Realistically, nobody should have expected Ryzen to be king of the hill when it comes to gaming. We know that Broadwell isn’t, after all; Intel’s Skylake and Kaby Lake parts both beat Broadwell in a wide range of games. This is the case even though Skylake and Kaby Lake are limited to fourcores and eightthreads; for many or most games, high IPC and high clock speeds are the key to top performance, and that’s precisely what Kaby Lake delivers.
In spite of this, reading the various reviews around the Web – and comment threads, tweets, and reddit posts – one gets the feeling that many were hoping or expecting Ryzen to somehow beat Intel across the board, and there’s a prevailing narrative that Ryzen is in some sense a bad gaming chip. But this argument is often paired with the claim that some kind of non-specific “optimization” is going to salvage the processor’s performance, that AMD fans just need to keep the faith for a few months, and that soon Ryzen’s full power will be revealed.
I’m just glad there’s finally competition in the desktop processor space again. Intel started to charge some outrageous prices these past few years, but if you wanted the best performance, you really didn’t have much of a choice.
With Ryzen, AMD is showing the world it’s back on track. It might not be there yet in every aspect, but it’s an amazingly promising start.
When the CPU you are comparing to is TWICE the price and the performance delta is usually only a few frames per second, no one but the “hardcore” gamers are going to care. Everyone else will buy the less expensive product (which is SUPERIOR in many situations!) and be happy.
Experience says that, even in the case of Ryzen being way better at gaming than the Intel chip, Intel will be able to sell more chips than AMD because of brand image.
It happened back when AMD Athlon was a way better option than the P4 Intel was making and *many* people just bought Intel because of brand image.
In any case, I am also very happy to see an AMD come-back. When things settle down I may build a nice Ryzen machine for myself. But then, focus won’t be on gaming, but rather a multicore beast with quite a lot of memory if possible. Being able to have several VM around without even caring seems just great :p.
This. For performance per buck, AMD wins hands down, but that doesn’t mean that Intel’s chips are bad. They’re just aimed at different markets. If you need the performance whatever the cost, then Intel is for you, if you’re budget conscious, go AMD
I don’t think It’ll be on the desktop where AMD wins the fight, i think that’s still going to be dominated by Intel, with only budget manufacturers switching to AMD. No, i believe AMD is aimed squarely at the datacentre and server market. I also think you’ll see Naples (AMD’s server chips) dominating the TOP500 soon
Except for gaming, which was mentioned elsewhere in the linked article. I’m not knocking Ryzen, it seems to me to be a shockingly good CPU from what I have seen so far. However, if you are a gamer and your measure of performance is how fast your games run, Intel wins hands down. A 7700k outperforms a Ryzen 1800x easily in almost every gaming benchmark and does it for $150 less…
Sure, if you have something that can really take advantage of 8 cores, $500 is a great deal compared to Intel’s 8 core CPUs ($1000+) – no argument. Thing is, very few games do that…
I’m just saying, if all you care about is gaming than Ryzen is actually NOT a great deal – it is slower, it cost more, and it has all the little teething issues that brand new platforms always have. Its still a good CPU, it will stomp a 7700k on lots of workloads, but gaming isn’t really one of them (yet).
I think you misunderstood the term “performance per buck”
i think you didn’t read (him/her) properly: “A 7700k outperforms a Ryzen 1800x easily in almost every gaming benchmark and does it for $150 less…”
cheaper & faster.
Edited 2017-03-19 13:06 UTC
Yeh, my bad, sorry.
Or you can get the Ryzen 1700 for about the same price (currently on sale at NewEgg for $330) and run it in Turbo mode.
Not entirely true. When you run games with > 1080p, game are bootlenecked by GPU, not CPU. So, if you gaming > 1080p, ryzen sure is competitive. And people that buy 7700K for gaming usually not gaming with < 1080p.
Consider the following.
AMD has yet to fully land all the Zen optimization in LLVM. Which is expected to have at least 5% performance difference.
Unreal Engine as well as all other Middleware Engine are working towards Zen Optimization.
Windows 10 getting some AMD update in future patches.
Lots of software using Open Sources Compiler such as LLVM and GCC will benefits. People are now, FULLY aware of using Intel ICC consequences, compared to AMD Athlon era.
We will get a small uArch update with Zen 2 next year on the same motherboard and same socket.
For the first time ever i couldn’t find any faults with AMD. I/O are great. Stability no longer an issues. Great Roadmap. And Price too!
Your experience may vary, but I have used many generations of AMD CPUs (K6/K7/K8) and IMO stability was never an issue. Well, some K6/K7 chipsets needed BIOS tweaking, some motherboards had bad caps, you had to be sure that your CPU cooling worked (esp fo K6), you had to use stable PSUs – but no problems with CPUs themselves.
My latest AMD workhorse was socket 939 ‘desktop’ Opteron with low power consumption (sorry, I can’t recall its model number) – it was extremely stable, performant and cool system.
Then came the Intel Core arhitecture… I seriously hope that AMD returns.
The problem isn’t their hardware, it is the lack of decent chipsets. Intel makes their own chipsets and that is what makes them superior in stability. Every time I have gone with an AMD build, I end up having weird issues, whether it was the MSI board that would randomly have the USB stop working until I pulled out the CMOS battery, or the memory sticks going bad twice in a year, but they worked well enough for the system to run for months then die.
They just seem to be buggy. If AMD could put out their own chipset that they fully tested themselves instead of relying on someone else, then I would probably go that route. Until then, it is Intel and Nvidia for me, regardless of who can squeeze out more FPS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_chipsets
AMD has been making their own chipsets for almost 20 years, and 3rd party AMD chipsets effectively died out over a decade ago. Every motherboard since then has contained an AMD chipset…
Has it really been that long since I had my AMD with an nVidia chipset?
The one with the memory dimm going bad issue I think was an AMD chipset now that I think about it (SB700 or something around there.)
Key reasons, majority of current PC games are optimized for Intel quad-core CPU. The gaming world is about to change because big gaming industries start to optimize for AMD hardware, some of them having experience from both Sony Playstation 4, Microsoft XBox One and soon Scorpio.
This year belongs to AMD.
I am considering my options. I am retired, I don’t have a business to use as a writeoff of a system purchase.
That said, what can I get for my $700 with either Vendor. I do want 16gigs ram.
So, configure a system for that amount of money. I will suggest I am less in favour of a pot warmer than a toaster (Ryzen 65Watts vs Intel 90Watts). I do not intend to do significant overclocking.
Lets see. Would a Ryzen 1600x be just right?
I have an AMD E-350 that runs just fine, mostly for office and development purpose, and it’s enough. Really. No use buying the latest overpowered product just for the sake of it.
AMD returned in the game (pun intended) with the Ryzen, but as an underdog yet already has filled several niches (pun intended) with its APU processors. And quite brilliantly.
AMD knows its job, but please keep in mind they do race the competition with pride with 10x times less revenues. And are still afloat despite not being in the business range.
I applause their incredible resilience, impeccable technological choices and achievements through time. I just want people to select the right technology according their needs.
And if people find Intel better, so be it.
http://www.diffen.com/difference/AMD_vs_Intel
http://realmoney.thestreet.com/articles/01/27/2017/intels-earnings-…
Edited 2017-03-19 19:07 UTC
I’d buy an Intel for the superior single-threaded performance (I’m always looking to see what new thing I can emulate), but only if I can spare the cash to run two machines with the Intel on the same quarantined subnet I use for my DOS/Win98 and WinXP retro-PCs).
As-is, when I can afford to upgrade my Athlon II X2 270, I’ll go for the best pre-PSP Opteron I can track down.
The Version 4.9 of Linux will have corrections in it for single and multi-processor management. That is the reason the AMDs were shown to be slightly slower than the more expensive Intel cpus. I am not going to argue about which is better performing in seconds to complete a job. My testing of AMD vs Intel in most cases until now was a result of waiting for diskio to complete. Dollar for dollar, AMD won hands down. The games that I play will still work, only better than my existing system.
The new Ryzen chips that I am considering are coming to market at 65watts tdc versus Intel’s 90watts. The I5s and I7s are toasters. I am not after a toaster that is a few percent faster. I have set my budget to $700, where I will reuse my case, power supply, DVD and SATA disks. I am after a mother board, cpu, graphics card and 16gigs of ddr4ram. I think my budget is reasonable.
Even though my current system is fast enough for my needs, it does not have usb3 support or sata3 support and is short of memory (by todays standards).
Considering that it will cost me more money to get ddr2 memory for my system, in lieu of DDR4 and as well, a faster wireless connection, I am staying with my decision to upgrade.
My current system has new power supply (old one failed) and fan replacements (also failures). I’m sure that it’s ok as a backup system. I actually hope to turn it into a ‘Headless server’ for a home network and for my retirement hobby.
Isatenstein,
You are right, the cost of DDR2 really went up. It seems manufacturers stopped making it and now it’s worth a premium compared to newer ram.
I upgraded my computer from 4 to 8GB ram because I wanted to run more VMs and it kept running out. I also had to get a new monitor since the old one died, but now I can’t play videos full screen because evidently my system struggles with the resolution. I’m not sure if a video card upgrade is in order or if should just ditch the whole rig for something new.
For better or worse, I upgrade my servers far more than my own PC, haha.
You’re from Montreal, eh? Is that where you are retiring? Years ago I applied to matrox out there (remember them?), Montreal is probably where I’d be now if I had got the job.
Depends on your need. I’ve purchased notebook from sandy bridge i5 and ivy bride i7 era with half of $700. Still perfectly usable. Just need to upgrade the mem to 16GB and put SSD on that.
It really depends on what you’re doing. For me right now, the choice boils down to:
1. Is this a mobile system (laptop or similar)? If yes, go with Intel, their computing power per watt of power consumption is still better than AMD’s right now.
2. Does it need to run large numbers of things in parallel? If yes, go with AMD. Note that this is where I would categorize development that doesn’t fall under point 1, 3, or 4 (for 3 and 4, try to match your target system).
3. Is it just going to be used for gaming? If yes, go with Intel (aside from the optimization issues, most games don’t really get all that much benefit from parallelization beyond about 4 threads of execution, but do benefit from some of the areas Intel excels at like cache performance).
4. Is it going to be only Light desktop usage? If yes, then go with an inexpensive mid-range Intel (i3 or i5) and invest more in a SSD and faster RAM so that the system overall runs smoother.
5. Is it a server system that doesn’t need insane (multi-hundred gigabytes) amounts of RAM? If yes, go with AMD (but wait for the Naples chips to come out if possible).
6. Is it a server system that needs insane amounts of RAM? If yes, get a recent Intel Xeon and wait out the full release of Intel’s Optane SSD’s.
That covers 95% of what most people would be doing, and if you don’t fall into one of those categories, you probably have a very specific use case and should do a real TCO analysis to determine what to get.
I’ve been following similar discussions in recent months. Was quite into hardware, processor (AMD vs. Intel vs. Cyrix) stuff and graphics (ATI, Voodoo etc.) in the old days but then other things took over – job and family are priority. So after more then a decade I decided to buy a new computer – this time, like in the old days, part by part.
First of all, when I started reading I couldn’t believe how ridiculous it all became. “Oh, my computer does 5 FPS more than yours.” “You should get i7 WHATEVER because you can overclock it and you can play WHATEVER GAME in buttshiny resolution.” “Only 16GB of ram is enough for multitasking.” What crap! And people are paying 1000 euros for a single graphics card?! It all seemed like I entered some crazy universe.
Every genius that cannot live without a 3000 euro computer should play games on 320×200 for half a year and then be the smartest a*** around and give lectures on how 4K is the only way to go. And saying that AMD sucks just because he doesn’t get 150fps on whatever game at max resolution is total bull****.
Reading such things makes me think the average IQ of a person using the computer and having an opinion about it fell considerably in recent decades, well bellow the typical number of lines in a terminal window.
Angelina Jolie does not look any nicer at 1080p than at 1024×768. Trust me: she looks good at ANY resolution and whith whatever processor. OK.
Edited 2017-03-20 10:54 UTC
Agreed. On this note, I hate to admit that I just recently bought a 1500 USD (about 1400 EUR) laptop (i7-7700HQ, 16G of DDR4-2400 RAM and a GTX 1060 with 3G of GDDR5) partly so I could get better performance in games (the other reason was to get a decent system with DDR4 and 8 threads, I run Gentoo when I’m not gaming, and it’s nice to be able to finish updates in a reasonable amount of time), but it’s an excellent example of this. I can get 120 FPS easily in most games I play on the highest quality settings at 1920×1080 (and some I can even get upside of 400 if nothing is happening), but unless I turn on vertical sync, the image is almost constantly tearing because the framerate is so much higher than the 60 Hz refresh rate on my display. On top of that though, the framerate is literally bandwidth limited by how fast the CPu can push data to the GPU, not how fast the GPU is. The moment I start something in the background that uses more than 1-2% of the CPU, the framerate drops proportionate to the load on the CPU. Buying the GTX 1070 or GTX 1080 version of this system would have resulted in near zero actual improvement except for single-tasking despite costing an extra 1500 or 500 USD respectively, unless I opted for upgrades elsewhere in the system (which in turn would have cost even more), since both issues would still be the case. The same goes for the 4K display version of the system, which was close to 1000 USD more than what I payed (partly because it required getting the GTX 1080).