AMD Ryzen

After a 10 year hiatus Computer Developments is back! The news of the AMD Ryzen CPU's has caused quite a stir in the PC world. There have been many conflicting reviews showing questionable gaming and performance scores. My takeaway from the information I've gleaned over the past few months of Ryzen news is that this new architecture performs 15 - 25% better in gaming with 3200 Mhz RAM. Specifically, the min FPS is much higher due to the way the CCX communication functions between the two quad-cores in each Ryzen 7's CPU Complex. The Ryzen line of CPU's are priced to compete with Intel's Sky/Kaby Lake CPU's and their gaming performance at 1080p nets between 95% - 98% of those Intel CPU's. In all other performance benchmarks the Intel counterparts have about a 10% - 15% advantage in single threaded performance and 60% - 80% disadvantage in multi-threaded performance.

Considering where software is headed, both for gaming and productivity, it seems apparent that the purchase of a lower clocked Ryzen CPU with 50% to 75% more threads is more future-proofed than a higher clocked Intel CPU at the same price point with half or even a quarter the amount of threads available. Now that AMD's Ryzen CPU's are operating on the same 14nm process that Intel has been on for the past 3 years, comparisons between the two are on much more of a level playing field. Since the Intel CPU's have the clock speed advantage that means they run hotter and use far more wattage core for core compared to the lower clocked Ryzen processors when performing the same tasks. This would be a consideration for cool and quiet systems such as HTPC's or Mini-ITX gaming rigs where heat dissipation is an important factor.

Will you be buying a Ryzen rig?

10 Year Anniversary Post!