AMD's first Ryzen CPUs are finally here. This morning, the company is putting its highest-end chips up for pre-order. The Ryzen 7 1800X, the Ryzen 7 1700X, and the Ryzen 7 1700 will mark AMD's return to the high-performance desktop CPU market, and the company's final internal numbers ahead of launch suggest they'll mark a return to competitiveness, as well.
We're flying home with Ryzen review samples as of this writing. Independent review results are still under NDA, but these are the three CPUs that will mark AMD's return to competitiveness in the marketplace:
Model | Cores | Threads | Base clock | Boost clock | XFR | TDP | Price |
Ryzen 7 1800X | 8 | 16 | 3.6 GHz | 4.0 GHz | Yes | 95W | $499 |
Ryzen 7 1700X | 3.4 GHz | 3.8 GHz | Yes | 95W | $399 | ||
Ryzen 7 1700 | 3.0 GHz | 3.7 GHz | No | 65W | $329 |
One of the most oft-repeated numbers from the lead-up to Ryzen has been AMD's goal of a "40% IPC increase" relative to its older processor generations. CEO Lisa Su claimes the company has not only met, but exceeded that goal with a 52% improvement.
With that greater-than-expected IPC gain, Su says the Ryzen 7 1700X is 4% faster than Intel's $1050 Core i7-6900K, a Broadwell-E chip with eight cores and 16 threads of its own. Su also touted the 1700X's 39% Cinebench all-thread advantage over the similarly priced six-core, 12-thread Core i7-6800K.
The Ryzen 7 1800X ups the ante over the i7-6900K with a 9% Cinebench all-threads performance advantage. Su says this chip is now the fastest eight-core, 16-thread CPU on the market.
Cinebench is just one benchmark, of course, and an especially favorable one for demonstrating a processor's multithreaded performance. I'm eager to produce a more complete picture of Ryzen performance from my own test benches with a full range of single-core tests.
Folks who are already impressed with Ryzen can make like a buffalo and stampede over to their favorite online retailer to place a pre-order today. The more cautious can hold off for benchmark info in tandem with these chips' hard launch on March 2.