WINNER: AMD Ryzen
it’s easy to see why Ryzen is shaping up to give the CPU market the biggest shake-up we’ve seen in years
Bear
with me here, because the CPU of 2016 hasn’t even been released yet. AMD’s brand new Ryzen CPU is due to release any day now, but the mere mention of this new processor gave hope to gamers around the world. As far as gaming performance goes, CPU performance has stagnated for at least four years, when AMD simply couldn’t keep up with Intel’s Core CPUs. So we’ve had to make do with the tiniest of speed improvements from Intel each year, rarely exceeding 7% in most gaming tests.
AMD’s Ryzen looks set to reignite the CPU wars in a way that we haven’t seen since the days of the magnificent Athlon architecture. The latest leaked benchmarks show that the new architecture looks set to deliver on the huge promises AMD has been making about Ryzen’s new Zen architecture. The company claims that these cores have experienced a huge 40% performance increase when it comes to Instructions Per Second (or IPC for short), an area where its chips have lagged well behind Intel cores for far too long. In fact, some benchmarks are showing up to a 50% performance increase, which is the kind of performance leap we haven’t seen in the CPU world for over half a decade.
AMD has always offset its lower IPC performance by offering products that have more CPU cores than Intel, and has offered affordable octa-cored CPUs for many years already. Unfortunately most games don’t make use of more than fourcores, so this has really only been of benefit to applications designed with multithreading in mind, such as video and image editing. The good news is that AMD will still be offering these eight-brained beasts with the new Zen architecture, so not only will we get the massive IPC increase, but we’ll also get them in formats of up to 8 cores at a price that simply smashes Intel’s 8-core chips. For example, rumours suggest the top of the line Ryzen R7 1800X will be priced at around US$650, yet will operate at a top speed of 4GHz. Compare that with Intel’s Extreme Edition CPUs, which sell locally for $1600, and its easy to see why Ryzen is shaping up to give the CPU market the biggest shake-up we’ve seen in years.
We’ll be getting our mitts on the new AMD chip in the next month or two, where we’ll be able to back up these claims, but even the mere mention of this new chip has had a dramatic impact on the entire PC industry. Here’s hoping it really does live up to the leaked benchmarks and prices, but all indicators suggest that it will.