
AMD Ryzen Hype - ensiferum
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/01/amd-ryzen-motherboards-hype/
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Lintaris
The article title gives out a negative vibe. AMD has a marketing team and the
team so far is doing good work. #savedyouaclick.

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geezerjay
That's not what the article says. At all.

The article says that although Ryzen does outperform Intel's offerings, the
deal breaker will be its price. If it's too expensive, it won't sell well. If
it's just the right price, it will be an overnight success.

In short, platitudes.

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xorfish
I get the vibe that the author thinks that AMD will just launch a 8c/16t
processor.

But AMD will launch an entire lineup, from the 8c/16t high end processor to at
least a 4c/4t model.

That said, 500$ for a 8c/16t CPU seems reasonable. The 6c/12th model must be
around 350$ to be competitive and a 4c/8t CPU will own the market at a
200-250$ price point. The 4c/4t model must be below 200$ to compete with
Intels i5 lineup.

I'm not sure if AMD has a response to the recent release of the Pentium G4560.
For 64$ it offers the same performance we expected from a i3.

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geezerjay
The article is spot on in what is essentially the main performance indicators:
price, and the price/performance ratio.

Ryzen's performance means close to nothing if its priced out of the market.
Nowadays, most computational needs are already well met and even surpassed by
what's on the market for the past, say, half a dozen years. AMD's newest
product may blow Intel's offerings out of the water, but that means close to
nothing as they already outperformed the market's needs. In a world where the
main incentive to increase performance is laid squarely on e-penis bragging
rights, either the price makes sense or it's yet another nice-to-have-but-
don't-bother offering.

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devwastaken
I would not say that performance has been met. Performance has been met for
those who pay a lot of money and then only use their computer for Chrome or
photoshop. It still performs quite poorly for many other things, like
compiling, physics calculations, network tweening in multiplayer games, and
all the things you can do with your computer outside of the basics. Thats not
e-penis, thats real work/applications that still suffer quite badly, even with
an I7 extreme edition.

Personally I've been dissapointed in how CPU's haven't improved in the same
way GPU's have. I'd much rather that CPU's start getting bigger rather than
smaller, and put more effort into single-core performance.

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geezerjay
> It still performs quite poorly for many other things, like compiling,
> physics calculations, network tweening in multiplayer games, and all the
> things you can do with your computer outside of the basics. Thats not
> e-penis, thats real work/applications that still suffer quite badly, even
> with an I7 extreme edition.

The market share associated with those use cases is between very slim and
practically nonexistent.

Then, you've isolated the market segment which is willing to pay a premium for
performance, and then argue that cost is a factor.

> Thats not e-penis, thats real work/applications that still suffer quite
> badly, even with an I7 extreme edition.

Quite frankly, those who care for performance and are bound to a budget are
also not waiting for new product releases. They are in fact paying attention
to the used parts market, where nowadays it's possible to buy dozens of server
processors for chump change.

As an example, nowadays it's possible to buy on ebay dozens of bulldozer-based
Opteron processors for the same amount of cash that a brand new i7 processor
is sold for, and whoever is interested in computational power can easily setup
a 4-socket Opteron server for less than €1000.

~~~
devwastaken
>The market share associated with those use cases is between very slim and
practically nonexistent.

If so, then why do extreme editions and the 6700K exist? Those are
significantly slimmer in usage than dual core I7's, I5's or I3's. In reality,
there are a lot of power users who work with video, code, and plenty of other
tasks that demand the highest computing power. These are usually also backed
by a business, so they can charge a good amount for it.

>Quite frankly, those who care for performance and are bound to a budget are
also not waiting for new product releases. They are in fact paying attention
to the used parts market, where nowadays it's possible to buy dozens of server
processors for chump change.

That depends upon your budget. If you're working proffessionally with the
things I've listed there, chances are an $800 cost is tiny compared to the
returns of a productivity increase.

>As an example, nowadays it's possible to buy on ebay dozens of bulldozer-
based Opteron processors for the same amount of cash that a brand new i7
processor is sold for, and whoever is interested in computational power can
easily setup a 4-socket Opteron server for less than €1000.

That statement largely ignores all the aspects of proffessional machines, and
single-core performance. Getting a bunch of old opterons and slapping them in
a machine is not a reliable setup. Even if it was, there are plenty of things
that cannot be threaded well, its just how some algorithms work. If everything
was threaded, Intel could have shoved 12 cores into all their chips long ago.

