Intel should be very worried about AMD's Ryzen 7 processors

SoDiMm · 06 Mar 2017

I'm kinda disappointed with Ryzen.

On one hand, they've really improved upon their architecture since Bulldozer. They've also (hopefully) kicked Intel into offering CPUs with higher core count.

On the other hand, the clock speeds/pricing tiers of these new CPUs are pretty dismal. None of these CPUs appear to like going much beyond 4.0GHz. Polaris based GPUs also based on GF's 14nm process also seem to have a problem getting up there in clock speeds. Intel has a very real advantage in clock speed and AMD's continued IPC deficit vs. Intel's current generation Kaby lake. AMD could've been helped in this regard if GF had a decent 14nm process that yeiled better performing silicon.

Then there is pricing. On the surface, $500 vs. Intel's $1000 sounds like a great deal. The problem is as Gamer's Nexus outlined, some of the workloads AMD is touting would normally be offloaded to a much more efficient GPU. When you factor in that work being done by the GPU, why not save $200, and get an i7? Only If you're running VM's or have a crap ton of applications running simultaneously, does Ryzen begin to make sense.

Hopefully, AMD can make improvements to the clock speed/IPC in upcoming revisions. Intel is ahead in everything but core count/price and I bet is won't be long before that's a non issue.

yu gnomi · 06 Mar 2017

All AMD has released so far are the R7 chips, which I think are meant to compete with Intel's big ticket "enthusiast" processors. Some time soon (I don't know when), they will release R5 and R3 chips which will compete against Intel's dual and quad core consumer desktop processors. I would expect them to be along the lines of 90% of the benchmark performance for half the price of the CPUs, which AMD wants you to compare them to.

sygnus21 · 06 Mar 2017

vram said:

Then there is pricing. On the surface, $500 vs. Intel's $1000 sounds like a great deal. The problem is as Gamer's Nexus outlined, some of the workloads AMD is touting would normally be offloaded to a much more efficient GPU. When you factor in that work being done by the GPU, why not save $200, and get an i7?

This is like the shiny new car we all wanted and drooled over. Once you got it, you realized the insides were failing badly.

This is how I see AMD's R7 Ryzen chips.... "hey y'all, we got 8 cores for half the price of Intel. Gaming? We got 8-Cores!!!"

Cliff S · 07 Mar 2017

CountMike · 07 Mar 2017

Ugh, wow, couple of overclocked 1080Ti and processor never hits above 50%. That just means that game engines are not ready for newest generations of top processors.

essenbe · 07 Mar 2017

No Mike, those are not 1080 TI's, they are a generation old Titan on the older Maxwell architecture. They are not the newer Pascal architecture. Still, they are no slouches, but there are faster cards he could have tested with. Also, more cores don't help in gaming because games won't use all of them. Gamers have always said the GPU is much more important than the CPU. That was a positive video of Ryzen.

CountMike · 07 Mar 2017

essenbe said:

No Mike, those are not 1080 TI's, they are a generation old Titan on the older Maxwell architecture. They are not the newer Pascal architecture. Still, they are no slouches, but there are faster cards he could have tested with. Also, more cores don't help in gaming because games won't use all of them. Gamers have always said the GPU is much more important than the CPU. That was a positive video of Ryzen.

Right, anyway, it looks like processor is not utilized enough and R5 1600 would be better (cheaper) choice.

SoDiMm · 07 Mar 2017

If you watch the video, the GPU is consistently @ 100% utilization. While the CPU may be underutilized, it's having no trouble keeping the GPU fed. This is a good thing. It means there is plenty of potential for the CPU in the future as games become more complex.

You don't want a pegged CPU while gaming. That will cause stuttering and other problems because Windows has other things going on in the background. If you CPU is maxed out, it won't have any resources left to deal with anything else.

CountMike · 07 Mar 2017

vram said:

If you watch the video, the GPU is consistently @ 100% utilization. While the CPU may be underutilized, it's having no trouble keeping the GPU fed. This is a good thing. It means there is plenty of potential for the CPU in the future as games become more complex.

You don't want a pegged CPU while gaming. That will cause stuttering and other problems because Windows has other things going on in the background. If you CPU is maxed out, it won't have any resources left to deal with anything else.

Pegged no, but that also means it's not bottlenecking even two good GPUs and developers could offload more work from GPU to CPU which Dx12 should help to do. That was one of selling points for Dx12.

SoDiMm · 07 Mar 2017

I think DX12 is actually about moving more work directly to the GPU and bypassing the CPU.