The wait for Ryzen is almost over. AMD will launch three chips in the Ryzen 7 line on March 2, with the least expensive starting at $329. Better still, the company says it has exceed its target of improving instructions per clock by 40 percent over previous AMD hardware. Instead, it claims to have hit an improvement of 52 percent. That’s massive, and a breath of fresh air in an era where hardware enthusiasts have come to expect a generational improvement of 10 to 15 percent, at most.
This is an exciting time, not only for AMD, but for any who’s a fan of PC hardware. A return to legitimate competition between AMD and Intel can only mean lower prices and faster chips for everyone.
Yet there’s reason to be cynical. AMD released its Phenom processor line in 2007 with a value argument that’s not dissimilar to that we’re hearing with Ryzen; more cores, better pricing. Unfortunately, Phenom suffered lackluster per-core performance and a widely-publicized hardware bug, issues that let Intel sweep it aside.
Is Ryzen truly able to compete with Intel? Or is AMD’s again making a risky bet on processors that only outrun Intel in tasks that need many cores? Let’s take a closer look.
Targeting prosumer, and hitting gamers as collateral
While AMD says that Ryzen will eventually be a processor for everyone, its target market at launch is clear, and specific. The processor is going after “prosumer” users, as well as gamers, though the focus is heavily slanted towards the former. That isn’t a huge surprise. Gamers are certain to enjoy Ryzen more than any other recent AMD processor due to its overall performance, but the design of Ryzen is not entirely favorable to games.
That’s because it focuses on many cores, with many threads. The Ryzen 7 series, which is what’s launching on March 2 and available for pre-order now, consists entirely of processors with eight cores and sixteen threads, as you can see below.
Ryzen 7 1800X
Ryzen 7 1700X
Ryzen 7 1700
Cores
8
8
8
Threads
16
16
16
Base clock
3.6GHz
3.4GHz
3GHz
Boost clock
4GHz
3.8GHz
3.7GHz
TDP
95 watts
95 watts
65 watts
Price
$499
$399
$329
Clock speeds and features vary, but the core and thread counts do not. This kind of design is most important for high-demand applications which, of course, are the most likely to take advantage of many threads. PC games often don’t make great use of more than three or four threads, and as a result, they tend to run best on fast quad-core processors.
The focus on the prosumer is reflected in the Intel chips AMD is targeting. While the Core i7-7700K is mentioned in the company’s press information, AMD more often talks about the Core i7-6800K and 6900K. These elite Core processors are valued by prosumers for their high core counts; six and eight, respectively. They also have Intel’s Hyper-Threading, which gives them thread counts of 12 and 16.
Gamers, on the other hand, tend to go for the Core i5-7600K or i7-7700. These quad-cores hit higher clock speeds than their prosumer peers, and that often puts them at the top of game benchmarks.
Focusing on prosumer also helps AMD make a compelling price comparison. The Core i7-6800K goes for $424, and the Core i7-6900K sells for an incredible $1049 at most stores. Ryzen, meanwhile, starts at $329, and tops out at $499.
Nothing new to say about the platform, yet
While we had the chance to try Ryzen systems in-person, the bulk of the information we received is still embargoed. We can’t provide any new details about the architecture.
Luckily, there’s already a lot of information available. We covered Ryzen’s feature set last December, and the information found there remains as much as we can share with you today. You can also read the work of David Kanter, an analyst known for his (relatively) approachable deep-dives into processor architectures.
If you were wondering about the features of the motherboards that will go along side Ryzen, we must disappoint you. That information is also being withheld for now. All we can say is that over 80 partners will be launching boards for Ryzen. Look for more information on them soon.
Time to start the show
AMD’s making big promises with Ryzen, but talk is talk. The real question is whether it can perform. There’s some reason to be skeptical, because AMD has not lived up to expectations with past processors.
This is not a review; that’s coming later. However, AMD did provide us hands-on experience with the demos that it has so eagerly boasted of. We were particularly interested in the Handbrake demo, because we use Handbrake in our own PC test suite.
AMD’s test system was set up to encode a one-minute 4K .MP4 clip to 1080p, using default Handbrake settings. The test pit a Ryzen 7 1700 against Intel’s Core i7-7700K. Both systems had an identical 16GB of RAM, and identical 240GB solid state drive.
More: Intel Core i7-7700k review
This is less demanding than the Handbrake test we use, which encodes a four minute, 20 seconds long 4K .MP4 to 4K HVEC, but the fine-grain settings in Handbrake are the same as what we would use in our own tests.
The results? AMD’s hardware cranked through the video encode in 62 seconds. Intel’s hardware needed 71 seconds.
A difference of nine seconds doesn’t seem like much, but it does matter. Imagine if the clip were an hour long, instead of a minute. If that were true, the AMD Ryzen 7 1700 would complete the encode about nine minutes sooner than Intel’s Core i7-7700K. That’s a difference you’d notice if you encode video on a regular basis. And remember, the R7 1700 is the entry-level version of what’ll be available come March 2.
Good for gaming, though not setting records
Despite the focus on prosumer, AMD has certainly been speaking about Ryzen’s game performance as well. It’s easy to see why given the reputation that AMD has from its Radeon line, but at the same time, processor performance often isn’t the biggest factor in game performance – at least not when comparing chips that are supposed to be fighting in the same price point.
Still, AMD thinks it has an edge over Intel here, thanks to its delivery of high core counts and competitive performance per clock at lower prices. To demonstrate this, AMD rolled out Battlefield 1. We played it on two systems, one with a Core i7-6800K, the other with a Ryzen 7 1800X. Both systems had 32GB of RAM, and both had a 512GB solid state drive. The game ran at 4K resolution, with the Ultra preset enabled, in DirectX 11 mode.
The test system did not allow us to capture frame data as we usually would, so we had to go with the real-time frame counter. Having said that, we saw the AMD chip swing between 5 to 10 frames per second faster, with a few exceptions, where for brief periods of time the two would swing into direct competition. Both systems were producing an average of more than 80 FPS, so this win wasn’t visible in gameplay. The game looked butter-smooth on both.
That’s good, but we’re still a bit skeptical, for two reasons. One is that the Core i7-6800K sells for around $425 on Newegg, while the Ryzen 7 1800X will debut at $500. That muddies the value a bit.
Another issue is the choice of Core i7-6800K for this comparison, as it isn’t the best of the best to begin with. Testing has often shown the Core i7-7700K is just as quick, or quicker, in games due to its higher clock speed, which of course makes us wonder how the Ryzen 7 1800X (or any Ryzen) would compare to the Core i7-7700K in Battlefield 1.
More: How to optimize performance for Battlefield 1
AMD did not provide a game demo that pits the i7-7700K directly against any Ryzen 7, and that makes us a bit suspicious. The other game available to test, Sniper Elite 4, pit a Core i7-6900K against a Ryzen R7 1800X. Again, that’s not an Intel chip gamers frequently buy, so using it as a point of comparison seems odd.
Of course, AMD says there’s no reason to worry, and provided graphs that show exactly that. AMD hasn’t provided hands-on time to go with them, though, and we’d like to see the proof. It’s clear that Ryzen will make AMD a reasonable choice for even the most hardcore gamers, but it’s equally clear that Ryzen’s not pushing game performance well beyond what’s possible with current Intel hardware.
Conclusion
Ryzen will be available for pre-order by the time you read this, on February 22, but the launch doesn’t happen until March 2. It’s strange for a CPU to go up for pre-order, but we’re sure many fans are ready to pull the trigger.
What we’ve seen of Ryzen so far has been favorable, and the in-person tests worked exactly as AMD promised they would on stage. The performance we saw looks extremely price competitive if you want a processor to handle the most demanding, heavily multi-threaded tasks.
Gamers, on the other hand, should temper their enthusiasm. The story here is unlikely to be one of complete victory for AMD, but instead one of competition with Intel. That’s a kind of victory, given how far behind the company has fallen in game performance, but we don’t expect Ryzen to completely shut out the Core i7-7700K.
We always encourage our readers to wait for the full review. There’s still a lot we can’t say, and a lot we don’t know. You can expect that information when the processor ships on March 2. Our initial impressions are favorable, however, and indicate that Ryzen is likely the return to competition between AMD and Intel that enthusiasts have desperately hoped for.
Highs
- Reasonable pricing
- All Ryzen 7 chips have eight cores, 16 threads
- Excellent performance in heavy compute workloads
Lows
- Gaming performance may not exceed Intel’s best quad-cores
- Motherboard details still cloudy