In our last post, we talked about Intel’s dominance of the CPU market, and how that might be coming to an end. Here’s we’ll elaborate on AMD’s first all-new CPUs in about 5 years. They’re branding their new chips as ‘Ryzen’, and releasing three very high-performance products under this product line.
AMD Ryzen 7 1800X (US$499) VS Intel Core i7-6900K (US$1089)
This is AMD’s flagship. The demos they’ve shown prove that it’s faster than Intel’s flagship, but it costs less than half of what Intel is charging. If you take a closer look at the statistics, AMD’s chip isn’t actually better than Intel’s based on instruction per clock. Instead, they rely on a higher clock speed of 4.0Ghz to beat the Intel chip.
AMD Ryzen 7 1700X (US$399) VS Intel Core i7-6800K (US$434)
This may not be the best chip in the Ryzen lineup, but it’s still 4% faster than the i7-6900K in Cinebench! AMD is placing directly against Intel’s i7-6800K Broadwell-E processor and not only are they pricing it US$35 cheaper, but they’re also claiming it’ll be 39% faster at multi-threaded workloads.
AMD Ryzen 7 1700 (US$329) VS Intel Core i7-7700K (US$339)
While it may not be that much cheaper than the Core i7-7700K, this AMD chip still has a few aces up its sleeve. Firstly, it’s a true 8-core, 16-thread chip (the i7-7700K is a 4-core, 8-thread chip). Secondly, on tests like Cinebench, the Ryzen 7 1700 scored 46% higher than Intel’s chip. Plus, its 65-watt TDP makes it the most power-efficient 8-core in the market.
AMD is being smart about Ryzen. Rather than releasing all of their proposed products, they’re starting with the high-end, ultra premium stuff in the Ryzen 7 category. In a couple of months, we should see Core i5 competitors from the Ryzen 5 family, as well as Ryzen 3 products by the end of the year.
