Farewell Zen, Hello Ryzen: AMD’s Eight-Core CPU Runs At 3.4GHz+

[blppt]

"just might build a new rig next year with one of these new zen/ryzen (see! why not stick with zen!?!?! is it really that hard?) "

My problem with 'Ryzen' is that its a stupid name, sounds a bit like they're trying a little too hard to be cool. Not really confusing, IMHO.

 

[ssdpro]

Finally more SATA Express support, just want I need for those 0 SATA Express drives available.

+1

That is a bad sign IMO. SATA Express, when mentioned separately from NVMe in host plug form, is very 3 years ago. It has half the bandwidth, clumsy double SATA connector and never had any products - it is failed and dead in that form. U.2 specifically replaced that design and M.2 immediately took its place. Having that on a board in 2017 screams "developed 4 years ago but the bugs kept increasing and funding kept falling".

Hopefully, that is speculation as most other reports lean positive.

 

[Kewlx25]

You left the most important part:

Ryzen was matching/beating Intel's flagship at ONLY 95 WATTS!!!

You mean the Ryzen engineering 95watt sample at 2.8ghz was beating the 140watt 3.7ghz flagship Intel. Ryzen was using not only 36% less power, but it had 24% lower clock.

 

[Guest]

I really don't care about power saving and other crap. I always disable that. What i am interested in is pure performance and overclocking. I never run CPU on stock speed let alone have it downclock for some power saving.

 

[Guest]

If this CPU performs same as Broadwell E 8 core for fraction of its cost, it is gonna be a winner. I'd rather pay $300 than $1000.

 

[tashfeenmajid]

You left the most important part:

Ryzen was matching/beating Intel's flagship at ONLY 95 WATTS!!!

You mean the Ryzen engineering 95watt sample at 2.8ghz was beating the 140watt 3.7ghz flagship Intel. Ryzen was using not only 36% less power, but it had 24% lower clock.

I am not sure about it running at 2.8 GHz, because Sue kept saying 3.4 the whole time. But I can't believe Tom's Hardware, that always makes a big deal about power consumption (and rightly so), just decides to omit that Ryzen is achieving this performance at 95 Watts. It's kind of a big deal.

People need to know that this processor was matching Intel 6900K in performance... an $1,100 chip, that might have jumped to 3.7 GHz during the testing, and was consuming 140 Watts.

 

[ajpaolello]

As with all shows of performance, wait until some reviewers get their hands on the chips and give some benchmarks.

 

[bit_user]

+1

That is a bad sign IMO.

Look, if they're going to put SATA ports on there, why is SATA Express a bad thing?

M.2 is a laptop-oriented format that doesn't make a lot of sense for high-end desktops. I wish U.2 were more common, in the consumer market. It gives you flexibility to put drives where you have fans, rather than trying to point fans at where your M.2 slots are located. Plus, physical size constraints limit M.2 capacities and push up the prices of medium-sized drives by making them use higher-density parts.

 

[gggplaya]

I'm in it for the performance boost XFR(Extended frequency range) feature alone. It'll maximize the clock based on my water cooling performance, pretty awesome.

 

[TJ Hooker]

If this CPU performs same as Broadwell E 8 core for fraction of its cost, it is gonna be a winner. I'd rather pay $300 than $1000.

... yes, when given the choice between paying full price for a thing or a 1/3 of that price for the same thing, most people would choose the latter.

But if AMD has a CPU that performs the same as a CPU currently selling for $1000, why on earth would they sell it for $300? Somewhat cheaper, sure. 70% cheaper? That makes no sense, they'd just be leaving a ton of money on the table at that point.

 

[gggplaya]

If this CPU performs same as Broadwell E 8 core for fraction of its cost, it is gonna be a winner. I'd rather pay $300 than $1000.

... yes, when given the choice between paying full price for a thing or a 1/3 of that price for the same thing, most people would choose the latter.

But if AMD has a CPU that performs the same as a CPU currently selling for $1000, why on earth would they sell it for $300? Somewhat cheaper, sure. 70% cheaper? That makes no sense, they'd just be leaving a ton of money on the table at that point.

Everyone is expecting a price war. AMD will make an initial price move, then intel will need to drop their prices, amd will continually price their processor a little less than intel and intel will continue to drop their price until the profit margins are no longer acceptable to drop.

Moral of the story is intel's stock prices will go down slightly, so sell your intel stock now. They will still be profitable based on their total portfolio, but AMD will cut into their desktop market next year. However, the desktop market is relatively small in the grand scheme of things.

If AMD's SOC APU laptop offering based on the zen processor can game modern titles like battlefield or call of duty at 30+ fps consistently, then expect an even larger hit to intel's bread and butter laptop market. That'll have a larger impact because intel doesn't have an integrated GPU to match even if they did drop the prices. AMD's ATI buyout will finally start to pay off here in huge strides.

AMD will definitely cut into intel's marketshare next year. So buy AMD stock now, and sell intel stock if you have it. Then ride the money wave next year 🙂

 

[TJ Hooker]

@gggplaya even if AMD manages to (nearly) match Intel's performance, this isn't the first time in history that they've been on par in high end performance. And last time around it didn't result in flagship chips suddenly being sold on the cheap. Maybe prices will go down somewhat, but some people seem borderline delusional with the price drops they're expecting. Also, it would be retarded for AMD to get into a full on price war with Intel. AMD's been in the red for years, they absolutely need to make some money with Zen, whereas Intel could afford to sell chips at a loss until AMD went under.

 

[AS118]

This looks good, but I'm still waiting for Benchmarks and reviews. That said, I really dislike this "Ryzen' name. It sounds dumb, and I think it'll eat into AMD's marketshare until they change it.

For one thing, Apple probably wouldn't agree to put "Ryzen" CPU's into its Macs. They're very image-conscious.

 

[gggplaya]

@gggplaya even if AMD manages to (nearly) match Intel's performance, this isn't the first time in history that they've been on par in high end performance. And last time around it didn't result in flagship chips suddenly being sold on the cheap. Maybe prices will go down a bit, but some people seem borderline delusional with the price drops they're expecting. Also, it would be retarded for AMD to get into a full on price war with Intel. AMD's been in the red for years, they absolutely need to make some money with Zen, whereas Intel could afford to sell chips at a loss until AMD went under.

I remember very well what happened in the late 90's/early 2000's. I was building computers back then, i had a pentium 1 chip, then an AMD K6-II, then an athlon XP, then a core 2 processor and have been intel ever since.

The good thing about google are articles are still around since that era. In this 2001 article, it shows processors drop as much as 17-53% http://www.zdnet.com/article/chip-price-war-redux-amd-follows-intel-5000123115/

The great AMD/Intel price war of 2001 led intel to drop the price of their flagship pentium 4 from $562 to $260 according to this old CNN article: http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/ptech/08/08/pentium.prices.idg/

In 2002 they realized how much money both companies lost to keep marketshare, so drops may not be that drastic if they learned their lesson, but like i said before they'll drop them until they can't afford to lower it anymore based on profit margins.

 

[salgado18]

Ok, lets talk AMD then:

As exciting as this is, there are a few things I am still quite worried about that AMD needs to contend with.

1) AMD is a 'cheap' brand. The way things stand now, there is just no way for them to sell a chip that costs more than $400. The problem here obviously is that CPUs are so advanced now, that to put out something for the high end gaming or pro-sumer market this chip is going to have to be in the $500-1000 range. While the AMD faithful won't have an issue with this, the mass-market mindshare won't even look at anything other than Intel in this price range.

Liza Su already said they are not the cheap brand anymore. Also, they can't sell a $900 chip for $400 just because. Prices will be close to Intel's based on performance, as it has always been. They can match the $1000 Intel? Then price will be close to $1000. And guess what: people will buy if the chip is decent. Brand loyalty is not that widespread, trust me.

2) AMD is a confusing brand. Sure, Intel's lineup is not exactly straight forward (really with the LGA2011 parts were an i9 instead of i7 part to differentiate the class of chips), but almost anyone can tell you that the class of chips goes from celeron and pentium on the junk side of things, and then i3/5/7 on the mainstream to high end. AMDs branding is just a mystery looking from the outside-in. I mean, they have an APU lineup... and nobody really knows what an APU is still after years of AMD trying to explain it. Then there are the FX chips that are all mashed together. They need this new gen of parts to have clear performance levels that are understood with clear name conventions. When shopping, people need to know if their FX part is equivalent to an i3 or an i7 without needing to memorize tables and comparisons.

AMD is very, very confusing regarding brand, UNTIL the RX 4xx series. Those cards have great names, easy to remember, easy to speak. I expect more out of those, especially with the new name for the processor.

3) AMD has confusing motherboards. Say what you will about Intel requiring a new mobo every 2 years, but it makes things so much easier when building a rig! Chip x needs socket y, and it will have all of the latest technology available to the CPU. None of this silly 'well, I bought a new chip, but found out the board I was looking at was a 5 year old model and will technically work, but give up on technology a, b and c'. No more of that! 2 years is a perfectly acceptable amount of time to come out with a new chipset for new boards that supports new chips and technologies. Stop supporting legacy crap and confusing the unwashed masses of people learning to build rigs. Sure it is nice if you know what you are doing to just replace your CPU, or to save some money by buying an older board... but those are money savings that AMD cannot afford to give, and savings that can more easily be had by people who shop on the used parts market.

Intel is very confusing, just like AMD. Socket 2011v3? Also, new socket for new CPU every 2 years doesn't mean you can't upgrade (who upgrades, anyway?), it means manufacturers have to put out new boards every 2 years, and those already in market are bound to be obsolete very soon, even if the tech in them is very modern. So many 1155 boards had all the tech that 1151 boards had, but they were just dead weight in shops inventories, because Intel moved on. Keep the same socket for 4 years, for example, and it's a lot safer to stock boards, which lowers prices and reduces risk, helping both sellers and customers. Oh, and Intel has like 7 different MB chips, good luck finding the one best for you.

4) AMD has confusing code names!!!! Intel and nVidia have code names that are easy to remember, easy to report on, and easy to pronounce. With rare exception, AMDs code names (and product names) are just work. Who cares about a bunch of islands that nobody has ever heard of? Give us names that are easy to say, easy to remember, and are asperational in some way to give the brand something to desire (outside of performance).

Code names, really? Also, is Zen hard? That's just nitpicking.

Not saying that they will be putting out a bad part. In fact, I just might build a new rig next year with one of these new zen/ryzen (see! why not stick with zen!?!?! is it really that hard?) chips on board. But if AMD wants to sell to the mass market, they need what they have never had: a marketing team that can be trusted to make a good long-term brand that appeals to human beings rather than engineers. No matter how good their parts are, the audience will be very limited without a proper marketing department.

It seems their marketing team is exactly that: what it needed all those years. My bet is on Zen, AM4, and the RX 4xx series. Their branding with drivers is great, on Facebook is great. Rest assured, that's what I've been complaining for years, but now they probably got it right.

 

[TJ Hooker]

I remember very well what happened in the late 90's/early 2000's. I was building computers back then, i had a pentium 1 chip, then an AMD K6-II, then an athlon XP, then a core 2 processor and have been intel ever since.

The good thing about google are articles are still around since that era. In this 2001 article, it shows processors drop as much as 17-53% http://www.zdnet.com/article/chip-price-war-redux-amd-follows-intel-5000123115/

The great AMD/Intel price war of 2001 led intel to drop the price of their flagship pentium 4 from $562 to $260 according to this old CNN article: http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/ptech/08/08/pentium.prices.idg/

In 2002 they realized how much money both companies lost to keep marketshare, so drops may not be that drastic if they learned their lesson, but like i said before they'll drop them until they can't afford to lower it anymore based on profit margins.

I stand corrected, didn't realize they had dropped prices that much in the past. Although if you look at the price drops for desktop chips, they're not more than 30%. Not to say the 30% isn't a significant decrease though.

That 2nd CNN article is simply about people speculating about a price drop of the Pentium 4, not about an actual price drop occurring.

Edit: I just can't help feel that the rampant speculation on (Ry)Zen's pricing is yet another railcar on the hype train. In all honesty I expect AMD's next gen chips to be solid products at competitive prices. It'd be a shame if that was overshadowed by the unrealistic expectations people had set. In some ways the same thing happened with Polaris; very good card(s), but compared to some of the rumours leading up to launch (e.g. RX 480 matching/beating a 1070), it fell short.

 

[gggplaya]

I remember very well what happened in the late 90's/early 2000's. I was building computers back then, i had a pentium 1 chip, then an AMD K6-II, then an athlon XP, then a core 2 processor and have been intel ever since.

The good thing about google are articles are still around since that era. In this 2001 article, it shows processors drop as much as 17-53% http://www.zdnet.com/article/chip-price-war-redux-amd-follows-intel-5000123115/

The great AMD/Intel price war of 2001 led intel to drop the price of their flagship pentium 4 from $562 to $260 according to this old CNN article: http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/ptech/08/08/pentium.prices.idg/

In 2002 they realized how much money both companies lost to keep marketshare, so drops may not be that drastic if they learned their lesson, but like i said before they'll drop them until they can't afford to lower it anymore based on profit margins.

I stand corrected, didn't realize they had dropped prices that much in the past. Although if you look at the price drops for desktop chips, they're not more than 30%. Not to say the 30% isn't a significant decrease though.

That 2nd CNN article is simply about people speculating about a price drop of the Pentium 4, not about an actual price drop occurring.

Edit: I just can't help feel that the rampant speculation on (Ry)Zen's pricing is yet another railcar on the hype train. In all honesty I expect AMD's next gen chips to be solid products at competitive prices. It'd be a shame if that was overshadowed by the unrealistic expectations people had set. In some ways the same thing happened with Polaris; very good card(s), but compared to some of the rumours leading up to launch (e.g. RX 480 matching/beating a 1070), it fell short.

Fair and true, but like i said before, the desktop market is really small now. Their laptop GPU is the place where they can make the most gains, i think the price war in that market will be more of an inferno, as opposed to the desktop market which will be more of a smouldering coal.

 

[quilciri]

Somewhere (maybe PC World?) reported that both systems were running Titans and the Intel machine had twice the RAM of the Ryzen, in quad channel no less. AMD was trying to go out of their way, apparently, to show that they didn't cripple the competition's chip with bad hardware just to score some points. If this thing can trade blows with that chip across multiple benchmarks I'll be ecstatic. As it is this thing is already a major improvement because no AMD chip in their lineup can come close to the 6900K.

Confirmed. This was reported by PC world. The Skylake platform was running 32GB quad-channel on an Asus RoG X99 board and the Summit Ridge was on 16GB as reported. They did not specify the number of memory channels on the AMD platform.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3149051/components/amd-offers-more-proof-that-zen-now-renamed-ryzen-is-its-best-chip-in-a-decade.html

Call me cautiously optimistic.

 

[ohim]

Even if this CPU will deliver the same as 6900K a 800$ price tag won`t sell them that many CPU, people with that kind of cash will still be going for Intel just because they feel secure with their purchase.

Lower that price to 500-600$ and enthusiasts will for sure pick one. AMD has a lot to prove to get back in the game and the right price. Even today i had an argument with a guy who went from AMD to Intel and now he doesn`t even want to hear about the green team and he was already exaggerating the performance gains when he switched to Intel.

They need a good product, an attractive price and some advertising ... i can`t recall when i last seen an AMD add anywhere on the internet.

 

[dgingeri]

I will love to see them compete on the server processor level. I hope Zen server chips are able to match the Xeon E5v4 series.

 

[why_wolf]

Marketing department justifies it's existence with pointless name change at the last minute. Frankly don't care how they want me to pronounce it, I'm still going to pronounce it like the poison. Of course that assumes I'm going to stop going to stop calling it Zen in the first place.

 

[rhysiam]

You left the most important part:

Ryzen was matching/beating Intel's flagship at ONLY 95 WATTS!!!

You mean the Ryzen engineering 95watt sample at 2.8ghz was beating the 140watt 3.7ghz flagship Intel. Ryzen was using not only 36% less power, but it had 24% lower clock.

I am not sure about it running at 2.8 GHz, because Sue kept saying 3.4 the whole time. But I can't believe Tom's Hardware, that always makes a big deal about power consumption (and rightly so), just decides to omit that Ryzen is achieving this performance at 95 Watts. It's kind of a big deal.

People need to know that this processor was matching Intel 6900K in performance... an $1,100 chip, that might have jumped to 3.7 GHz during the testing, and was consuming 140 Watts.

I don't know exactly how the TDP/Power consumption game is going to play out, but Ryzen was achieving similar efficiency to Broadwell-E in the Handbrake test...

From Anandtech's article (link):

Part of the demo in the pre-brief was a Handbrake video transcode, a multithreaded test, showing a near-identical completion time between a high-frequency Ryzen without turbo compared to an i7-6900K at similar frequencies. This mirrors the Blender test we saw back in August, although using a new benchmark this time but still multi-threaded. AMD also fired up some power meters, showing that Ryzen power consumption in this test was a few watts lower than the Intel part, implying that AMD is meeting its targets for power, performance and as a result, efficiency.

I'm not saying this is a bad thing. In fact, given where AMD has been, achieving performance and efficiency parity with a premium Intel workstation CPU is a major milestone. Further tuning of boosts and voltages could improve things further too. But let's not confuse TDP with efficiency, or worse still, start using TDP values to calculate efficiency relative to Intel CPUs... that's not helpful at all.

 

[atomicWAR]

You left the most important part:

Ryzen was matching/beating Intel's flagship at ONLY 95 WATTS!!!

You mean the Ryzen engineering 95watt sample at 2.8ghz was beating the 140watt 3.7ghz flagship Intel. Ryzen was using not only 36% less power, but it had 24% lower clock.

No not quite. The clock speed was not 2.8ghz it was 3.4ghz with precision boost running so in fact AMD had the higher clock with less wattage which in my opinion is even more impressive then what you misstated. The 2.8GHZ number you pulled was from early engineering sample not the testing done yesterday. Though in your defense tom's did mention that clock speed in the article when referring to early engineering samples. Even the test before this one had zen running at 3 ghz and the to the dismay of many that test also lowered the i7 6900k down to 3ghz as well to show clock for clock performance. Yesterdays demo was the first time AMD exceeded the 3ghz mark in public I am aware of and Intel's chip was running full stock speeds. Regardless things look very hopeful for AMD and rather dim for Intel if this all ends up being more then just cherry picked results. It's a good time to be needing an upgrade in the next year 😉

 

[rhysiam]

No not quite. The clock speed was not 2.8ghz it was 3.4ghz with precision boost running so in fact AMD had the higher clock with less wattage which in my opinion is even more impressive then what you misstated. The 2.8GHZ number you pulled was from early engineering sample not the testing done yesterday. Though in your defense tom's did mention that clock speed in the article when referring to early engineering samples. Even the test before this one had zen running at 3 ghz and the to the dismay of many that test also lowered the i7 6900k down to 3ghz as well to show clock for clock performance. Yesterdays demo was the first time AMD exceeded the 3ghz mark in public I am aware of and Intel's chip was running full stock speeds. Regardless things look very hopeful for AMD and rather dim for Intel if this all ends up being more then just cherry picked results. It's a good time to be needing an upgrade in the next year 😉

See my post above. Anandtech reported on the power draw. Apparently Ryzen was within a few watts of the 6900K system under the handbrake load. That's still great, but it's nothing like the 95W vs 140W efficiency values people have been throwing around.

 

[atomicWAR]

No not quite. The clock speed was not 2.8ghz it was 3.4ghz with precision boost running so in fact AMD had the higher clock with less wattage which in my opinion is even more impressive then what you misstated. The 2.8GHZ number you pulled was from early engineering sample not the testing done yesterday. Though in your defense tom's did mention that clock speed in the article when referring to early engineering samples. Even the test before this one had zen running at 3 ghz and the to the dismay of many that test also lowered the i7 6900k down to 3ghz as well to show clock for clock performance. Yesterdays demo was the first time AMD exceeded the 3ghz mark in public I am aware of and Intel's chip was running full stock speeds. Regardless things look very hopeful for AMD and rather dim for Intel if this all ends up being more then just cherry picked results. It's a good time to be needing an upgrade in the next year 😉

See my post above. Anandtech reported on the power draw. Apparently Ryzen was within a few watts of the 6900K system under the handbrake load. That's still great, but it's nothing like the 95W vs 140W efficiency values people have been throwing around.

I was aware of your post and anandtech's both. I just wasn't getting drawn in by one test because even anadtech said AMD were meeting their power requirements. I will be interested to see after a hard launch how correct or not the 95w TDP really is.