Coffee lake prices with Zen+ release, and [speculative] performance comparisons

[subterminal303]

Howdy folks!

The CPU/MOBO is one of the last pieces I need to buy for my build. However, with the Zen+ release supposedly happening next month, I have a few questions.

Mainly, are there any good guesses on how the Ryzen release will impact Intel Coffee Lake prices? I've been eyeing the i5 8600k and am happy to wait if that means a $30-$50 sale/price drop.

The second question, which is more speculation really, is regarding the performance of the new Zen+ chips. Is there any reason to believe that the single threat performance will be as good or better than the Intel chips? If so, that would make switching to Ryzen a no brainer for the better single and multi-thread performance, which I am open to as I haven't bought a MOBO or RAM yet.

Cheers!

 

[ohiou_grad_2006]

You'd have to see if there are any specs out there.

I did find this.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/antonyleather/2018/02/20/amds-ryzen-second-generation-cpu-is-17-faster-in-leaked-benchmarks/amp/

But take that with a grain of salt. If you're willing to wait I'm sure more will come out. I think they are saying April 19 is a number I thought I saw. But figure that say a 200-300mhz bump in clock speeds would help a little. No way to know until actual release I'm guessing?

 

[Lutfij]

I wouldn't worry about a price drop since the RyZen platform managed to catch Intel off guard and thus the Coffeelake and subsequent Kabylake X processor lineups and rushed processor launch. With Zen+, the processor wont bring much to the table but a refinement in lithography.

If you're moving from an AM3+ socket then anything AMD puts out now is amazing. If you're from Intel, you will want to stay Intel, to a degree.

 

[ohiou_grad_2006]

However if you're coming from like a core 2 quad.... The difference would be huge.

I know that I've read ryzen was actually their worst case scenario. So there will be some refinement that needs to take place of course. I think they are saying the biggest bump you'll see is when they jump next year to ryzen 2, which I'm guessing will be like ryzen 3000 series.

Reason for that should be when they jump from 14nm to 7nm. I'm guessing that at that point, you'll see quite a bit higher clock speeds and also IPC improvement as well. Ryzen +, next month that is should be good, but not as dramatic of a change probably as ryzen 2.

I will say however, what should tell you how good ryzen was, was how quickly Intel rushed out coffee lake.

 

[coozie7]

There is a printed French review hosted over at Guru3D and Techpowerup of these updated Zen parts but the available numbers are a little disappointing: Mainy it's down to them testing with an A320 motherboard so the more advanced boost features of these updated chips won't be effective.

As for IPC, no, Intel still has an advantage, although Zen has caught up a bit and you can still push a 'K' CPU faster if you wish-and have the budget. 😉

The ideal choice is going to boil down to what you're doing with the system;
For pure gaming Intel has the edge, and that edge is especially large on high refresh 1080 displays but once you get into 2K that advantage diminishes and at 4K all games are effectively GPU limited anyway.
If you regularly use software that can use all the cores/threads AMD has an advantage, especially given the lower prices of the higher end parts.
For mixed uses you'll have to decide where you want peak performance, maybe trading off some multithreaded AMD goodness for superior Intel gaming-or vice versa.

No, we don't know about pricing, until AMD releases these updated parts in April we just won't know.

 

[subterminal303]

For pure gaming Intel has the edge, and that edge is especially large on high refresh 1080 displays but once you get into 2K that advantage diminishes and at 4K all games are effectively GPU limited anyway.

This is a great point, thank you. I will be mostly gaming in 1080 despite my 2k monitor as my GTX 1060 will be my bottleneck until the GPU market settles down and I can afford a 1070 TI or even 1080 TI.

As for the extra threads... I do toy with the idea of streaming, but I would convert my old rig into a capture system. And I do some video editing as well, but I use Vegas Pro which I don't believe is optimized for multi-threads. So, there's not a huge need for me currently to take advantage of Ryzen's multi-threading on the Zen+. And from the sounds of it, the single thread performance isn't going to be as good as Intel.

 

[subterminal303]

I wouldn't worry about a price drop since the RyZen platform managed to catch Intel off guard and thus the Coffeelake and subsequent Kabylake X processor lineups and rushed processor launch. With Zen+, the processor wont bring much to the table but a refinement in lithography.

If you're moving from an AM3+ socket then anything AMD puts out now is amazing. If you're from Intel, you will want to stay Intel, to a degree.

I've always been an Intel person, though have strongly considered the Ryzen CPUs recently. However, I don't think I'll switch over quite yet if the single thread performance isn't as good as Intel, unless there's any points I may be missing.

 

[ohiou_grad_2006]

It's not quite there yet. It's basically as fast on single thread as haswell. But that said, the next couple of generations of ryzen should get better. I believe they said that from the FX series to ryzen was about a 40-50% increase in performance. Ryzen is only at first generation now, so it should get better as they refine it.