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AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed

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Re: AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed

#61

Post by washadjeffmad »

Asooka wrote: post #48
mrb wrote: post #10

First (amateur) third-party benchmarks confirm a ~$350 Ryzen beats $1000 Intel processors in CPUMARK, 3DMark Fire Strike Physics, Cinebench: https://www.chiphell.com/thread-1706915-1-1.html AMD had said for years their Zen goal was a 40% IPC gain over their previous microarchitecture, but they ended up with a 52% gain: http://www.anandtech.com/show/11143/amd-launch-ryzen-52-more... Today's launch event by AMD's CEO:…

I'm a bit dubious. If they have such an amazing part why is it being sold for so cheap? Why not 80% of the price of the comparable Intel part? Selling it at 50% or even less raises some heavy alarm bells for me.

Feature parity and market penetration. FP and AVX are middling, no iGPU, fewer PCIe lanes, and they've got keep firm hold of that budget build bracket.

In case you were also wondering why Intel's pricing has been so obscene, it's to do with AMD's underwhelming pre-Zen microarchitectures and having had no serious competition in the past decade until now.

Re: AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed

#62

Post by [deleted] »

dstaley wrote: post #52
masklinn wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they have such an amazing part why is it being sold for so cheap? Because they get exploded in single-threaded performances, so they have to pit their 8-core parts against Intel's 4 cores. The 1700X will be competing against the $350 7700K more than the $1100 6900K (which incidentally is a Broadwell-E part not a Skylake part despite de 6 prefix)

The linked benchmarks are putting the $350 1700X about on par with the $1100 6900K when it comes to both single-threaded and multi-threaded performance. Both of those processors are 8-core/16-thread chips. Also the 1700K is a 95W TDP compared to the 6900K's 140W TDP.

[deleted]

Re: AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed

#63

Post by samcat116 »

edko wrote: post #13
slantyyz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It would be nice. However, would they be able to still keep Thunderbolt?

They would have to license it from Intel. Which I bet Intel wouldn't really want to do.

Re: AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed

#64

Post by samcat116 »

sp332 wrote: post #19
edko wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be nice. However, would they be able to still keep Thunderbolt?

The standard chipsets do have support for USB 3.1 Gen 2. But mixing in support for DisplayPort would require either a custom chipset (which Apple may be able to do but might not be as cheap), or wait until a Zen-based APU comes out.

USB 3.1 Gen 2 plus display is not the same as Thunderbolt. TB is basically straight PCIE. Can't just combine data and video and call it Thunderbolt. Plus 3.1 Gen 2 is only half the speed of TB3.

Re: AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed

#65

Post by mrb »

Asooka wrote: post #48
mrb wrote: post #10

First (amateur) third-party benchmarks confirm a ~$350 Ryzen beats $1000 Intel processors in CPUMARK, 3DMark Fire Strike Physics, Cinebench: https://www.chiphell.com/thread-1706915-1-1.html AMD had said for years their Zen goal was a 40% IPC gain over their previous microarchitecture, but they ended up with a 52% gain: http://www.anandtech.com/show/11143/amd-launch-ryzen-52-more... Today's launch event by AMD's CEO:…

I'm a bit dubious. If they have such an amazing part why is it being sold for so cheap? Why not 80% of the price of the comparable Intel part? Selling it at 50% or even less raises some heavy alarm bells for me.

"Why not 80% of the price of the comparable Intel part?"

1. Because Intel is about to significantly drop their prices in response to Ryzen.

2. Because AMD really wants to immediately hurt Intel's revenues as badly as possible.

3. Because AMD has such an uphill battle to regain mind share that it really needs to release a product that makes people realize that AMD now has the superior perf/$ product, beyond any doubt. If Ryzen was only priced 20% lower than Intel, many people/OEMs/etc would not be motivated enough to go AMD.

Re: AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed

#66

Post by solotronics »

washadjeffmad wrote: post #61
Asooka wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a bit dubious. If they have such an amazing part why is it being sold for so cheap? Why not 80% of the price of the comparable Intel part? Selling it at 50% or even less raises some heavy alarm bells for me.

Feature parity and market penetration. FP and AVX are middling, no iGPU, fewer PCIe lanes, and they've got keep firm hold of that budget build bracket. In case you were also wondering why Intel's pricing has been so obscene, it's to do with AMD's underwhelming pre-Zen microarchitectures and having had no serious competition in the past decade until now.

do we think Intel will drastically drop prices on middle and high end chips?

Re: AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed

#67

Post by amunicio »

Asooka wrote: post #48
mrb wrote: post #10

First (amateur) third-party benchmarks confirm a ~$350 Ryzen beats $1000 Intel processors in CPUMARK, 3DMark Fire Strike Physics, Cinebench: https://www.chiphell.com/thread-1706915-1-1.html AMD had said for years their Zen goal was a 40% IPC gain over their previous microarchitecture, but they ended up with a 52% gain: http://www.anandtech.com/show/11143/amd-launch-ryzen-52-more... Today's launch event by AMD's CEO:…

I'm a bit dubious. If they have such an amazing part why is it being sold for so cheap? Why not 80% of the price of the comparable Intel part? Selling it at 50% or even less raises some heavy alarm bells for me.

If history is of any reference (see the Hammer architecture), AMD needs to build a large ecosystem of EOMs and partners to be able to cover with enough SKUs all different segments of the market.

If they price their CPUs anywhere near Intel, even if they are marginally better, OEM and partners will be shy and slow in creating new lines of products. They will only modestly deep their toes on AMD waters.

Intel can hold the line for a couple of years by offering OEMs large rebates/discounts for keeping volumes of sales in line with what they bought pre-Zen.

AMD has no choice but build market share and ecosystem by pricing way below Intel. Otherwise, history will repeat itself and they won't be able to capitalize long term on the Zen architecture as happened with the Hammer architecture.

Re: AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed

#68

Post by gcp »

philipkglass wrote: post #31
gcp wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, but what should they benchmark GEMM with? MKL? I don't think so, it takes the worst codepath if the chip isn't GenuineIntel. OpenBLAS? Doesn't have Ryzen support. Doesn't even recognize some AMD cores. ACML? Wasn't updated since 2013 or so. This is a serious question. What are you supposed to do if you need a GEMM kernel for Ryzen? I sure hope AMD puts out updated ACML libraries real soon .

I'd like to see benchmarks with OpenBLAS. Unlike ACML it's under active development, unlike MKL it won't deliberately screw AMD performance, and it offers "pretty good" performance across every environment I've tried it in. Good enough that it's not worth paying for MKL, not worth going through ATLAS's self-tuning routine, not worth changing my build scripts to use vecLib under OS X. If OpenBLAS currently runs poorly…

OpenBLAS performance is atrocious in 32 bit mode because it doesn't properly support AVX with the halved register file. Not the most common configuration, but MKL handles it fine (on Intel chips, obviously).

That said I agree it makes more sense for AMD to contribute to OpenBLAS than anything else.

Re: AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed

#69

Post by philipkglass »

gcp wrote: post #68
philipkglass wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to see benchmarks with OpenBLAS. Unlike ACML it's under active development, unlike MKL it won't deliberately screw AMD performance, and it offers "pretty good" performance across every environment I've tried it in. Good enough that it's not worth paying for MKL, not worth going through ATLAS's self-tuning routine, not worth changing my build scripts to use vecLib under OS X. If OpenBLAS currently runs poorly…

OpenBLAS performance is atrocious in 32 bit mode because it doesn't properly support AVX with the halved register file. Not the most common configuration, but MKL handles it fine (on Intel chips, obviously). That said I agree it makes more sense for AMD to contribute to OpenBLAS than anything else.

Interesting -- what are the use cases for single precision BLAS on CPU? All the scientific software I use requires double precision and for tasks that do well with single precision, I would have thought that GPGPU would now be the go-to solution.

Re: AMD Ryzen price and release date revealed

#70

Post by RUG3Y »

Cyph0n wrote: post #38
tracker1 wrote: post #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.

Seems like you skipped over the FX series (Bulldozer, I believe). I got a FX-8320 a few years back, and my brother got a FX-6300. Both are capable processors and are MUCH cheaper than their counterparts (i5 and i3, respectively). Heck, if I built a PC in the past year, I would have gone with a FX-8350 just because it's so damned cheap yet very performant. Once Zen is out, it's really a no-brainer for me.

I'm still running an FX-6300 and it can't be beat, the thing only cost me $100. It does everything I need it to. I could imagine myself going for a ~$300 AMD chip.
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