Intel’s latest 10-core, high-end desktop (HEDT) chip – the Core i9-7900X – costs £900/$1000. That’s £500/$500 less than its predecessor, the i7-6950X. In previous years, such cost-cutting would have been regarded as generous. You might, at a stretch, even call it good value. But that was at a time when Intel’s monopoly on the CPU market was as its strongest, before a resurgent AMD lay waste to the idea that a chip with more than four cores be reserved for those with the fattest wallets.
[…]
AMD’s Ryzen is far from perfect. But when you can buy eight cores that serve even the heaviest of multitaskers and content creators for well under half the price of an Intel HEDT chip, i9 and X299 are a hard sell (except, perhaps, to fussy gamers that demand a no-compromises system).
The question is: Are you willing to pay a premium for the best performing silicon on the market? Or is Ryzen, gaming foibles and all, good enough?
I’ve said this countless times, but I want to keep bringing this one home: this is what competition does. It lowers prices, improves performance, and makes Intel looks like a stumbling fool. And what better day to celebrate the benefits of competition than today?
Cheers, America. Party safe!
The Core i9-7900X actually performs worse in games than the previous 6950X.
Hardware.fr has an extremely detailed analysis:
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/964-6/piledriver-zen-broadwell-e-sk…
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/964-18/jeux-3d-civilization-vi-tota…
Anandtech also mentions this and does not provide game benchmarks.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/11550/the-intel-skylakex-review-core-…
Edited 2017-07-04 23:09 UTC
I have been told that in England, July 4 is often celebrated as “Thanksgiving”.
For us brits, it’s more of a “Look at what you could have won” day
We don’t need Thanksgiving. The romans had pillaged and killed all the locals around 2000 years ago
Edited 2017-07-05 07:21 UTC
*removed for unnecessary snarkiness*
Edited 2017-07-05 14:10 UTC
It’s not really a loss for Intel if they no longer considered the PC market because they weren’t making profits out of it.
Good for AMD to still be around to take in the “leftovers”.
Main threat now for both Intel and AMD is that processing becomes more optimised for specialised chipsets which will not come only from Intel.
It’s no secret that nVidia has been working on accelerating AI with GPU computing models in mind for some time and the industry has reacted ok to this.
I think AMD is still in a better position at this point and their recent innovations prove they are on the right track and I’m hoping though that the pricing of GPU’s at least for the PC market will not sky rocket in future due to this.
Gaming is what is still keeping the PC community alive at this point.
For pretty much everything else there are alternatives out there.
AMD are due to release their next Ryzen iteration next month called Threadripper. If they are as good as rumoured then Intel really does have a fight on its hands.
In fact these releases from Intel look like a knee-jerk reaction to Threadripper, some unfinished projects released early to try and stem the tide so to speak!
Just going by the comments over on Ars Technica Intel is on the losing foot, specially regarding the pricing!
Someone needs to pay for Intel’s CEO salary.
I am not building / buying a rig any time soon, but if AMD can keep up with Intel’s performance, then I will buy AMD on principle.
I’m the same. My main PC is a first gen Core i7 920, it still serves what I need and I haven’t found anything that stresses it yet.
If I was going to build a new one though, it would definitely be AMD based. More or less the same power as, but half the price of Intel. It just shows how much price gouging Intel have/are doing!
I did just that.
My previous build is close to 10 years old (q6600) and now I just got a 1800x.
I waited since mid last year when the rumors about Ryzen started coming up and decided that I had enough of intel shenanigans and, on principle, went ahead with AMD.
As Thom mentioned, competition benefits everyone.
And your feedback? Does it keep up with online benchmarks? What about heat dissipation, power consumption and noise generation during broad usage?
It uses less power, puts out less heat than i9 chips, and the performance is about 75% of it, what’s there to ask? It also has a better platform encryption system.
Intel dropped the ball by artificially crippling their Skylake X or whatever they did to rush it without thinking things through.
I’ve been buying AMD on principle since I found out about Intel rigging benches and bribing OEMs over Netburst but honestly…I’m happy with my AMD FX-8320e.
I’ve got 8 cores that hit 4.2Ghz stock and if I ever run into a program that needs more speed this chip is trivial to reach 4.5Ghz on air. Not that I have ever needed the extra speed as most of the programs i run are either FOSS or come from countries where they don’t use ICC so I don’t have artificial crippling of my chip and without that crippling? It just flies. Even my games are running on average 90FPS with all the bling cranked and recording all my footage so I’m very happy and with a board that supports 32gb of RAM and triple CF? I honestly do not see myself maxxing this puppy out anytime soon.
Still I’m glad to see AMD end up on top again and growing by doing things the honest way and competing on the merits and when my AMD lappy is ready to be replaced? I’ll be sure to make it an AMD Ryzen based APU.
AMD’s platform encryption is private and local, a million times better than intel’s SGX solution that requires them to have an online database for authentication and business dealings with them. If I was in the business of secure virtualization, I would be making my ryzen order right now.
I’m also upgrading my 2008 core2quad build to a Ryzen 1600. Will be receiving the parts soon.
9 years, the pace has slowed down for sure even if I streched it.