AMD Ryzen To Challenge Intel

Finally, the much anticipated big day has arrived and AMD's first set of Ryzen CPU's are on the market- details in AMD's press release here and includes the following extract "Starting today there are three 8-core Ryzen 7 models available. Beginning in Q2 AMD expects to launch 6- and 4-core Ryzen 5 processors followed later this year by Ryzen 3, which is designed to bring more performance to mainstream applications. All Ryzen processors support the new AM4 infrastructure, with motherboard designs available from top ODMs." As expected, there has been a plethora of reviews - and the they reflect a wide variety of perspectives, opinions & predictions. You can find Tom's Hardware review here, and their summary states "AMD's Ryzen 7 launch represents more than just a new CPU family. For most of our readers, it signals the return of competition to the enthusiast-oriented processor market. And considering the flagship 1800X’s potent cost advantage compared to Intel's Core i7-6900K, the competitor AMD singled out months ago, Ryzen 7 does deliver. It's just not as universally superior as the company wanted everyone to believe." Anandtech's review can be found here and here's an extract from their conclusion section "Price for Performance is still one of AMD's strong points. For the multitude of tests where that $499 1800X is able to match or beat a $1049 i7-6900K, it directly translates to a 2x in price/performance. Intel still has the plus on the ecosystem and chipset, but the argument is around how many users actually do what that extra IO." PCGamer's review can be found here which includes this extract from their summary "With the huge strides in performance relative to the archaic (in CPU terms) FX-8370 Vishera chip, I expected Ryzen to achieve parity with Intel's X99 processors. It gets there in the CPU-centric tests, but falls well short on gaming performance. And I don't really have a good explanation, other than the feeling I keep getting that Ryzen was pushed out the door before it was truly ready." Another extract from their summary sections states that "For non-gaming use, it's a very different story. Professional and high-end applications like video and image editing can definitely benefit from additional CPU cores, and in the right application like Blender or Adobe Premiere, Ryzen blows away Intel's mainstream parts, and in many cases outperforms even the X99 CPUs. What's more, it does so at significantly lower prices."

Looking across the broad spectrum of reviews, the vast majority are complimentary of what AMD has accomplished with Ryzen. However, there is a general consensus that there are some issues to be working out on the gaming front. According to PCPerspective, AMD has responded to those concerns, details here. According to this article, John Taylor, AMD CVP of Marketing made the following statements:

“As we presented at Ryzen Tech Day, we are supporting 300 developer kits with game development studios to optimize current and future game releases for the all-new Ryzen CPU. We are on track for 1000 developer systems in 2017. For example, Bethesda at GDC yesterday announced its strategic relationship with AMD to optimize for Ryzen CPUs, primarily through Vulkan low-level API optimizations, for a new generation of games, DLC and VR experiences.

Oxide Games also provided a public statement today on the significant performance uplift observed when optimizing for the 8-core, 16-thread Ryzen 7 CPU design – optimizations not yet reflected in Ashes of the Singularity benchmarking. Creative Assembly, developers of the Total War series, made a similar statement today related to upcoming Ryzen optimizations.

CPU benchmarking deficits to the competition in certain games at 1080p resolution can be attributed to the development and optimization of the game uniquely to Intel platforms – until now. Even without optimizations in place, Ryzen delivers high, smooth frame rates on all “CPU-bound” games, as well as overall smooth frame rates and great experiences in GPU-bound gaming and VR. With developers taking advantage of Ryzen architecture and the extra cores and threads, we expect benchmarks to only get better, and enable Ryzen excel at next generation gaming experiences as well.

Game performance will be optimized for Ryzen and continue to improve from at-launch frame rate scores.” John Taylor, AMD

All of these reviews & press releases server to underscore a very important point- winning against Intel in the CPU market isn't just about having a competitive product, it's also about enabling the ecosystem. With it's long-established technology lead (at least up to now) and far deeper pockets, Intel clearly has the upper hand in this regard. However, there is a genuine hunger out there for greater competition in the marketplace- and that's just what AMD appears to be on the cusp of delivering in the coming quarters. Another critical success factor at play here is pricing. According to multiple reports e.g. here and here. This latter report from Fudzilla claims that .. " According to Hot Hardware,Intel appears to be starting to counter the new chip, even before it has been released. At Micro Center we've seen the six-core Intel Core i7-6850K (3.60GHz) drop from $700 to $550, and the i7-6800K (3.40GHz) drop down to $360, from $500. In the mid-range, the i7-6700K, a 4.0GHz chip has dropped from $400 to $260, and the 3.50GHz quad-core i5-6600K has dropped from $270 to $180. The Kaby Lake-based i7-7700K has dropped, from $380 to $299. Amazon and NewEgg have them at $349. Amazon is being a little slow at cutting prices but this is expected to change once Ryzen hits the shops"

Assuming these reports are accurate, it would not be an unexpected response from Intel. There is little doubt that Ryzen has heralded a new era of competition that will slowly but surely challenge Intel's market share dominance- and even worse- ASP's and margins. For now, that challenge is aimed squarely at the desktop but the focus will soon shift to the server & datacenter with the launch of the Ryzen server CPU part, codenamed Naples in Q2.