If someone were to ask me what CPU to get for a PC build, I would have recommended them an Intel CPU hands down. AMD has been out of the CPU competition for quite a while now. Intel CPUs getting incremental improvements to their CPUs each year and have completely pushed AMD out of the competition. AMD’s current lineup of FX series of processors perform quite well, although, they are clearly outdated when they are compared to Intel’s Skylake CPUs.
For about a year, rumors about AMD’s Zen finally catching upto Intel have been leaking out promising AMD’s Zen CPU to finally bring all complaints to a rest. Intel has definitely dominated the PC hardware platform for quite a while, and it seems like AMD could be the one that will push Intel back into it’s territory.
This afternoon, AMD announced and showed off a few details regarding the upcoming Zen CPU, that AMD renamed to Ryzen. According to AMD’s CEO, Lisa Su announced that they’re Ryzen CPU will come with eight cores paired with 16 threads. AMD took Intel’s Core i7 6900K for the comparison tests that proved how much they’ve improved with the boost in IPC performance and their implementation of the more efficient 14nm architecture. Both CPUs were neck an neck with AMD’s Ryzen CPU edging out the $1000 6900K by a split second.
Next up, they compared their Ryzen CPU to Intel’s i7-6900K with Handbrake in which AMD’s Ryzen CPU finished the task 5 seconds earlier than the Intel counterpart. But this would make more sense if AMD would actually price these CPUs cheaper than Intel’s equivalents. AMD has been well known for their lower prices, and if they nail their Intel counterparts for lower prices, AMD could be back in the race and become the choice for enthusiasts again, content creators and gamers alike which would really force Intel to lower their prices and come up with a trade blow.
2017 alone seems to be a very promising year for AMD and the PC Gaming community as a whole, especially when you consider AMD’s new Ryzen CPUs arriving anytime in Q1 and Vega GPUs coming soon after that. AMD has certainly got a plan to finally regain its name if it’s CPUs perform just as well as the hype once Ryzen CPUs hit stores.
It really seems like Intel is feeling the heat if the OC’able i3 releases on Intel’s Kaby lake architecture.
Although what makes me feel empty is the absence of an actual release date and an actual idea of how much AMD would price these CPUs at. Well, Q1 2017 isn’t that long, right?
