Pinch me. AMD releasing Ryzen CPU, could be competative on more than just price
I’ll admit it. I was a hardcore AMD fanboi back in the day. K7 was awesome, and the subsequent stream of related CPUs gave Intel a proper foil on the performance, and value, fronts. But, somewhere along the way AMD got lost in the wilderness… Perhaps too distracted by their attempts to ingest ATI into the fold… Although… I guess it doesn’t really matter why, with the gist being that if we’re honest, it’s been quite a while since one could purchase an AMD CPU for any reason that didn’t lean very heavily on the value argument.
Excitingly, that could be changing with Ryzen though. From what I’ve seen from the PR and initial analysis (so let’s keep the enthusiasm tamped down for now) on the interwebs they could actually be turning that around. Releasing a competitive 8C/16T 100W CPU on a modern platform; supporting NVMe, USB3.1 Gen2, PCIe Gen3, and DDR4. Come Q1, might be time to start cross shopping again.
AMD’s Zen CPU core architecture is now called Ryzen (pronounced rye-zen, not rizen). Perhaps more importantly, though, as we creep towards Ryzen’s promised Q1 2017 release date, AMD has finally revealed some solid specs for a chip based on Ryzen cores.
In the eternal battle to drive more details out of AMD ahead of the full launch of its new Zen microarchitecture based CPUs, today AMD is lifting the lid on some new features in order to whet the appetite (and appease the hype-train, perhaps) and that will be part of the product launch. We now have new details on the brand naming, some platform details, and a high-level overview of what will be the key points being promoted when it comes to market.