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AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed

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21–30 of 139 posts

Re: AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed

#21
Jim Keller deserves a frigging statue in front of the AMD HQ, if he doesn't have one there already. I'm not even kidding. His efforts shouldn't be easily forgotten, and it could serve to inspire new generations of AMD engineers.

Beyond the product quality itself, I think AMD has had a pretty smart launch strategy by releasing the CPU chips first to show that it can beat "Intel's best".

But they really need to start focusing on notebooks ASAP. That's where they can steal most of the market from Intel, especially now that Intel is showing signs of (slowly) abandoning the notebook market, by prioritizing Xeons over notebook checks for its new node generations.

AMD should prioritize notebook chips either next year or the one after that, at the latest. They should be making the notebook chips first, before the PC ones. They need that market share and awareness in the consumer market.

In terms of how they should compete against Intel in the notebook market, I would do it like this (at the very least - AMD could do it even better, if it can):

vs Celeron: 2 Ryzen cores with SMT disabled

vs Pentium: 2 Ryzen cores with SMT enabled

vs Core i3: 4 Ryzen cores with SMT disabled. Or keep SMT and lower clock speeds, as Intel did it. This may help further push consumers as well as developers towards using "more cores/threads".

vs Core i5 (dual core): 4 cores with SMT enabled

vs Core i5 (quad core/no HT): 4 cores with SMT enabled + higher clocks and better pricing. Maybe even 6-core with HT, if AMD goes the 6-core route. I honestly don't even know why Intel decided to make "Core i5" a quad-core chip as well, and its Core i7 a dual-core chip as well. It's so damn confusing - but maybe that was the goal. For differentiation's sake, it may be better for AMD to have a 6-core at this level or maybe even an 8 core with SMT disabled - so same thing as Intel, but with twice the physical cores. I don't know why but for some reason 6-cores don't attract me much. It feels like an "incomplete" chip.

vs Core i7 (quad core/HT): 8 cores with SMT enabled

The guiding principle for this strategy should be "twice the cores or threads with competitive/better single-thread performance, and competitive/better pricing).

In a way it would be the inverse of the PC strategy where they maintain the number of cores but cut the price in half. This would mainly focus on doubling the number of cores (because notebooks come with so few in the first place), while maintaining similar or better pricing.

The only ones that don't really fit well in this strategy are the Celeron and Pentium competitors and that's because a dual-core Ryzen, even at low clock speeds should destroy Intel's Atom-based Celeron and Pentium. We could be looking at a least +50% performance difference, and that's what AMD should strive for there as well. AMD should show Intel what a mistake it made when it tried to sell overpriced smartphone chips for laptop chip prices.

Re: AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed

#22
post #9

Really looking forward to this, and I'm glad that AMD's management no longer seems to be on the pipe. Even if the real world perf is close to the $1K Intel chips it will be a win. It's going to force price cuts from Intel and hopefully spark some competition again.

It would be interesting if Apple used these chips in upcoming Mac desktops. I'm guessing that adopting these lower priced chips without lowering prices would have a negligible impact on sales for Apple if the performance is as good as AMD claims.

I wonder what features are intel specific (like quicksync) that Apple is is using in MacOS

Re: AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed

#23

Really looking forward to this, and I'm glad that AMD's management no longer seems to be on the pipe. Even if the real world perf is close to the $1K Intel chips it will be a win. It's going to force price cuts from Intel and hopefully spark some competition again.

Agreed... upgraded to an i7-4790K about 2 years ago, and really, other than software (x265) video encoding, I've been extremely happy... getting a big boost in performance for about the same price (for the cpu) as I paid 2 years ago would make me relatively happy.

Now, just need a refresh on the GTX 1080, so that 4K gaming can be consistent at >= 60fps.

ASIDE: I've been using nvenc with vbr2 for h.265 with very good results (but about 10-15% larger than roughly equivalent x265).

Re: AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed

#24

Really looking forward to this, and I'm glad that AMD's management no longer seems to be on the pipe. Even if the real world perf is close to the $1K Intel chips it will be a win. It's going to force price cuts from Intel and hopefully spark some competition again.

I think the server chip (Naples, up to 32 cores!) based on Zen may have more impact than the desktop chip. The servers chips are a smaller market, but it's growing faster than desktop, and I assume has larger margins.

Depends, I suppose, on how much AMD chooses to undercut on pricing.

Re: AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed

#26
post #21

Jim Keller deserves a frigging statue in front of the AMD HQ, if he doesn't have one there already. I'm not even kidding. His efforts shouldn't be easily forgotten, and it could serve to inspire new generations of AMD engineers. Beyond the product quality itself, I think AMD has had a pretty smart launch strategy by releasing the CPU chips first to show that it can beat "Intel's best". But they really need to start f…

From what I recall of their recent marketing material, it seemed like like they are looking to corner the market on 64bit ARM servers and also have some hybrid amd64/ARM chip plans to help people wanting to take advantage of ARM in datacenters migrate.. but I'm no expert and this is based on a recollection of marketing materials from a few months back - 64bit arm could be a huge thing in large scale light-duty computing centers (e.g. web/cloud datacenters) because of the cooling/horizontal scale out and also mobile/IOT/industrial so this isn't quite as crazy as it sounds.

Re: AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed

#27
I just have to say, I really hope that this is real. AMD has burned a lot of trust a few times in overzealously stating performance marks in their prior generations of CPUs. I ran AMD for several years until the Core-2 came out from Intel (currently very happy with an i7-4790K).

If these comparisons are real, my next build may be AMD again.

Re: AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed

#29
post #24

Really looking forward to this, and I'm glad that AMD's management no longer seems to be on the pipe. Even if the real world perf is close to the $1K Intel chips it will be a win. It's going to force price cuts from Intel and hopefully spark some competition again.

I think the server chip (Naples, up to 32 cores!) based on Zen may have more impact than the desktop chip. The servers chips are a smaller market, but it's growing faster than desktop, and I assume has larger margins. Depends, I suppose, on how much AMD chooses to undercut on pricing.

A big part of it is going to be whether major cloud providers adopt these.

Re: AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed

#30
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the server chip (Naples, up to 32 cores!) based on Zen may have more impact than the desktop chip. The servers chips are a smaller market, but it's growing faster than desktop, and I assume has larger margins. Depends, I suppose, on how much AMD chooses to undercut on pricing.

A big part of it is going to be whether major cloud providers adopt these.

I would guess at least some meaningful purchases, if only to keep Intel honest.
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