AMD's new cpu's. How are they matching Intel's processors but keeping their cpu's low budget?

Rafael Mestdag

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Mar 25, 2014
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I like AMD, I've had lots of their processors and I'm curious to try out one of their new ones which seem to finally match Intel's cpu's. But what worries me is how they are managing this. How is it possible without some form of compromise? And if there is a compromise it must be quality related.

Is it the case?
 
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Well firstly they haven't quite matched Intel. When AMD sent their sample boxes out for testing they encouraged reviewers to test at higher graphical settings and resolutions - when you turn things down to around medium you start to see some larger gaps:

http://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-performance-of-ryzen-7-vs-core-i7-with-geforce-gtx-1080-ti/
http://www.idgconnect.com/abstract/25249/ryzen-review-amd...
The pricing of processors is a very complex issue.
The basic historical trend is whenever intel processors have anywhere from a slight to a massive edge over the competition, they then price them much higher.
AMD has to price lower to move units.
 

InvalidError

Titan
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Pretty much what Gamer said. AMD has been next to irrelevant for the past five years and now that it has a decent architecture, it is desperate to regain market share and had to price their CPUs at a level where most people who would have systematically gone with Intel now have to at least consider AMD.

The fact that Ryzen currently has next to no overclocking headroom beyond 4GHz doesn't help with the gaming-only crowd which usually benefits far more from overclocking Intel's quad-core CPUs to 4.5-4.8GHz, which may be another reason why AMD had to price Ryzen aggressively to gain attention.
 

InvalidError

Titan
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Ryzen is well ahead of where AMD used to be, isn't far on Intel's heels in most games, pulls ahead in some, wipes the floor with Intel on performance per buck in heavily threaded workloads and performs about the same clock-for-clock as Intel's chips, so I wouldn't call it 'inferior quality.'
 


so its safe to assume you are so biased for AMD all you did was read that one line and not the whole post just like you did you when you quoted it lol

 

InvalidError

Titan
Moderator

I do not own any AMD CPUs and my newest GPU is Nvidia so no, I'm not an AMD fan. I was pointing out that AMD isn't doing "quantity over quality" as Ryzen is clearly capable of delivering on both counts when software isn't hitting odd performance quirks and this has been improving steadily since Ryzen's launch as more game developers issue patches to fix their multi-threaded performance issues that made Ryzen look worse than it should, especially when you look at 0.1% frame time variance where the R5 are often beating similarly priced i5 and sometimes even the much more expensive i7-7700k.

The only thing that really bothers me with Ryzen is its picky memory controller.

BTW, AMD's 12-core CPU is still only a rumor at this point and Intel's i7-6950k does have 10 cores which don't perform too well at gaming either, that doesn't make it any "lower quality" either. Intel even has 24 cores server CPUs if you don't mind the $9000 price tag and 2.4GHz base clock. AMD wasn't first in the high core count "race", it merely brought that amount of parallelism and performance down to more palatable price points.

Please keep your replies civil and leave the baseless accusations out of your future comments. If you don't have anything useful to contribute, move on.
 

kgt1182

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CPUs main bulk of the cost is research. Intel spends far more on research which is why they can already fit 24 cores/48 threads at 2.4 GHz, with 165W TDP and 60MB inside a LGA 2011 package. (Xeon E7 8894v4) They already have the technology but need the ever increasing amount of money to continue their research. Thats why Intel CPUs are more expensive, but also more advanced.

Secondly, Intel used to be more reasonable on prices and performance increases by generation. It is due to lack of competition (monopoly) from AMD as well as investor pressure that drove server CPU prices up/stagnate mainstream processor performance and price. Respect the nanotechnologists and engineers in Intel and AMD; blame the Intel CEO and "dash investors" mining money from technology companies. It is amazing how a technology oriented CEO like Lisa Su can bring to AMD. You just cannot bull**** the CEO.

Lastly, is profit, Intel has no reasons to lower their prices as AMD is not even taking a significant share from their CPU market, and even till now with the release of Ryzen, their 3 year old i7 4790K is still on par with AMD latest Ryzen 7 1800X CPU in single threaded performance; they dominate the gamer market, and that is where the main bulk of PC sales come from. Also OEMs prefer Intel.

The only compromise by AMD is that they lower their profit margin so that their CPUs become a better deal, this is to gain market share from a competitive x86 market.

 

InvalidError

Titan
Moderator

Old news. The newest Xeons go to 28 cores.

On AMD's side, Naples which should be launching in the near-future will have 32C64T with 8-channel RAM and 64 PCIe lanes per socket. That should be a game-changer capable of putting AMD back on the datacenter map with performance approaching Intel's 4S servers in a 2S form factor.

Intel's server chip prices may be about to have a much needed sanity check.
 

Seanie280672

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Mar 19, 2017
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Thats going to be 1 chunky CPU lol.

I never in my life thought id own an 8 core 16 thread CPU, Intels version of it is £1000, I thought AMD's version would be £700 ish, with this in mind my intentions were to wait for RyZen 5 and grab one of the 6 core 12 thread varients, to my surprise when they finally released the prices, I was shocked at how cheap they were, I was going to get the 1700X, but the way these things shot off the shelves, the only option I could get my hands on was the 1700, so glad I did.

1700X and 1800X has hardly any overclocking headroom, as 1 person already mentioned, they all pretty much do 4ghz, lets forget boost and XFR here for a moment because as soon as you start overclocking one of these CPU's, these 2 features are disabled, so if you take the stocks of the 1800X 3.6ghz, overclocks to 4 / 4.1ghz thats a 400-500mhz overclock, 1700X stock is 3.4ghz overclocks to about 3.9 / 4ghz, thats a 500-600mhz overclock, 1700 stock is 3ghz and overclocks to 3.9 / 4ghz, thats a 900mhz-1ghz overclock, and save money at the same time.

Rocking with 16gb DDR4 3200mhz ram too, its lightening fast, I can only imagine things are going to get better and better for AMD with one team working on Zen2 and promising to support the AM4 socket for 4 - 5 years, sod intels tick tock money making scam......(more like rippp roffff)

Its pretty enlightening how quickly AMD has addressed problems with RyZen and fixed them, its only been out for 2 months and already they have fixed most RAM issues with the next fix coming this month, and games have already started optimising for RyZen, if you look at recent benchmarks, theres now hardly any difference in the latest games between RyZen and Intel, thats pretty darn quick, all those arguments in the begining, oh stick with Intel because RyZen is crap at gaming are a thing of the past, even Intels Z170 had problems in the begining and there Z270 chipset had massive problems, but everyone has forgotten about those now its all running smooth, the same will happen for AM4.

RyZen was a new technology, built from the grounds up, nothing has been done like this in decades, every CPU manufacturer has just improved on there technology over the years, this time AMD went right back to the drawing board and with a clean sheet of paper, started redesigning its CPU's entirely, of course there were going to be teething problems.
 

Well firstly they haven't quite matched Intel. When AMD sent their sample boxes out for testing they encouraged reviewers to test at higher graphical settings and resolutions - when you turn things down to around medium you start to see some larger gaps:

http://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-performance-of-ryzen-7-vs-core-i7-with-geforce-gtx-1080-ti/
http://www.idgconnect.com/abstract/25249/ryzen-review-amd
http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/ryzen-7-1700x-cpu-by-amd-review/7/

^ but if you look at the fps they are pulling you should quickly realise that ryzen is still fine for anyone gaming at 60hz. I would still recommend intel to anyone with a 144hz monitor though.

Compromise - I don't think so. Intel have had the monopoly for a while now so they have had no reason to lower their prices, AMD have likely just taken a lower margin that's all. I know we have had some teething troubles with ryzen but that's not been so much to do with the CPUs and more with the fact that the motherboard manufacturers apparently didn't get their hands on the finished articles until quite late in the process - hence the slew of bios updates for the x370 and b350 chipsets. I don't think the quality is lacking though, AMD have been making CPUs for a very, very long time.
 
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