AMD Zen processors...Are you interested?

[Extremity]

I think they're impressive for AMD, but I also think that Intel's going to blow them away whether it's in a week or six months.

If I were going to enter a industry, Intel is the last entity I would want as my primary competitor. In my eyes, and I deal with tech on a daily basis, Intel is just... well, it's Intel. I can't imagine anybody wanting to out-tech or out-innovate them, honestly. So many people just default to "Intel" when building machines. Every machine I've built has had an AMD alternative that was cheaper for similar performance, and each time I go with Intel even if it's a few bucks more. Maybe that makes me a fanboy, I don't know, but it's how my brain works.

The same goes for GPUs with me; I always default to Nvidia. I just feel like I always have some weird compatibility issues if I go AMD. I will admit that in the GPI category AMD has become more appealing as of late, and I'm exciting to see what they come up with on the GPU front especially with the new tech they're coming out with, it's performing impressively. While it would still take a lot for me to swap to AMD from Nvid, I'm much more likely to switch to AMD GPUs than CPUs.

[Fascinate]

I wonder how nerfed the 65w parts will be compared to the 95w ones?

[Blackmist]

I want to see how the 1400X and 1200X compares to the i5-7600K and i7-7700K.

Those are the main gaming chips, so if it's close, that could hurt Intel in that sector.

[Fascinate]

I will be waiting for WoW and overwatch benchmarks before i make a purchase, as those are basically the only games i play atm. Curious to see how these chips stack up against my 2500k, i mean you think they would smoke it but i guess time will tell.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

when you are at the top for so long of course you get like that. its reality. why invest millions more of 5% boost when you dominate the market? I have always loved amd. I hope they can turn it around

Well I don't love or hate either company. I just want vastly superior processors to push out and the only way it will happen is if both are in the fight slugging it out. The question of why invest millions for 5% more should be obvious to them and us now. They would be 10 to 15% stronger now that the AMD release is about to hit instead of where it is at while still being one of the most wildly successful companies on the planet. This is pretty much how they defeated AMDs last generational cycle in my opinion. There is no way they were surprised by this because I have been hearing about zen for a year or two and I am sure they hear more than I do.

[Fascinate]

How messed up would it be if the ~150 dollar zen failed to match the fx 8350?

[Life-Binder]

I will be waiting for WoW and overwatch benchmarks before i make a purchase, as those are basically the only games i play atm. Curious to see how these chips stack up against my 2500k, i mean you think they would smoke it but i guess time will tell.

if you've OCed your 2500k (which you should) then they wont be smoking it in WoW and OW .. maybe not even beating it at all

for these 2 games you pretty much can run your 2500k forever tbh, they dont use the extra cores/threads, they wont use the extra speed of DDR4 RAM, nothing

[Fascinate]

if you've OCed your 2500k (which you should) then they wont be smoking it in WoW and OW .. maybe not even beating it at all

for these 2 games you pretty much can run your 2500k forever tbh, they dont use the extra cores/threads, they wont use the extra speed of DDR4 RAM, nothing

Why shouldnt they? Overwatch and WoW scale pretty good with CPU performance, and of course im talking about an overclocked zen vs my overclocked 2500k.

[Life-Binder]

^ because per core performance of even Skylake/Kaby Lake is not really that far off from Sandy/Ivy per core performance, which is all WoW/OW cares about

WoW and OW scale with more MHz and Sandy Bridge can hit 4.5-5.0 GHz


the biggest reasons newer CPUs pull somewhat ahead is more cores/threads for multi-thread apps and DDR4 RAM speed (which also costs a pretty penny for 3200-3600+ RAM) and WoW/OW arent going to take advantage of those


I mean overall a new CPU would be an upgrade over 2500k, but if you looking for big fps boosts specifically in OW/WoW then I would temper the expectations


plus WoW is so old engine that even a 5.0 GHz Kaby quad cant sustain 60 fps everywhere on high/max settings

[Evildeffy]

I'm curious to see what price cuts Intel will do (if any). Looking at these prices I'm tempted to get a 8/16 processor, but it will likely perform worst in games compared to my 4.8Ghz 6700k. Maybe it will matter in a couple of years, but Zen+ or the next big Intel thing might be out by then.

Assumption.
Wait until you see benchmarks before you state "it will likely perform worse".

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I will definitely skip this gen of CPUs, but will keep an eye out for both Zen and Skylake-X gaming benchmarks/prices and if Zen goes toe to toe in games then I might just get a Zen+ in 2018/2019 if Intel doesnt do something big by then or lowers their 6c/8c prices drastically

And what exactly are you expecting from Skylake-X?
It's literally just Skylake with up to 10 cores and no iGPU, there will be 0 architectural or IPC improvements.

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I think they're impressive for AMD, but I also think that Intel's going to blow them away whether it's in a week or six months.

If I were going to enter a industry, Intel is the last entity I would want as my primary competitor. In my eyes, and I deal with tech on a daily basis, Intel is just... well, it's Intel. I can't imagine anybody wanting to out-tech or out-innovate them, honestly. So many people just default to "Intel" when building machines. Every machine I've built has had an AMD alternative that was cheaper for similar performance, and each time I go with Intel even if it's a few bucks more. Maybe that makes me a fanboy, I don't know, but it's how my brain works.

The same goes for GPUs with me; I always default to Nvidia. I just feel like I always have some weird compatibility issues if I go AMD. I will admit that in the GPI category AMD has become more appealing as of late, and I'm exciting to see what they come up with on the GPU front especially with the new tech they're coming out with, it's performing impressively. While it would still take a lot for me to swap to AMD from Nvid, I'm much more likely to switch to AMD GPUs than CPUs.

It's honestly that stigma which creates mindshare when it's really false.
You state compatibility issues in graphics cards.. it's based upon an international specification of compatibility they need to pass before it's allowed to be used.
If there's a compatibility "issue" then both nVidia and AMD have it.

And games preferring a certain architecture over another is not a compatibility issue.. it's TWIMTBP issues.

As far as an answer from Intel... they don't have any for at least 1 year, their next-gen is another optimization of Kaby Lake and still on 14nm.
(confirmed by Intel itself)
Which means AT MOST you'll get another couple hundred MHz out of it.

Also just a random question:
What exactly did Intel innovate?
For the most part they have innovated very little if anything and I'm genuinely curious what you understand as innovation from them.

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^ because per core performance of even Skylake/Kaby Lake is not really that far off from Sandy/Ivy per core performance, which is all WoW/OW cares about

WoW and OW scale with more MHz and Sandy Bridge can hit 4.5-5.0 GHz

the biggest reasons newer CPUs pull somewhat ahead is more cores/threads for multi-thread apps and DDR4 RAM speed (which also costs a pretty penny for 3200-3600+ RAM) and WoW/OW arent going to take advantage of those

I mean overall a new CPU would be an upgrade over 2500k, but if you looking for big fps boosts specifically in OW/WoW then I would temper the expectations

plus WoW is so old engine that even a 5.0 GHz Kaby quad cant sustain 60 fps everywhere on high/max settings

You're missing his point.

If you pit the 2500K overclocked vs. Ryzen overclocked, and let's assume they can reach the same frequencies, the Ryzen CPU should have the upper hand.
Even if Ryzen is 20% stronger IPC than Sandy Bridge, which according to tests so far puts it above Skylake/Kaby Lake so closer to 25%, it should be offering more performance than his 2500K.

He's not talking about anything else, but you are already assuming that Ryzen's IPC is not better than that of Sandy Bridge...
Come off it already, if IPC wasn't stronger than that already then it could never win in a 1-on-1 fight in Handbrake vs. BW-E.

Also just a note for you:
CPU bottlenecked games on Skylake/Kaby Lake actually do get an increase in performance with faster RAM.
Whether this is true or not for Ryzen remains to be seen as it seems to be architecture dependant for the most part.

[Life-Binder]

20% is hardly worth an upgrade (especially for games like WoW and Overwatch, where WoW will remain limited by the engine and OW already gets 100+ fps easily @ 1080p with an OCed 2500k and a half-decent GPU) and thats best case scenario

and whether Zen can clock as high as the very high clocking Sandy B remains to be seen

CPU bottlenecked games on Skylake/Kaby Lake actually do get an increase in performance with faster RAM.

WoW and OW ? do you have proof link ? RAM dependancy varies a lot game by game

And what exactly are you expecting from Skylake-X?
It's literally just Skylake with up to 10 cores and no iGPU, there will be 0 architectural or IPC improvements.

(1) Skylake has IPC improvements over Haswell-E and BW-E, not big ones, but they are there
(2) mainly its the higher clocks, maybe there will be 4.7+ GHz OCing 6c/8c Skylakes .. 6800K-6900K only go to ~4.3 on avg, maybe 4.4-4.5 at best
(3) mostly Im expecting price drops

[Turaska]

I want to see some benchmarks first, initial impressions are good though.

[caervek]

The processors are extremely interesting, 8C16T at mainstream prices with competitive IPC and 4GHz+ speeds out of the box sounds awesome.

*however*

No manufacturer has yet shown a high end board for the socket (I mean high end as in decent connectivity not RGB lights) and without decent motherboard support it doesn't matter how good the CPUs are.

[Life-Binder]

1600X or 1700X look the best if I were upgrading now

[Fascinate]

Like i said earlier the real interesting CPU's are the 65w parts. My guess is they will overclock as well as the 95w parts but are just TDP binned from the factory for power savings.

Im pretty sure the r5 1500 will end up the bang for the buck CPU, as its a 6 core 12 thread part for 220 bucks. Its just yet to be seen what exactly the 65w tdp means.

[Life-Binder]

[Turaska]

Am I still half asleep or am I seeing the VI Hero and Pro are basically the exact same board?

[Evildeffy]

20% is hardly worth an upgrade (especially for games like WoW and Overwatch, where WoW will remain limited by the engine and OW already gets 100+ fps easily with a half-decent GPU) and thats best case scenario

and whether Zen can clock as high as the very high clocking Sandy B remains to be seen

You fail to grasp the difference here:
If the IPC gain is "only" 20% (low-balling this!) over Sandy Bridge then AMD's Ryzen would only need to get just under 4,2GHz to beat Sandy Bridge's 5GHz.
And unless you have a golden sample.. you're not reaching 5GHz on Sandy Bridge, 4,8GHz yes but not really higher.
In which case only 4GHz is required by Ryzen to beat a 4,8GHz Sandy Bridge, anything above that is a gain.

Whether it can clock higher than Sandy Bridge is not relevant at all, whether it can match it's performance is the question.
Considering the 8C/16T CPUs can come clocked at a base 4,0GHz ... I'd say that answer is given since less core chips should get a couple 100 more MHz than higher core chips because of complexity.

WoW and OW ? do you have proof link ? RAM dependancy varies a lot game by game

Yes lemme grab that proof out of my butthole... it's how RAM works, Digital Foundry's tests have told you by now that the gains are shown mostly by CPU bottlenecked games get alleviated if you put in faster RAM, this should apply for WoW as well.
Problem is how you are going to prove anything in WoW, there's no scripted benchmark and everything is dynamic at all times.
Why do you think it's not really ever taken in benchmarks? I'm surprised that TechReport or whichever site it was is doing it.

(1) Skylake has IPC improvements over Haswell-E and BW-E, not big ones, but they are there
(2) mainly its the higher clocks, maybe there will be 4.7+ GHz OCing 6c/8c Skylakes .. 6800K-6900K only go to ~4.3 on avg, maybe 4.4-4.5 at best
(3) mostly Im expecting price drops

1: Still not any gains over Skylake normal chip, it's not going to exceed that so you're not gaining anything over a Skylake socket 1151 CPU except more cores.
2: The architecture will be exactly the same which means the average is between 4,6 and 4,8GHz if you're lucky, and due to the complexity of HEDT line chips they tend to always clock lower than their socket 115X counterparts, this has always been the case and will continue to be so especially since Intel's HEDT design concept is exactly the same still, so I wouldn't expect higher than 4,6GHz really.
3: Possible... but I doubt it.

[RaZz0r]

Im interested for sure especially since my CPU is starting to show its age i7 4770K @ 4.5GHz and i have been looking for a upgrade.
So if AMD's Zen CPU's has anywhere near or better single threaded performance then the Intel equivalent i might juts go with a AMD CPU.
Especially since AMD boards are finally getting SLI support on top of it, i cant wait to see some proper benchmarks.
And hopefully someone to give it a run threw a WoW raid or two to see how it holds up compared to Intel.
As that is the only performance test i really care about the higher FPS i can get in my raids the better.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

I just made the choice about a week ago and went with the 7700k and while I do feel the AMD chip is superior physically this go around my deal breaker was uncertainty in chip set performance and how well it will jive with everything. Now there really isn't a ton of direct evidence pointing towards these things but I know they are known issues on very virgin launches. If in 3 or so years when I platform upgrade again AMD is still going strong, motherboard manufacturers are well in tune with the base idea, and all the jiving issues are proven to be non-existent I will give them a serious look. I just was burned by this once in the past and don't feel comfortable running the odds again.