Performance, pricing details for AMD’s upcoming Ryzen CPU leak online

By Joel Hruska

Over the weekend, a brace of leaks spilled critical information on how AMD’s Ryzen will compare with Intel’s Core i7 family, and how the chips will supposedly be priced. All of this information should be taken as preliminary and with a substantial grain of salt given the websites involved in leaking it and their records (WCCFTech’s in particular) of playing fast and loose with the truth. This is rumor, not fact, and should be treated equivalently.

That said, these rumors are at least plausible. According to VideoCardz, which leaked the performance data, these numbers reflect a CPU without Turbo Mode, apparently running at a flat 3.4GHz. The RAM used was DDR4-2400, and not great DDR4 at that — timings were set to 17-17-17-39 2T. The motherboard was an MSI A320 board (meaning a budget model) rather than a high-end product. Clearly AMD felt these chips were close enough to shipping product to represent Ryzen, but there were obviously a few issues still to be sorted out. Furthermore, VC used Passmark, a synthetic test with limited value for telling us how performance will look in the real world. Caveats aside, let’s examine the data.

These figures look plausible enough to me to be worth writing about, even if I wouldn’t draw any firm conclusions on them. Synthetic tests don’t always translate well to the real-world, and the CPU in question is clearly an early core.

But what these figures show most importantly is an AMD that’s once again in a position to compete with Intel. CPU pricing will determine how much truth is in that statement, but let’s be honest for a moment — it doesn’t cost Intel anything like $400 to build a six-core processor and it certainly doesn’t cost $1000 to build an eight-core chip. These are price bands Intel has maintained solely to boost its own revenue. Even if you believe accusations of Intel acting in bad faith to slow the speed of performance improvements are unfounded (and I do), there’s no arguing that the company’s price structure is optimized to earn itself the most amount of money, not to push higher CPU core counts into markets that could plausibly use them.

And speaking of rumors on pricing…

Pricing, positioning details

WCCFTech is claiming to have the full suite of AMD SKUs for its eight, six, and quad-core parts. According to the site, AMD will have a set of “Ryzen 3” parts with quad-core chips (no SMT), while “Ryzen 5” chips will a mixture of six-and-eight-core parts, all with SMT. The eight-core chips will be “Ryzen 7” models, and all of them will carry SMT as well. Supposedly all Ryzen cores will have a TDP between 65W and 95W.

I am uncertain as to the validity of the entire SKU lineup and so will not address it in further detail. What’s more interesting are three specific claims WCCFTech makes about the “Ryzen 7” product family.

If these figures are remotely in the ballpark, Intel is in for a world of hurt. The chip most closely resembling the Ryzen tested above is the Ryzen 7 1700X, a 3.4GHz chip with a 3.8GHz Turbo. The results above suggest (tentatively!) that AMD’s $389 core will land between the Core i7-6800K ($441) and the 6850K ($628). Meanwhile, the top-end Ryzen 4GHz chip will land at $500 — less than half the price of Intel’s current eight-core CPU family. That $389 price point could blow the quad-core Core i7 out of the water at an equivalent price and should be advantageous against the “middle” of Intel’s HEDT lineup.

I suspect Intel will hold its fire and avoid changing its product lines further until it sees how Ryzen actually stacks up in representative suites of benchmarks. But these results could mean we’re about to see a competitive CPU market again for the first time in a half-decade. AMD doesn’t need to match Intel at every price point or SKU to build a compelling product; it just needs to offer a CPU that compares well with Intel in overall price/performance. Ryzen looks like it could be shaping up to do just that.