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AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed
- Symmetry 10y agoI'm optimistically looking forward until the independent benchmarks on March 2nd.
- arielweisberg 10y agoAgreed. I really want to know how having two memory channels is going to play out for memory intensive workloads like in-memory databases and caches. I've been wanting something wider to play with at home for a long time, but the AMD parts are slow, and the Intel parts are expensive and have expensive motherboards. I guess I don't want it that bad.
- rasz_pl 10y agoIntel motherboards are super cheap, the trick is to ignore the sucker options.
- arielweisberg 10y agoHave you priced an LGA-2011v3 board recently? The cheapest board on Newegg is 125$ for a refurb. To my knowledge you can't get >4 cores with Intel without stepping up LGA-2011v3 or similar. The quad-channel boards genuinely cost more to manufacture. It's not clear how much more because almost all of them are intended as server or enthusiast boards and have other things driving up the cost. If Intel marketed LGA-2011v3 as a mainstream option then I think it might be reasonable, but I really can't tell.
- kogepathic 10y agoThe NDA on benchmarks is supposedly set to expire on February 28. [0] Not sure why this PC World article is coming up now. There have already been many stories on Ryzen pricing and the release date of March 2 has been known for several days now... [1] Product lauch video [2] [0] http://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-reviews-live-february-28th-testers-receiving-samples/ http://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-reviews-live-february-28th-tes... [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/5urylu/when_does_amd_ryzen_benchmark_nda_lift/ https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/5urylu/when_does_... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v44wWAOHn8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v44wWAOHn8
- bryanlarsen 10y agoIt was known, but not official until now. Also, preorders are now live. [0] http://ir.amd.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=74093&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=2248241 http://ir.amd.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=74093&p=irol-newsArticle&I...
- sp332 10y agoThat's funny, Ars Technica says reviews won't be out until launch day. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/amd-ryzen-arrives-march-2-8-cores-16-threads-from-just-329/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/amd-r...
- youdontknowtho 10y agoReally looking forward to this, and I'm glad that AMD's management no longer seems to be on the pipe. Even if the real world perf is close to the $1K Intel chips it will be a win. It's going to force price cuts from Intel and hopefully spark some competition again.
- slantyyz 10y agoIt would be interesting if Apple used these chips in upcoming Mac desktops. I'm guessing that adopting these lower priced chips without lowering prices would have a negligible impact on sales for Apple if the performance is as good as AMD claims.
- edko 10y agoIt would be nice. However, would they be able to still keep Thunderbolt?
- samcat116 10y agoThey would have to license it from Intel. Which I bet Intel wouldn't really want to do.
- qmarchi 10y agoConsidering that AMD Graphics Cards can be used behind the Thunderbolt interface I wouldn't be surprised. (XConnect) If I remember correctly, you'd have to get permission to add Thunderbolt support into drivers....
- sp332 10y agoThe standard chipsets do have support for USB 3.1 Gen 2. But mixing in support for DisplayPort would require either a custom chipset (which Apple may be able to do but might not be as cheap), or wait until a Zen-based APU comes out.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- gnipgnip 10y agoI wish people benchmark GEMM performance for all of us math folk.
- deepnotderp 10y agoIirc gemm and float performance isn't very good, since amd made a decision to reduce math performance in order to decrease latency.
- gcp 10y agoIt's not so much reduced math performance (it's twice faster than Bulldozer!), it's that Intel chips as of Haswell have dual 256-bit FPUs per core. If you use them, the Intel chips downclock (sometimes severely) in order not to violate their TDP, but the dual FPUs are still there, and it's still a win for GEMM. I can see why AMD didn't follow along here, but it could be a factor in some small spaces - when you need GEMM but can't use a GPU. Note that Ryzen can split its 256-bit FPU into two 128-bit units, so on code that's not using AVX, it's completely on par with Intel.
- deepnotderp 10y agoWow, who uses 256-bit floats?
- jsheard 10y agoIt doesn't handle 256-bit floats, in this context 256-bit means it can operate on eight 32-bit floats or four 64-bit floats at the same time.
- deepnotderp 10y agoAh, that's what I thought, I was so surprised when i thought you said they had a 256 bit fpu XD I'm dumb. It's interesting that power consumption increases with avx instructions. Do you happen to have a link?
- mrb 10y agoFirst (amateur) third-party benchmarks confirm a ~$350 Ryzen beats $1000 Intel processors in CPUMARK, 3DMark Fire Strike Physics, Cinebench: https://www.chiphell.com/thread-1706915-1-1.html https://www.chiphell.com/thread-1706915-1-1.html AMD had said for years their Zen goal was a 40% IPC gain over their previous microarchitecture, but they ended up with a 52% gain: http://www.anandtech.com/show/11143/amd-launch-ryzen-52-more-ipc-eight-cores-for-under-330-preorder-today-on-sale-march-2nd http://www.anandtech.com/show/11143/amd-launch-ryzen-52-more... Today's launch event by AMD's CEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v44wWAOHn8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v44wWAOHn8
- Asooka 10y agoI'm a bit dubious. If they have such an amazing part why is it being sold for so cheap? Why not 80% of the price of the comparable Intel part? Selling it at 50% or even less raises some heavy alarm bells for me.
- snovv_crash 10y agoProbably because of their contract with GlobalFoundries which requires them to pay penalties if they don't move a specific volume.
- masklinn 10y ago> If they have such an amazing part why is it being sold for so cheap? Because they get exploded in single-threaded performances, so they have to pit their 8-core parts against Intel's 4 cores. The 1700X will be competing against the $350 7700K more than the $1100 6900K (which incidentally is a Broadwell-E part not a Skylake part despite de 6 prefix)
- dstaley 10y agoThe linked benchmarks are putting the $350 1700X about on par with the $1100 6900K when it comes to both single-threaded and multi-threaded performance. Both of those processors are 8-core/16-thread chips. Also the 1700K is a 95W TDP compared to the 6900K's 140W TDP.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mtgx 10y agoJim Keller deserves a frigging statue in front of the AMD HQ, if he doesn't have one there already. I'm not even kidding. His efforts shouldn't be easily forgotten, and it could serve to inspire new generations of AMD engineers. Beyond the product quality itself, I think AMD has had a pretty smart launch strategy by releasing the CPU chips first to show that it can beat "Intel's best". But they really need to start focusing on notebooks ASAP. That's where they can steal most of the market from Intel, especially now that Intel is showing signs of (slowly) abandoning the notebook market, by prioritizing Xeons over notebook checks for its new node generations. AMD should prioritize notebook chips either next year or the one after that, at the latest. They should be making the notebook chips first, before the PC ones. They need that market share and awareness in the consumer market. In terms of how they should compete against Intel in the notebook market, I would do it like this (at the very least - AMD could do it even better, if it can): vs Celeron: 2 Ryzen cores with SMT disabled vs Pentium: 2 Ryzen cores with SMT enabled vs Core i3: 4 Ryzen cores with SMT disabled. Or keep SMT and lower clock speeds, as Intel did it. This may help further push consumers as well as developers towards using "more cores/threads". vs Core i5 (dual core): 4 cores with SMT enabled vs Core i5 (quad core/no HT): 4 cores with SMT enabled + higher clocks and better pricing. Maybe even 6-core with HT, if AMD goes the 6-core route. I honestly don't even know why Intel decided to make "Core i5" a quad-core chip as well, and its Core i7 a dual-core chip as well. It's so damn confusing - but maybe that was the goal. For differentiation's sake, it may be better for AMD to have a 6-core at this level or maybe even an 8 core with SMT disabled - so same thing as Intel, but with twice the physical cores. I don't know why but for some reason 6-cores don't attract me much. It feels like an "incomplete" chip. vs Core i7 (quad core/HT): 8 cores with SMT enabled The guiding principle for this strategy should be "twice the cores or threads with competitive/better single-thread performance, and competitive/better pricing). In a way it would be the inverse of the PC strategy where they maintain the number of cores but cut the price in half. This would mainly focus on doubling the number of cores (because notebooks come with so few in the first place), while maintaining similar or better pricing. The only ones that don't really fit well in this strategy are the Celeron and Pentium competitors and that's because a dual-core Ryzen, even at low clock speeds should destroy Intel's Atom-based Celeron and Pentium. We could be looking at a least +50% performance difference, and that's what AMD should strive for there as well. AMD should show Intel what a mistake it made when it tried to sell overpriced smartphone chips for laptop chip prices.
- tracker1 10y agoI just have to say, I really hope that this is real. AMD has burned a lot of trust a few times in overzealously stating performance marks in their prior generations of CPUs. I ran AMD for several years until the Core-2 came out from Intel (currently very happy with an i7-4790K). If these comparisons are real, my next build may be AMD again.
- Cyph0n 10y agoSeems like you skipped over the FX series (Bulldozer, I believe). I got a FX-8320 a few years back, and my brother got a FX-6300. Both are capable processors and are MUCH cheaper than their counterparts (i5 and i3, respectively). Heck, if I built a PC in the past year, I would have gone with a FX-8350 just because it's so damned cheap yet very performant. Once Zen is out, it's really a no-brainer for me.
- RussianCow 10y agoThe biggest problem with the FX series, IMO, was the deceptive marketing. The FX-8000 CPUs were marketed as being 8-core, when in reality every pair of cores shared an FPU and cache, so real-world performance was much closer to that of a quad-core for many workloads. Add on top of that the abysmal IPC (compared to Intel's offerings) and high power consumption, and there was very little reason to get an FX-8350 or similar over an i5. (Yes, today the FX CPUs are much cheaper, but when they came out they were barely so. I know because I got an FX-8350 as soon as it came out and regretted it.)
- Cyph0n 10y agoYeah, I would understand going for an i5 if the price difference was insignificant.
- mrb 10y agoI have to disagree with that. Most workloads (H.264 decoding/encoding, gaming, typical desktop software, etc) are ALU-bound not FPU-bound. So the FX series is generally beating Intel on the perf/$ metric, just because it is so darn inexpensive. In my experience a $100 FX CPU is as good as a $200 Intel CPU when doing H.264 encoding: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13172972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13172972 (However the FX series perf/watt is worse than Intel, I give you that.)
- nimos 10y agoI think the low TDPs have to be the scariest thing for Intel. Really interested to see what they can do in the 15-25W range for notebooks and their server stuff.
- rasz_pl 10y agoI have to wonder if the AMDs console win for the current generation gave them this badly needed R&D to reach decent TDP.
- redtuesday 10y agoHow so? The R&D budget is even lower than before AMD got the console deals. https://ycharts.com/companies/AMD/r_and_d_expense https://ycharts.com/companies/AMD/r_and_d_expense
- rasz_pl 10y agoIts still better than nothing. AMD management is dysfunctional, they treat engineering as a cost and were cutting it badly during K9-K10 era.
- arca_vorago 10y agoThis is really exciting, as I have been waiting to build a new system with the new AMD gear. Lots of people also don't hear about it, but I am super-excited to see the new server class CPU's. I built a quad opteron 6380 system and have been in love with them ever since, but they weren't perfect and had some issues I hope are fixed with this new line.
- adamnemecek 10y agoI can't think of a more spectacular comeback than AMD in the last year or so. They are positioned pretty well for the inevitable convergence of CPU and GPU. That CUDA crosscompiler was such a brilliant move.
- mtanski 10y agoIt's already in the works. https://www.overclock3d.net/news/cpu_mainboard/amd_reveals_a_exascale_mega_apu_in_a_new_academic_paper/1 https://www.overclock3d.net/news/cpu_mainboard/amd_reveals_a... CPU, GPU, HBM all on one package. That would be a game changer for building analytics databases. There's a bunch of GPU based databases out now but a lot of the benchmark numbers they give you rely on having the data cases in GPU RAM. Real world benchmarks that require moving data over PCIe are less generous.
- toxican 10y agoI'm far too broke to shell out cash for a new Mobo and CPU right now, but I'm excited to see what this does to Intel's prices for older CPUs. I'd love to upgrade my i5-2400 soon-ish.
- icefo 10y agoUnless you are regularly doing CPU intensive tasks you can probably stick with it a few more years. I noticed since I bought a SSD that most of time the hard drive is limiting the CPU. Until my DVD reader burned my desktop motherboard I was using a core2quad and it was still fast enough. No lag whatsoever. Now I'm using a laptop with the first gen I5 and I feel no need to upgrade it (I'm using it as a desktop battery life does sucks) I understand why PC sales drop every year. You just don't have to buy a new one unless yours die.
- some-guy 10y agoI bought an i7 desktop CPU from 2008 and have absolutely no inkling or reason to upgrade. I never thought I would be using the same CPU for almost 10 years, but here we are.
- toxican 10y agoIn terms of general use, yeah definitely no problem with the CPU at all. It's zippy enough. But I also do a lot of CPU-intensive gaming (Cities: Skylines w/ tons of mods, RimWorld, Banished, etc.).
- laura2013 10y agoevery time i look at AMD's stock price from last year to today i really wished i'd been wiser with my money. they've performed excellent and it's showing, this will likely be huge.
- crudbug 10y agoInteresting to see multi-core wars starting here. Intel did not do anything as a market leader, 8 years back I could still buy 4 core machine. Waiting to see, how AMD does on Server parts, 32 cores / 64 cores ? Power9 does 24 cores/ 96 threads.
- walrus01 10y agoI was highly skeptical when the first info about Ryzen came out. This is looking really promising versus the $300 to $400 price range Kaby Lake i7 (7700, 7700K) CPUs. And when comparing the 1700/1700X to the $200-250 price range i5-7600 Kaby Lake.
- Asdfbla 10y agoIf AMD makes a comeback, how did they do it? Not enough competition and Intel got complacent or what? Or did they just reach the limits and it's not possible anymore to keep the lead and prevent AMD from catching up?
- wmf 10y agoAMD's failure was mostly caused by (1) Intel's anticompetitive tactics starving them of revenue (2) Barcelona delayed many months by TLB bug and (3) clever yet bad Bulldozer design. All of these are now gone so AMD is back.
- hokkos 10y agoThey hired Jim Keller. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_(engineer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_(engineer)
- abandonliberty 10y agoThey actually have a history of this. They did it with Athlon too.
- rasz_pl 10y agoAMD has a history of having dysfunctional R&D: 386DX - copied Intel design verbatim (1:1 microcode). Got sued, won only because Intel had multiple source agreements with IBM. K6 - purchased NexGen. Designed 100% by outsiders. K7 - once again hired somebody else's engineers. This time almost whole DEC Alpha design team. K8 - DEC people had some more steam left in them. K9-Zen period - no more companies to take over and claim credit for their designs, add terrible management bleeding engineering talent while burning money on stupid ideas like Seamicro = in house garbage with 50% Intel IPC. Zen - finally managed to rehire competent ex DEC engineer Jim Keller after his successful career at Apple.
- walshemj 10y agoGood now Intel has some competition