Ryzen from the ashes

It has been nearly four years since Intel faced any sort of competition in the processor market and that seems to have led them to get extremely complacent. Well, not anymore. AMD, has literally taken the market by the scruff of the neck and turned it upside down. How? You may ask, and the answer to that is fairly straight forward, Ryzen.

Enter, AMD’s latest line up of desktop processors. Earlier this week, AMD announced the launch of their top of the line 8 core, 16 threads processor line, the Ryzen 7. Featuring three CPUs at various price points, all supporting DDR4 memory in a dual channel setup, the Ryzen 7 processors are set to take the gaming and enthusiast market by storm.

At the reveal show, AMD pit their three chips against their direct rivals from Intel in terms of price, and in each case bar one, the AMD chips came out miles ahead of the competition.

Let’s start with the cream of the Ryzen crop here, the 1800X. With a base clock of 3.6 Ghz and a boost of 4 Ghz, the Ryzen 1800X managed to match Intel’s 6900K in single core performance in Cinebench and beat it by 9 per cent in the multi-core rendering test. You might think that a 9 per cent better performance is nothing to write home about, but it so is when you consider that the 1800X will retail for less than half the price of the 6900K. Identical results were seen when the 1700X was compared to the i7 6800K, again the former being cheaper. The only result where the Intel chip came out in front was in the single core performance of the 1700, the lowest member of the elite R7 line up vs the i7 7700K. This is due to the fact that the i7 comes with a much higher base and boost clock compared to the 1700, which features base/boost clocks of 3/3.7 Ghz.

However, this shouldn’t matter given the price of the 1700, the fact that it too features eight cores and 16 threads and comes with AMD’s Extreme Frequency Range tech, which means that this chip can be easily overclocked.

AMD is launching Ryzen for retail on March 2, 2017. It is amazing to see the phoenix rise from the ashes, and shaking up the market with a product that looks set to dominate the market. The pricing set by AMD is not just competitive, it is disruptive and Intel needs to pull out a miracle from somewhere if they wish to stay relevant in the CPU market going forward. There are already rumours flying around of Intel dropping prices.