> Yes, you can go really low cost if all you care is theoretical performance / $. Yes that's a fact, and if you're trying to evaluate a solution based on perfo

> Yes, you can go really low cost if all you care is theoretical performance / $. Yes that's a fact, and if you're trying to evaluate a solution based on performance/$ then the comparison is made with regards to this factor, and not others. > In practice, the cost efficiency of the system should be seen as 1 / (time to solution for typical applications) / (cost of ownership per year). If you believe that criteria is relevant then you should know that Ryzen's advertised TDP is around 95W while some Opteron 61XX processors have a TDP of 85W. > Furthermore, the biggest news for me regarding Ryzen is what they're doing with APUs. Affordable APUs with unified memory supporting HBM (stacked memory) could be a game changer. For 40$ you can buy 4 opterons with 12 cores each. This means that for less than 1000$ you can put together a 48-core system that supports up to 512 GB of RAM. For around 500$, anyone can put together a 24-core system that also supports a couple of GPUs. Anyone that cares about HPC on a budget knows quite well that used Opterons is where the optimal price/performance ratio can be found, particularly as Opterons already out-perform Xeons in BLAS-based work.