Maybe somebody could give us an estimated performance per dollar based on this some previous AMD CPU releases..
Another wrench in comparing things is that AMD's promising some interesting peripheral support, like 64 lanes of pcie, usb 3.1 and direct nvme support, which will further complicate direct comparisons until release date. Intel's hanging on with the x99 chipset, which is stuck with usb 2.0 and pcie 2 for the support lanes.
Fall will be interesting, to say the least.
It's a shame the AMD is nearly half a year away, I need the invoice dated June 30 at the latest for tax purposes. So if the AUD isn't too horrible I'll probably just get a 6850k, water-cooled and overclocked, with the Samsung 950 M2 drive and 32gb DDR4 ram with room for 64. For my work in Visual Studio/NCrunch/Resharper this will be a killer combo, especially for the I/O offered by 4 PCIE lanes to the SSD.
Can't wait to see Intel get some competition again though.
Not only that, the differences between Haswell (2014) and Broadwell (2016) are fairly modest. And nobody buys the $999 version anyway -- if they can make something that competes with the i5 at the $300 price point they're in business.
Regardless, you get the point. It matters much more that they have something competitive with the Intel processors that constitute the bulk of market volume than that they can beat the crazy expensive one that doesn't.
Intel is raking it in right now because AMD doesn't have an equivalent product. If AMD produces a competitive chip Intel should reduce their prices.
So it is possible AMD releases this chip and Intel reduces the price of the 5960X. End result => people still buy Intel.
Intel will never go toe-to-toe with AMD on pricing, at least not in the long term (1+ years), and unless it's approaching bankruptcy, which I assume isn't the case for now.
Intel's chips are the best value for the money right now because AMD totally messed up its last microarchitecture. They bet on something (high parallelization) that didn't pan out. And they suffered greatly for it. Kind of how Sony went with the Cell processor in the PS3 (although Sony did make the best of it in the end).
But Zen completely changes that equation. Zen is basically a direct and very close competitor to Intel's current microarchitecture and they should have rather similar performance.
However, It doesn't mean AMD's chips will necessarily beat Intel's chips in "peak performance". Because for one, Intel still has a better process technology, and second, AMD still had to compete with a moving target (albeit a very slowly moving target - Skylake is only like 20-25% faster in single-thread performance compared to Sandy Bridge).
But I imagine Zen is going to be within 10% or so of Intel's equivalent chips in single-thread performance, but potentially much better at multi-threaded performance if AMD actually sells twice as many Zen cores in its similar priced chips (8-core Zen vs quad-core Core i6, quad-core Zen vs dual-core Core i5, etc). On top of having more cores, AMD may also offer lower pricing points that outweighs the 10% difference in single-thread performance, but that remains to be seen (I probably wouldn't do that if I were them, as double the cores at a similar pricing point should be more than enough value for money).
Concrete example: I recently built a Linux video transcoding machine to reencode H.264 BluRay movies to smaller H.264 files [1]. A $110 AMD FX-8300 is able to reencode an average BluRay movie around 47-50 fps, while you would need to spend more than twice that amount of money to match this performance with Intel (the performance of the FX-8300 at this tasks falls between a $200 Intel i5-4590 and a $250 Xeon E3-1231 v3).
[1] Using: avconv -i input.mkv -threads auto -s hd720 -c:v libx264 -c:a libmp3lame -sn -b:v 1400k -b:a 128k -ac 2 output.mkv
It gets you to do the math.
The $100 estimate was based on a scenario where the AMD product ran 100W hotter and ran all year long with a heavy workload.
In reality, the comparable offer from Intel runs only 10W hotter, and a normal workload, at best, only costs some cents per year.
After all those years saving money going with the best and cheaper offering from AMD, the money you save gets you more cash to upgrade your computer.
Because economic matter.
I'm not repeating cargo cult science; I benchmarked it because I didn't believe it either (which is good! be suspicious!) and it would have been quite handy for a startup I was developing. But alas. Looks like dogshit or costs too many bits.
Be careful not to confuse "looks fine to me" with quantifiable.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7007/intels-haswell-an-htpc-pe...
and I honestly can't see the difference between the QuickSync and regular H264 samples. I am sure there are some tiny subtleties that I miss and perhaps my screen is not good enough to render the difference, but if we are talking about that level of degradation, and unless you are really a purist, the 10x performance gain is really worth it.
Some people do very professional stuff with consumer PCs.
One of the reasons I've had some hope for Zen, personally, is because AMD has put manufacturing and tech sharing agreements in place with Samsung ahead of the Zen launch. Intel still arguably has a process lead, but Samsung is one of the only companies in the world that has the resources to compete.
A couple of years ago, I thought Intel's process lead might be a semi-permanent advantage. Now I'm seeing some hope that may finally be coming to an end.
That's why Intel still keep their own fabs and AMD don't have fab anymore.