After months of rumors, leaks and teasing from AMD itself, Ryzen has finally risen and it’s the company’s most impressive processor lineup yet.
AMD is on a mission to bring high performance CPUs to the market and challenge Intel, so it has introduced a trio Ryzen 7 chips, its highest-end lineup of CPUs. Starting with the flagship, the AMD Ryzen 7 1800X features 8-cores and 16-threads, as well as a 3.6GHz base speed and top speeds of up to 4GHz.
Based on AMD’s first ultra-small 14nm (nanometer) FinFET architecture. Unlike the company's previous architecture, FinFET transistors aren't built on a single plane – instead, they use several fins – and use multiple gates, which means more hardware can be packed inside a CPU and, therefore, more work can get done.
The result is a flagship CPU achieves 52% more instructions per clock than AMD's previous chips. In short IPC refers to how much work can a CPU do per cycle and in this case it's a big leap forward with potentially double the performance. So overall, AMD's latest chip is both smaller and quicker.
Performance-wise, AMD claims the Ryzen 7 1800X scored 1,601 points in the Cinebench R15 NT benchmark, beating the Intel Core i7-6900K’s 1,474 score.
The AMD Ryzen 7 1800X will be available for pre-orders for $499 (about £400, AU$650) – or about half as much as the $1,049 (about £999, AU$1,499) you would spend on the 6900K – starting today, and will arrive to shelves on March 2nd.
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Triple threat
Just below the Ryzen 7 1800X, AMD also announced the 1700X at an introductory $399 (about £320, AU$520). This 95-Watt TDP processor comes with the same cores and threads as its bigger brother, while clocking in at 3.4GHz for its base speed and a boosted frequency of 3.8GHz.
With a Cinebench R15 nT score of 1,537 points it competes with the Core i7-6900K and Intel’s lower-end processors.
Last but not least, the Ryzen 7 1700 comes at an astounding value for $329 (about £260, AU$430). Not only do you get 8-cores and 16-threads as with all other Ryzen 7 chips, it runs pretty quick at a 3.0GHz base clock (3.7GHz boost clock), helping it to puts up a decent Cinebench R15 nT score of 1,410.
Comparatively, Intel’s competing Core i7-7700K processor posted 967 points in the same test and goes for $349 (£339, AU$479).
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