So, appreciating this is a best-case multi-threaded scenario, you can see that AMD offers the same kind of performance as Intel’s high-end desktop chips at a fraction of the price. After years of struggling to match Intel in even the mid-range segment, Ryzen promises to challenge Intel’s strangle-hold of the desktop market like never before. Over at a Ryzen event in California AMDs CEO Lisa Su made several announcements that we can now share with you.
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AMD will launch the 8-core, 16-thread Ryzen 7 1800X, Ryzen 7 1700X, and Ryzen 7 1700 – which are created to bring innovation and choice back to the enthusiast PC market and include the world’s highest performing, and lowest powered 8-core desktop PC processors. Both Intel chips have a 140W TDP.
The Ryzen family will come in multiple flavors, but the high-end Ryzen 7 is shipping first.
Earlier today, AMD took the wraps off their Ryzen 7 line of CPUs, giving us specifications, pricing, and a sneak peek at performance. 1800X is now the fastest eight-core processor in the market. This may not seem much of a price difference as compared to the Intel 7th generation Kaby Lake Core i7 7700K but looking at the price to performance it is making a statement on its own.
The Ryzen 1800X is the next CPU up the chain and it can be boosted from 3.6Ghz to 4Ghz. AMD R 5 1600x is one among them and will cost about $259, as per Forbes report. It also has a more modest 3.0GHz base clock speed and 3.7GHz boost speed. AMD has said that Ryzen processor will challenge the Intel Core i7 and the Core i5 processors and will target the users and video who seek powerful computers. This chip rivals Core i7-6800K which costs $425 but AMD’s chip performs 39% better in benchmarks and costs only $399.
The $329 Ryzen 7 1700, on the other hand, is positioned against the Core i7-7700K. Pre-orders for the new Ryzen processors begin today. Keep in mind, however, with these chips, AMD finally makes the move to DDR4, so you can not use your aging DDR3 sticks here.
The new processors are available for preorder now, and will ship on March 2nd. Instead, AMD ended up with 52% more instructions per cycle.
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PC CPU market share having been in a steady decline for most of this decade, and with the company having largely ceded numerous most lucrative segments of the market to Intel (INTC) in recent years, it’s hard to blame many industry observers for taking a wait-and-see approach to how AMD’s new Ryzen CPUs are received, in spite of impressive early claims. AMD had nothing to compete with Intel for 10 years; that’s longer than the iPhone’s been around for.
