Due to it largely being deregulated, the electronics industry makes the Mafia look tame at times, and people have been eagerly awaiting AMD's newest Ryzen processors and Navi graphics cards coming on the market this summer, as the only way to compel the industry to stop gouging customers. This is the first confirmation that their newest chips will provide everything people have been asking for except the kitchen sink. The IPC gains alone are impressive, and amount to roughly driving prices down a hundred dollars, and provide the first truly high performance six core budget processors. Besides speeding them up, they've doubled the amount of cache and added pcie 4 for outrageous bandwidth, and it appears that even some of their last generation motherboards will be compatible with pcie 4 with a bios update. I'm talking outrageous bandwidth, where if you have to wait 3 seconds for a game to load you are doing it wrong. The newer motherboards have fans on the southbridge because the bandwidth alone is enough to melt the motherboard which also has to be made to higher HPC specs, but it means if you have one its likely going to be significantly upgradeable for higher speed ram and processors for at least five years, with such upgrades typically amounting to over 50% higher speeds over the lifetime. Cheap-cheap high performance computing bang-for-your-buck. As far as desktop processors go, it just doesn't get much better than that and prices just can't come down fast enough, especially with all the bullshit going between the US and China. Power supplies might be in short supply for awhile and we'll have to see how things go, but this is the bright side of the news and we can all rest assured that someone will likely assassinate the president before he can launch the nuclear weapons or destroy the entire world economy. AMD's Navi graphics card is rumored to be roughly about as good as anyone could ask for 4k gaming at high frame rates and an extremely attractive price, but we'll have to wait and see. Its empire baby, and controlling the distribution of even baby formula is what its all about.
Interesting developments but really has little affect on my life and what I buy. I'm always a few years behind on PC hardware, as I only buy used lower end stuff. Quad core i5's are still going to suite me just fine for the next couple years at least. I have owned one first Gen Ryzen, a quad core 1200. Recently sold it because a lower powered i3 6100T seemed to be beating it in performance. Intel is really taking a beating, they're stuck on 14nm lithography with AMD is moving to 7nm. Intel CPU's have also been taking massive hits with security exploits; Meltdown, Spectre, Foreshadow, Zombieload... Which patches threaten to severely impact hyper-threading, a process my i3-6100T deeply depends on. This also makes i7 processors less worthwhile. I have a true quad core i5 coming in the mail.
Its actually all that much more important if you prefer to use older parts that are cheaper. The newest AMD motherboards are backwards compatible with their significantly cheaper older processors. For enthusiasts, its often about which motherboard to buy and how backwards compatible it is, with one of these motherboards likely to be worthwhile upgrading for as long as the next decade. Parts being cut in half in price every three years means with the right motherboard you can have twice the performance for half the cost, by merely replacing the processor and gpu whenever they come down in price to dirt cheap. What these motherboards have is pcie 4, which is a huge leap in bandwidth capacity making the motherboard itself much more compatible with whatever higher performance parts they come out with. There's no point in spending a fortune on a processor that runs like crap on a cheap motherboard, while Intel specializes in selling you a new motherboard with every processor and making it difficult if not impossible to overclock. Its what we call upgrade time. Whether you wait three years or not for the prices to come down, its time to upgrade to pcie 4 and higher speed ram, knowing they will be making processors for the motherboard for many years to come. Here's a technical breakdown of what is know so far about the new chipset and motherboard.
It's good that there's people willing to pay a premium for the latest and greatest. But that ain't me. In 3 to 5 years I might see a deal on a PCI-e 4 GPU, and that's when I'll look for a deal on a compatible mobo.
Upgrading to the latest and greatest is seldom an option with AMD products, which are perhaps four years behind Intel and Nvidia, but these motherboards are an exception. If you have one of their current Ryzen 5 or 7 processors it means in three years you can get a serious performance boost by merely slapping them in a new motherboard, and that motherboard will remain seriously upgradable for many years to come. Usually a motherboard doesn't make such a huge difference, but lag issues are about to become a thing of the past for the most part, with high speed memory roughly doubling read and write speeds. Your average PC uses maybe 1,600mhz ram, while these boards can take up to 5,000mhz ram. For things like VR, rendering, ray tracing, etc. everyone will eventually have to upgrade and the cheapest way to go is AMD by far. I'd say it is easily half the cost of using Intel parts. If you just want disposable technology, Intel will have that by the time these come down in price.
AMD makes supercomputers for people like Oakridge National Laboratories, famous for their employees sometimes vanishing into thin air. Their newest 65 watt 8 core Ryzen is pcie 4.0 compatible and is basically a low cost HPC computer capable of VR and ray tracing on a budget. Intel will make the disposable version, but this is the low budget one for do-it-your-selfers. In three years a cheap home computer could have enough processing power to make your own video games at home from scratch, but you have to assemble it yourself, which takes maybe six hours and is very straightforward and idiot proof these days. Its often compared to playing with Leggos. To put this in perspective, gamers save a few hundred dollars, while AMD's newest Threadripper chips for work stations provide more than twice the bang-for-your-buck than their Intel counterparts, and their newest EPYC 64 core servers stomp Intel into the dirt for cheap raw bandwidth. Its flat out embarrassing, which means Intel must inevitably respond by dropping their prices significantly, from top to bottom. Now that Intel's hyperthreading is complete trash, they will either adapt or continue to be swept aside.
So the latest news released is that the pcie-4.0 in 3rd gen Ryzen won't be backwards with older motherboards after all, but they can use pcie 3.0. Some older motherboards might be able to support pcie 4.0 if you don't give them a bios update, but they would likely only be able to use 4 lanes for an m.2 slot making it a dubious sacrifice to make and how stable it would be is anyone's guess. So, that's a little minor disappointing news. Being able to use a single m.2 slot for pcie 4.0 means you can have read speeds up to 5,000b. At those speeds load times for things like games is reduced to almost nothing and simply raiding two such drives on the motherboard would produce ridiculous speeds for both read and write. Someone doing production work on the machine might not be particularly impressed, but for home use I'm talking 3 second load times and higher frame rates. The standard for pcie 5.0 has already been established even though 4.0 just came out, and Intel has plans for using it first as far as I know. PCIe 5.0 is so fucking fast it is twice that of 4.0 which is already ridiculously fast by modern standards. When it becomes the new standard for PCs that will basically mark the end of almost every basic complaint people have about PCs. Laptops will come on instantly when you open them, and start right where you left off, no more long downloads, no more short battery life, no more bugs, no more long downloads, and the machine will even be able to talk to you in plain English if you want and answer any questions your have.
