The AMD New Horizon event took place recently, and there, the company officially announced its newest desktop processor, RyZen. The new processor is based on the Zen architecture, and it is designed to bring faster performance to regular desktop users and gamers alike.
The current line of AMD processors comes from the FX line, the most notable being the FX-8150. However, this line of processors isn't capable of competing with Intel in the enthusiast market, and as such, AMD has failed to compete greatly with the market leader.
With RyZen, the company is hoping to break free and return to the days of the Athlon 64 where it had the upper hand over Intel.
How Good Is RyZen?
AMD CEO, Dr. Lisa Su, was very excited during the entire conference, as she spoke much about what RyZen is capable of and how it stacks up against similar Intel processors.
"[W]e believe that there has been no innovation in desktops over at least the last five years," Su said. She's not wrong, as the performance gains have been small and unimpressive.
Then again, we could blame AMD here, as Intel would have little reason to innovate in a meaningful way if the company had strong competition in the market. However, this could change soon, seeing as the processor is set to hit store shelves before the end of Q1 2017.
"The 'Zen' core at the heart of our Ryzen processors is the result of focused execution and thousands of engineering hours designing and delivering a next-level experience for high-end PC and workstation users," said Su. "Ryzen processors with SenseMI technology represent the bold and determined spirit of innovation that drives everything we do at AMD."
Now, when RyZen is released, AMD claims the main processor, which is designed for the high-end market, will compete neck and neck with the Intel Core i7-6900K. In the demo shown at the event, RyZen is rocking eight cores and 16 threads at a speed of 3.4 GHz.
Unfortunately, AMD did not talk about the price, but seeing as the company has been consistently releasing cheaper products than Intel, we should expect the same to apply here.
What About Gaming?
AMD showed some live demonstration of RyZen when it comes down to video games, and it's quite impressive. If you're the type of person who loves to play video games and stream to Twitch TV or Beam at the same time, then RyZen might be right up your alley.
Here's the thing: many streamers tend to use two computers. Basically, one computer for playing the game and the other for streaming and encoding. This could be the end of this major problem, and despite the demonstration, we'd rather see this in action with our own eyes.
The Core i7-6700K was also shown doing the same thing, but it fails in this regard, as the game being streamed on Twitch TV was dropping frames all over the place. It should be noted that the Core i7-6700K was running at an overclocked frequency of 4.5GHz.
Vega, Anything About That?
Yes, but not much was shown, and that's a bit of a disappointment. The newest Star Wars: Battlefront was shown running in 4K. Apparently, the hardware the game was running on consists of RyZen and Vega in a single machine. No word on when Vega will hit the market, but at least we have an idea of when RyZen is coming.
