UK and US prices for AMD R7 Ryzen processors spotted

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

What is even more irrational about the E-PEEN argument is that most people due to the retarded product segmentation won't even realistically own the E-PEEN SKUs,what is the bet most people can't even afford(or even want) to spend £350 on a 4C/8T CPU in their system??

The E-PEENers don't get that if AMD has a £300 8C CPU,it means 6C and 4C CPUs will be under that price. Intel has to respond too,and its not helped by the E-PEENers trying to justify overpriced SKUs.

You want Intel to reduce their prices - DON'T GIVE THEM IDEAS.

There is massive issues with pushing large ST performance jumps,its not viable any more and more and more games are moving to using more threads since another 10% increase in IPC is not going to suddenly make a 25FPS minimum in a game like PS2 any more playable.

Look at the current Intel range - not a single quad core under £170. How can devs push things forward if loads of gamers can't even afford a reasonable CPU.

We should be having quad core CPUs at £100 to £120 by now.

We still have bloody dual cores all the way upto £175.

4C/8T pricing is even worse - merely a few years ago you could get £180 Xeon E3 4C/8T CPUs. But Intel locked them out artificially on consumer socket 1151 motherboards even though they are the same socket.

Now you have to spend £300.

Defending stupid tiny E-PEEN IPC and clockspeed increases is pointless in the face of £175 Core i3 7350K CPUs,etc.

It does zero to push anything forward apart from silly one-upmanship in Super PI and other rubbish.

In fact I don't give a flying monkies if Intel has a slight IPC and maximum overclocks advantage if the AMD SKUs are shipping at a lower price,or have more cores for the same price.

Edit!!

Then add the fact if AMD plays their cards right with motherboard support,even a £70 motherboard can run a 6C or 8C CPU.

Socket 2011 motherboards start at £200ish - you can only get one £270+ mini-ITX in the UK.

Once AMD board partners actually get a mini-ITX motherboard out,AM4 will offer something Intel can't on socket 2011,which is a decent price mini-ITX platform which can run even 8C.

Ryzen is an SOC so should prove well suited for that area.

Everybody should be hoping AMD can match a Core i7 6900K in performance,or even slightly exceed it at half the price(or even less).

There is no rational viewpoint for wanting Ryzen to be a failure.

[EvilCycle]

100% agree with CAT.

Anybody trying to bash AMD or are hoping that they fail are either being paid by intel to type this stuff, or are genuinely bonkers with more money than sense, or even people who just want to try and see lower budgeted consumers pushed out of the high end market for self ego boosting!

[Tabbykatze]

Cat, music to my ears.

AMD can only improve Intel and sort out the ridiculous market state that CPUs are now in. Even if they don't win/beat Intel, sorting out the Market is a win for me.

[anselhelm]

Hoping there's some truth in this. I've been seeing a lot of comments from people who think that AMD should be charging something in the region of 75-80% of the price that Intel sells its chips at for the same performance markets, but these people are completely forgetting just how much the underdog AMD and how much people believe that Intel is always better.

If AMD charges more than 50% of Intel for the highest-end chips, it's not going to convince those with money to make the move from Intel to AMD. With the mainstream chips, there's a bit more price flexibility, maybe up to 66% of the same price for the same performance, but AMD has to take the battle to Intel (whilst making decent profit) in order to win back customers.

I'll be particularly interested to see what laptop APUs are produced. I haven't seen AMD APUs or CPUs in any gaming laptop for years. With respect to custom laptops, I haven't even seen their GPUs as an available option there either for some time. AMD has an uphill battle on both fronts there. Hoping the fight back will begin with Ryzen and continue with Vega.

[Valantar]

Any idea behind 2 8-core chips with 30w & £50 difference? The other leak article, if accurate, suggested there's no chip with HT disabled.

Lower clocks = lower power and lower price. That's pretty natural, no? Remember, TDP != power consumption. The difference between these two chips will not be 30W in practice - just as the difference between an i7-7700 and i7-7700K or an i5-7600 and i5-7600K aren't actually 26W at stock clocks.


As to the leak: Holy sh*t. This was the kind of pricing I was hoping for. Not the kind of pricing I was thinking would actually happen. Hot damn. That high-end 6/12 SKU is starting to look like it'll find a home here, for sure (as long as they don't go bonkers and price it at $400, of course).

Now, start launching motherboards, please. I'll take a not-overly-expensive and nice mITX one, please.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The whole point if I do seem rather militant about this is - remember back to the decade between 1995 and 2005. Look at the amount of competition we had from so many companies and how it made PC gaming something affordable by all.

Ryzen might not be even an Athlon or Athlon 64 moment,but it just needs to get close enough to Intel to breath back competition into the market.

I was peed off about how Intel made overclocking a paid for sport instead of what it was meant to give to gamers.

Then what they did with the Xeon E3 4C/8T chips was a pure cash grab,and we need AMD to have something which is decent otherwise £200 Core i3 K series here we come.

To put it bluntly if Ryzen does not pan out,enthusiasts and even gamers are going to get really screwed over.

[LSG501]

Even if we get the usual 1:1 ratio pricing based on US prices those top end prices are still pretty good value, if it's the UK prices even better (assuming true) when you consider what it's supposed to be comparable to.

That $490/£440 (inc vat) R7 1800x is supposed to compare with the Intel Core i7 5960X (slower clock speed too) which currently sells at over £1000... you could almost buy 2 rigs for the price of one i7 one which for me is a bargain for my 3D rendering. Hell the r7 1700 is likely comparable to the i7 for my needs if all the previous benchmarks are true and that's even cheaper to buy, supposedly unlocked and a low tdp so overclocking would be an option too.

[Valantar]

The whole point if I do seem rather militant about this is - remember back to the decade between 1995 and 2005. Look at the amount of competition we had from so many companies and how it made PC gaming something affordable by all.

Ryzen might not be even an Athlon or Athlon 64 moment,but it just needs to get close enough to Intel to breath back competition into the market.

I was peed off about how Intel made overclocking a paid for sport instead of what it was meant to give to gamers.

Then what they did with the Xeon E3 4C/8T chips was a pure cash grab,and we need AMD to have something which is decent otherwise £200 Core i3 K series here we come.

To put it bluntly if Ryzen does not pan out,enthusiasts and even gamers are going to get really screwed over.

Unfortunately, you're absolutely right about Intel pricing. In 2008, I bought a Core2Quad Q9450 (quad core 2,66GHz) for 2200 Norwegian Kroner (about £217 by 2008 exchange rates). I still use it, overclocked to 3,5GHz. The cheapest (and only) overclockable 4c4t Intel CPU today is 2500 kroner. It's clocked higher and has higher IPC, but it's also comparatively tiny in silicon area. So in 8 1/2 years, prices have gone up for roughly equivalent parts. Except for one thing: the Q9450 was two steps away from the highest end chip Intel had at the time, the QX9770. Their third most expensive chip was slightly more than £200. In other words, with Intel today, you pay only slightly less money per performance than 9 years ago, while paying far, far more per silicon area. According to Anandtech, the KBL 4+2 die is 126mm2, while my Yorkfield is 220mm2. In other words, price/area has pretty much doubled - or far, far more if you want HT and overclocking. And moving up the product stack has become the realm of Russian oligarchs and YouTube celebrities. Am I utterly naive in thinking price/performance should increase over time?

Intel has been screwing consumers over ever since AMD truly fell behind. I very, very sincerely hope Ryzen can change this.

[scaryjim]

... In other words, with Intel today, you pay only slightly less money per performance than 9 years ago, while paying far, far more per silicon area. ...

You don't get many benchmarks where you can directly compare a Q9450 with an i5 7600k, but anandtech bench does at least have one set: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/51?vs=1828

The i5 is around 3x faster than the Q9450. A Skylake i3 6100 is over twice as fast in the single threaded benchmark and ~ 60% faster in multi-threaded. Which I imagine means the ~ £60 Kaby Lake Pentiums, which now have HT, are as fast as your Q9450. That's paying *a lot* less for the same performance, or a lot more performance for the same price...

As to silicon area, whilst the dies have been shrinking they've not been getting much cheaper - since (iirc) 32nm the cost per wafer has been going up and yields have been stable or decreasing, so the cost per usable die hasn't really been going down like it used to in the past...

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

You don't get many benchmarks where you can directly compare a Q9450 with an i5 7600k, but anandtech bench does at least have one set: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/51?vs=1828

The i5 is around 3x faster than the Q9450. A Skylake i3 6100 is over twice as fast in the single threaded benchmark and ~ 60% faster in multi-threaded. Which I imagine means the ~ £60 Kaby Lake Pentiums, which now have HT, are as fast as your Q9450. That's paying *a lot* less for the same performance, or a lot more performance for the same price...

As to silicon area, whilst the dies have been shrinking they've not been getting much cheaper - since (iirc) 32nm the cost per wafer has been going up and yields have been stable or decreasing, so the cost per usable die hasn't really been going down like it used to in the past...

The current Core i7 chips are actually tiny:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9505/s...ckage-analysis

At 122MM2 this is almost the same size as some phone chips made on 14NM/16NM,and is Core i3 level size from a few years ago. If anything remember,Intel was selling the Core i7 5820K and GT3 BW-E chips for around the same price as the Core i7 6700K,meaning it was nothing to do with the cost of 14NM as all these chips are 14NM and the first two are significantly larger. The GT3 BW-E CPUs also had a large L4 cache too.

Then consider this - Polaris 10 uses a 232MM2 14NM die made in the US,with VRAM chips,etc and sells for between £160 to £250.

Ryzen is probably around 200MM2 or slightly smaller than Polaris 10 on a 14NM process so AMD are probably making good margins on selling the full chip for £300 to £500.

Intel are just price gouging now so then can throw away the billions then spent on Atom which desktop users are subsidising.

Edit!!

The 14NM Cherry Trail Atom is just under 90MM2:

https://www.fool.com/investing/gener...-revealed.aspx

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Apparently Intel is releasing a version of Kaby Lake which is faster:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9505/s...ckage-analysis

Wow,how interesting - they could have released Skylake and Kaby Lake at faster clockspeeds,but the moment they released AMD has something competitive,now they suddenly find these performance improvements.

OTH,it could be Intel pushing some news out to delay people from buying Ryzen too.

[AGTDenton]

So the inc VAT prices would be:

1700 - £282.42
1700X - £339.97
1800X - £438.78

If the $ price was right then personally I think the 1800X would be closer to £465-£480 inc VAT and the others possibly another £15-20 on top of what we're seeing. It's getting a lot closer to like for like dollar prices now.
Looking forward to some benchies and really hope Intel have serious competition in the near future.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

So the inc VAT prices would be:

1700 - £282.42
1700X - £339.97
1800X - £438.78

If the $ price was right then personally I think the 1800X would be closer to £465-£480 inc VAT and the others possibly another £15-20 on top of what we're seeing. It's getting a lot closer to like for like dollar prices now.
Looking forward to some benchies and really hope Intel have serious competition in the near future.

Well with a pound worth $1.25ish and VAT being 20% it kind of evens out in actual price.

[PowerPie5000]

These prices make me happy!... Especially if they come close to (or beat) the performance of the equivalent offerings from Intel. I really can't wait to see the prices and performance for the 4 & 6 core Ryzen 5 parts now! I suspect the 6 core/12 thread Ryzen chip along with a B350 based AM4 board might be the sweet spot for gamers who don't want to fork out too much .

[MercutioUK]

If I was a PC retailer, I'd totally "accidentally" put prices up then "apologise for the mistake" and take them down

Will be a few folks there waiting as "they had them first!".

[mtyson]

UPDATE: The source of the UK pricing image in the article has emailed me to say that the screenshot is from Ingram Micro, rather than Kikatek. Ingram Micro is a worldwide distributor rather than consumer retailer, so we probably can't expect these prices to translate very closely to retail, even with the added 20 per cent VAT.