For a long time AMD has been promising a 40% IPC improvement with Ryzen, today they delivered 52%. Better yet the highest end Ryzen 7 1800X beats Intel’s Core i7 6900K by a bit at less than half the price.
The die shot of a Ryzen core
SemiAccurate was expecting a CPU that ran neck and neck with Intel’s best, the ‘big’ socket Broadwell-E CPUs. During the Sonoma even there were enough hints that a pre-production stepping Ryzen with some key features not working yet, notably turbo, would put up a pretty solid fight against the 6900K It was obvious that a final stepping device with newer firmware would give the best Intel 8C CPU a run for the money.
Cinebench shows beating per dollar clearly
Today AMD delivered that part and it lived up to expectations. Only one benchmark, Cinebench, was disclosed today where it beat Intel’s best 8-core CPU by 9% in multi-threaded tests. More interesting is the single threaded test where it tied the 6900K exactly which lends credence to AMD’s IPC claims. Better yet the cost of Ryzen 7 1800X, $499 v Intel’s i7 6900K’s $1050, is less than half of the competition. Can you say trouncing?
Cinebench may be seen as a non-representative benchmark for some but SemiAccurate is confident that Ryzen’s performance will hold up across a wide range of benchmarks. This last bit may explain why Intel PR sent out a last-minute “call us before you write” email to most of the press, but not SemiAccurate, after hours last night. You could infer that they are suddenly really worried about something. In case we read that wrong, they should be.
Three Ryzen 7 SKUs
Today there are three Ryzen 7 CPUs available, the 1800X, 1700X, and 1700, all 8C16T devices, and all are significantly cheaper than their Intel counterparts. More interesting is that the TDPs for Ryzen are significantly lower than Intel’s, 95W vs 140W and 65W vs 91W for the 1700X vs the Intel 7700K. On that last one AMD had a sizable 46% advantage on Cinebench but it was a case of 8C vs Intel’s 4C, price differences not withstanding. For “Recorded Idle Wall Power”, the AMD 8C systems had an ~50% power advantage over Intel’s 8C systems while the 7700K 4C had a 25%, 10W, power advantage over AMD’s 8C 1700.
In the end Cinebench is not representative of much for most potential buyers. In Sonoma AMD showed off some games and Ryzen was really close to Intel’s 6900K while using less energy. We are confident AMD is in the right ballpark but time will tell. Better yet AMD is significantly cheaper than their Intel counterparts, 50%+ at the high-end, and are available for pre-orders as of right now. AMD is claiming 82+ motherboards at launch and 91 system builders at launch with ~200 expected in Q1. Cheaper, more efficient, and probably neck and neck with the best Intel has to offer. Looks like AMD is back.S|A
Charlie Demerjian
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