Comment by rgbrenner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rgbrenner | Hacker News Reader

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That remains to be seen.

I just built a new PC and put an i7 in it. The Ryzen 1800x is more expensive than an i7-7700k, while having worse performance.

Obviously AMD makes cheaper versions where that comparison doesn't hold.. but the advantage for AMD here isn't clear cut, and so there's no reason to believe there will be a mass migration to AMD.

Besides I've heard this kind of rhetoric about AMDs cpus before.. and yet I've never seen the sort of switch like you're describing. If it were true that everyone was switching to Ryzen CPUs, they would be sold out everywhere and AMD would be talking about how to scale up by an order of magnitude to meet demand.. none of that has happened.

AMD did a good job with Ryzen, and they'll probably post some great numbers next quarter... maybe they'll get to 5 or 6b over the next year... but Ryzen hasnt changed the selling proposition for AMD. It is still: in the low to mid end desktop processor market, AMD is cheaper and has similar performance.

I'm not a Intel or AMD fanboy by any stretch (only ever built with Intel), but I don't know what benchmarks you've been reading and I've read a lot and you'll have to clarify what you mean by worse performance.

In any multithreaded application the Ryzen 1600(x) are just as good if not better. The 1800x to 1700 are even more multithreaded performance and the 1700 is priced a little cheaper than 7700k and able to be OC to the same performance as the 1800x (the entire Ryzen lineup seems to be capable of the same OC, but also capped pretty heavily). The only place that is showing Intel winning are in single threaded scenarios and in gaming scenarios. The gaming scenarios are interesting as one of the more recent benchmarks I saw (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VvwWTQKCZs) was showing in many cases the worse case FPS is better than the 7600k. Additionally, several games have received engine updates that seem to put Ryzen on par with Intel now.

Yes, you are right that the 1800x has better multithread performance.. In my workload, the single thread performance was what mattered, so that's what I paid attention to.

I went the other way with the 1700. Though I do game it's not my main motivation. This is a workstation first and foremost. And every benchmark I saw the 7700K got crushed by the 1700 (in linux productivity benchmarks).

If you are gamer, the 7700K is the right choice though.

The fact that there are some workloads that amd is good for and others where it falls short only reinforces my point.. which is that the selling proposition for amd hasn't changed.

They haven't unseated intel with that strategy in 40 years... and they aren't going to do it today either.

Ryzen is a good start. But to unseat intel they needed a clear performance advantage and/or additional products that match intels other major product lines with similar or better performance.. and demonstrate they can do that over the long term.

In other words, it's going to take them years

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