when did AMD suddenly become relevant again?

just saying...their cpus are the bomb nowadays. The ryzen 20xx series and now the 30xx series are putting up a serious fight against intel. Anyone else surprised at this? Im also a bit of an intel fan, but I purchased my first amd build around an amd 2600 for the first time in almost 8 years. Whatever they are doing I hope they keep it up...the prices of the cpus are all going down because of the competition, and baby im loving it. When could you buy a 6 core processor for under $130 in the last 10 years of intel dominance?? Never.

Since ryzen, they offer better performance at certian price points intel dobt compete.

Intel is still better performance wise, thanks to higher clocks, IPC is the about the same now and AMD wins in performance per watt. But despite that Intel still locks HT for cheaper CPU's and they give you inadequate coolers. It's like they don't care about being competitive. So yeah, screw them. XD

Was I surprised by that? No actually AMD in the past has always been a competitor and has beaten intel multiple times back in the day. The problem started when intel started buy up patents, and bribe and or force the oem's to use their products and not AMD's over 10 years ago. This forced AMD to stick with older tech longer and they had to create their own alternatives. Intel was caught and fined for their shady practices but the damage was done and fine too little.

It took AMD 3 revisions to really "catch up" so ofc Intel has been sleeping.

Still no reason to upgrade off my 4790k quite yet.

Very good post. The bribes and patients really started to hurt AMD really badly in the 2009 to 2014 range.

AMD becoming the partner for both of the 8th gen consoles (along with Intel easing up due to the lawsuit) allow AMD to dump a good amount of money into Ryzen development in the 2013-2015 span.

Since AMD is doing yearly releases instead of having to sit on processors forever (FX series was like 4-5 years), it's causing the previous generations to actually lower in price. My local hardware store for example has last years 8 core 2700X for only $130 (can't beat that value)

Ryzen has been great (i have a 1500X).

Unfortunately AMD just got it badly wrong with bulldozer and in the hardware world it can take quite a long time to turn it around after going down the wrong path (they are only starting to turn it around on the GPU side now with navi...a whole different topic). the basic story behind ryzen is that basically AMD said "right: if bulldozer never happened how would we proceed with enhancing out CPU".

So intel could clobber them over the head a bit. It's very hard to make a CPU appealing when it generates more heat, has less performance and can't compete with the competition at the price it's selling at.

It's great to see proper competition and a wealth of choice in the CPU market again. Hopefully it causes chipzilla to rise again from its long slumber (though that make take a while). man 2015-16 were grim.

Hopefully we see a similar thing on the GPU front and NVidia get more solid competition at the high end because MY GOD do they (and we) need it. Intel will be entering the GPU market too next year so that could be a big wrench in the works. next year should be very interesting.

If we could also have more competition in the OS space too that would be great.

Sounds like the Ryzen 9 3950x or whatever is a real ass-kicker.

I heard you need fast memory to really get the most out of it, though. Is this true? That would certainly up the cost a bit.

I think I'm going to upgrade my processor this Winter, and I might actually go all-out on processor and mobo this time around. Definitely eye-balling this processor.

But Intel has served me well for quite some time.

Do it, 10920X for me.

@mrbojangles25: up to certain point ryzen really likes me bandwidth, after that the gains are marginal. I'm also considering grabbing 3950x in January as I'll get new gpu next year and slam it all on next year's tax deducts

I'd hold off until you need to upgrade our 8700's still doing the job quite well.

Yeah I have a 4th gen i7 that still seems to do the trick, but I do experience some slowdown in the past few months. not sure if that's processor or memory (or both) related.

AMD launches Zen + CPU with 12nm microarchitecture in April 2018, following up with 7nm Zen 2 microarchitecture in June 2019 includes updates to Epyc line with new processors using the Zen 2 microarchitecture in August 2019.

Looks like all the 3950x and 3900x are sold out, and likely will be for a while. Not surprising, I suppose.

My FX 6360 was actually pretty good in my opinion and experience. Granted a core I5 would have been better, but it did pretty good when paired with my RX 560 and my previous pairing with my old Nvidia GT 730.

Nowdays my rig has a Ryzen 5 1600 and a RX 570 and I've been beyond happy with it. Might consider upgrading to a Ryzen 7 2700 and something capable of 2K gaming in a few years though.

@PfizersaurusRex: I

It depends. The 9900ks is still the king of gaming but the i5 lack of threads is a problem is some newer more threads friendly titles where it suffers from stuttering when there's lot of action. Also when it comes to workstation duty Intel doesn't have any advantage. It depends on the workload but there's many case where AMD wins. If you got the money as a workstation the Threadripper 3770x is a no-brainer. As the best value overall (as a wannabe consumer workstation + casual gaming) the Ryzen 3950x wins. Outside of the 9900k(s) in a purely gaming oriented use-case Intel doesn't have much to offer right now honestly.

Since, they started offering CPUs at lower price than Intel with more performance in same price bracket. Only downside is newer AMD processors require mobo with firmware update or the 570 chipset which is more expensive mobo wise. I'm excited to see what they are going to come out with next. I'm still rocking my i7 6700k and if AMD keeps it up. I might upgrade to AMD when my processor isn't viable.

I've been out of the game for a while but back in the early-mid 2000s, AMDs Athlon Line beat out Intel with their terrible Pentium 4's and Pentium D's. Once Core 2 came into fruition, AMD started to slide. By the late 2000s, their Athlon IIs and Phenom IIs, while good performers for gaming especially in the value segment, were lacking in IPCs compared to Intel. I think Sandy Bridge was what really did AMD in. Ivy, Haswell etc. were very minor upgrades and AMDs FX line for the most part was a joke outside of some niche tasks and it seemed like AMD was doomed. Intel sat on their laurels, got spanked for their shitty practices (arguably not hard enough), and AMD surprised everyone with Ryzen. When you look back in time, AMD and Intel have always traded blows.

AMD created its own problem with many weak threads Bulldozer which has server market bias.

AMD didn't continue K10's evolution path.

monopolies are a bitch