AMD is coming out swinging against longtime competitor Intel with the launch of Ryzen, its latest desktop PC processors based on the company's Zen chip architecture.
On Wednesday, the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based chipmaker announced details for three central processing units (or CPUs) under the Ryzen 7 brand that beat Intel's top PC chips in both price and performance.
The Ryzen chips all feature 8 cores and 16 threads. They come in three tiers:
- Ryzen 7 1800X running at 3.6 GHz or up to 4.0 GHz for $499
- Ryzen 7 1700X running at 3.4 GHz or up to 3.8 GHz for $399
- Ryzen 7 1700 running at 3.0 GHz or up to 3.7 GHz for $329
Using the popular CPU benchmark tool Cinebench, AMD pitted the three processors against comparable Intel PC chips, and the initial results look promising:
- Benchmarks show the Ryzen 7 1800X performs 9% better than an Intel Core i7 6900K. Perhaps even more crucially, however, that top-of-the-line AMD chip costs half as much as Intel's: $499 for AMD versus $1050 for Intel.
- The 1700X performs 39% better than Intel Core i7 6800K, based on Cinebench's figures. The 1700X will cost $399, versus $425 for Intel's i7 6800K.
- Finally, the Ryzen 7 1700 achieves a 46% performance boost over Intel Core i7 7700K, and costs $329 against Intel's $350.
With Ryzen, AMD hopes to reinvigorate a waning PC industry, which has experienced overall annual decline in sales for the past five years.
“Ryzen is more than just another processor launch,” boasted Jim Anderson, senior vice president of computing and graphics at AMD, at a Tuesday event in San Francisco. “It represent real innovation and competition in the high-performance PC market.”
Of course the chips aren't likely to kickstart demand for the PC -- the boom days are long gone. But by introducing some competition into the market, AMD hopes it can improve its market share and make high-performance PCs more accessible to consumers. Not only are gamers continually demanding higher performance, but so are people editing and compiling videos and photos.
“We’re starting to see insatiable demand for better experiences when creating content,” said AMD CTO Mark Papermaster in an interview. “We have thousands of photos we want to edit and create photo albums for. We’re all becoming content creators. The old low-resolution displays are not good for any of us anymore. We need more processing power.”
AMD has had a rocky recent past. While it competed successfully against Intel for many years up until the mid-2000s, a string of duds brought the company to near extinction. During that time, Intel gobbled up CPU market share in both PCs and the data center.
“Take a look at the PC market over the last two or three years — it’s starved for innovation and it has really stagnated,” said Anderson. “In the tech industry, the worst thing is incrementalism. That’s what the market has been suffering from. This has benefitted our competitor in their financials, but it hasn’t benefitted the industry and the end user. Ryzen injects some real competition into the industry.”
Ryzen is the initial step in a potential turnaround for AMD. Wall Street is certainly betting on it: AMD's stock is trading up more than 600% over the past 12 months.
AMD began building the architecture Ryzen is based on -- Zen -- four years ago. Its original goal with Zen was to hit 40% more instructions per cycle, which is a metric for processor performance, over the previous generation's architecture. Instead, AMD ended up with 52% more instructions per cycle. Typically, most chips based on new architecture achieve only up to 20% jumps in performance.
The three Ryzen 7 processors are going up for pre-orders on Wednesday and will launch globally on March 2nd. More than 180 retailers and PC makers will support the new chips.
