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Or will getting close be good enough to tempt you?
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Or will getting close be good enough to tempt you?
Getting close enough with a reasonable price is good enough IMHO OFC. At least from the viewpoint of a gamer,any savings on the CPU can be put into the graphics card for example and even from the viewpoint of a photographer the savings can be put into faster storage and more RAM.
being at the same speed as the 8 core but cheaper by $500 is worth killing intel for their high noncompetitive prices
It depends what you mean by faster; what are the metrics?
Gaming?
Productivity?
Media work?
Mathematics and Science?
AI?
I don't see AMD completely dethroning Intel and running away with the performance king of all possible metrics at all price points, but as long as they trade blows in enough of them, I think they should be back in the game.
As long as the figures for gaming and media work are solid, I may well be tempted.
that's like asking is hexus better than the reg ?
my 8350 does what it needs to @5ghz and in real terms plays anything out there like an intel chip would ..
but i'll be getting a zen and a vega ..and have change left over to buy the wife something :P
and if lasts as long and overclocks as my 8350 has money well spent ..
To be credible Ryzen needs to be around the same performance in most benchmarks with Core chips at a similar price, without using much more power or having any strange quirks. Most benchmarks means not just heavily multithreaded benchmarks but day-to-day average user type stuff where single thread performance matters.
If Ryzen can exceed performance in a few useful benchmarks, offer some sort of value add or just be straight up better value for money when the whole platform is taken into account then AMD might have some chance of selling them in good numbers.
I never bought anything because it was the best of the best, I always buy with performance/price or quality/price in mind.
if AMD can give me a CPU with the power of an intel CPU but cheaper, I will go get it.
So far all the systems I have had where running an amd CPU because when I was buying the performance/price ratio was on their side. But this didn't stopped me from getting an i3 for my girlfriend when the performance/price ratio was on the intel side.
I believe most people will buy in this fashion, after all didn't we all want the best our money can buy? Keeping in mind the terrible market share from AMD at the moment I do believe that whatever their performance is (better or equal) they will go for a lower price tag to claw back market share.
At least this is what I hope :P
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.
"Bang for your buck" - always true when it come to CPU's - I never buy top of line (I'm not that rich!) so essentially, let's imagine I have £200 to spend on a CPU. If AMD outperform Intel for £200, they win. Simples!
I'm going to go against the general flow of comments and say that AMD need to be more than just "competative" with Intel. First, cards on table - historically I was a big champion of AMD, but for my customers, Intel Core2Duo onwards made a real difference which AMD had no answer to. I *like* AMD, but Intel's case was far stronger.
Now, Intel have built a really solid eco-system - chipsets/motherboards/CPUs. These things work, have solid features, and reliable/predicatable drivers. There's a lot to be said for that - a firm foundation for building your house/PC.
With that in mind, AMD need to provide a reason for a customer to choose the AMD solution over the Intel one, above and beyond "our performance is similar and we're the little guy". As others have intimated, this could be keen pricing - deliver consumer-i7 beating performance for 200ukp (i5 territory) for example. Or it could be better-featured motherboards in particular price brackets (ie. deliver H170-esque features for H110 prices). Ideally they need to offer a combination of both in order to make a compelling case to move from the "known good" Intel alternative.
As it stands, the only "bad" things about Intel's products are their ever-increasing pricing, and the lack of significant progress in the last few years (not even 10% per generation). Both of those things give AMD room, and real competition from AMD will hopefully cause Intel to improve in both areas. Either way that's good for the consumer which ever horse you back.
AMD should under cut Intel, even if the performance is on par or even better than the Intel equivalent part. Just imagine buying a Zen chip that's a bit cheaper than an i7 but also a bit faster than an i7? Most customers would be happy with that.
Edit:
So to answer the question (lol), no the AMD chip doesn't need to be faster just well priced and the buyers will come.
If it's close enough at a good price I would be tempted (as long as they don't brute force the performance by using silly amounts of power).
Coming from a 6700k, and needing single-threaded performance more than adding more cores, there's no reason for me to consider Zen unless it can offer a performance improvement. There's all the chipset stuff too: VR needs a good solid USB 3 host adapter, and the rumblings are that the AM4 chipset to accompany Zen uses an ASMedia USB 3.1 controller rather than an on-board adapter, which is less than idea.
Performance per £ will be what makes the difference although I'm going to be looking at 8/16 core/thread cpu's (3D rendering etc) rather than consumer 4/8 core/thread ones. If I can get a ryzen (still prefer zen) with 90%+ of the performance of intels equivalent for say 75% of the cost then it's a no brainer imo if you're getting to the point of needing an upgrade.
The problem for intel isn't so much getting on par with intel, it's finding enough of a margin to make people actually want to upgrade.... plenty of people are still rocking 2500k's and people with the last 3 or 4 gens of intel have no real reason to upgrade other than motherboard extras.
If it's a decent upgrade from my 4670k and fairly priced then yes, I would jump to it. Skylake's gain over Haswell was a joke and Kabylake is looking no better so Intel has nothing worthwhile for me to upgrade to. What I wan't is a higher single core performance as the game I play most, TS2017, is for the most part single threaded and my 4670k is holding my 1070 back.
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 $260/£270 (Amazon UK / Newegg US)Quote:
Originally Posted by infraction
a 8 core mini-ITX at £/$ 150 to 200 would be quite cool though
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.
Same speed but a lot cheaper is good enough for me, I miss the old Athlon days with plenty of competition.
As long as AMD gets in the ballpark at a better price, I'm sold.
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.
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.
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.
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
As said above if they can emulate what they did at the time of the Athlon they will get a huge increase in sales.
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.
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.
i think the general consensus would be competitive but a lot cheaper.
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by will19565if 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 $260/£270 (Amazon UK / Newegg US)Quote:
Originally Posted by infraction
a 8 core mini-ITX at £/$ 150 to 200 would be quite cool though
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.
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.
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.
It's got to give better price/performance, even if they don't take the overall "best" crown.
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by decends
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...
This is so true, my second PC, HTPC netbook and laptop all have AMD APUs as they are epic for the money.Quote:
Originally Posted by scaryjim
I will say I only bought the laptop this week and when looking in PC worth it was hard to even find one with an APU, likewise on the website if you filter by processor type you have to click see more to list anything AMD.
Interestingly if Ryzen is everything I hope at the right price my house will become intel free, this is nothing to do with hating intel its all about buying the best parts for me.
It's a question that has different answers at different levels.
Personally, all I need is Bristol Ridge. Been waiting to put that in my HTPC for almost a year, but AMD doesn't want to sell it to me. I don't much care about Ryzen vs. Intel in this respect, but hopefully Zen based APU's, if and when they appear will be a decent upgrade over Bristol Ridge (if and when it appears :).
For AMD fans, I think that Ryzen will be good enough even if it's not as good as Intel.
For consumers in general, I think that Ryzen needs to beat Intel CPU's in at least some games. And when I say 'Intel CPU's' I mean a Core i5. That to me will be the measure of AMD's success. If AMD wants to be more mainstream and not just relegated to fans, it needs to be at a 'no brainer' position. It doesn't need to be faster at everything, but it shouldn't be at the classic 'I'm only buying this because I don't want to spend more money on something faster' position.
For servers, performance / power matters.
This. It's volume sales to the likes of HP and Dell that AMD need to be pitching too, for corporate sales, along with embedded systems. In these cases saving a few dollars to achieve an acceptable performance is crucial. Purchasers of commodities don't care what is in the box, so long as the box delivers. AMD needs high volume sales to system mfrs.Quote:
Originally Posted by Myss_tree
It just needs to be similar but better value.
A lot of folk appear to be in the camp which says "if it's close enough to Intel performance and cheaper then I'll buy AMD".
Being "close enough" isn't going to cut it. Just being cheaper and close enough isn't going to cut it either. There is another dimension which a lot of folk are missing out on. There is a segment of the market which won't stump £1000 on Intel's hottest CPU, but would happily spend double the highest AMD offering for only 25% more performance. That's the reality right now. Most people that have bought an i7 in the last five years probably could have already brought an AMD CPU simply because their main performance requirements came from either their GPU or an SSD, and not necessarily the CPU. Nevertheless, they spent way more than they needed to on a K Sku 4c/8t i7 than they really needed to, regardless of whatever AMD had on offer at half the price. So the question remains is "what remains for AMD do to get this market share?" because some folk will just buy intel and pay the premium for no real justification than bragging rights, or because their friend who knows about this stuff told them too.
AMD can and will undercut Intel to gain market share, but it won't be enough. It actually needs to be better (at least in some workloads) and not merely close enough, otherwise it's just the exact same scenario we have now.
We need AMD to be better in order to keep Intel honest, otherwise I'm going to bypass their £200 offering for Intel's £350 offering, which is exactly what I've been doing this last 5 years.
AMD need to be better or go home.
For me, I've never gone for an i7, apart from in my laptop, cos that was the only way to get the screen I wanted, but if AMD's mid-range line beats the equivalent i5 and is cheaper, I would get that when it came to changing. I have no interest in the XTREME! versions, I think you're into the realms of diminishing returns there.
I prefer to give my money to AMD, so in my case the answer would be that unless Intel is offering a significant price/performance advantage then Ryzen only has to be "good enough". I'm pretty sure there must be quite a few people with a similar bias (although I realise that's not going to affect the mass market sales which is presumably where success will live or die...)
It will be very nice to see AMD once again able to offer both a competitive price and equivalent performance right up through Intel's product range, rather than just at the budget level, as that has to help when pushing the brand to oem's and the wider public.
I like squeezing performance out of chips, Ryzen needs to beat intel out of the box (by performance, not necessarily Ghz) and clock a nice lead with some gentle OC and cooling.
I doubt they'll pull it off at the top end, but I'm open to being pleasantly surprised.
^This^ Despite most people saying fast enough but cheaper is what they want that would just put AMD in the same place its been in for the last 5-10 years, what AMD need is for Ryzen to be faster better in at least some form, or metric, and by how much and how many of those metrics it beats Intel the better.Quote:
Originally Posted by rainman
Its already been shown the market will spend more money on a faster better more expensive CPU despite it not necessarily being cost effective to do so, what AMD need are for people to read that Ryzen is better than the alternative.
The main issue AMD has had with CPUs is the power consumption and the fact they have been selling largish chips for not much money.AMD does not need to beat Intel in single core performance,getting reasonably close is enough,as long as power consumption and core size goes down. This will be more important for the areas in which it is competing in - servers,supercomputers and laptops.
The whole "it has to beat XYZ at any cost" is a very enthusiast E-PEEN mindset,when in reality most of the computing devices people are buying are not powered by top end DESKTOP CPUs.
Plus TBH,I would be shocked if Ryzen could best Intel in single threaded performance,especially using GF as their foundry.
I know loads of people who work in the computing area,gamers,scientists,etc. I am yet to see anyone of them buy anything better than a £300ish CPU and a 4C/8T one at that. The reality,is that unlike graphics cards,people are less likely to be spending £400+ for most builds.
For instance,if a 4C/8T Ryzen CPU was around Haswell level single threaded performance for gaming and was around Core i5 6600K level pricing with a reasonable included cooler and cheaper motherboards most sane people would seriously consider the AMD chip since a £100 difference is better spent on the graphics card. If AMD can get to Broadwell level for gaming that would be an achievement IMHO.
If a 6C/12T one was around Core i7 6700K pricing,again it would probably be fine.
But then wait for the enthusiasts to cart out examples of idiotic games which they are willing to throw money at which are so poorly optimised and hardly anybody plays or poorly optimised and millions play on less than great hardware(WoW or WoT being some of those examples). Then they will wheel out stupid high voltage maximum overclocks arguments,etc even though not a single one of them can guarantee those clockspeeds for everybody.
I can even appreciate someone spending a £1000 on Titan X since even that might not be fast enough for 4K games as time progresses.
The E-PEENers for bragging rights will still pay £320 for a Core i5 6700K,so in the end I doubt AMD is going to convert such people,as such people will always buy Intel but want AMD to reduce the price of their Intel purchase for them.
Remember loads of enthusiasts still bought the Pentium 4 in droves,even the Athlon series chips for most of their lifespans were a better purchase.
I still remember back to the days of the Phenom II X4 955BE,when people were still pushing the more expensive Q9550 for hardly a performance difference(once pricing settled down after launch the Phenom II could be had a decent amount cheaper),even though at the time some of the AMD motherboards were better specified for a similar price.
In the end the rise of ARM based computers indicates,that having the fastest chips is not the only important metric when it comes to things nowadays. Power consumption and cost of manufacture are just as important.
For the last 5 years, AMD hasn't been within 50% of Intel's flagship single threaded performance. At it's best in the last ten years it hasn't been within 10%. OTOH for some heavily threaded tasks the FX 8350 [i]outperformed[/]i the i7 3770k; performance depends on the metric you're looking at. Intel didn't need to beat AMD at every test in order to be seen in a more favourable light.Quote:
Originally Posted by Corky34
FX 8350 was faster than the i7 3770k in some metrics. It was very close to it in a number of others. Typically, the ones that hammered lots of threads with integer tasks. Didn't do it any good, because in some areas Intel were so much faster. So I don't think Ryzen does need to be faster than Intel, not on a single metric. But it does need to be only marginally slower for everything. Don't give Intel a metric where they can say "look, we're 50% faster than AMD". That's been AMD's problem for the last decade - not that they were slower for everything, but that they were a lot slower for one thing.Quote:
Originally Posted by Corky34
Maybe i should have just quoted what rainman said and left it at that as it seems I've done a bad job of saying good enough but cheaper isn't really going to cut it. ;) :D
Yeah,but lest we forget CPUs like the Phenom II X4 955BE which by the time pricing settled,was a reasonable bit cheaper than a Q9550,had a better stock cooler,and the AMD AM2+ and AM3 motherboards had some decent specifications too - you could get motherboards with SATA3,USB3,XFire support,etc for much less than the Intel equivalents. The AMD chip also had a much better stock cooler too.
What were the arguments which were carted out - maximum overclock arguments and it consumed more power,hence if you ran the CPUs at 100% 24/7 the Intel CPU would be cheaper longterm,etc. Nobody needed SATA3,etc.
Some will buy Intel whatever AMD has - whether they are around the same performance,or even ahead. Lest we forget all those enthusiasts who still bought Pentium 4 chips even when AMD had superior price comparable ones(yes I know just before the Athlon 64 was released,the Pentium 4 started to claw back some ground).
*shrug* I think there's a difference between "good enough" and "doesn't have to beat Intel but needs to get close". You're absolutely right in that what they have now is "good enough but cheaper than Intel". I don't think anyone is saying that as long as they can manage an incremental improvement on Piledriver that'll be good enough - but there are areas in which they can make a huge improvement over Piledriver and still not quite catch Intel.Quote:
Originally Posted by Corky34
A better perspective might not be to compare them with Intel directly, but to ask how much faster they need to be than AMD's incumbent CPUs. If they can do a 4C/8T Zen at the same price as an FX 8350 that's 50% faster in single-threaded tasks, I reckon that would make people sit up and take notice - but that still might not be enough to beat Kaby Lake.
So can AMD get away with being "good enough"? Probably not. But do they need to be faster then Intel across the board? Probably not. If they can be nearly as fast as Intel, that'll be staggeringly faster than their incumbent chips. And I reckon that'll do it for them.
Do we really need anything more powerful? Sure we do. Yeah. Right.
But if ARM has shown us anything, its great energy efficiency and great value (low cost) will conquer the market.
Intel has been milking the consumer suckers for a decade at least. With incremental BS 10% improvements each time while creaming consumers with sky high prices.
AMD, do what ARM does. Be fast enough (match Intel), but offer it at a much lower cost (force Intel to sweat by cutting prices) and much greater energy efficiency (Gaia will appreciate it).
A pincer movement from ARM and AMD will surely end the Intel hegemony.
Given how the demos show that AMD can do at a TDP of 95W what Intel does at 140W, I am personally more interested in how that translates to OEM portable computing products.
OEM platform wins for high end laptops and ultraportable 2-in-1 devices could also be a profitable segment for AMD. Not just gaming PCs.
AMD doesn't have to be the poor cousin to Intel scraping the bottom of the barrel with budget PC consumers.