Now that AMD has announced the official specs on their Flagship CPU’s, is there a comeback in the making? Quickly recapping, AMD is releasing the 1700, 1700x, and 1800x processors to compete against Intel’s Core i7 7700K, 6800K and 6900K flagships. All of these Ryzen chips have an 8 Core, 16 Thread architecture that is built with multi-processing in mind. What’s most notable, is the clear performance gains in favor of AMD Ryzen in such key benchmarks like Cinebench, Handbrake and even some 4k and online Gaming. Now besides performance, is the welcoming price at $329 for the 1700, $399 for the 1700x and $499 for the 1800x. Now the two Ryzen 1700 prices aren’t significantly less than the Intel 7700K or 6800K, but the 1800x is half the price of the 6900K which currently retails for $1,050! And this is where I see AMD making a comeback and putting some real competitive pressure against Intel.
AMD in the Golden Years was always known for their Performance and Price meaning you simply got the best value versus a competing Intel processor. However ever since the mid-90’s and beyond, AMD has faltered in the area of Performance. Most recently were the AMD FX series, released in 2011, which were touted as the first 8 core consumer-grade processors which touted Performance however real world use was less than flagship quality with the mid range Intel i5 handily beating AMD’s best offerings. Now this wouldn’t have been so bad if AMD hadn’t made such remarkable claims without backing them up. But that was how AMD was operating for many years until Lisa Su became the current CEO of AMD. Under her leadership, AMD has started to make changes in the right areas. The first major area was in their GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) with their Polaris-based AMD Radeon RX Series to compete against Nvidia. These lower to mid-end offerings were well received mainly for what AMD was known for: Price and Performance. All the specs were backed up by real world performance and the prices were simply an incredible value for Gamers and Content Creators alike. I actually bought the AMD RX-470 4GB myself and have been enthusiastically surprised by the amount of performance I’m getting for my money. Nvidia responded with price cuts and it looks like this will also happen with Intel as well if the Ryzen chips sell as well.
With my most recent Linux “Monster” PC Build, I have the Intel Core i7 7700K paired with an AMD RX-470 GPU, 2 SSD’s and 16GB of DDR4 RAM. So with this build, I’m not lacking for performance nor do I have any buyer’s remorse. However I knew that the Ryzen chips were coming out along with their high-end AMD Vega GPU’s, but I just couldn’t wait for another 4-5 months…ahhh Technology. Overall I’m extremely happy with the gains that AMD is making not only in providing incredible value for consumers but also for giving Nvidia and especially Intel some much needed competition!
-Geek Outside!
