http://hothardware.com/news/amd-ryzen-5-1600x-cinebench-r15-score-matches-core-i7-6800k Without even overclocking this puppy you should be able to run just about any game with a nice consistent frame rate and, when overclocked, games will run at 60fps or better even at 4k resolutions. At the suggested price of $259.oo it represents the first truly affordable gaming CPU which can only get cheaper. Eight cores are ideal for using matrices, and the R5 1600x only has six cores, but virtually all games only use four with a few capable of using six or more. Bandwidth and latencies are becoming everything and the next generation chips may well incorporate things like optical circuitry to increase communication across distances on chips and, in general, doing more with less. Intel engineers have compared their job to designing jet engines, while AMD has adapted their own propeller driven drone-like approach to using multiple jet engines and managed to reduce latencies by 40%. Distributed memory and processing are rapidly emerging as the central issue with the fastest processors capable of leveraging more with less including less memory and processing and shuffling about of course! The second generation of these specific chips, and Intel's as well, will incorporate AI circuitry that can be used to train other AI circuitry and do mundane tasks such as facial recognition and, as with analog approaches in general, their work may sometimes appear to take on a life of its own.
The current AI being developed usually tends to work as an adjunct to existing graphics architectures with, for example, Nvidia's upcoming architecture combing their graphics with what is essentially an arithmetic accelerator IBM cooked up and connecting the two with ridiculous amounts of bandwidth. Separating the two tasks of AI and graphics you can leverage more of the strength of both in combination and the next generation of chips coming out in a year or two will include the ability to do this on both the cpu and gpu to different degrees and play them off one another if you want using outrageous memory bandwidth. Some things, like doing repetitious ambient occlusion are the kind of things you don't necessarily want to tie up the gpu with and might be faster and more efficiently implemented on the cpu with a specialized AI circuit. By dividing the basic tasks out among the two chips in a balanced manner you can accomplish them all much faster even stack chips right on top of one another to reduce latencies with 64 chip stacks being enough to produce a supercomputer that fits in a tiny cube the size of the end of your pinky finger. To put this in perspective, the Ryzen chips coming out for laptop use will pack somewhere around the punch of a PS4 in a single chip at around 35 watts and there's no reason, in a few years, the next generation chips cannot pack as much as 100 times that in a single chip that might use as little as 15 watts or less. Merely by reducing latencies in every way imaginable they can leverage already existing technology for incredible performance improvements just shoving every chip imaginable into one huge stack and connecting such stacks on transposers. They're about the standardize the SoC or system on a chip for bandwidth issues and redefine the basic PC architecture around AI and once they do there's no telling how much power they'll squeeze into a single chip connecting stacks of chips.
my interest isn't in gaming, but it is in creating 3d graphics of they sort used in advanced gaming. with advanced rendering engines, such a cycles being computationally intensive and relying on gpu co-processors, of a higher order then those shipped with systems low end types like me, can afford.
The 1700x or 1800x version of Ryzen might interest you then. They contain eight cores and sixteen threads allowing them to do computational heavy loads at speeds similar to that of Intel's current top of the line Broadwell "e" chips, but at one half to one third the price. The 1700x is comparable to almost a 6900k which costs over a thousand bucks compared to its $389.oo estimated price. Six cores are plenty for most household uses such as digital photography or converting things like movies to different formats and even provides a bit of slack in case you want to download something in the background while playing a game or whatever, but the advantage of eight cores is being able to work full blown matrices that are 25% more efficient even if the cores themselves run a bit slower.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RdISWkIUmM There are rumors that AMD's project "Quantum" will receive a zen update and they intend to put the computer on the market, hopefully, sometime later this year. Other manufactures have jammed as much overpriced crap as possible into a lunch box sized computer, however, AMD's engineers hit on a winning design where two graphics cards and the CPU can be jammed together even harder by making them all share the same giant heat sink and liquid cooling system. Then they separated the reservoir, radiator, and cooling fans in another lunch box elevated slightly about the bottom one containing all the electronics. Its a nice funky new design that gets around the problem that most computers this size either look like just a lunch box or a trash basket, an electric space heater or, in the case of the new Mac Pro, an over-sized pencil sharpener. Merely elevating the cooling system above the electronics in their own separate box and providing as much airflow as possible to the radiator itself they've come up with a design that is both functional and attractive and looks like something out of an alien spaceship instead. AMD has long supported open standards in everything and made their chips as backwards compatible as possible for enthusiasts and their Quantum PC should turn out to be much the same. Dual graphics cards are plenty for anything a gamer might want to do, however, Ryzen will come with usb 3.1c which means you will also be able to daisy chain them together at a lan party or whatever using 40gb/s Intel thunderbolt 3 and create a serious impromptu supercomputer. The Mac Pro can already connect perhaps 25 or so PCs this way allowing something like a small office full of ten inch computers to be used as a supercomputer at night for crunching really large data bases or whatever and the thunderbolt 3 connection means there is no virtually no limit to what can be plugged into the Quantum including a separate computer, for example, designed for AI or to act as a server or whatever. As exciting as AMD's new product line is looking, I'm interested in this case for its own sake as a possible new standard for enthusiasts who don't want a giant monster server case that isn't portable. Mini-ITX cases are becoming more standard, but its obvious what is required at this point is the smallest possible form factor that can still accommodate liquid cooling and doesn't look like crap. As power requirements continue to go down and the technology continues to advance, I expect liquid cooling to eventually become history, but that could easily be ten or twenty years from now for enthusiasts. A Ryzen 1700X cpu and dual Vega graphics cards would provide enough raw computer power to render your own video games and start your own franchise and might cost around $1,500.oo - $2,000.oo to build yourself and produce roughly 48 teraflops of single and 24 teraflops of double precision compute power or enough to do real time ray tracing with the improvements to AI and graphics coming in the next few years. As hobbies go, that's approaching about as cheap as it gets if you realize the cost is spread out over about four or five years and this is enough compute power for anyone to do almost anything their little heart desires including intensive tasks such as editing video games in real time that can save people from pulling their hair out waiting for the computer to catch up.
http://www.legitreviews.com/amd-ryzen-7-1700-overclocking-best-ryzen-processor_192191 These days, if you want a desktop computer that costs something like $800.00 or more you can save money and get better components if you build it yourself. The trade-off is that you don't get a warranty for the whole computer and can't just send it back to the manufacturer if something goes wrong and it takes about a day to assemble all the pieces yourself. On the plus side, its easier than ever to slap one together yourself without screwing it up. Enthusiasts often prefer to build their own so they can upgrade parts every few years and save money in the long run and, for that, AMD provides better products than Intel due to their making all their chips and whatnot as backwards compatible as possible. That way, if a better processor comes on the market within a few years there's a good chance it will fit the same socket on your mother board and you can swap it out without going through a huge amount of trouble and expense. Hence, part of the reason enthusiasts are excited about AMD coming out with the first seriously competitive processor they've had in five years. This particular chip is a cheaper one of their 8 core processors now on the market that's about a third the price of a comparable Intel chip and about as "future proof" as its possible to make a computer these days. For just gaming you only need four to six cores at most but, within a few years, that should start to change as games start to more commonly leverage as many as 8 or more cores. The other advantage of 8 cores is they can process matrices 25% more efficiently shaving off a significant amount of time in doing things like spreadsheets. Sometime soon AMD should be releasing their six core R5 versions of ryzen which is aimed more squarely at gamers and, later this year, they should be releasing their Raven Ridge version of the chip with HBM2 memory that will pack the punch of a PS4 into a 35 watt chip for laptops, but this is the enthusiast version for those who need more power than just for gaming or a laptop and at 1/3 the price of a comparable Intel chip she's a beauty.
In half of the benchmarks that I've seen so far, the i7 6800K beat the new Ryzen 1800X. I can find the 6800k for around $510 cdn, the 1800X is about $610 cdn. The real kicker right now is I can probably find a used i7 for under $500 with not tax and a $50 second hand LGA 1151 Motherboard. At this point, a new AM4 Ryzen mobo is going to spank me around for $300 or more. So in all practicality, I'd rather spend $550 building an i7 system that beats a new 900+ Ryzen system. By all means, jump on board and support new hardware if you can and if it's your passion. But Ryzen is not the i7 killer some thought it was going to be. In a year from now it may be a completely different story where the price is down and people are selling second hand systems and then Ryzen might give better value for the more thrifty computer buyers.
In my opinion you are correct and its now the time to sit back and see what happens with Intel's prices. Ryzen does better for efficiency making it an interesting choice for server and business and portable uses, but it doesn't have the gaming benchmarks either and the gaming community is now adapting to the new chip which is far more flexible than their previous chips. What's coming at the end of the year should prove an eye opener when Intel integrates its own Optane memory and Amd introduces its own variations on the theme of everyone racing to distribute memory and processing with higher efficiency and bandwidth and lower latency. Intel has been saying for a few years now that we require an entirely new PC architecture and many have been working towards that very goal. They are producing rudimentary analog architectures that balance memory, bandwidth, and efficiency with speed. Ideally, a computer like that would work like our synapses where the act of processing information is the same one that generates memory storage like on an abacus.
They've got their own jet engine cranking with IBM, but the future of video games will be who has the best AI and it looks like Intel is just now pulling out the big guns using distributed ai with high bandwidth capacities. They are mating it to their Knights Bridge cpu/gpu and we should have a better idea of what's coming in the near future. Knights Bridge turned out to be a power hog and combining it with more advanced ai could conserve a huge amount of power while also conserve its ability to do certain tasks quickly. Its ultimately all about crunching the most enormous numbers with the greatest of ease and speed and that means everything will move towards more analog approaches, but by how much becomes the burning question. Theoretically, if you have the best distributed ai you can use the same "scalar" architecture for both the software and hardware. With new machine learning techniques they could have one computer teach another how to find the best solution by examine different ranges of values for what appears to work the best. Theoretically, the ideal graphics card would emulate the human brain and eye, but nobody has those kinds of neuromorphic and recofigurable chips at this point. But, IBM is the one to watch for neuromorphic chips which could be on the market in as little as three to five years. They invented a memristor that can assume any arbitrary number of values just like our brains. The math and everything to leverage the damned thing to its full potential might require a few decades to tweaking, but that's essentially the kind of 4nm architecture that you want that uses almost no energy and IBM estimates it could fit the intelligence of anywhere from a cat to a human in something the size of a coffee can. That's the first "big model" with, for example, someone creating a memory density of over 200 petabytes per square centimenter, but finding a good alternative in that kind of size range for commercial applications could take decades if not longer. Note, in each case they seem to be leveraging mixing less efficient speed with greater efficiency to make each chip more flexible. Ideally, these scalar architectures would include four different rudimentary types of transistors on a chip and different things they are better at processing and, like a family, they can all work together.
