The advent of Ryzen and the response of Intel

[Dirk Broer]

The advent of Ryzen has brought Intel in near-panic mode.
All of a sudden there are overclockable i3's announced and Pentium G series and i5's with hyperthreading.
There are also rumours about a upcoming mainstream (Socket 1151) Coffee Lake i7 with 6 cores/12 threads...

All this at a price, or another trade-off:

The Pentium G doesn't support as much instructions as an i3 (which has the same amount of cores/threads, but is more expensive and has more cache).
The overclockable i3 reaches speeds up to i7 level, but has half the cores/threads (plus far less cache and a worse IGP).
The (overclockable) i5 with hyperthreading is rumoured to have a tdp of 100 Watt.


I do hope the 8-core, 16-thread Ryzen will blow all of Intel out of the water though.

[Brucifer]

Time will tell. :-) Personally I'm not too excited by the latest cpu offerings. Seems like any more an i3 functioning as a life support system for a high end graphics card gets more crunching output for the projects I'm interested in. Sadly both high end graphics cards and cpu's crank out the heat. My one voyage in a fancy 5960X some time back was an expensive but educational lesson for me. I enjoy OGR-28, and that of course is not a gpu effort. I will watch the ryzen and see how things go from the heat generation end of things and then maybe purchase one. The 5960X was/is a powerful chip but the current draw and heat produced severely limit my use of it. In hind sight I probably should have just picked up a couple 4 core i5's for the OGR thing... live and learn. Hopefully ryzen pans out to be a good chip for the crunching world. :-)