AMD always had products, but they struggled to make money. So if they have a chip that performs at the level of a $1100 Intel CPU, why would they give it away?

What I took away from the live stream is that AMD has something decent, but I will definitely wait for full reviews, full line-up with prices. Especially the power draw, TDP of 95W for an octacore I'm a bit sceptical about...

DosFreak wrote:

Meh. I'll wait for the real reviews. Marketing BS always annoys me.

Same. Lets see what ends up in the shops and at what price.

I'm all for it if it makes the more obnoxious intel fanboys salty. 😁

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

So if they have a chip that performs at the level of a $1100 Intel CPU, why would they give it away?

For Intel, price is just a number.
AMD wants the prices to be as high as possible, to avoid losses.
Intel can lower the prices to put AMD under pressure.

If I look at the Core2 Duo... When it was launched, it was AMD who had $1000 CPUs (FX-series of Athlon64). Intel came out with the E6600, which delivered about the same peformance as the $1000 FX-62, and priced it at $300. So overnight, the chips were devalued to less than a third.
Intel could afford to do that because it wasn't that expensive a chip to make (much smaller than the Pentium 4, which was competing with AMD up to then).

I think Intel is still the one that has the lower operating cost for their octo-core CPUs (their 14 nm process is more mature (as I say, they can even make 22-core/44-thread CPUs), and their CPUs have been on the market for a while, so R&D is already covered to a certain extent). So I don't think AMD can undercut prices. Intel currently sells them at $1100 beacuse they can, not because they have to. They will probably lower the prices to whatever AMD comes up with, and still make a profit.

Scali wrote:

For Intel, price is just a number. AMD wants the prices to be as high as possible, to avoid losses. Intel can lower the prices t […]
Show full quote

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

So if they have a chip that performs at the level of a $1100 Intel CPU, why would they give it away?

For Intel, price is just a number.
AMD wants the prices to be as high as possible, to avoid losses.
Intel can lower the prices to put AMD under pressure.

If I look at the Core2 Duo... When it was launched, it was AMD who had $1000 CPUs (FX-series of Athlon64). Intel came out with the E6600, which delivered about the same peformance as the $1000 FX-62, and priced it at $300. So overnight, the chips were devalued to less than a third.
Intel could afford to do that because it wasn't that expensive a chip to make (much smaller than the Pentium 4, which was competing with AMD up to then).

I think Intel is still the one that has the lower operating cost for their octo-core CPUs (their 14 nm process is more mature (as I say, they can even make 22-core/44-thread CPUs), and their CPUs have been on the market for a while, so R&D is already covered to a certain extent). So I don't think AMD can undercut prices. Intel currently sells them at $1100 beacuse they can, not because they have to. They will probably lower the prices to whatever AMD comes up with, and still make a profit.

One thing to consider is that Intels currrent CPUs (consumer ones anyway) use half their silicon for the integrated graphics, which gives AMD an advantage, since they can make 2x the CPUs per wafer by not including an integrated gpu (in theory).

Munx wrote:

One thing to consider is that Intels currrent CPUs (consumer ones anyway) use half their silicon for the integrated graphics, which gives AMD an advantage, since they can make 2x the CPUs per wafer by not including an integrated gpu (in theory).

Intel did this because it made business sense for mainstream parts (they can produce larger dies at lower cost than any of their competitors). Enough systems want the onboard GPU (laptops, tablets, all-in-one systems, low-end desktops etc) that including it by default is cheaper than having separate product lines with and without GPUs.

If this doesn't make sense for certain relevant market segments, then it is trivial for Intel to just remove the GPU (they have many Xeon CPUs that don't include a GPU, also the 6900K that AMD compared against has no GPU).

Scali wrote:

Munx wrote:

One thing to consider is that Intels currrent CPUs (consumer ones anyway) use half their silicon for the integrated graphics, which gives AMD an advantage, since they can make 2x the CPUs per wafer by not including an integrated gpu (in theory).

Intel did this because it made business sense for mainstream parts (they can produce larger dies at lower cost than any of their competitors). Enough systems want the onboard GPU (laptops, tablets, all-in-one systems, low-end desktops etc) that including it by default is cheaper than having separate product lines with and without GPUs.

If this doesn't make sense for certain relevant market segments, then it is trivial for Intel to just remove the GPU (they have many Xeon CPUs that don't include a GPU, also the 6900K that AMD compared against has no GPU).

Not all Zen based CPUs will be without iGPU. When Summit Ridge will be 4/6/8 core CPUs without any iGPU, Raven Ridge (the APU version of Zen, and probably the mobile variant as well) will likely max out to 4 cores with an iGPU

I'm looking forward to some quality reviews of it. I'm mostly ignoring the hype machine. Pricing will be interesting. If it is actually amazing, I'm sure the pricing will be high.

Even if Zen will not be good, I buy AMD CPU, because I don`t like Intel LGA socket. For me perfomance isn`t too important but I want something reliable to use it for some years without any problems.

Tiger433 wrote:

Even if Zen will not be good, I buy AMD CPU, because I don`t like Intel LGA socket. For me perfomance isn`t too important but I want something reliable to use it for some years without any problems.

My amd system has a lga socket.

Jade Falcon wrote:

Tiger433 wrote:

Even if Zen will not be good, I buy AMD CPU, because I don`t like Intel LGA socket. For me perfomance isn`t too important but I want something reliable to use it for some years without any problems.

My amd system has a lga socket.

So you propably using server AMD CPU, I read somewhere that AM4 will be PGA socket like AM3+ and older. And also AMD platform propably will be cheaper for me than on Intel.

Waiting for reviews before "fapping" let alone anything more than that as AMD has failed up before miserably with shit like bulldozer. Even if the performance lives up to expectations prices will probably be high due to short supply and some will be forced to buy Intel like many have had to settle with Nvidia either because the prices were too high or there was nothing else to buy. A lot of people simply refuse to wait once something new hits the market even though six months to a year later it is no longer a big deal...

At least it is just one socket one architecture this time instead of the low end bobcat and apu spam that left people buying new boards every time something new came out (same complaint with Intel).

eL_PuSHeR wrote:

What do you need so many cores for? Aside from Ashes of the singularity no other game uses more than 4 cores.

I happen to know from experience that Mechwarrior Online can use as many as 22 freaking threads at once; Part of the reason why it runs so badly on dual-core CPUs. So in theory, it could take advantage of up to 22 cores. ;)

...yeah, that's the only example I have, but multi-threading is becoming more and more commonplace for the AAA devs because of how much sheer power you can get with it. Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, Space Engineers can do some crazy multi-threading too. :B

OH, also, I dunno about Radeon cards, but GeForce cards have an option for "Threaded Optimization" which can increase CPU usage quite a bit, but balances rendering calls by the CPU across multiple threads automatically, so can improve performance with games which are not using available cores to their maximum potential. ;)

Personally, I'm not upgrading my i7 3770K till something Graphene based of at least 10-GHz per core shows up.
It is quite sufficient for my needs of internet browsing and console emulation, as I don't play modern games at all.

BTW, it doesn't really matter if it is Intel or AMD for my needs but Intel is my first choice for some unknown default reason.

I would buy ZEN because I'm an AMD fan boy even if it does'nt live up to the hype the cpu is not as important as it has been in the past.

James-F wrote:

Personally, I'm not upgrading my i7 3770K till something Graphene based of at least 10-GHz per core shows up.
It is quite sufficient for my needs of internet browsing and console emulation, as I don't play modern games at all.

BTW, it doesn't really matter if it is Intel or AMD for my needs but Intel is my first choice for some unknown default reason.

I have been an AMD user since the AMD 386 DX days, but since I got my Core I7 I am very satisfied with it. I have had also a Phenom I pc, but I had my share of issues with AMD lackluster performing chipsets (AHCI hell and others). In my opinion Intel chipsets are more reliable and better performing. i don't know about latest AMD chipsets though. I hope they will be getting better.

James-F wrote:

Personally, I'm not upgrading my i7 3770K till something Graphene based of at least 10-GHz per core shows up.
It is quite sufficient for my needs of internet browsing and console emulation, as I don't play modern games at all.

BTW, it doesn't really matter if it is Intel or AMD for my needs but Intel is my first choice for some unknown default reason.

I've got the same CPU, but the non k. I agree, with a SSD, it's super responsive and video rendering takes maybe 10 or so minutes. Most of my money goes into old parts, I'm having much more fun with those.

eL_PuSHeR wrote:

What do you need so many cores for? Aside from Ashes of the singularity no other game uses more than 4 cores.

Actually, there are more games that can utilize >4 cores... from the top of my head Crysis 3.
And games aside - video encoding really love big CPUs. My next CPU will be no less than 8 cores and with good AVX2 performance (for x265)... so either Zen or Skylake-E, reviews will decide.

Tiger433 wrote:

Jade Falcon wrote:

Tiger433 wrote:

Even if Zen will not be good, I buy AMD CPU, because I don`t like Intel LGA socket. For me perfomance isn`t too important but I want something reliable to use it for some years without any problems.

My amd system has a lga socket.

So you propably using server AMD CPU, I read somewhere that AM4 will be PGA socket like AM3+ and older. And also AMD platform propably will be cheaper for me than on Intel.

Mine is. But the quad fx platform uses lga socket.

Bulldozer is the NetBurst of this decade - hot, inefficient, and outperformed by its predecessor the Phenom II. Expect to see them flooding recycling centers come 2026.

AMD has a history of promising the world and underdelivering. I really hope that's not the case this time. More than anything we need some real competition on the CPU front; if Intel had their way with things the future would be very bleak pricing and performance-improvement wise. They've already been stagnating since Sandy Bridge.

EDIT: From what I've seen of purportedly leaked Ryzen benchmarks, AMD may actually have a hit on their hands. Now they just have to price it properly.