutting the chip. Bellow 6 nm there is quantum tunneling (aka electrons going through the 6nm "wall" into unwanted area.
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lilmoe - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
bah bye Intelnathanddrews - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Hardly. If we're lucky, we'll get a price war.Manch - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
LOL, yeah Intel isn't going anywhere. This will put pressure on them to drop prices and innovate for sure though vs this 2-5% BS or in the case of Kaby vs Sky....nada. Maybe they've been holding back the way NVIDIA does to sandbag AMD GPU's upon release. I am wondering what Intel will do as far as price drop, but not enough to wait on ordering.III-V - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
If you think Intel's been holding back as far as "innovation" goes, you're an uneducated fuckwit.Manch - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Wow, calm down bro. Intel has rested on its laurels before and stagnated. That's how AMD caught them with their pants down before. Without that competition from AMD with its Athlon XP & 64 we wouldn't have Core as soon as we did. AMD did the same, drug their feet on releasing a new architecture, then double down on the wrong horse and has been AWOL from competition for a long time after the Core counterpunch that dropped them. We will see Intel innovate and put out processors with much better generation performance now bc they will have to. Competition does best for us the consumer. dickheadLemDong - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Honestly you gotta do more research here, AMD didn't rest on their laurels. They were crushed by intel's absolutely corrupt business tactics and monopoly abuse when they feared they would be dethroned. The CEO at the time was asked if he regretted what he did after intel lost a court case and said "I'd do it again." because of the market advantage that it net them. Intel has a track record of laziness. They would rather stomp out competition then compete.Michael Bay - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
I gues IPC can be bribed now.Ranger1065 - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Dude you can't even spell "guess" correctly.Back to your troll cave.
bananaforscale - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
FOR THE HORDE!upsidedownfunnel - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
I used AMD CPUs up until Sandy Bridge. Intel may have had some shady business practices, but their superior technology is ultimately what won them their current near monopoly of desktop PC CPUs.random2 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Takes you a while to catch on does it? The advantage became clear with Conroe. :)Do love the fact AMD appears to be back in the game.
redraider89 - Monday, February 27, 2017 - link
Don't discount the shady practices that muc. The reason they gained technological superiority is because of the flush of cash the got from those shady deals, which they poured into research and development while restricting AMD's cash to pour into research and development. Instead of research and development, it forced AMD into survival mode, not grow and expand mode. So they ARE ahead a large part of because of shady business practices.redraider89 - Monday, February 27, 2017 - link
CORRECTED typos: Don't discount the shady practices that *much*. The large part of the reason they gained technological superiority is because of the flush of cash *they* got from those shady deals, which they poured into research and development while restricting AMD's cash to pour into research and development. Instead of research and development, it forced AMD into survival mode, not grow and expand mode. So they ARE ahead a large part because of shady business practices.
mapesdhs - Tuesday, February 28, 2017 - link
("may have"??)Hmm, superior technology eh... does that include deliberately heat-crippling IB with poor thermal transfer material? (check the YT delidding results and tech site articles, up to 35C load temp drop) How about the two locked-out cores of the 3930K, because AMD couldn't even compete with Intel's 4-core? Or the lack of USB3 or other improvements with X79? Or the lack of more PCIe lanes for multiple generations? Or the crippling of PCIe down to 28 lanes with the 5820K onwards? (the 4-core 4820K can be faster for multi-GPU since it has 40 lanes, higher oc with its greater per-core thermal limit, and no restrictions on GPU vs. storage allocation) Or how about the insane price hikes? The list goes on and on. There was no competition, so Intel sat on its butt for 5 years. Intel had the better tech back in the days of SB, but their monopoly has stagnated the market, as always happens when there is no competition. Year after year with little to encourage users to upgrade, yet sites kept reporting declining PC sales (well duh).
Intel made the 2500K, etc. too good (from their point of view), then spent the next 5 years kicking customers in the face. They could have released an 8-core CPU back then, because in reality that's what the 3930K is; they didn't because there was no need to, the 1100T couldn't even take on the 2600K (*), never mind the 6 allowed cores of the 3930K (much of the time 1100T is slower than the 2500K). Not seeing the implication of "superior technology" when this situation meant the market had to wait a crazy amount of time for a consumer 8-core, and when it finally came out the cost was utterly through the roof (even as I type it's still a whopping 1100 UKP on Scan UK, which was nuts long before we knew how Ryzen was going to be priced).
If Intel ends up in a pickle as a result of a disruptive Ryzen launch, it's nothing less than Intel deserves. They had a lead back with SB to which they were justly entitled, but ever since then it's been one snoozefest after another. The release of the 4770K saw headlines such as, "Haswell Is Faster; Desktop Enthusiasts Yawn" (toms). On Anand's forums, Samus posted this on June 2013 which sums it up nicely: "I'm using an i7-950 (over 4 years old) and its funny seeing how still-competitive it is to Intel's newest chips. It seems Sandy Bridge brought the bang and its just been trickle down performance since..."
I've used a lot of SB/SB-E CPUs, they work very well, but for me the financially worthwhile leaps Intel offered with these products stopped with that generation. The threaded performance gain of the 6950X over the 3930K isn't particularly attractive to a solo pro looking to upgrade (given the cost), while heat/power issues mean the former isn't that much better for single-threaded tasks once both are overclocked, the latter having far greater headroom.
Intel has survived on the back of convincing consumers that dribbling IPC increases are worth the money, while charging far more for CPUs such as the 6700K than was remotely the case for the top-end mainstream CPUs of earlier times (I was amazed at the launch price of the 6700K, found myself wondering who on earth was buying them). X58 really felt like an enthusiast platform, while P55 was cost effective but nonetheless highly potent due to its lower latency, and at least X58 eventually had 6-core options. How long has it been and yet still no fundamental change to the base tech in mainstream chipsets? Still the same old x8/x8 PCIe split, lower max RAM, etc., while mbd makers stopped including features which had previously become standard even on P55, such as LED debug and onboard power/reset buttons (the Asrock P55 Deluxe is a typical example, proof that such features are cheap to include, yet numerous much newer Z97 and later models don't have them; they should be absolutely standard on all boards by now). Likewise, the presence of PLX and other tech wained, and now users have to contend with complex decisions about what mbd features will be active based on what storage devices and GPUs are connected, even more so with crippled 28-lane CPUs.
Here's a revealing thought: if Intel had ever released simple PCIe SATA3/USB3 addin cards using their own chipsets (so they would perform exactly the same as onboard SATA3/USB3, picked up by the same drivers) and mbd makers released BIOS updates to allow older mbds to boot from NVMe, how many users of boards all the way back to P55/X58 would have upgraded? Heck, I know people who'd probably have kept going with E8400 and Q6600/QX96xx rigs if they'd been able to move up in terms of storage and I/O tech. Sure, those who want maximum threaded performance will climb the CPU ladder, but in more general terms we've been in a long period of stagnation. Every tech site agrees that SSDs have made one of the biggest differences to the PC user experience, yet even with the delights at the time of P55/X58, one had to wade through a nightmare of poor-performing 3rd party controllers and often terrible drivers (some Marvell SATA3 driver packages can completely wreck a system). Years later, despite lacking competitive CPUs, AMD often had a significant advantage in native SATA3 provision.
I've built a lot of Intel systems in recent years, but good luck to AMD I say. I'll be ordering a 1700X this evening.
Ian.
(*) Ref: i5 2500K and i7 2600K review on Anandtech, 03/Jan/2011, page 17.
nowayandnohow - Friday, March 17, 2017 - link
Buddy, you speak about this like you are a member of the management team with insight. Intel is not a room of three gnomes who sit and are evil - it's a multi-bilion dollar company, with strategies, boards of directors, analysts, research, and what they do is a result of what will make them the most money.I am not disputing any of their business practices being shady, but your rant here insinuating that you knew the "right way", and how Intel "kicked us in the face", you clearly have no idea how a large business is ran.
There is no secret in that intel focuses on User Perceived Benefits, that have publicly said so, and can you blame them? If market research tells you that you are #1, your brand is strong, and you are on the top list as far as all specs, why WOULD you keep pushing a market segment where you are already #1 for the foreseeable future. No one is stopping anyone else from coming up with a processor that does what you want it to do, and tackle over the market - but no one has, so again, what are you on about?
Top that up with that INtel does a hell of a lot more than churn out processors for PC's, so there has been no slowness on their side, it just hasn't been in your narrow focus of products.
IN the end, they are churning out Xeon processors with amazing numbers as far as specs, and everything that comes anew, is usually better and faster than before - More's law still stands, and he worked for Intel.
sseemaku - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
You honestly believe that's the only reason AMD lost to Intel? Then please also explain how did they lose the GPU market to Nvidia.dr.heyden - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
I'm curious did you ever use an ATI Graphics card before AMD acquired them. If you have then you would know that they never lost it to NVidia, they actually never had it to start with. They have certainly improved the product line and in some cases have surpassed NVidia however you can't lose something you never had. The one really good thing has done for ATI Graphics is provide good drivers. I remember working on computers and the minute I saw an ATI Graphics card I knew what half the problems were. Even if you aren't an AMD fan you have to appreciate them for what they do, without them we probably wouldn't have anywhere near the level of both CPU/GPU performance. Any and all competition is good for the end user. I am glad to see AMD back in the saddle again so to say and hopefully continuing to push the envelope. We the consumer are the ones who come out ahead.Qasar - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
i have used ati card from the 9800 pro, the x1900, 4800 5800 and 7900 series.. maybe even a few others... and never had an issue that was directly related to the video card...Johan Steyn - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Very simple, it actually takes money to have proper RND. After Intel's deceptive moves, AMD struggled financially for extremely long.Shoot a dog in both its legs and then expect him go on fighting.
Maybe you have not been in business ever. If you struggle financially, it demoralises the whole company. You not only feel like a looser, you actually become one. The fact that AMD was able to make a comeback is actually remarkable.
You are an Intel fanboy, that is all.
Manch - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
?? Who are you replying to?gruffi - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
What? AMD lost nothing. They still sell more GPUs than Nvidia. There is more than just enthusiast dGPUs. Btw, Vega architecture is ready to join the Zen party. ;)SolMiester - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link
I have no idea where you got that from, AMD is miles behind NV is GPU sales, they are not even close.Manch - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Intel business practices def had an effect on sales. No doubt about it. Talking about procs designs here. AMD had an absolute hit with their Athlon/64 lines. Problem was Intel responded in kind bc they had to. AMD didn't have an answer that would compete. Top it off their answer came late, underperformed horribly. Shared FP? really? From the get go it was bad. Process technologies no doubt hindered them as well but I don't think it would have helped enough to stay competitive. I'm glad they've come back with performing chip though.mtroute - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link
Well I wish people would clarify exactly WHAT intel business practices they are refering to. Beyond that, the fact that their CEO Sanders was completely incompetent and they were in financial trouble for decades. then they lost the only reason they stayed competitive in the first place, Atiq Raza who left right after the K7 was introduced...Johan Steyn - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Someday Intel will get what they deserve. I remember how I had to buy white box Asus motherboards with zero branding just to be able to get an Athlon motherboard for my customers. Why? Because Intel forced Asus (and everyone else) to not sell AMD boards or loose discounts.People kept on defending Intel. The court found them guilty and got a slap on the wrist. No justice was done. I have zero respect for Intel. What they have done to AMD is unforgivable. They are an evil company.
I was not even allowed to advertise AMD anywhere near to Intel adds if I as a dealer wanted "special" privilege.
I really hope AMD comes back with this. They might have a chance, but the evil is strong with Intel!
rocketbuddha - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link
Despite all the shenanigans that Intel did to AMD, AMD was struck by a thunderbolt with the release of Core 2 Duo. I have seen interviews with the senior management in AMD, dismissing the claim that a x64 processor without IMC would beat a "Hammer" processor with IMC. In addition Intel ditched the "Pentium" branding and went with a new "Core" branding which at that time was strange.Haawser - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
No. Intel simply sabotaged themselves. All the cool stuff that they have actually introduced like AVX2 etc they fuse off on lower tier chips so they can sell the same die for more money. So nobody bothers to use them. If they left the features intact, it wouldn't be a problem. They've shot themselves, basically.vladpetric - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Almost everyone here is making the mistake that right now AMD would be the main competitor for Intel. Actually, it's ARM. Sure, 10 years ago it was.AMD's main problem was its inability deliver good products on time. There's two factors to this - getting good chip designs, and manufacturing them.
AMD failed on both sides. For the first, it missed production cycles, and production targets. For the second, it never ever matched Intel's manufacturing yields.
Manufacturing chips on 28/22/14/10nm is an incredibly hard problem, and Intel still has the best yields on the planet.
deltaFx2 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
@vladpetric: Everyone is assuming AMD is the main competitor to Intel because it is. In what market do Intel and ARM vendors compete head-to-head, after Intel has essentially given up on entering the mobile space? None. Intel sells in volume in the desktop, laptop, and server space. The first two are the PC market, which despite decline YoY is still a multi-billion dollar market. And it's unlikely to decline forever unless a worthy successor comes out of the tablet market (it hasn't). There is no ARM design that's even close to matching intel performance in this market. Apple is probably the closest on IPC, but not frequency. The rest aren't even in the ballpark. ARM server is a long way away from being close to a credible threat to x86 in server (in fact, IBM has a better chance). ARM doesn't even have decent hardware except a few niche players in cavium and AMCC.vladpetric - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
@deltaFx2: Intel tried entering the mobile space (phones, tables), and failed spectacularly. They were relegated back to their traditional markets. They did compete with ARM (though not only) and failed.OK, let me refine my statement (which is an opinion) - within the next couple of years the ARM ecosystem is far more likely to steal sales from Intel than AMD. You are correct in that right now there's no direct competition to x86, but things are likely to change. My prediction.
The problem with scaling frequency is energy and heat (the pipelines are generally pretty fast). For Apple's use cases (tablets, phones), energy and heat matter a lot more than the GHz bragging rights.
deltaFx2 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
@ vladpetric: Fair enough. However, ARM has the same foundry exposure that AMD has. So, if your point is that Intel yields better than AMD, ARM won't change that.The other issue around ARM is the design point. Any CPU design has a sweet-spot: given an IPC and frequency, there's a point at which it is balanced in terms of perf and power. x86's sweetspot (intel and now AMD) is roughly at 3 GHz, which works for server, desktop and mainstream laptops. Intel and AMD have used economy of scale to push the same design in all these markets. However, in fanless laptop/tablet, the frequency has to be dropped to 1.5GHz, where the deeper pipeline starts to hurt. ARM designs' sweetspot is lower frequencies and much lower TDPs, resulting in short and/or less wide pipelines. These CPUs, designed for phones and scale up to tablets are sub-optimal for laptops, servers, or desktops, so they don't have the economy of scale. They have to design a from-scratch CPU to take Intel on head-on that they cannot sell in mobile, thus losing the cost advantage that intel/AMD have. Unless, of course, ARM becomes a real alternative for a mainstream laptop. The software isn't there yet for this to happen. It could, though, and if it does, my money is on Apple.
StevoLincolnite - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Bullshit. ARM A15, A57 for instance has a 19 stage pipeline, A72 has a 16 stage pipeline and A73 has a 15+ stage pipeline.Sandy Bridge, 16 with fetch/retire, 14 without and that has remained consistence even today with Kaby Lake.
Of course, some instructions will not require the full use of the pipeline on both architectures.
deltaFx2 - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
@StevoLincolnite: I thought I was clear: "resulting in short and/or less wide pipelines". You can do one or the other to save power. A15 is in-order, A72/73 are 3-wide decode. Haswell/Skylake are 6-wide machines out of the uopCache. As is Apple, so that's a good comparison point. Apple's minimum mispredict penalty (aka front-end pipeline depth) is 9 cycles now. Haswell's minimum mispredict penalty on an uopcache miss I$ hit is ~20 cycles, and I think 16 on a uopcache hit. Apple clocks its parts at 2.3GHz tops, IIRC, in ipad pro.Also remember that it's not just about pipe stages, but physical design methodology. There are many tricks that you can play to hit high frequency that come at a significant power cost. I'll leave you with one datapoint: AMD, which knows how to do high-frequency design, put out an ARM server part, A1100 that used A57 cores as-is, hookedup with custom un-core. Top frequency? 2.0 GHz.
Meteor2 - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Few will switch to ARM (or Power) for servers as the x86 software ecosystem is far broader and completely mature. It's far more expensive to switch software than hardware.jayfang - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Sure, remember also: It's about the money.Apple's A10 Fusion can already pretty much replace Intel's expensive-for-their-die-size Core m line. That will hurt, especially when general ARM SoC catches up.
But the big growth and profit margin area is currently in server chips. The big cloud providers have no choice at the moment and are being milked. AMD can really make an impact there, for the reasons that @deltaFx2 puts so well.
bcronce - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link
Intel actually had a higher performance more efficient mobile CPU than ARM. The CPU is not everything. Turned out the platform as a whole, like the chipset, consumed way too much power for Intel.Arm has had the inverse issue. They can't compete with Intel's CPU performance without becoming horribly inefficient. Arm is still pretty much limit to embedded or many small core CPUs, which is a very niche market.
FullmetalTitan - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
As someone in the semicon industry who works with many former Intel employees, I can tell you they achieve their goals with a very heavy work demand of their engineers. One of the worst companies for work-life balance in the industry, profit above all.Yields make good news, but employee turnaround can break the bank.
mtroute - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link
as someone that works at Intel, I disagree...mdw9604 - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Isn't AMD fabless now? So shouldn't manufactoring issue be a thing of the past, theoretically?tuxRoller - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
I won't argue about their use of the ad hom, but 3-5 is right.David Kanter says the exact same thing, over and over.
jameskatt - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Intel is falling behind in the chip technology race. Chinese firms have processes that are more sophisticated than Intel. They are offering 10 nm process chips while Intel is stuck at 14 nm.jameskatt - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
And Korean firms like Samsung also have surpassed Intel.Intel's only claim to fame is complete compatibility with Microsoft Windows and Mac OS.
damianrobertjones - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
"Samsung also have surpassed Intel." - In some areas.mtroute - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link
omg, that's hilarious...Jumangi - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
The size of the process technology is one of many that determine how good it is. Only ignorant fools look at what the nanometer scale being used as to making a judgement.ImSpartacus - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
You know those numbers are just marketing, right?I believe Intel's 14nm process is roughly the same density as competing 10nm processes.
It's a well known fact that Intel's 14nm process was much denser than competing 14/16nm processes (which were basically just 20nm with finfets).
Intel released a nice chart 26th their interpretation of completing processes through time.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/11115/intel-confirms...
LemDong - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
While I do agree there is a bit of marketing going on with 10nm vs 14nm you're grossly incorrect in saying that they are "Just marketing".You also made a gut check in saying "I believe intel's 14nm process is roughly the same density as competing 10nm processes." What is this based off of? If you have a 1m x1m surface you could fit more 10nm objects on that surface then you could 14nm.
I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm saying you should do research and cite sources to your claims.
naxeem - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
No, LemDong, not really. Intel's 14nm is actually much smaller than others' 14nm.##nm is not really exact.
http://imgur.com/a/FIlbS
Gigaplex - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
"You also made a gut check in saying "I believe intel's 14nm process is roughly the same density as competing 10nm processes." What is this based off of?"It's based off http://images.anandtech.com/doci/11115/C4PU6KzWMAE...
"If you have a 1m x1m surface you could fit more 10nm objects on that surface then you could 14nm."
Sure. But the objects aren't actually 10nm. The 10nm rating is just the dimension of one aspect of the transistor, it doesn't describe the actual density.
haris525 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Yes, you are right it is just marketing.these are just some "drawbacks" to node shrinkage
1. reduced current use by transistor switching
2. consume less power (kinda same as number 1, P = VI)
3. Increased clocked Headroom
4. decreased heat output
5. lower prices
that's some good marketing right there!
fanofanand - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Decreased heat output isn't really true because as transistor density goes up the heat is focused in a smaller area with less room for the heat to escape.RMSe17 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Which Chinese processor?name99 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Your point is well-taken, but let's not get carried away.- TSMC is Taiwanese (only"Chinese" if you insist on trying to score some strange political point that no-one cares about) and Samsung is South Korean.
- no-one is shipping 10nm in volume yet. The A10X will probably (but rumor) shipping in new iPads (due March 2017, but rumor) be the first.
- there is plenty of room for arguing either way as to whether TSMC's and Samsung's 10nm processes are better or not than Intel's 14nm.
The mature analysis is that each is optimized for its target customers. TSMC and Samsung are more flexible and better for mobile, Intel is obsessed with density, cost reduction, and process options that benefit its server chips. (I'd argue that the Intel choices were short-sighted and are already hurting them, the sort of things that happen when a one-time engineering company gets taken over by finance, but that's for another comment.)
evilpaul666 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
China has nuclear weapons and seems fairly certain Taiwan is part of China. I'm going to take their word for it.name99 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Good luck trying to act on that theory ("Taiwan is part of China"). Your Taiwan visa will be ever so helpful trying to get into PRC, likewise your attempt to spend NT dollars in Beijing.India has nuclear weapons and claims all of Kashmir is part of India. Do you also believe that?
If you think that believing political propaganda is a useful way to understand the current and future technological development of both PRC and Taiwan, you're seriously deluded.
webs1987 - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Fuck Pakistan! Fuck China! Kashmir is a part of India! Only if our gutless politicians would go ahead and assert the fuck out of this fact!!! Grrr!! BTW registered just to post this comment.Also Fuck China again! Since Arunachal Pradesh is also part of India!!!
kdogg4536 - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link
Why do you care? Politics?BTW fuck u
Cooe - Thursday, May 6, 2021 - link
Kashmir is NOT part of India. Self-determination is a thing that exists, and Kashmiri's do NOT want to be part of India. Unless you like slavery?Reflex - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
China has nuclear weapons is your argument? So does Pakistan, does that make Kashmir part of Pakistan? The US has a defense agreement with Taiwan, does that make Taiwan independent since their major defense partner has superior nuclear weapons to China?Taiwan is Taiwan. Full stop. Until China can set laws that the people of Taiwan must follow, Taiwan is not a part of mainland China.
Notmyusualid - Saturday, February 25, 2017 - link
I know people in Taiwan that would disagree with you.They get much harassment entering China with Taiwan listed as their country of origin.
But they do it anyway...
drothgery - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
You do know that process names have been pure marketing rather than measuring feature sizes for a while now, and Intel's "14nm" is roughly comparable to anyone else's "10nm", right?Morawka - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link
I haven't seen anyone beat intel's Density and Metal interconnect.. even GloFound 7nm has a 20nm metal interconnect.Meteor2 - Sunday, February 26, 2017 - link
Morawka, I don't believe that's the case; GloFo have said that they are skipping 10 nm to concentrate on making 7 nm a full node, which should be comparable to Intel's effort. It's TSMC who are planning to use much larger back end of line, pushing up their effective transistor density.BrokenCrayons - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
It's certainly okay to disagree with someone, but is f-bombing really necessary to get your point across? I don't think it makes your thoughts seem more valuable to get so ...um... "NASCAR" about things.damianrobertjones - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
What a horrible person you must be to post such a horrible thing.P.s. Of course Intel has been holding back. They're in it to make money to speed us along into the next great thing.
shaolin95 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Dont mind that III-V moron..... I am happy to see AMD finally step back into the game. Intel will need to bring better prices and finally show the real advanced they have been holding back since there was no competition. The CPU market has been VERY boring but now there is finally excitement in the air.Let the games begin!!!!!
ddriver - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
They have been holding back so obviously that only an "uneducated fuckwit" would fail to notice it.Intel999 - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
They better have been holding back. They just got their arse kicked by a company that is still, essentially a node behind.Their rollout of 14nm has been their most problematic rollout ever.
It is obvious that Intel's massive R&D spend has been heavily tilted towards trying to stay ahead in the node race instead of investing in any material architecture improvements.
Until they spin off the fabs and start putting real effort and money into architecture they are going to remain in a world of hurt. At this point, the evidence suggests that the only way they can beat Ryzen is with higher frequencies (7700K). Then again we haven't officially been introduced to AMD's 4 core CPUs. If they have one in the wings that runs at 4.0 ghz their superior IPC makes the 7700K an also ran.
More food for thought is the fact that in the back half of the year AMD will have seasoned yields on 14nm that will allow for modest bumps in frequencies from where they are now.
Intel's is going to lose margin and sales this year and they did not guide for that in their recent 2017 financial guidance. When the blind loyalist see this there will be a freefall in Intel's share price.
They are called "puts". All of us should be buying them.
Sometime after the Q2 earnings release is when all of this "should" become apparent to the Intel investor base.
eddiechi - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link
Holding back?Here is one "uneducated fuckwit" that failed to notice it, but noticed a number of other things that lay contrary to that edict....
Intel's brand cache has been eroding for years now, the erosion was accelerated when CEO Krzanich took reign and has forever proclaimed success on Moore's Law..... Things have deteriorated severely at Intel.......
Intel's brand cache has been eroding for years now, the erosion was accelerated when CEO Krzanich took reign and has forever proclaimed success on Moore's Law.....
Things have deteriorated severely at Intel. Internal sources at Intel have stated the climate has been awful and not just due to recent layoffs of 12,000 or 11% of workforce. In light of many recent news headlines and not just Ryzen, Intel is probably in the most delicate situation it has ever had to face.
CEO Brian Krzanich has lead Intel into a slow death spiral and it hurts me to admonish my croation brotheren. Back in 2006 Intel had about a 50% market share with AMD and has watched it increase dramatically every year since to now about 80/20 but years of bad decisions and throwing good money after bad have caught up to the CEO with his pants down. Throwing $8 Billion at Mcafee and $17 Billion at Altera and wasted Billions trying to crack the mobile market with the “contra-revenue” Bay Trail processor where Intel basically tried to bribe tablet makers into using Bay Trail Processors at substantial loss for Intel.
All these casualties has had the CEO reducing costs at the greater cost of unexpected consequences. The delay on 10nm has just increased, worse yet Canon Lake is not expected to feature any significant architectural improvements…. The CEO mistakenly doubled down on the hope that AMD not competing with them - so those that think “Intel has been holding back” are severely mistaken, there is the rumbling of a major earthquake going on right now under Intel’s feet……. Management has been coalescing to get momentum to push CEO out and bring in Murthy Renduchintala. Krzanich has lead a disaster and has basically and systematically undressed Intel, R&D is screwed and has left a void until well into 2019, CEO had completely underestimated the possibility of an AMD comeback while trying to continue with his Moore’s Law mantra which has been basically tossed out window with end of tick/tock procedures followed for almost a decade.
CEO has sat by idly after their 2016 Q4 earnings call from CFO stated product issues have limited profitability mainly due to fault with Atom c2000 family that bricks devices and had to set aside a pot of cash to deal with problems and recently announced Atom C2000 chip line contains a clock flaw and the recently hired COO Kim Stevenson resigned after just taking helm of division that leads PC business in August.
Intel has been in no position to “hold back” recently with all the internal problems and now AMD has just put them way behind the 8-ball. Should expect a plethora of changes at Intel shortly after Ryzen is released, writing has been on wall way before recent revelations of potential AMD comeback….. adding to issues of AMD resurgence is that Intel is also in the crosshairs of sleeping giant Qualcomm.
Kaby Lake brought in “new” PAO process, Process - Architecture – Optimization….. there is no underlying change to the microarchitecture, Intel is not promoting any performance difference with the previous generation, they are however promoting better efficiency and creating a bit more headroom for OC’ing. Moore’s Law has driven Intel computing for a decade and has now forced Intel to dump tick/tock at most inopportune time with CEO not seeing AMD coming and with no immediate recourse at hand and most likely not until into 2019 will Intel be able to do anything but marketing tactics disguised by slashing prices.
Intel has enjoyed their monopoly for years and seems to have rested on it’s laurels and market superiority for too long but they have not been holding back. Anandtech just released article last week about 8th gen continuing on 14nm and 10nm pushed back to late 2017 or 2018….. Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake, Cannonlake, Ice Lake or Tigerlake will not help Intel if the AMD hype comes to fruition next week.
Rukur - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
What I will remember is Intel have been taking us from behind and they can crawl back but there on my shit list like sony.SantaAna12 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Right on the $.lucinius - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
true that! 55% of their cpu die is now the integrated graphics processor? yeh tired of subsidising their counter move against ARM ....name99 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Is Intel holding back? The problem for the Intel faithful is that Intel has released a stream of uninspiring updates and their handling of the 10nm transition has been a clusterfck from beginning to end. So how to explain that? Unpalatable answers are- Intel is incompetent (sub-variants
+ incompetent at process bringup
+ incompetent at CPU design now that it has become so advanced
+ incompetent at project planning)
- the x86 architecture puts terrible constraints on how aggressively it can be optimized and Intel has pretty much hit those constraints
So what's left to explain the delay in releasing 10nm, the weird (and constantly shifting) Coffee Lake/Ice Lake/server parts first on 10nm story? The palatable answer is that it's all part of a cunning profit-maximizing plot: Intel doesn't need to introduce 10nm yet because they have no competition, so they've been sitting on it, and dribbling out these lame upgrades, until the moment they really are forced to offer something better.
Make of that theory what you will. But if you dismiss it, you then have to give your explanation for the Coffee Lake/Ice Lake/10nm shuffle.
Meteor2 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Certainly something is up with Intel, as they have no published or even rumoured plan to compete in the desktop space with AMD. But maybe sales are so small in that area now, they don't care. It's not as if AMD is rolling out 5W x86 processors.lucinius - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
i pretty much agree with what you said, i just wanted to add that the migration to 10nm is a problem for anyone, having done a little physics and some google reminder searches we see that optical light is in the range of approx 300-700nm, and i believe the smallest feature should be half the wavelength of the light etching the surface/? so you can get down to 150nm with standard light, to get shorter u have to go UV direction into 'EUV' ...otherwise they can do a trick i believe by keep re-exposing the same circuit tracks with overlayed frames shifted a few nanometers to keep slicing down the accuracy to the 10nm range....but every extra 'frame' stencil w/e costs loadssss**** and so they really want shorter wavelength light, but to produce that kinda light ...at a good intensity so you don't have to shine it for days just to etch the pattern you want...i believe is a problem all the equipment manufacturers are facing .... and i think this is one of the reasons others have caught up.... plus 'ya know' greed, lethargy all the other sins along with mis-management are to play :) the fact they are at the top of the industry and had to lay off 15k staff points to some serious issues!just some old guy - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Do you have proof that Intel hasn't held back or is this just your opinion? Its like an as_hol_... everyone has one.FourEyedGeek - Sunday, February 26, 2017 - link
You are a sad little twatKrysto - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
If Intel dropped prices by 40% across its products lines, there would be chaos at Intel. I'd be surprised if they even drop them 20% when Ryzen is out, and even then they'll only do it where AMD is actually competing with them. They won't do it for servers for a while, for instance.But even with a 20% price drop, Intel will not be competitive. Intel will have to overhaul its own architecture and make it leaner as well, before it can even compete within a 20% margin difference with AMD. And that won't happen for at least another 3 years.
This is AMD's game to lose now. They have all the advantages, even if they raise their prices after a year or two by 20%. AMD chips should be a no-brainer for everyone. If they don't buy AMD, they probably don't know what they're doing, and they're just going with the "trusted brand, Intel", but not for any technical reasons.
niva - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
You're making an awful lot of assumptions about Ryzen, before you've actually even seen the benchmarks, the energy consumption, etc. This is just PR at this point. While it looks good, and even if it's true, long term stability for workstations running these CPUs has yet to be researched and it will be a few weeks/months to get a more complete picture. Anyone buying machines in the meantime will enjoy discounts on the Intel chips. It's only after sales drop for Intel taht they'll really be pressured into dropping prices.Don't get me wrong, I'm a big AMD fan, matter of fact my livingroom PC still runs an original Phenom, yeah the one with the bug in it... that we only found out after we bought it. I hope the best for AMD, we need the competition badly, but I'll reserve judgment on how good these CPUs really are for the time being.
Vigrith - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
I have to agree.AMD has hyped Vega up really hard, and the numbers that they have released seemed to live up to it, but a lot is still unclear, and will be for the next few months at least.
As much as I would like to exclaim that,'The hammer has fallen. Intel's fate has been decided.', I cannot. Because as of yet, it hasn't. All we know is that Ryzen is way better than Bulldozer, and that it is going to be, at the very least, competitive with the Kabylake chips, and that Intel is going to be under fire pretty soon for their high prices.
But does AMD really has Intel beat? While I definitely hope so, only time will tell. Fingers crossed for March 2nd.
#TeamRed
Lolimaster - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Intel was always dependent on getting node shrinks fast with the power of money with no so much optimization. FFW to today and no matter the money Intel can't access 10nm on time. Their designs are heavily based on Core Arch, there's no much to squeeze.Lolimaster - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Core is basically a revamped Pentium III.Michael Bay - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Intel past SB is _all_ about optimization. Since opponent is a perpetual noshow, literally all they have shown for years were various design gains in power consumption.Now, I understand times are hard and AMD is not paying much for such low-grade shilling, but even you must have some modicum of self-respect, right?
dcbronco - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
I think the best way to judge what Ryzen's potential is outside of retail CPU benchmarks right now is to watch Intel's reaction. Intel has dropped almost every CPU but Core, following AMD with Zen. Intel has announced an additional product refinement at 14nm after early Ryzen leaks. They are going tick, toc, toc, toc. That may be because of issues with 10nm, but Intel seems to react to every AMD move. We never saw that with the Cat cores. Intel is afraid. And even if they have a better process, with AMD potentially skipping 10nm and potentially getting 7nm out two years before Intel, AMD will have an advantage for those two years. If it takes Intel two to three years to catch up on value, we could see Intel in a hole for four or five years. If they have been getting by with incentives and payoffs to keep AMD suppressed, those obligations may start to bleed them with price cuts they will have to make. I believe Intel is afraid because they know they are in trouble. IBM used to be Chipzilla. Companies get complacent and it eventually gets their lunch eaten.andrewaggb - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
exactly. they look really good right now. but we need real benchmarks and there is so much that could go wrong (like nasty processor errata) that I don't think business critical servers should use them right away. If they are stable and reliable they'll shake up the virtual machines/ec2/azure market for sure but they'll need to prove themselves a bit. They aren't doing anything intel isn't or can't and they aren't giving new performance that intel isn't or can't. That gives intel some time.Haawser - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
You mean apart from ~the same performance for half the price ? Seems you forgot that bit. Intel can't do that because the E-series are actually the highest clocking Xeons they have. Much faster than their equivalent 8/10 core server parts. Which means they probably only get a handful from each wafer that can clock that high. They can't just turn on some magic tap to make more of them. That's probably one of the reasons they're so expensive in the first place.Jsizzle83 - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Right now, I think it is too early to really say "~the same performance for half the price" because AMD is not actually comparing apples to apples when they make that comparison.The best value in terms of price/performance is in the lower$$ value segment (Celeron/Pentium/Corei3)... After that value drops at a fairly linear rate as price increases to corei5 .... corei7... AMD is comparing a mid-$300 CPU to an enthusiast $1000 CPU when they "CLAIM" roughly the same performance for half-the-price. To me, this is just bad logic (and good marketing). What AMD is really going to compete against is the Corei7-7700K. Their "X" series CPUs automatically overclock, so to get a real apples-to-apples comparison, one would have to determine the maximum achieved frequency of the AMD overclock, attempt to match the same overclock (manually) on the Intel 7700K, and then compare benchmarks and real-world performance (games) in a series of different tests to get an idea of performance.
Right now, I am very skeptical (but hopeful) that AMD will offer equal or better value than Intel at a number of price points. But don't take this the wrong way, but let's wait for the "REAL" tests and benchmarks and not get taken by this "faulty logic" in the marketing war. Right now, that's all this is: marketing.
Cooe - Sunday, February 28, 2021 - link
This entire post assumes all anyone EVER does with their PC is play video games... An 8-core workstation class monster was NEVER intended as a direct i7-7700K competitor, and ALWAYS had the also 8c/16t Broadwell-E as its target. Only an idiot buys an 8-core CPU JUST TO GAME. And the "X" CPU's never automatically overclocked...Manch - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Intel doesn't need to drop its prices that fast. They can more than afford to take a wait and see approach. Also remember Intel has a lot of brand cache. Some people just wont buy AMD. For them, Intel is a trusted brand and has earned their loyalty. Just like Apple which has a lot of sheep err.. brand loyalty and some people will not shy away no mater how good the competition is. I have no such loyalty when it comes to tech, and Im willing to take a chance on AMD's new processor and pre-order before all the benchies are released. From leaked benchmarks, the price/performance beats Intel hands down. In pure competition, the ZEN appears to stand on its own. Of course not too long from now we will have confirmation that will tell the whole story. Then of course consumer uptake will indicate to Intel what their next move should be. Also remember, Intel has known that ZEN was incoming for a long while. Well before we were privy to it. They're in the business to make money and stay on top. I don't doubt for one min theyre holding back. How much though, and how much TTM is the question. Either way, great for us consumers.Lolimaster - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
We are on another time, all the pc master race, gaming, esports will switch to AMD, sheep will follow.stockolicious - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
"Also remember Intel has a lot of brand cache"no they dont - its a "myth" - intel has always, for the most part, had better products. Intel makes semiconductor chips which are a "Commodity" AMD didnt get all of the console business because of their brand - its because Sony and MSFT put them in there. AMD needed a reason for a builder to use them - well now they have and we will see that chips are just a commodity. :)
dcbronco - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
I think servers will start switching the second these chips show stability. The difference in power consumption and price makes it a no brainer. The 30+% power savings per month alone makes it a win. AMD can simply make insurance contracts on the chips and any short of catastrophic failures beats what Intel can offer.Fallen Kell - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
I'm sorry but I dont see companies switching their servers over unless you can use multiple cpus in a single system, which is not a feature that I have seen announced in the press releases. What company is going to purchase 4-8 AMD servers when they can get a dual or quad CPU Intel server with 16 or 20 cores per CPU? The overhead of needing the extra computers negates any price savings of the cpu.fanofanand - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
With contracts switching to "per core" beefier cores may be the route companies end up going. The actual processor price is a minimal cost, it's the energy consumption and software licensing that's the killer.Cooe - Sunday, February 28, 2021 - link
Uhhh... Dual socket Zen CPU's were annouced months before this event.iwod - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Edging closer to 70% of the PC market are mobile. Where AMD wont be competing in it for another year, and Intel going mobile first meaning 10nm Intel Mobile CPU wont have any competition in performance /watt until AMD moves to 7nm, late 2018 or likely 2019.Within the Desktop PC segment, most aren't even in the Ryzen 7 prices range, they are Pentium price range, which AMD's APU compete against, and not coming anytime soon.
So could Intel afford to cut 40% of their desktop line, of course they can. And heck I am sure Intel's brand name is worth some money so even a 20% price drop in the perfect scenario of AMD's launch will still be enough.
Meteor2 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
^^This. I'm super-pleased AMD are sticking it to Intel in the desktop space... But my next computer purchase is going to be a x86 2-in-1. And that means Core M, quite possibly a Cannon Lake 10 nm part. I'm not aware of a roadmap from AMD for 5W parts. Only desktop CPUs, and I vaguely recall something around APUs. That's great n all... But so few desktops are sold these days.Haawser - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Zen APUs with Vega graphics are in second half of this year. Confirmed (again) by Lisa Su yesterday.Murloc - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
let's see the 5 parts first, those are the ones that matter, the performance level of these parts is way above what the average computer or even gaming computer features.I'm sure the intel margin is thinner on those and the picture won't be as stark.
kadajawi - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Well... it's not that clear cut. Most Intel CPUs have integrated graphics, and while it's nothing to write home about, it isn't terrible either, and will be more than enough for most users. Yes, you could buy a Ryzen 3 instead of an i3, and it will be cheaper (the CPU that is, the motherboards I've seen so far don't seem to be significantly cheaper?), but you'll have to buy a graphics card too. Even a crappy entry level card will eat into the price advantage.For gamers it's a no-brainer, of course. But if you're a programmer that needs a beefy CPU but couldn't care less about the graphics card? Even in media creation the graphics card is of limited importance (it's getting more and more important, but so far...).
Nagorak - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
The thing is the R3 has 4 cores, whereas i3 only has 2 plus HT, so the R3 is a lot better. Even if you have to pay for a graphics card, you can buy a cheap graphics card for $20 if graphics performance is unimportant. Obviously AMD will want to get the APUs out to address those who just want a cheap all-in-one processor, but right now a lot of us don't even use the onboard graphics, ever...Aries1470 - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
"but right now a lot of us don't even use the onboard graphics, ever..."You mean home users, right?
Call centres and office workers, the majority use integrated graphics, as they do not need graphics, most are web based programs. Given the power usage scenario is the biggest issue, the issue will be with suppliers, of which Intel still holds the majority by their b*lls! That is where AMD's sales will primarily cone from, but, Intel will go back to their old self and no-obe will dare speak out, for a long time, unless the IT department specifically requests AMD and can't easily get hold of them from their traditional suppliers. So AMD's apu's will have a hard time getting a leg through the door.
I have even worked at places that had intel Atom's!! You only neefed to boot up, log in, get your few windows up and bam, ready for work! Nothing else allowed and worked actually ok.
thomasg - Saturday, February 25, 2017 - link
As a programmer and someone who compiles a lot of software, it's pretty clear to me, that the opposite is the case.Yeah, the Intel GPUs certainly are sufficient, but buying the fastest Intel Quadcore with a integrated GPU will give you a _much_ slower CPU than buying a Ryzen (assuming the promises hold up), and sticking in a < USD 50 dGPU with it's own ram means you don't have penalties from the iGPU while still spending a _lot_ less on the whole system. Fair enough, power consumption will be slightly higher, but who cares when the CPU is doing a lot of compiling at full power?
Even more, if you're going up a tier to the 8-core CPUs, which a lot of programmes really love to have, Intel doesn't have the iGPU anymore, and you'll spend about twice the money for twice the same performance.
So yeah, a dGPU will cut in the savings a bit for budget programer systems, but the difference appears to be so large, that you'll still save a lot of money.
So clearly, if you're a programmer wanting a beefy CPU, there is no reason whatsoever to consider Intel if everything holds up as promised. The iGPU certainly isn't one.
stockolicious - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
I think you hit the nail on the head.lilmoe - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Same to a little faster performance for half the price? For me, Intel is dead bro. They took too much of my money already, not anymore.Lolimaster - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Half the price on their worse price/performance chip, most of the times is 2.5-3x as cheap.lilmoe - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
And at those, AMD has even cheaper AND faster processors... AMD still hasn't introduced their integrated GPU SKUs. I can vouch for their GPUs over Intel's in both performance and drivers. It's only a matter of time before Intel silicon makes little to no sense.This isn't only about the desktop. Intel has lost BIG in mobile. With Windows on ARM getting ready for debute, I'm not sure where Intel is going to stand.
If I had Intel stock I'd sell.
The_Assimilator - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Only someone who incorrectly believes Intel is a CPU-only company would sell their stock.medi03 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
If we are lucky AMD will get so much needed market share income and will be able to bring competition to both GPU and CPU markets.Krysto - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
It was smart of them to go with the PC lineup first, to show that they can beat "Intel's best".But with Intel starting to focus on servers first, AMD could make a killing by focusing on laptops first. Next year's generation should really come out on the notebook first and wipe out Intel from the notebook market. But they need to do it soon, before Intel moves to 10nm, because then it will get a bit harder, even if AMD will continue to have the performance/price advantage. And AMD won't switch to 7nm (I think directly from 14nm) until late 2019 probably. But it will be a good time to switch before Intel gets a chance to do it.
Meteor2 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
I still get my head around the Intel announcement last week or whenever it was. Are the first Intel 10 nm parts going to be server CPUs or mobile CPUs? The latter would presumably be Cannon Lake but it seems most unclear what the former might be; some sort of next-gen Xeon D?Meteor2 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
I still *can't* get...mapesdhs - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Welcome to 21st century editable forums. Oh wait... :\mtroute - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link
Data Center First. Give your highest margin customers the latest technology first, then move the node down market.AntDX316 - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
If we're lucky? If datacenters can save money and get more performance per watt they would go AMD.mtroute - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link
no they won't. Naples is short on several important technologies. No integrated fabric, imbalanced architecture, memory cant take advantage of all the PCIe lanes and they will not have support for AVX512...thomasg - Saturday, February 25, 2017 - link
We'll have to see what AMD brings.While we now have a idea what Ryzen will be, we still don't really know much about Naples.
"Imbalanced architecture" is quite a bold claim, let's see what will come and how people will use it.
AVX512 isn't the be-all-end-all and AMD has a lot of things going for them as well.
Maybe both won't play in the same niche and there will be use-cases where users will want the one over the other and vice versa.
Cooe - Sunday, February 28, 2021 - link
So Zen has no "integrated fabric" huh... Then what the hell is "Infinity Fabric" then??? O_o. And Naples most DEFINITELY can use / memory can access all 64x on-die PCIe 3.0 lanes.ericore - Saturday, February 25, 2017 - link
Not as simple as a price war.Take AMD's 6 core @ 225 USD, what Intel going to do when all it has under i5 and i7 is 4 cores.
Laughts in Intel's face, and Intel fanboy's faces
HOOfan 1 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Buh bye like when the Athlon 64 X2 processors were superior to the Pentium 4 D processors?lilmoe - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
I don't want to get ahead of myself (maybe I did a little), but lets just say they're severely threatened in the consumer market, on all ends, desktop and mobile.Wolfpup - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Wow, sounds great so far! Hopefully they'll be competitive. I'm at the point I'd really like to support AMD.bcronce - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Intel's R&D budget is like 3x AMD's total revenue.Manch - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Wow, on the price/core count alone, I'm ordering one. I was hopeful they would undercut Intel. This makes me happy.cknobman - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
This makes me very happy. Not only am I building a new gaming rig with one of these puppies but my AMD stock buy in of 2.78 is currently sitting at 14/share!cygnus1 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
ha! you better sell quick before Intel sneezes and the AMD stock price tanks again :pCrazyTom - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
I bought at 1.90 sold at 5$ bought at 10. sold around 13. Hah I should of just held it all this time lolMeteor2 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
I hate you ;). Might be worth selling some though; it is is buy low *sell* high, after all. There's nothing worse than seeing something tank and then holding on as things get worse and worse while you always hope that maybe it'll recover...jamyryals - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Cannot wait to see the real benchmarks!darkfalz - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Good. I will probably never put an AMD build together but hopefully this wakes Intel from their medicore tick-tick-tock malaise. I am sure they can do better than 5-10% IPC a year but they just haven't had any reason to until now.krazyfrog - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Pretty much this. In the very least it would light a fire under Intel's cozy ass.medi03 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Good job guys, I hope AMD dies soon enough, so that you feel consequences of your decisions on your pockets.xype - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
In 25 years, the Wiki article on the demise of AMD will read "…the demise can be attributed to AnandTech users darkfalz and krazyfrog, because they didn’t buy the 2 CPUs that would have helped keep AMD afloat."0ldman79 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Hahahaaha!BrokenCrayons - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
It's only funny because the lore behind the name darkfalz is amusing. Phantasy Star was a good series.Agangidi53 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Intel can't . End of Moore's law, remember ! AMD's claim of 52% improvement in IPC is even worth looking at because of how low they started . It's GPUs / FPGA and application specific ICs ( ASICs) that have potential to solve the lack of improvement of CPU performance .medi03 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
52% is over Piledriver. 64% over buldozer.silverblue - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
No; 52% over Excavator, which is at least 10% above Steamroller and that was about 5% above Piledriver.flgt - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
This. Intel's bet on Altera will be interesting. There will be diminishing returns on general CPU architecture improvements. But if you lay down your specific application in hardware on an FPGA you might see 100, 200, 300% performance improvement. Creating the hardware development environment and deployment will be the key problems to solve.Notmyusualid - Saturday, February 25, 2017 - link
Yes, I have a very interesting read in my IEEE on just this.BIG performance increases are more likely than ever.
dr.heyden - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
You apparently don't know much about how they started so to say. AMD has some of the best engineers in the microprocessor field, they were very smart purchasing the IP of DEC and hiring most of the engineers that designed the DEC Alpha cpu. Back when this happened intel had the Pentium 60 and DEC Alpha processors were hitting close to 1ghz. This was a long time ago but some of those very smart people are still there and many more smart people have been added. AMD didn't start out with the ATI graphics line either they bought the company and actually made it work. ATI used to be worse than S3 video cards. They couldn't produce a driver that was stable. Matrox and 3dfx was the way to go until NVidia came along and changed things. That spelled the end of days for ATI and then AMD bought them and actually made something good out of the rubble. AMD is good for the consumer, good for innovation and really good at taking a turd and polishing it, then dumping it and making something better. I am really looking forward to playing with the RYZEN chips. Should be fun.mtroute - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link
AMD's past fortunes were directly tied to the purchase of NexGen in 1995... http://articles.latimes.com/1995-10-21/business/fi...Lolimaster - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Simply they can't. No amount money brings you a node shrink when you want as 5-10 years ago.Meteor2 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Well, AMD are delivering a big IPC gain... once. No guarantee that they'll deliver anything more than ~5% next year. But it certainly looks like they have Intel beat, with a simpler design, on this generation. I reckon that neural net branch predictor might be the key; it seems the only feature distinctly different from anything Intel has.Cooe - Thursday, May 6, 2021 - link
I'm from the future. AMD has been able to improve Zen's IPC by nearly another +40% beyond the original Zen architecture. Intel otoh? Just +10-15% IPC on desktop vs Skylake (&+19% on mobile/server). Or basically only 1/3rd as much as AMD on desktop & 1/2 as much on mobile/server.mdw9604 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Very excited to finally have some real competition again in the cpu market. I hope all the leaked benchmarks are accurate.I also hope that Intel does not dump its chips on the market or pull some shady $hit, which it has done in the past to unfairly compete with AMD. If so I hope the DOJ watches closely. We need healthy competition in the microprocessor space.
Aries1470 - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Shh... that's one of the reasons Intel went to the Whitehouse not that long ago and announced about their FAB in the USA ;-)lopri - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Congrats to AMD. Well done.Andrei Frumusanu - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Had to laugh at your watermarks :Dcreed3020 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Yeah they are somewhat sly!ddriver - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
That's rather lame. Kinda childish to put your name on publicly released promotional materials without being involved in the product or its promotion in any way. Take example from other sites such as TH which didn't do it.Murloc - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
if AMD didn't release this material to everybody on their website, it can make sense to do this to prevent superfast rip-offs, this creates a delay so that it's clear that this article was first.grrrgrrr - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Congrats AMD, wish you fare well in the competition without Jim KellerMichael Bay - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
What`s concerning is where he went next.fanofanand - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
What's concerning about Jim working on the autopilot stuff? Seems like he will revolutionize self driving like he did x86Duckeenie - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
I think all these congrats are a little premature. Of course we all want to see competition but what we're looking at is still marketing dribble at this time.sor - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
There have been several independent benchmarks leaked in the past week already that paint the picture even better than this. I think we will find the numbers here a bit reserved.Manch - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
At the price point they're offering it only needs to be within spitting distance. Their price/performance ratio will be great comparably. Unless there is some ugly baby in the benchmarks we haven't seen. This should be great for us consumers.Gothmoth - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
actually we are looking at benchmarsk kiddo.and in my case exactly the benchmarks i am interested in... as a content creator.
Michael Bay - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
It`s the first time I`ve seen bottom feeder shill call itself a "content creator". I concede defeat in this round.fanofanand - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Are you suggesting that having 16 high speed threads would be bad for content creation?sor - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Maybe I'm blind, but I'm missing the link to preorder info.medi03 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Starts today 7PM.Goes on sale on 2nd of March.
medi03 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
What about chip size?Meteor2 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
There's some die shots around; wccftech or Fudzilla I think. Apparently smaller than Intel but on a less-dense process.NJCompguy - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
This is fantastic. Thank you AMD for getting back in the game and putting Intel on check. Bring on the price wars.Gunbuster - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
So is the only difference between the 1800X and 1700X is the stock clock speed? Presumably binning? I cant see shelling out an extra $100 if the only difference is just a trip to the BIOS away.medi03 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Guaranteed 4.0 vs 3.8 Ghz?Manch - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Later in the life of these procs, Id agree with you. Right now, like you said binning. Can't imagine there would be a lot of headroom in those chips for OC. Wait and see though!Lolimaster - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
It's called different speed SKU's, something that intel forgot to apply those as a "new gen".6700K
6720-6730-6750K (pick your number) = 7700K
Murloc - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
it's not just a trip to the bios away if they're binned and you can't OC the 1700X as hard.BrokenCrayons - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
The news so far is pretty exicting, but I'm more interested in quad core mobile parts that maybe include a decent Radeon IGP. I'm thinking at 95W TDP, dumping four cores, harvesting the best chips, and clocking down a little to around 2.8GHz should give AMD enough TDP headroom to add in some nice graphics and hang out in the 35W TDP space so laptops can get a little bit more performance. Maybe Intel will be compelled to ship more Iris parts and we'll actually get better graphics performance without the huge, hot running discrete GPUs that end up making for overpriced, gigantic laptops.A5 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
I would be surprised (to say the least) if AMD was able to put out a 35W Ryzen APU any time soon.BrokenCrayons - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
I'm not holding my breath either, but I am dreaming little Crayon dreams about such things.Manch - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Normally I wouldn't either but Kevin Sorbo err.....Jim Keller designed this thing. The man is brilliant. I think we will see it before years end.Meteor2 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
He did leave AMD a while ago, you know. He oversaw at least the basic approach but it's not clear what more than that.Manch - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Yeah in Sep 2015. Not that long ago. The majority of ZEN was done by then.Manch - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
ZEN was taped out near the end of 2015 I believemedi03 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Having in mind 8 core 1700 has TDP rating of 65W...A5 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Sure, but even Intel doesn't sell a mobile Quad, period, under 45W.And that's with the non-Iris graphics. You can get an 2/4 + Iris Plus at 15W, though.
If AMD is able to get a 4/8 chip out with a better GPU for 45W, that would be huge for them. Even better if they could hit a lower number. But I'm not holding my breath.
rev3rsor - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Intel has mobile quads with configurable TDP down to 35W, if that counts. They also make a desktop quad at 35W (the 6700T iirc, and similar).That said, AMD could make a killing from laptops in the near future. Maybe the biggest barrier would be consumers being unaware, but with the right marketing maybe they'll claw over some market share.
fanofanand - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
I have had dozens of conversations with people in my office (anecdotal I know) and none of them are even aware of AMD. That said, none of them have any clue what a CPU does or why Intel is good. If the devices are put together properly they will sell like hot cakes.cocochanel - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
AMD has some Ryzen based APU's rolling out in the second half of 2017. Or so they say. No word yet on mobile versions. But you're right. Intel needs a good kick in the pants.Achaios - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
i7-6900K PASSMARK SINGLE THREADED= 2,176 MARKS (STOCK)i7-4770K PASSMARK SINGLE THREADED= 2,255 MARKS (STOCK)
Cool it down, homies. Ryzen ain't that good after all, and not sure what you are going to do with 8 cores as a gamer.
BrokenCrayons - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Don't force such a narrow perspective. Not everyone here thinks of their computer as primarily a means to play video games.1_rick - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
" Not everyone here thinks of their computer as primarily a means to play video games."Exactly. This is going to <i>rock</i> for certain kinds of develepment environments, especially if you don't need absolutely-the-fastest single-core speeds.
SQL Server will bring an i5 to its knees[1]. OTOH, with the 6 and 8-core CPUs, you can just stick it in a VM.
[1] Nothing like watching a 4460 where the disk average response time goes into the tens of seconds when you do ANYTHING (including stuff like "open Notepad".)
redmok - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
DX 11 doesn't benefit as much. However, DX12 and Vulkan can and will benefit from multiple cores. "Vulkan is also able to better distribute work amongst multiple CPU cores." from Wikipediacocochanel - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Not now. In 2-3 years, it's a different story. DX12 and Vulkan will become mainstream API's. DX12 is Windows 10 only and Microsoft is pushing that OS very hard. The upcoming XBox Scorpio will have full 8 cores. And probably will be DX12 only as well. What do you think game developers will do ?medi03 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Battlefieldd 1, Overwatch and a bunch of other (modern) games are already capable of using more cores.And I'd happily go with double the cores for a couple of frames less, thank you very much.
Gothmoth - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
get a job kid.. your mommy is probably paying for your gaming system. this is something people with a job are interested in....warreo - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
99% of people's jobs do not benefit much from Ryzen, and the vast majority of people buying it will in fact be gamers. Move out of your mommy's basement and get a real job, because your comment just announces your own stupidity.And spare me your fake "I'm a graphics artist/software developer/whatever other job that requires huge multitasking" comeback. Your company ain't paying for this, its buying an Intel machine. If you work for yourself and can afford a $500 CPU, guess what? You're part of the 1%.
BrokenCrayons - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Spending $500 on a microprocessor for a SOHO computer does not put you in the 1%. That's not, by any stretch of the imagination, a large enough sum of money to use as a measurement of someone's socio-economic ranking. When you get into the top 1% even homes (the average working person's largest asset) are relatively meaningless when net worth is taken into account and I'm not talking about your run-of-the-mill $300k starter home that most middle class types go eyeballs deep into debt for 30 years to occupy.fanofanand - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
As usual you are spot on. The 1% doesn't even know how much money they have, they have employees that worry about that sort of thing. The 1% have more money than they could ever spend, they drop $500 on a plate of sushi!warreo - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
My apologies, I was unclear, I wasn't actually referring to the "1%" rallying cry of Occupy Wall Street days. I meant the 1% of people who really need 8 cores for their jobs enough to justify dropping $500 on a CPU (on their own or their company's dime).My main point was to respond to Gothmoth's pointless comment -- Ryzen is in fact not for people with jobs. Ryzen is targeted at gamers, as AMD's own marketing will attest.
fanofanand - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
I get what you mean, I'm not a hater of the successful like some, I just think most people can't even imagine what being that wealthy is like.Back to the actual topic, AMD has marketed to gamers because their products weren't really competitive in anything else, and value was all they could offer. Most games aren't bottlenecked by the CPU so they made sense there. Hopefully now they can take a slightly more mature posture, and try to win over professionals and businesses. A thriving AMD is good for everyone including Intel. They needed a kick in the pants pretty bad.
BrokenCrayons - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link
Ah, I understand what you mean now! Sorry about my previous post, I tend to get a bit defensive when it comes to wealth. It seems like society in general tends to get pretty aggressive with people that aren't struggling so that makes it easy to assume anytime someone mentions the 1% that they're on the attack.Cooe - Sunday, February 28, 2021 - link
I REALLY hope you are one of those idiots that actually put their money where their retarded mouth was & bought a 4-core/4-thread i7-7600K in 2017 instead of a 6-core/12-thread Ryzen 5 1600 for their gaming rig. If so, how are those like 1/2 as high framerates & even WORSE frametimes vs the 6c/12t R5 1600 in modern games treating ya??? :Pprime2515103 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
You know what would be really funny? If these average a 5Ghz OC on air (the 4c/8t model). How long has Intel been all but promising that?This pricing structure is rather interesting. I remember AMD saying the prices on the Athlon 64 (if I'm remembering this right) would reflect their performance, and it did - the prices were uncharacteristically high for AMD, and with good reason.
I'm thinking that if all this PR hype ends up being BS, no one will ever trust AMD again and that will be the end of their desktop CPU days, if not the end of the company entirely. But what do I know...
Gothmoth - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
..not much.negusp - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
hypocrite much?shabby - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Seems a bit strange to do a preorder only based on non-gaming benchmarks.euler007 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
I play cinebench all day, it's great!On a serious note, pit this against my six year old 2500k@4Ghz. Need to see if the FPS gain would be worth the upgrade. As far as work goes, I'm often bottlenecked to single core performance by the software I use, not sure if I would take the risk to change my specs to save 50% on one part of the workstation.
ddriver - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
If you play games probably not. If are into content creation, multiphysics simulations and such, you will get over twice the performance.Vatharian - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Soooooo... we're getting early March HEDT Skylake launch?nevcairiel - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
While multi-threaded performance is impressive for that price-point, the single-threaded performance makes me stop and think still. A 6900K is a multi-threading CPU first and foremost, its clocked relatively low and a consumer 7700K quad core beats it in single or lightly-threaded work any day.So while this is impressive for AMD to finally catch up, the desktop market is still far more focused on single and lightly-threaded workloads, high multi-threading isn't that common, certainly not to fill 8 cores. Hopefully they can close the ST gap in future Zen generations as well.
If anything, this will prompt Intel to shift focus back to performance instead of the other goals they have been persuing the last couple generations, and lower prices, so thats always good.
Lolimaster - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
You care about ST? Get the 4c/8t ryzen and OC the hell out of it for less than half of a 7700K that gets so hot it needs to be delid.Ryzen chips will need less cooling, operate at 20-30°C less vs intel chips and consume less.
silverblue - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
That's wonderfully optimistic. Anyway, if EFR does what it's supposed to, you may not need to dabble with overclocking unless you really want to go past acceptable limits (i.e. not on air). :)fanofanand - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Xfr (not efr) will be on x model processors only.silverblue - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link
Very true; at the lower price point, you probably wouldn't go for the non-X edition.Lolimaster - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
ST is Haswell level which is 5% below Skylake.ddriver - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Just get a celeron LOL.Michael Bay - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
...but after LAV 1.0 is released.zeeBomb - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
AMD has definitely "Ryzen" back to relevancy again!My god these prices are amazing! Overclockable, Unlocked and Hyperthreading for significantly less...the only thing to be expected is Intel will fire back with a price war. So happy to be the consumer nowadays!
LarsBars - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
New Ryzen info official leak confirmed by AnandTech! Love the watermark, Ian.The Hardcard - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
So far, the most disappointing rumor was that the reviews would be live Feb. 28.warreo - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
uh, you mean Mar 2?The Hardcard - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
They will be on Mar 2, but there were rumors they would go live Feb 28. That extra wait is thr disappointment.Murloc - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Feb 28 is the last day of Feb so it's not that badfanofanand - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Actually In a previous article the date Feb 28 was mentioned and anandtech rarely publishes rumors. I thought 2/28 was a for sure date :(Ilias78 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Goodbye Intel. Its over for you.Meteor2 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Lol. You don't really think that, do you? These parts are competing against about 10% of Intel's revenue.Gothmoth - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
hell there are a lot of moronic intel fanboys out there..... how can people be so stupid and not see that this is good for all of us... such imbeciles.euler007 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Competition is great, Intel has been racing against itself since Nehalem. I just don't get the "intel is dead" comments. It's like the fanboys think they will fire everyone and fold the company, game over.fanofanand - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
It's just a troll thing, you will also see "Intel rekt" and other such nonsense. It's just trolls trolling other trolls. If you aren't a troll it's best to just ignore it and move onto the next comment.Einy0 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Wow, way too many fanboys commenting! I'm personally thrilled to see AMD competitive again. I'm a bit surprised, I thought AMD would hit that magic $300 price point with one on of these 7 series chips. I think I need to change my magic numbers to $400 because that seems to be the new bang for buck price point. I'll wait for independant reviews before jumping on this ship.fanofanand - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
The product stack (if leaks are to be believed) extend all the way down to $100. What we haven't seen much of is what product differentiation AMD has done aside from cores, threads, and xfr. Intel does a lot to gimp their lower level chips, it will be interesting to see how AMD does it.romrunning - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Does this mean that the Xbox "Scorpio" might have a Ryzen CPU?medi03 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
No, it definitely doesn't.cocochanel - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Probably. A Ryzen based APU with stacked memory. The damn thing is supposed to offer the same performance as a midrange PC equipped with a GTX 1080. You're not gonna get that with a Bulldozer type CPU.fanofanand - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
It might, it might not. A lot will depend on how well AMD handles demand. The console parts are lower margin so I'm sure AMD would rather not use their top end chips if they don't have to. Of course it's possible, but it isn't likely. The flops you are referring to is almost entirely GPU driven. So the better question is, will Microsoft use Vega in Xbox Scorpio?flgt - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
What do the leaked benchmarks say about the performance vs power?HomeworldFound - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Was just emailed a UK link from a vendor. 28th of February they're due here, pre-orders open. They come with a cooler. The box art is sexy.fanofanand - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Interesting, microcenter has them for pre-order but no mention of a cooler being part of "what's in the box". I was quite disappointed actually. For non-gamers you now have to get a cooler and a dgpu, which shifts the cost advantage a bit. I know top end Intel parts don't come with coolers either but the lack of any igpu will hold back some sales.Chaser - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
No single core benchmarks and using only 2 channel memory? Don't hold your breath.medi03 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
There were single thread benchmarks.Cooe - Sunday, February 28, 2021 - link
Uhhh.... Since when is single-thread Cinebench R15 not a "single core benchmark"??? O_oLeyawiin - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Finally I can go back to AMD for CPUs without feeling like a fool. Only took 12 years.jtd871 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
82+ mobos at launch - I've only heard about a single one being mITX (having one of the "enthusiast" chipsets) - Biostar X370GTN. AMD is being let down by their board partners on this front, and I will predict that whatever Ryzen's merits, the mITX crowd will either sit out the launch or buy Intel due to the lack of options in this form factor.creed3020 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Definitely had the same thought when I did some research this morning and only found the single mITX option.fanofanand - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
I have read about AMD having a large focus on mitx so wait and see what happens before writing off that category. AMD is definitely aware of the space and have said they will be catering to it strongly.MrBungle123 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
"Ryzen 7 at the high end, Ryzen 5 in the middle, and Ryzen 3 for more price-conscious consumers."I really wish AMD would come up with a naming scheme that wasn't a me-too knock off of intel's.
medi03 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Why? So that it is harder for people to comprehend?BrokenCrayons - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Yeah, I noticed that too. The naming convention has an also-ran flavor that I don't personally find appealing. However, if you've ever listed to average people talk about computer processors after they've made a purchase, they usually discuss them in terms of Core i7, i5, i3, etc without regard for or understanding of the underlying technologies or the many iterations of processors that used that naming scheme. They also don't differentiate between dual core i7 laptop parts and quad core i7 desktop parts which are vastly different animals when it comes to performance. AMD might be a copycat with the naming convention, but they're following along after Intel in using a now broad, superficial understanding of relative processor performance.name99 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
It's an interesting psychological question.Suppose they instead did something like calling them
r11
r15
r19
Same idea, not obviously an Intel copy.
Does that give the impression that they are independent of Intel, or does it give the impression that they are well aware that they are copying, and trying to hide it? I honestly don't know.
Remember it's not like intel invented this scheme. They copied it from BMW (kinda sorta, though BMW and Intel are in strong competition for who can come up with the most incomprehensible and needlessly painful naming conventions...)
fanofanand - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
I actually thought the exact same thing when the I series first came out a decade ago (or 8 years whatever it is), in fact I wondered if they would make a m series be their top performer among each category, which they sort of kind of did with core M.BrokenCrayons - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link
I always thought of the i-Series naming convention as an Apple ripoff as it followed in the footsteps of the iPhone and iMac. When that was happening, iSomethings were everywhere in media and it was a little annoying.Michael Bay - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
In this case it`s tradition, right back to K-ratings.MrBungle123 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
They were doing a me-too with the overclock-able APUs... stick a 'K' at the end of the number. I liked the "Black Edition" branding from older parts much better.fanofanand - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Black SKUs matter! Seriously though I liked it a lot better too.Agent Smith - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
UK price comparison for 8-coreIntel I7-6900K = £1,000
AMD R7-1800X = £430
I know which one any sensible person would go for.
zodiacfml - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Not really. I think the price AMD has set is just right. If it does perform similarly or close to Intel, AMD can ask a bit higher and still leave a huge price difference.We have to wait for the reviews for a proper assessment and not just leaks/hypes available right now. I am certain the AMD is a bargain for multi-threaded workloads
fanofanand - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
There is always a premium for slightly better performance, with rare exceptions. This might be a terrible analogy but with the Camaro for instance, the standard v8 already provides a huge amount of power, but you can improve performance by a couple tenths by paying for the even higher end engine, which costs a boatload more. Some people are willing to pay 30-50% more for a 10-15% increase, I don't see why this would be any different.nikon133 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
I can see this in my next rig. Current Haswel i7 is performing well, and Intel parts released after it just haven't motivated me to upgrade, considering cost for gained performance... but this, if marketing is close to truth, this is motivating.Also... in a few years time, I can see Ryzen as very sweet foundation for next-gen consoles APU. Compatibility with Jaguar, vast performance boost on CPU side... throw in good GPU, and it would be quite respectable piece of hardware.
fanofanand - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
The next PlayStation should theoretically be more powerful than today's 8 core rigs with a 1080. That's just the way progress marches on.CaedenV - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Still skeptical... but this is what I was hoping for. Something that can come close to Intel's raw performance, while offering a much lower price. I am sure they will not beat out Intel on anything other than these few cherry-picked benchmarks... but honestly they don't have to.I am still rocking my now 6 year old i7 2600, and the reason I have not upgraded is because the only way 'up' is to get a vastly more expensive 6-8 core i7, and an insanely expensive motherboard to go with it. And while I would like to have that, I know I cannot justify spending that kind of money. If I can buy a mobo, cpu, and RAM for ~$800 or less that can offer similar single-thread performance, while giving the option for far more threads (and threads that don't need to be flagged specifically for HT tech) then it would be a much easier purchase decision.
Michael Bay - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
>amd marketing slidesYeah, no. Hopefully Anand provides actual testing this century!
BrokenCrayons - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Timely CPU reviews haven't been problematic for Anandtech to publish. Ian's always done a good job getting big meaty reviews done. It's those pesky GPU reviews that need a little help (GTX 1050, RX 460, RX 470) and those aren't Ian's domain.fanofanand - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Considering this is the biggest (in terms of market disruption) CPU release in 5+ years, I have no doubt Ian has had many sleepless nights to have this all done. His Twitter feed suggested his introduction to the article was 1600 words long. Those whining about slow article time frames (I am guilty of this as well) should be pleasantly surprised by Ian's analysis which I have no doubt will be second to none.Pilotter - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Just saw youtube Austin Evans:1800x oced to 5.2g on 8 cores!!!
Here take my $499, AMD.
tarqsharq - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Well, keep in mind I think that was LN2.Not superb OC. I myself got the 1800X just because... but I won't expect base OC to get past 4.0ghz + boost.
AlexTi - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
So, IPC-wise, taking posted benchmarks at face value, Ryzen 7 1800k@4GHz is equivalent to [email protected]. Which is possibly enough to heat up CPU competition, but does not take Intel's crown for having best architecture :( I wonder how multi-core advantage is achieved then?Let's see all benchmarks though.
UpSpin - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
We'll have to wait for third party benchmarks.The Core i7 6900K runs at 4 GHz in single threaded applications. (Intel® Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0 Frequency.) So they are direclty comparable in these benchmarks.
KAlmquist - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
The 1800X could be running faster than 4.0 Ghz, since it's an X processor.PixyMisa - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
It looks like AMD has a better SMT implementation than Intel. Ryzen shows better multi-threaded scaling than Broadwell-E on the benchmarks released so far.This should be cleared up when the reviews come out and we have more data to look at.
Dug - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
I'll be skeptical until I see solid motherboards.I'm old enough to remember what a pain drivers were for AMD chips. Chipset, achi, RAID, etc.
prisonerX - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
LOL, I remember Intel CPUs having the same problems, worse than AMD. Maybe you're not old enough or you have selective memory.PixyMisa - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Intel video drivers, 2017.BrokenCrayons - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
The pretty much ever Intel GMA I've gotten my hands on was a PITA. The 950 started out broken and though it improved dramatically over its lifespan, it was still glitchy. The x3100 was better, but not by much and the 4500MHD was vastly improved. I think the 4500 was the first Intel GPU I thought had a satisfactory launch. The first generation HD was a step backwards and there are still problems with it now (I have one that frustrates me to no end under Terragen). However the HD 2/3000 weren't bad and neither was the HD 4000. My office laptop uses a Haswell with its IGP, but the nature of my work doesn't demand much from it. It displays web browser windows and Word documents just fine under Win10.The point though, Intel's drivers have had their own problems.
Dug - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
This was 1999. Problems continued throughout the years as AMD didn't make a chipset and relied on 3rd party.And please show me an installation of Intel chipset drivers that caused so many problems.
I'm not talking video as I've never used on board video.
fanofanand - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
That's 18 years ago, Lisa Su was only 30 years old in 1999. The world has changed quite a bit since then and so has AMDs software support.prisonerX - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
"Only problems since 1999, and only chipsets, and only companies whose names start with A..."God you're an idiot.
Sttm - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
As a 6900k owner I am actually rather happy at this news. Since it means that more and more programs will fully support the 16 threads my CPU has, and the next time I upgrade I likely will get to pay less.Marburg U - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
The only thing we are missing, now, is Anand.rileychris - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Pre-order looks to be up at MicroCenter:http://www.microcenter.com/site/content/AMDRyzen.a...
fanofanand - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
The discounts aren't available yet but I did see they plan on giving a $30 discount for a CPU/Mobo combo purchase and $20 off a CPU GPU combo. I expect the discount to increase after the initial preorders are fulfilled but even today if you buy Polaris, am4 and a Ryzen CPU they will knock $50 off. That's not bad for a day 1 release.sorten - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
One week from release and not a single independent review, and their performance claims are based on a single synthetic benchmark. I'm pulling for AMD to return to the land of the living as much as the next enthusiast, but I remain skeptical. Have these been reviewed and are just under a NDA blackout until next week? I hope so.Makaveli - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
You ever heard of an NDA Sorten?sorten - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
@Makaveli: Did you read my comment? All of it? LOLfanofanand - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
NDA is March 2nd, nobody is holding back because of poor performance. If Ryzen is a dog dont worry, there will be plenty of bashing on the 2nd.lamanuwa - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Core i7 6900k = AU $ 1499vs
RyZen 1700K = AU $ 569 (with similar or better performance)
B166ER - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Holy fuck you nerds are douches. Just reading your comments is like an elementary school bitch out. You support teams with fantasy and untruths, then convolute facts with misstatements and clouding. Tech isn't like football, where fact and statistics leads to nothing as "Any given Sunday..." Tech shouldn't be shrouded in confusion, but it seems easy to confuse and easier to garner support based upon....nothing? Anyone thinking Ryzen is gonna kick Intel out of bed is beyond stupid, because there are NO facts yet. Just a bunch of silly statements saying "Ryzen" this and "Ryzen" that. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for the competition, I'm no fan of anyone, I just want the best bang for my buck.prisonerX - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
And you're the resident school marm, evidently.fanofanand - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Trolls complaining about trolling. It's a brave new world we live in.swatkat - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
For the Cinebench test, it looks like AMD ran the 6900K with Turbo Boost Max turned off. I'm running mine, same set up with it on and with the program in the whitelist and repeatedly get 171-172 for single thread @ 4.0Ghz. I get AMD's number (162-163) with it turned OFF at 3.7 GHz. Might want to check this Ian when you run your numbers.prisonerX - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Why would you run benchmarks so that they depend on the idle temp of your CPU, the case, the room, etc?"Turbo" isn't a "boost," that's marketing doublespeak, it's the CPU running faster than it's specified TDP, until it throttles to stay within the envelope.
Cooe - Sunday, February 28, 2021 - link
Turbo Boost Max is the equivalent to AMD's XFR. It's 100% opportunistic and dependant on power + thermal headroom being available, & thus is never guaranteed. It also has a strict time limit on its continuous use. If they'd enabled TBM on Intel you'd need to enable XFR on AMD for it to be a fair comparison.kosmosrl - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
I'll believe it when I see it.willis936 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
In the immortal words of Fox: I want to believe.I'm itching to see the superscalar order, size of the reorder buffer, and number of reservation stations. 20 MB of L3 and dedicates L2 is already very nice and enough to bump it into this decade but if they want to squash intel properly they need to have the same amount of instruction level parallelism exploitation.
ryan258 - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 - link
Just bought myself one of these dope AMD Fanboy tees. Dicks out for Ryzen! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XMZ4CGCfanofanand - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Lol that's um.. interesting? I can't imagine loving any company enough to pull out my unit for them. Now maybe in the future if that company fan give me a virtual BJ....Bleakwise - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Intel is running server Broadwell-E xeons at 4w per core, which is the same or lower than what Arm can do, when you add IPC per core to the mix, or SMT/HT, Intel and x86 is destroying ARM, literally just destroying ARM not only matching them at power usage (4w per core) but having 2-5x the computing potential, more if you count SSE and AVX units.Bleakwise - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
I mean do we really think dual core ARM chips that get out-performed by chips from 20 years ago such as the Athlon 64 are going to define the future? Gee I wonder how much power an Athlon x2 would use on a modern node? ARM is nothing special.Bleakwise - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
To be clear, > 64 core/128 thread systems and HUGE memory busses are going to be the way forward into the future as we move from the Information Age of information storage to the AI Age of Turing Passing (not the lambda test, but the "can trick your average low/modest IQ human" test) information processing, and wattage per core is going to be the determining metric.Bleakwise - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Along with IPC per core and MT performance of course.Meteor2 - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
I think that useage is going to be delivered more by GPUs and FGPAs more than conventional CPUs.Bleakwise - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Lets not forget AMD is using Samsung for their fab. Ryzen is really an AMD/Samsung joint venture, it's Samsung's process that made it possible.One has to wonder when TSMC will be ready. Cannonlake is coming in Q2 and it will bring with it the first 6 core Desktop i7, complete with a pretty decent GPU borrowing from Radeon technology and 15% IPC gains. 6 core Intels usually retail around 400-500$, lets say the 15% IPC boost lets the 6 core Cannonlake beat the 8 core 6900k and 1700x, and rub on the 1800x with less cores and beterr IPC.
Lets say it retails for 429$ the price of the current 6 core. Remember it's going to have an HSA-like OpenCL 2.0 accelreator, what if there is some killer game /app that uses that for some kind of feature? Who is going to be cutting prices then?
Zrat - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Intel said that Cannonlake would be 15% faster than Kaby Lake, not having 15% more IPC.It's the same statement they used for Kaby Lake compared to Skylake: 15% faster. In reality all the performance gains were coming from frequency bump.
If Cannonlake has not a really enhanced architecture, the only resort for Intel is to push frequencies.
Meteor2 - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
No. The 6C i7 chips will be Coffee Lake parts, coming late this year. They'll be 14 nm parts and will likely have no IPC gain over Skylake, just as Kaby Lake doesn't. Just maybe slightly higher clock speeds for the same power.Cannon Lake is the 10 nm consumer parts. They will likely launch as Core M parts first, but not in 2017, and not before some unknown kind of datacentre chips using 10 nm have been released. There is no release date, rumoured or otherwise.
It's also not totally clear Intel cores do more work with 4/5W of power than anyone else's. Apple's AnX chips might be better, but as they only run iOS and are only in iPads, they can't be meaningfully compared.
cheshirster - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
6 core i7 is not coming to dual channel motherboards.Outlander_04 - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
The Ryzen processors are built by Global Foundaries , not Samsung .If Samsung were building them they would be taping out gen 2 in 10 nm right now
fanofanand - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Glofo and Samsung share tech for their foundry's so though he is wrong he isn't really all that wrong.Outlander_04 - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Yes I understand the process is licensed from Samsung.But He is still not correct .
It's also easy to see that AMD are hedging long term that Samsung may FAB future processors . The changes to the WSA with GloFo strongly suggest that is the case
Cliff34 - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Love to hear that AMD is back in the game but until some real benchmarks are posted I will just sit and wait.Ro_Ja - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Maybe this will stop Intel from releasing new processors with 5% performance gains over it's predecessor.Ranger1065 - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Can't contain myself any longer...DOUBLE FUCK INTEL.
GeoffreyA - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
The days of the Athlon and the Athlon 64 have returned; and AMD has been able to do in a single design cycle what Intel has done in many generations of microarchitecture.serendip - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Now AMD needs to get Ryzen on mobile with very low TDPs. Intel still has the edge with laptops but they've conceded the tablet and phone space to ARM by killing off Atom. A Ryzen Atom-like SoC would be great.GeoffreyA - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Ryzen's TDP is astonishingly lower than Intel's, and this suggests that Ryzen has a much higher performance-per-watt than Intel's CPUs, and a better design. Ryzen will also probably do quite well in laptops and so on. Those will likely be APUs.serendip - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
I want a Ryzen-based APU in a Surface-like tablet with passive cooling, like a beefed up Atom. Oh, and it has to be a lot cheaper than the Surface Pro.fanofanand - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
It has a lower tdp but actually usage is quite similar to Intel. Tdp really isn't an accurate measurement of power consumption.Outlander_04 - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
And if we counted years rather than design cycles?Outlander_04 - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
So far the benches are cherry picked to use all cores in parallel work loads.I expect that they processors may fall behind in gaming, and especially games that do not multithread well , but the difference will not be great.
The extra cores will be a great help to anyone streaming thats for sure.
Two problems so far as I see it . Where are the hexcores? Where are the mATX boards build for overclocking? May they come soon
fanofanand - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Hexacores are part of their r5 lineup and undercut Intel as much as the 7 vs 7s.Outlander_04 - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
I know.But when will I be able to buy one?
mapesdhs - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
HOOfan 1 wrote:> Buh bye like when the Athlon 64 X2 processors were superior to the Pentium 4 D processors?
Years ago I was considering building a new system based on the E8400, but it was expensive and I couldn't find a S775 board that also had proper PCIX. Then AMD did a huge discount the Athlon64 X2, so I bought a 6000+ and a relevant AM2 board to go with it (ASUS M2N32 WS Pro). This was great at the time, but I got burned by the lack of BIOS updates (can't use Ph2, ASUS just wasn't interested, whereas Asrock released a Ph2 update even for its budget AM2 boards).
Sometimes what can seem a good thing because of a pricing issue can end up being a pain in the butt. I hope we don't see this sort of thing happen again. The industry is full of all sorts of niggles like this, especially BIOS issues. I love the ASUS M4E, runs any 2700K at 5GHz no problem, but there's something wrong with the NEC USB3 controller which has never been fixed. Atm I'm trying to get a simple PCI capture card working on a Gigabyte Z68 board; works on an Asrock board, but makes the Gigabyte do an instant power-off. I could list endless examples just from my own experiences, I'm sure anyone else here could do the same.
We as techy consumers get taken in way too much by specs, benchmarks, etc., when in reality all sorts of practical issues can make a right mess of the genuine usefulness of many tech products, from dodgy drivers to hw compatibility problems that shouldn't happen if product makers were complying with official interface specs. And now we have deliberate OS lockout; can I run Win7 on Ryzen? Consumer tech is not tested properly, updates are sketchy, bugs are not dealt with, and even pro items often don't receive the support their pricing should command.
If you want a perfect example of this, ask any tech site to do a comparative review of a new CPU/mbd combo using the mbd fitted with maximum RAM. I had a hell of a time getting an X79 board to work with 64GB when they first came out, the manufacturer just hadn't bothered sorting out the stability issues for such a config, the auto/defaults were just not good enough. Why are they allowed to get away with claiming a board supports some maximum RAM when in reality it simply doesn't work?
There's a lot of talk here about AMD shaking things up, an understandable comments about the potential appeal of Ryzen to professionals. This is true, but don't leap too fast. Before buying an 1800X for any pro task, find a review site that's tested it with max RAM, ie. 64GB.
Ian.
iranterres - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
I don't think AMD will defeat Intel in benchmarks that much, but I'm sure the competition is back and Intel will be pressed once again.fanofanand - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
This is so true, they slap the highest numbers on the box that they can, but it's more similar to someone who has overclocked the bejeesus out of their CPU and are able to get it to post so they think that's their oc. 5 seconds into prime it crashes but they have they cpuz screenshot. I have had boards that couldn't even handle the RAM speed it claimed unless it was less than half of the stated max capacity. I don't want to know what it can do in a 1% edge case I want to know what it can handle day in and day out without artifacting and corrupting.mapesdhs - Tuesday, February 28, 2017 - link
I have a Kingston DDR3/2GHz kit that simply will not run at its rated speed (tried various boards), whereas a GSkill or Mushkin kit works fine.And pro tasks are demanding in a way that no tech site review benchmark can convey (not helped by many pro benchmarks being very contrived). In 2013 I built a 4.8GHz 3930K triple-580 system with 64GB/2133 RAM that passed every benchmark and test I could throw at it (toms sent me their test suite), handled all the 3D tests aswell, both gamer and pro (Viewperf, etc.) But trying something for real in After Effects, doing a render that gobbled 40GB RAM (so hammering the entire system), it didn't crash but there were artefacts in the render output (possibly something an ECC setup would prevent); reducing the clock to 4.7 resolved the issue. Even then, to get it stable with 64GB required a lot of info requests to ASUS, specific settings needed to handle the current loading, etc., and I was using a top-end board supposedly specifically designed to cope with such high-end specs (P9X79 WS). Standard oc profiling assumes far less RAM is present.
If the same sort of problems occur with Ryzen, I just hope the mbd vendors will get their BIOS updates out fast, otherwise there's a risk people will blame AMD rather than the market pressures and/or lazy testing that allows imperfect products to come to market. Nobody would tolerate this sort of thing if it was a car (oops, gone over 70mph, the wheels fall off, sorry!), but somehow with computer tech it's become the norm to expect faults. The loss of productivity globally from this must be staggering, both hw and sw related.
Ian.
fanofanand - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
I thought Feb 28th was the embargo lift day?sharath.naik - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Ok, lets face it, kaby-lake still holds a 15% performance advantage, and the intel can boost much higher. But now for the good bits, the TDP is probably the most interesting info (again taken with a grain of salt give AMD's way of measuring TDP), if this holds true then intel may have a serious competition in the server space. As it will allow AMD to ram in much higher number of cores than what intel currently can(22 core's for >5000$). I am looking forward to that because at that point AMD is simply a better buy given intel keeps changing the socket every generation, adding to the cost of everythingsharath.naik - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Intel is playing the money game they used to before AMD became a treat 10 years ago. That forced them into the Tick Tock model. They are back at it again, since process change costs money, they are stretching the existing node until they are forced to. This is bad for innovation and the tech industry, as most systems are built on it. I wish someone comes up with a high performance ARM core for desktops and servers. And windows moves away from x86, that way you are not tied to Intels management, to move the tech industry forward.gruffi - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Where is that 15% performance advantage of Kaby Lake? Please show us! Kaby Lake has a 12.5% clock advantage, less with active XFR on Ryzen. Maybe it also has an IPC advantage (0-10%?). BUT it also has a 50% core disadvantage. To sum it up, Kaby Lake is no competition because it will significantly lose in multithreaded apps and only slightly win in single threaded apps. You will have to wait for Skylake / Kaby Lake X to see a 15% or similar advantage to Ryzen. But don't forget, in one year the 2nd Zen generation might also be ready to be launched. ;)svan1971 - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
So let me get this straight, AMD will have the processors ready to ship on the release date ! Intel had me wait three months for availability for skylake....Way to go AMD ....and 52% improvement not 40%.....Intel take notes.AnotherGuy - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Wow I cant believe AMD actually pulled it off to beat Intel. Congrats to them!Outlander_04 - Monday, February 27, 2017 - link
It's happened beforeSaturnusDK - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
I'm thinking the R5 1600X is the hidden gem for gamers. It's the only R5 95W TDP part and with 6C/12T it should mean that it can overclock a fair bit higher than an 8C/16T part on the same TDP.PixyMisa - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
1600X does look like the hidden gem. I wouldn't count on having a lot of OC headroom, though, I expect the 1600X and 1800X are already running pretty close to their full potential.cheshirster - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link
Definetlykarma77police - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Sorry but Ryzen is not faster than Intel counterpart and here is why. Also Ryzen chipset is crippled meaning only allows SLI or Crossfire to run at 8x speed. I am waiting for 2066 socket with competitive price.Here is why i claim that Ryzen benchmarks are AMD BS where they changed quad to dual channel for Intel and probably crippled 2 x 16x speed to run at 2 x 8x speed.
http://www.3dmark.com/spy/1259762
http://www.3dmark.com/fs/11790011
Benchmark is done on Xeon 10/20 running at 3.2Ghz clearly having frequency disadvantage.
l187l - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
what are you trying to prove with those benchmarks? You just posted a 10 core 20 thread CPU with the same score as an 8 core 16 thread CPU. Even with a 10-15% clock difference, that's a 25% core difference...Outlander_04 - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Intel Z170 boards split the graphics lanes into x8/x8 too . What is it you are complaining about?The intel set ups in these benchmarks AMD released had twice as much RAM configured in 4 channel . They still got beaten by the AMD running dual channel RAM . What is it you are complaining about?
cheshirster - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link
4 channel to 2 channel memory has no effect on Cinebench scores.karma77police - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Before you order Ryzenhttps://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/e7438f4957b9f...
Don't sell your Kaby Lake...
gruffi - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
What does one old game show? Not much. Maybe you should post an x264/x265 comparison, or POV-Ray, or Blender, or Handbrake, or 7-zip, etc. ;) Everyone knows that games are often GPU limited and don't show the full potential of a CPU. And even if a 4-core CPU achieves similar fps as an 8-core CPU in many games, the latter one has way more free resources for additional tasks.willis936 - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link
You did read the game title right?Cooe - Sunday, February 28, 2021 - link
GTAV was already ancient in early 2017 and by and large uses only a SINGLE CORE for basically all primary engine processing / CPU work.Lol anyone that followed your "advice" and bought Kaby Lake over Ryzen 1000 in early 2017, "exclusively for gaming" is feeling like the BIGGEST idiot in the god damn world about now. ESPECIALLY if they got a 4-core/4-thread i5-7600/K over a 6-core/12-thread Ryzen 5 1600/X. Nowadays, Ryzen 1000 absolutely freaking BITCH SLAPS Kaby Lake in modern titles/game engines, and this trend started as recently as mid-late 2018.
l187l - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
so a ryzen 7 1700 at 3.2 GHz is running the game the same as a more expensive CPU clocked at 4.2 GHz. Sounds like a win to me. Overclock the ryzen 7 and it will have identical minimum FPS, and who cares about 2 secs of max FPS being higher lmfao.For a better comparison, that should have shown the Intel 8 core CPUs as well ;)
Gastec - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link
No, that image is irrelevant without a context.gruffi - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
The second benchmark slide is slightly misleading. If i7-6800K is the base then the Ryzen 1700X bar should show +39%. If Ryzen 1700X is the base then the i7-6800K bar should show -28%.Anyway, I think we can say now, AMD is back! Finally their architecture is competitive again. I hope they can significantly improve it with every new generation.
Gastec - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
- Ryzen 7 1700X: 8C/16T, 3.4 GHz base, 3.8 GHz turbo, 95W, $400, £390 on Amazon.co.uk- Intel Core i7-7700K: 4C/16T, 4.2 GHz base, 4.5 GHz turbo, 91W, $340, £328 on Amazon.co.uk
The question is, will Ryzen 7 perform better in games and other single-threaded tests? Because it sure is more expensive than Kaby Lake.
Gastec - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Edit: Intel Core i7-7700K: 4C/8TOutlander_04 - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Core for core, thread for thread the AMD will trail the last two generations of intel socket 1151 in games . Atleast it looks that way in the low resolution poorly threaded games comparisons.But generally it wont matter . So many people just look at a bigger fps number and think its better. Often it is not . And monitor technology is one of the reasons why.
A 60 Hz monitor can only ever display 60 fps . If two systems with rival processors are outputting 80 fps and 120 fps respectively then the user experience is identical . Both actually see 60 fps . All the other frames are dropped by the monitor and never displayed at all.
This is why even the FX processors already available are almost always a match for the current intel i5's . Yes there are situations where intel have the advantage, but they are rare enough to not bother with too much . And especially not when you are considering optimizing costs.
Ryzen is a clear step up though and those running really high resolution monitors, streaming and encoding will do well with one.
For those wanting to push 144 HZ to a 1080p monitor then intel may remain the better choice.
The benchmarks are coming ... then we will know
prisonerX - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Games are not single threaded, unless you only play stuff from the 1990's.PixyMisa - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Ryzen is about level with Broadwell on IPC.So on single-thread workloads, the 1700X should be about equal to the 4770K, 10% behind the 6700K, and 15% behind the 7700K.
For 1600X or 1800X, that would be 5% ahead of 4770K, 5% behind 6700K, and 10% behind 7700K.
Of course, that will vary by application. Ryzen has half the AVX2 performance per core of Skylake, but double the L2 & L3 cache.
tamalero - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
Those processors looks gorgeous for personal servers.Haawser - Thursday, February 23, 2017 - link
OCUK has gotten the R7 1700 to 4GHz with OC (all cores).That's 6900K performance for 1/3rd of the price, never mind 1/2...
R.I.P Intel E-series. There is no coming back from that.
msroadkill612 - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link
Well yes, this IS a PC~site, but no one I see mentions a fresh major app/market, in the form of autonomous EVs etc.I hear AMD have a lot going for them as a smart, cheap and powerful platform to base them on.
History is full of examples of booms waiting in the wings for some pre-requisite tech development. electricity begat many inventions, as did oil e.g.
A historic such shift is relatively recent battery tech and economics. Been around since ~2005, but not cheap and mainstream.
At a guess, they have improved by a factor of ~4-10x in each of; weight, cost, dis/charge rate, longevity, ..... This isnt incremental improvement. Its a still evolving revolution.
This is a major paradigm shift in what is doable electrically using batteries.
So I am just saying, in the context of AMDs future?, their appeal to EV makers e.g ought be considered.
maybe auto makers will just put a pc mobo in their cars and be done with inferior proprietary bespoke approaches to increasingly smart cars.
I heard AMD have done well with console makers, as their platform gets their game products to market faster. Its a similar environment to cars ATM.
Predictive adaptive cruise control (ACC) really is a "dealbreaker must have" for many savvy car buyers right now. the rewards are huge for the winner, but they are very slow to make it a mainstream fairly priced option, if at all.
its a tough job to do it right, it takes some AI. maybe its time cars had a PC integrated? If so, does amd have an edge?
Gastec - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link
Your comment made me remember about the last of the Adaptive Cruisers, Antaeus from Hostile Waters :)eddiechi - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link
Intel Holding back?
Intel's brand cache has been eroding for years now, the erosion was accelerated when CEO Krzanich took reign and has forever proclaimed success on Moore's Law..... Things have deteriorated severely at Intel.......
Intel's brand cache has been eroding for years now, the erosion was accelerated when CEO Krzanich took reign and has forever proclaimed success on Moore's Law.....
Things have deteriorated severely at Intel. Internal sources at Intel have stated the climate has been awful and not just due to recent layoffs of 12,000 or 11% of workforce. In light of many recent news headlines and not just Ryzen, Intel is probably in the most delicate situation it has ever had to face.
CEO Brian Krzanich has lead Intel into a slow death spiral and it hurts me to admonish my croation brotheren. Back in 2006 Intel had about a 50% market share with AMD and has watched it increase dramatically every year since to now about 80/20 but years of bad decisions and throwing good money after bad have caught up to the CEO with his pants down. Throwing $8 Billion at Mcafee and $17 Billion at Altera and wasted Billions trying to crack the mobile market with the “contra-revenue” Bay Trail processor where Intel basically tried to bribe tablet makers into using Bay Trail Processors at substantial loss for Intel.
All these casualties has had the CEO reducing costs at the greater cost of unexpected consequences. The delay on 10nm has just increased, worse yet Canon Lake is not expected to feature any significant architectural improvements…. The CEO mistakenly doubled down on the hope that AMD not competing with them - so those that think “Intel has been holding back” are severely mistaken, there is the rumbling of a major earthquake going on right now under Intel’s feet……. Management has been coalescing to get momentum to push CEO out and bring in Murthy Renduchintala. Krzanich has lead a disaster and has basically and systematically undressed Intel, R&D is screwed and has left a void until well into 2019, CEO had completely underestimated the possibility of an AMD comeback while trying to continue with his Moore’s Law mantra which has been basically tossed out window with end of tick/tock procedures followed for almost a decade.
CEO has sat by idly after their 2016 Q4 earnings call from CFO stated product issues have limited profitability mainly due to fault with Atom c2000 family that bricks devices and had to set aside a pot of cash to deal with problems and recently announced Atom C2000 chip line contains a clock flaw and the recently hired COO Kim Stevenson resigned after just taking helm of division that leads PC business in August.
Intel has been in no position to “hold back” recently with all the internal problems and now AMD has just put them way behind the 8-ball. Should expect a plethora of changes at Intel shortly after Ryzen is released, writing has been on wall way before recent revelations of potential AMD comeback….. adding to issues of AMD resurgence is that Intel is also in the crosshairs of sleeping giant Qualcomm.
Kaby Lake brought in “new” PAO process, Process - Architecture – Optimization….. there is no underlying change to the microarchitecture, Intel is not promoting any performance difference with the previous generation, they are however promoting better efficiency and creating a bit more headroom for OC’ing. Moore’s Law has driven Intel computing for a decade and has now forced Intel to dump tick/tock at most inopportune time with CEO not seeing AMD coming and with no immediate recourse at hand and most likely not until into 2019 will Intel be able to do anything but marketing tactics disguised by slashing prices.
Intel has enjoyed their monopoly for years and seems to have rested on it’s laurels and market superiority for too long but they have not been holding back. Anandtech just released article last week about 8th gen continuing on 14nm and 10nm pushed back to late 2017 or 2018….. Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake, Cannonlake, Ice Lake or Tigerlake will not help Intel if the AMD hype comes to fruition next week.
eddiechi - Saturday, February 25, 2017 - link
and the pressure has already hit Intel and AMD hasn't been released yet for independent reviews...... INTEL JUST ANNOUNCE more than a dozen price cuts starting with $300 off 6950X.......Here we go.......................
mapesdhs - Tuesday, February 28, 2017 - link
Still far too expensive.hahmed330 - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link
BENCHMARKS PLEASEAries1470 - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link
Has anyone else noticed this article here http://www.anandtech.com/show/11031/amd-set-to-lau...Still made for Q1 :-D
mercantilist - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link
A substantial part of Intel's performance advantage stems from its lead in manufacturing minorization .It still holds a minor manufacturing advantage and will grow that advantage within months.Haawser - Friday, February 24, 2017 - link
No, they won't. https://www.engadget.com/2017/02/11/intel-8th-gen-...10nm desktop chips will not be this year. Maybe a few very expensive server ones, or 'premium' ULP SoCs, but not desktop. They are now 1H2018 at the earliest. Please do some research instead of just repeating the rumors you may have heard elsewhere.
cheshirster - Saturday, February 25, 2017 - link
I just calculated Ryzen die size at about 200mm2 (4.8B transistors)Broadwell-E is a 256mm2 die with 10 cores and 3.4B transistors. ~200mm2 and 3B working in 6900K.
We need a clarification for WTF is going on.
How can it be that AMD has much higher density?
yhselp - Saturday, February 25, 2017 - link
Finally, competition. The more important battle would be against NVIDIA on the GPU front; the kind of money NVIDIA has been charging for GeForce is absurd and has to stop, branding video cards based on mid-sized GPUs as flagships has to stop, a GTX 1080 (mid-sized GPU) costs up to $700, whereas a GTX 560 Ti (same class mid-sized GPU) cost $250 just a few short years ago - this has to stop.yhselp - Saturday, February 25, 2017 - link
Only good things can come from now on. That being said, the immediate benefit for consumers wouldn't be what AMD is trying to make it seem like - you wouldn't be able to buy an i5-7400, i5-7600, or i7-7700 equivalent for half the price, even if Ryzen is as good as Kaby Lake. Ryzen 3 1200X is $30 less expensive than than i5-7500; Ryzen 5 1400X might end up being slightly slower than i7-7700, but it's also $100 less expensive which might make it a very popular choice, especially if it overclocks well.yhselp - Saturday, February 25, 2017 - link
It's a bit disappointing that it doesn't seem like AMD would offer a quad-core Ryzen for $100, at least not initially. A CPU to challenge Intel's G4560 (2c/4t, no AVX for $64) would also be nice.Haawser - Saturday, February 25, 2017 - link
You would do better saving $129 for an R3 1100. 4C/4T is always better than 2C/4T. And unlike the HT Pentiums it will have AVX.yhselp - Saturday, February 25, 2017 - link
Not everyone can afford or wants to pay for more expensive components. The G4560 has been somewhat of a hit in the budget sector - it's perfectly capable of handling many of the latest games, virtually all of the e-sports-oriented MOBA/MMO/FPS games and it costs $64 - it's hard to convince someone to spend over twice that because it's "always better". AMD does not have an answer for the super-budget sector; it also chose not price the base 4c/4t CPU aggressively at $99, here's hoping that's what happens when Intel inevitably makes the sub-$120 i3 4c/4t.Lolimaster - Sunday, February 26, 2017 - link
Your answer is the Raven Ridge APU 2c/4t and 4c/8t.Lolimaster - Sunday, February 26, 2017 - link
Why would you want a platform with no upgrade path except totally not worthy overpriced quad cores?AM4 R3 1100 4c/4t all the way to the best performance/price chip ever, the R7 1700 8c/16t for $320.
yhselp - Sunday, February 26, 2017 - link
Because it's affordable and it works, it does what you need it to do with satisfactory results. Why is it so hard to understand that some people just don't want to spend, or cannot afford to, on more expensive components? Many people simply do not upgrade; they buy a configuration and use it for years until it becomes hopelessly obsolete. AMD has a part for the budget conscious *performance* crowd - Ryzen 3 1100 - but it does not have an answer for the low-end sector. A G4560/H110/8GB/GTX1050 combo can play all popular MOBA/MMO/FPS games and many modern triple-As. You don't even need to add a video card if you don't need it for games.The non-laptop Raven Ridge would likely be a 4c/8t HBM2 SoC; it won't be a $65 CPU. However, if it's fast enough so that you wouldn't need to add a video card, then it just might be something very special.
Haawser - Sunday, February 26, 2017 - link
I think their answer for the ultra low budget sector will be unlocked Carrizo based Athlon x4s. Which should hit ~4GHz, ie- AM4 Bristol Ridge without an iGPU. The locked Athlon x4 845 is only $69, so I'd imagine an unlocked AM4 version would probably be similar.For a 1050/460 it would be OK. It can run a GTX1080 at nearly 80fps in The Division (http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/amd_athlon_x4... so I don't think a 1050 or 460 would cause it many problems ? And most importantly, from AMDs perspective, get people onto an AMD AM4 platform instead of an Intel one. So they can sell them an R3/R5 in future.
Just wait. I don't think AMD are going to ignore the ultra budget sector. I think they are going to offer unlocked Carrizo Athlon x4s. Which really aren't that bad. Particularly as they *do* have AVX, AVX2 etc.
yhselp - Monday, February 27, 2017 - link
It does make sense. I've no doubt AMD will address the low-end; I was just hoping it would be with a Zen core and sooner rather than later. If Zen can scale down to 2c/4t, it'd be nice to see an entry part for ~$50.Haawser - Monday, February 27, 2017 - link
Don't think it would be economic to cut down an 8 core Ryzen to 2 cores ? Think that's why they said the R3s would be the last ones to be launched. Because they are probably working on a separate 4C/8T die. They also said that there might be some more unannounced SKUs, so who knows ? Later in the year you might get a 2C/4T Ryzen ?eddiechi - Saturday, February 25, 2017 - link
and the pressure has already hit Intel and AMD hasn't been released yet for independent reviews...... INTEL JUST ANNOUNCE more than a dozen price cuts starting with $300 off 6950X.......Here we go.......................
eddiechi - Saturday, February 25, 2017 - link
Ryzen 7 1800X Beats The World’s Fastest Desktop CPU With A One Click Overclock On Air Cooling, Surpasses 7700K In Single-Thread Performance...... recent testing revealed on youtubesushukka - Saturday, February 25, 2017 - link
So glad to finally see AMD catching up and hopefully again stopping Intel's market milking as it did with Athlon. First 486/Pentium processors were very expensive and AMD made real difference to the consumer market. There was 10x price difference at best between these two and having the processor as the most expensive single piece of PC stopped many dreams of building a decent, modern PC for gaming and other heavier use. From my point of view after Athlon the whole market made a leap forward. More people could enjoy the new features more capacity brought to the table, software developers could develop more advanced applications as even the cheaper computers could run the new stuff too. I really, really would like to see that the new Vega architecture would do the same with Nvidia's iron grasp on GPU market.Made also rough number investigation of these companies:
Intel: ~100 000 employees, 59 billion $ revenue
Nvidia: ~10 000 employees, 5 billion $ revenue
AMD: ~9000 employees, 1 billion $ revenue
To my view it seems that either AMD has very competent jobforce or the two others are really milking the market. Either way, keep up the good work AMD, we need you! :)
redraider89 - Monday, February 27, 2017 - link
All that talk about how seemingly unrealistic getting a 40% increase in IPC is pretty ridiculous as if it isn't already being done. One, if they were trying to get 40% more from Piledriver or Bulldozer, then sure. But we are not, so that's one reason it's ridiculous.Two, isn't Intel's CPUs already about 40% better than the FX CPUs? And the Phenom's IPC is better than the FX CPUs. So it's already being done. It's ridiculous to say that AMD hasn't had a CPU that's better than the FX, when they have and ridiculus to basically say that ONLY Intel can develop a CPU with higher IPC than the Piledriver and Bulldozer CPUs have.
Outlander_04 - Monday, February 27, 2017 - link
No, phenom was not better IPC than the X3XX cpu's . It was relatively close though at the expense of a bigger die and higher power consumptionfourier07 - Monday, February 27, 2017 - link
This release remembers me when the Athlon 64 was the king until the Conroe arrived. It has been about 10 years with Intel as the king. But in this long interval Intel has speculated with its prices just for 15-20% of performance, and in the time being maybe less. Now AMD release a CPU able to compete vs the 6900k for $500! So that I think the times of "fat cows" for Intel is over, at less in the next few years.nos024 - Monday, February 27, 2017 - link
So...tell me what is the advantage of buying an 1800x over a 1700? $200 difference, if you factor in the cost of the cpu cooler? A total ripoff. *yawns* if you are going to price a cpu at $500, at least give it 40 pcie3 lanes?Outlander_04 - Monday, February 27, 2017 - link
And if the heat spreader on the 95 watt chips is more heavily built with better thermal paste?pencea - Tuesday, February 28, 2017 - link
Hopefully when your reviews comes, there won't be any bias or influence from Intel.Intel Allegedly Playing Dirty To Undercut AMD’s Ryzen
The editors-in-chief of two of America’s top PC hardware and technology publications have confirmed to Wccftech that they have indeed been approached by Intel regarding upcoming Ryzen reviews. Although both said that it was business as usual. Affirming that Intel’s response following AMD’s Ryzen announcement was what they had expected it to be and nothing was particularly unusual about it.
wccftech.com/intel-playing-dirty-undercut-amd-ryzen/
Intel is rattled with AMD Ryzen. Its 10-year old Nehalem CPU architecture that has been shrunk and incrementally updated over the years, is finally coming across as dated in the wake of AMD's "Zen" architecture. What to do when a competitor with 1/50th your R&D budget threatens to wreck your next annual appraisal? Play dirty and arm-twist the media of course! And playing dirty Intel is, according to a TweakTown report.
Apparently, Intel has scrambled its PR department to call in favors with the press in return for "guidelines" on how to review AMD Ryzen. Intel's PR emails allegedly ask reviewers to "call us before you write." The guidelines are worded more to make it sound like Intel wants its chips to be reviewed "fairly" against Ryzen, but the underlying objective is clear.
Outlander_04 - Tuesday, February 28, 2017 - link
Yes, it looks like intel is quite happy to try its underhand anti-competitive tactics again .Yet another reason to buy Ryzen
GeoffreyA - Wednesday, March 1, 2017 - link
Intel feared the Athlon 64 and they now fear Ryzen.MongGrel - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
Intel never feared Athlon 64, they are not fearing anything now.
Cooe - Sunday, February 28, 2021 - link
All the blatantly illegal anti-competitive/anti-competition market manipulation & OEM bribing BS Intel pulled off in-between 1998 & 2008 says you have no freaking clue what the hell you are talking about... Athlon 64 (most ESPECIALLY the A64 Opterons) absolutely scared the freaking SHIT out of Intel!!! So much so they broke just about every anti-monopoly law you can think of trying to prevent its widespread adoption. Also, if they weren't scared of A64/A64x2, how in the HELL do you explain the absurd disaster that was the Pentium-D???lakedude - Thursday, March 2, 2017 - link
http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/AMD-Ryzen-7-1...Ryzen looks pretty awesome if you can use all those cores. I think the i7-7700k is generally faster in lightly threaded apps and most games. The 7700 is cheaper as well ($300 at a MC). I'm still on Ivy Bridge and still happy enough so I'll be buying neither. Anyone thinking about a new CPU should take a serious look at their typical workload before deciding.
oranos - Thursday, March 2, 2017 - link
With Intel firmly grasping the workstation/OEM market, AMD finds itself in a critical situation to sell to their #1 demographic - gamers. Unfortunately, this is where Ryzen looks to fall short. Today's benchmarks from various publishers conclude that Ryzen is in fact behind Intel's Skylake/Kabylake in games. Ouch.MongGrel - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
Don't post that in the actual forums, you will get banned.Imagine that.
MongGrel - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
This place has went in the toilet since the Purch purchase with the mods, apparently.Cooe - Sunday, February 28, 2021 - link
Hahahaha. Intel's "firm grasp" of the workstation market in early 2017 was about as limp, small, & loose as your Grandad's wang. People were FURIOUS at Intel over their price gouging & feature stripping ala PCIe lanes or ECC memory support. Ryzen (& later Threadripper) absolutely cleaned HOUSE in the workstation market.Calinux - Friday, May 26, 2017 - link
What nobody says here is the main reason why AMD managed to catch Intel. Being able to cut on 14 nm is the main reason and the future is bright for AMD because even 7 nm cut is in the roadmap for Samsung (and AMD uses GlobalFoundries which is backed up by Samsung). So by 2020 we might see AMD CPUs on 7 nm while Intel might be only at 10 nm by that time.Eitherway the most interesting period will be after ~6 nm because 6 nm is the physical limit for cutting the chip. Bellow 6 nm there is quantum tunneling (aka electrons going through the 6nm "wall" into unwanted area.