Not only does AMD's Ryzen look set to offer stiff competition for Intel in regards to top-end performance, but it's undercutting the chip giant by almost 50 percent in some cases. At its big Ryzen announcement event, AMD highlighted how it will have Ryzen 7 CPUs that have as many as eight cores, 16threads, a TDP under 100w and the ability to hit 4GHz on its automated overclock.
All of that, for as little as $329, but even the most expensive of them will be no more than $500, which is less than half that of Intel's top of the line Core-i7 CPUs.
AMD's Ryzen has been in the works for four years and aimed initially to hit a target of 40 percent more instructions per clock than its excavator cores. While that seemed lofty at the time, Ryzen 7 series CPUs have actually achieved as much as 52 percent improvement per clock. They also operate at much higher frequencies and are more efficient, so shouldn't overheat easily.
Better yet, all CPUs in the range will feature unlocked multipliers, so overclocking them yourself will be easy. However if you want the automated overclocking known as XFR - extended frequency range - you will have to pay a little more for it, as it's only present on the 1700X and 1800X CPUs, which start at $400.
Pre-orders for the new chips are already available at select retailers, with all chips set to go on sale on March 2. When these CPUs hit the market, Intel could be in a lot of trouble.
We don't expect Intel to respond until at earliest the third quarter this year, but we may see it drop prices before then. We'll have to wait and see.
Are any of you planning to pick up a new Ryzen CPU?
