QOTW: Does AMD Ryzen need to be faster than Intel Core?

[chinf]

To answer the question actually posed - getting close is good enough to tempt me, but only if AMD continues to support ECC RAM as standard with Ryzen (as per current FX chips); Intel force you to pay a hefty premium (or stick with i3) if you want ECC.

[Shane74]

Same speed but a lot cheaper is good enough for me, I miss the old Athlon days with plenty of competition.

[aidanjt]

As long as AMD gets in the ballpark at a better price, I'm sold.

[themandark_uk]

If amd brings out these chips at a good price and beat intel, all intel will do is lower their prices too. This happened with amd vs nvidia they just brought out extra cards to match amds prices.

[Myss_tree]

No matter if Ryzen is equally competitive to Intel chips a few thousand sales to enthusiasts is not going to make a big difference to AMD, they need to get a good advertising/sales pitch like the annoying "Intel inside" ads/logos and get inside prebuilt systems from the likes of Apple, HP and other retailers.
Most folk who are not tech followers have never heard of AMD and if they know any CPU manufacturer then its going to be Intel, AMD need to change that to be competitive.

[Moogly]

Close with better pricing. That'll be enough for me. I want AMD to be a serious contender, thus forcing Intel to stop taking advantage with their "reasonable" pricing.

[Bagpuss]

Just as a 'what if' scenario..

Intel 7700K 4cores 8 threads £350
AMD Ryzen 6cores 12 threads £300

..If the Ryzen is within 5-10% of the 7700K's single core performance AND can overclock to a similar speed as the new Kaby Lake (and that's a BIG if) then I'd go for the Ryzen every time, 2 extra cores will be much more useful in the next few years than the 5-10% extra single core speed of the 7700K

[Rubarb]

As said above if they can emulate what they did at the time of the Athlon they will get a huge increase in sales.

[GrahamC]

Within 5% will do so long as it's at least 25% cheaper core for core. I'm looking forward to grabing a new AMD sysytem.

[Corky34]

As price is largely irrelevant in terms of competing with Intel (it's already been said Intel can simply lower prices), then yes Ryzen does need to be faster, how we're defining 'faster' however is, in itself, rather tricky to nail down.

[DerbyDave]

i think the general consensus would be competitive but a lot cheaper.

[infraction]

I don't think that AMD need to be faster, however they need to be competitive in both performance and power consumption which is something bulldozer failed at even against the first gen i series.

Not only that but a lot of people are opting for smaller form factor PC's that fit a more casual entertainment lifestyle rather than big full size enthusiast atx towers and with AMD at this current moment you are pretty much forced to go the FM2+ socket (due to AM3+ CPU's not having integrated north/southbridges and therefore requiring bigger motherboards) for such builds which isn't optimal for anything above low end gaming.

Being able to slap an octacore chip into an itx motherboard would be a nice incentive to go AMD.

if you're willing to pay for it you can already get a mini-ITX motherboard which can support upto a 18 core Xeon CPU - the Asrock X99E-ITX/AC, however it's crazy expensive $260/£270 (Amazon UK / Newegg US)
a 8 core mini-ITX at £/$ 150 to 200 would be quite cool though

That's kind of what I mean, the LGA2011-V3 socket isn't what I'd call a mainstream one. It's more for slightly more professional applications (such as video rendering, audio production etc) as well as server platforms. It has it's place in enthusiast gaming but the small performance gains aren't quite worth the premium you're charged for the platform unless you're running a serious SLI/Crossfire beast and want something absolutely solid to not bottleneck the multiple GPU's.

I wouldn't go to the x99 platform just to chuck something like a single RX 480 in the thing, that would be a huge waste of money.

[EvilCycle]

I have always opted for AMD to get acceptable performance for gaming at a cheaper price (although I have stuck with nvidia for the GPU since the geforce 4 mx days). As long as they keep releasing chips that are cheaper than those from Intel but are powerful enough to run my games, I will keep doing what i'm doing, especially if the trend of the GPU being more important keeps going.

On my budget it is usually a choice between an Intel CPU and mid range GPU, or an AMD CPU and a higher end GPU, so unless I've been mistaken for the past 15 years, the latter always seems to be the best way to go for me.

[decends]

Faster, No. Same speed, not necessarily. Nearly as fast, The Bare minimum. If it can give similar performance in Gaming and day to day task, and strike at intel's knee's, it would be a huge success in my eyes. I love my I7 4790k, but im tired of how over priced intel products are because AMD just doesn't challenge intel at the moment.

[spolsh]

It's got to give better price/performance, even if they don't take the overall "best" crown.

[scaryjim]

... Nearly as fast, The Bare minimum. If it can give similar performance in Gaming and day to day task ...

I think this is a really interesting point, actually. One of the issues for Bulldozer/Piledriver was that in some DX11 games it had low enough single-thread performance for it to become the bottleneck. So if Ryzen can improve performance to the point where it's no longer the bottleneck, it doesn't need to outright beat Intel in every benchmark.

The bigger issue is that for most day to day tasks even a mid-range AMD APU is already perfectly adequate, yet many people still equate Intel with "good PC" and AMD with "cheap and second rate". That's a stigma that's not going to go away any time soon, and is only likely to be shifted by AMD not only beating Intel with a new CPU release, but staying clearly ahead of them for several years. That's going to be a pretty demanding task...