REFINING SUCCESS
Intel may be rattled, but AMD needs to cement its success with revision
IT’S A RARE OCCURRENCE for the hype train to be not quite as overwhelming as the potency of the product it represents. And with Jim Keller masterminding the development of Team Red’s latest architecture, AMD’s Zen CPU lineup was hardly going to be a dud. However, none of us truly knew what to expect from the company that had otherwise disappointed us on the computational front for the previous six years.
Ryzen was, and still is, a masterpiece. A once-in-adecade reinvention of a product. Something that AMD so desperately needed in order to assure its own future. Its effect on consumer computing has been vast and far reaching, pushing Intel to act, stop resting on its laurels, and raise its core counts higher, if only to retain anything like the market share it once had. And, at last, after six long years of waiting, there’s finally a choice— consumers actually have a decision to make once again. Both processor manufacturers now provide options more than capable of succeeding the platforms of yesteryear. Whether it’s Skylake X or Threadripper for workstations, Coffee Lake or Ryzen 7 in the mid-range, or Ryzen 3 or the Core i3s at the budget end of the spectrum, there’s a processor for everyone.
However, Ryzen certainly isn’t perfect, and even Don Woligroski, AMD’s Desktop CPU Marketing Manager, when speaking to YouTuber JokerProductions, stated that Ryzen was a “worst case scenario” for AMD. A new architecture on a new node brings up a whole plethora of issues, including memory and BIOS bugs, power draw woes, and overall lower frequencies than what were originally intended.
Ryzen 2, known as Pinnacle Ridge, looks to correct these issues. Rumored to be released some time in the first quarter of 2018, we’re expecting a drop to a 12nm production node (down from Ryzen’s current 14nm), higher base clock frequencies, lower power draw, and two brand new X470 and B450 chipsets to accompany the retention of the AM4 socket (allowing for backward compatibility with previous chipsets). All of which should bring up single-core performance to Skylake and Kaby Lake levels, and in turn enhance multicore performance as well. On top of that, it should also help refine the platform further, with enhanced memory support, better overclocking, and improved motherboard design, and potentially also allow AMD to introduce more PCIe lanes to its newer chipsets.
It would also be highly surprising if we didn’t see AMD launch its range of Vega-powered Raven Ridge APUs some time around Q1 as well. Hopefully, they’ll bring more options to those interested in building a budgetfriendly low-spec gaming machine or media PC. Rumor has it, these should feature four Zen cores (or two Ryzen core complexes, with support for 8MB of L3 cache, and multithreading), and 11 Vega GPU cores, and should prove to be quite the beast at 1080p low to mid-range gaming.