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AMD Ryzen goes on sale March 2.
They're available for pre-order today. I'd like to recommend that you don't. Wait for reviews, as there will be plenty of cards later. Of course, I'd say about the same about pre-ordering games, and a lot of people don't listen to that, either.
AMD has released benchmarks showing a Ryzen R7 1800X beating an Intel Core i7-6900K by 9% in multi-threaded Cinebench and tying it in single-threaded Cinebench. That's a benchmark commonly used in CPU reviews, so it's not like AMD conjured up an extreme corner case. But it's also not the only such benchmark, and shenanigans to cripple hardware are also possible. Still, AMD is claiming a 52% IPC gain over Excavator, as compared to previous promises of 40%.
AMD has released benchmarks showing a Ryzen R7 1800X beating an Intel Core i7-6900K by 9% in multi-threaded Cinebench and tying it in single-threaded Cinebench. That's a benchmark commonly used in CPU reviews, so it's not like AMD conjured up an extreme corner case. But it's also not the only such benchmark, and shenanigans to cripple hardware are also possible. Still, AMD is claiming a 52% IPC gain over Excavator, as compared to previous promises of 40%.
Comments
I am currently using a Xi3 Z3Pro PC for streaming music (it has a 12 watt AMD 64 bit dual core processor). I am currently running Daphile on it and works flawless (Daphile only works on X86 processors).
GL to AMD!!
The world is going to the dogs, which is just how I planned it!
Intel's server division, on the other hand, should be very afraid. It's not just that they'll have serious competition in the x86 server market for the first time in years. It's that Zen's superior performance per watt and good enough IPC will make Naples the superior option for a whole host of server workloads. Not all server workloads or anywhere near it, mind you, but a whole lot of them.
I'm not quite willing to make a prediction about laptops, as that depends tremendously on how low Zen's power consumption can go at idle. If Zen can match or beat Kaby Lake there, then when combined with AMD's far superior GPUs, Raven Ridge will leave Intel as the inferior budget option in laptops all up and down the lineup.
If not, then whether Raven Ridge or Kaby Lake is better for a consumer laptop will mostly be a question of how much you care about battery life. Yes, I'm assuming that Raven Ridge will have a better GPU than Kaby Lake, but this is like predicting that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow. Once Raven Ridge arrives, Kaby Lake will be completely ridiculous for people who want a budget gaming laptop and don't need very much battery life.
The world is going to the dogs, which is just how I planned it!
Now if the chips perform like the 3930k then we have a problem.
I think AMD learned a lesson before and is testing, testing, testing.
Take the article with appropriate caution - there are some retailers showing Intel price cuts. Despite the title of the article, it hasn't been confirmed yet if this is just retailer reaction to free up shelf space (which is entirely typical, and means the price cut is just temporary until inventory levels get down to where retailers want), or if Intel actually cut the price of their silicon (which would be unusual, but would mean the price cut is more permanent in nature).
It appears to be bigger than the typical Microcenter deal, but I don't have anything to back that up because I don't know what the prices were before this article hit. Maybe Microcenter has always cut that much and it just sucks that I'm no where near one. But I would think if an i7 6600K was going for $140 under MSRP routinely, I probably would have heard a lot more about it before this.
For example, the Core i7-6850K. Intel says it's $617-$628:
http://ark.intel.com/products/94188/Intel-Core-i7-6850K-Processor-15M-Cache-up-to-3_80-GHz
A launch day review says $617:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-core-i7-broadwell-e-6950x-6900k-6850k-6800k,4587.html
Micro Center is charging $550. That's a $67-$78 discount, or a little over 10%. The article says it's a $150 discount.
Then there's the Core i7-6800K. Intel says it's $434-$441:
http://ark.intel.com/products/94189/Intel-Core-i7-6800K-Processor-15M-Cache-up-to-3_60-GHz
A launch day review (same Tom's Hardware link as above) says $434. Micro Center is charging $359. Subtraction says that's a discount of $75-$82, or about 16% or so. The article says it's a discount of $140.
Go straight down the list and there's a ton of that. There are some older parts like Haswell and such that genuinely have seen discounts, but those probably happened quite a while ago.
Word is Intel is already planning price cuts.
They already have cut prices but not enough.