AMD Set to Launch Ryzen Before March 3rd, Meeting Q1 Target
by Ian Cutress on January 11, 2017 7:45 AM EST
Thanks to some sleuthing from various readers, AMD has accidentally let the cat out of the bag with regards to the official Ryzen launch date. While they haven’t specifically given an exact date, the talk to be given by AMD at the annual Game Developer Conference (GDC) says the following:
Join AMD Game Engineering team members for an introduction to the recently-launched AMD Ryzen CPU followed by advanced optimization topics.
From http://schedule.gdconf.com/session/optimizing-for-amd-ryzen-cpu-presented-by-amd
The GDC event runs from February 27th to March 3rd, and currently the AMD talk is not on the exact schedule yet, so it could appear any day during the event (so be wary if anyone says Feb 27th). At this time AMD has not disclosed an exact date either, but it would be an interesting time to announce the new set of Ryzen CPUs right in the middle of both GDC and Mobile World Congress which is also during that week. It would mean that Ryzen news may end up being buried under other GDC and smartphone announcements.
Then again, the launch could easily be anytime during February – this March 3rd date only really puts an end-point on the potential range. AMD has stated many times, as far back as August, that Q1 is the intended date for launch to consumers in volume. When we spoke with AMD at CES, nothing was set in stone so to speak, especially clock speeds and pricing, but we are expecting a full launch, not just something official on paper. Ryan will be at GDC to cover this exact talk, and I’ll be at MWC covering that event. Either way, we want to make sure that we are front of the queue when it comes time to disclosing as much information as we can get our hands on ahead of time. Stay tuned!
Source: GDC
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helvete - Wednesday, February 8, 2017 - link
Why shouldn't it be compatible with w7?Also SW has to make use of HW not vice versa.
Achaios - Wednesday, January 11, 2017 - link
Thus launch is completely irrelevant for gamers. All we care about is single-threaded performance, and pretty much every gamer today is all set for many, many years to come with Intel CPU's.The only thing that is of importance to gamers today is GPU's, and VEGA will come in late June and the 1080TI in Q3 or Q4 2017.
So yeah, *yawn*.
Nagorak - Wednesday, January 11, 2017 - link
Plenty of gamers are still running on Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge because there has been little reason to upgrade. More cores could be a reason, provided performance is also improved.benedict - Wednesday, January 11, 2017 - link
Thank you wise gamer for speaking on behalf of all gamers. Maybe I should stop consider myself one because I'm not set with an Intel CPU and I'd love to get an 8 core beast in my pc, sacrificing a bit of single-threaded performance.SquarePeg - Wednesday, January 11, 2017 - link
This launch is completely relevant for gamers. The vast majority of gaming builds fall in the $1200 or less catagory. With Intel giving it's customers nearly nothing in terms of IPC since Sandy Bridge there are a large amount of people out there still holding on to Sandy Bridge and Haswell i5's and i7's. So if you can pick up a quad core Ryzen cpu, motherboard, $30 cooler for the same price as a Kaby Lake i7 alone and then overclock it to near equal performance it's a no brainer.With more and more games being able to efficiently utilize more than 4 large threads a Hexacore Ryzen cpu will outperform a quad core i7 hands down. This will only increase in AMD's favor as DX12 and Vulken become the standard for new games.
The most important thing about Ryzen to people who don't want/need a new AMD cpu is that it will pull down Intel's ridiculous pricing. This is very relevant to all considering a new PC purchase.
You only feel that it's irrelevant because it may not apply to personally and you've come to accept the dribble's of nothing that Intel calls a new generation of cpu "performance" as good enough.
xype - Wednesday, January 11, 2017 - link
Geez, stop talking sense on a hardware forum, will ya?! Get the pitchforks and let’s shit on something! Whee!bananaforscale - Wednesday, January 11, 2017 - link
Watch out for flying pigs!lmcd - Thursday, January 12, 2017 - link
It's a little bit awkward to note, but Intel's actually been churning out decent-sized performance gains for the past 5 years. Jumping from "worse than our Phenom X6" to "Came out this decade" performance doesn't deserve this level of loyalty, and Intel's been delivering consistent product improvements that are easily worth the upgrades. As an owner of both a Sandy Bridge 3960X and a Skylake 6770HQ, the latter is significantly faster than the former at everything except the longest prolonged workloads despite running at less than half the power consumption.It's pretty amusing that you're calculating a quad-core Ryzen, motherboard, and cooler at i7 pricing. Given that a 3-year-old quad core (8350) and its top-end motherboard barely squeak under that number, there's no way a new quad core and its brand-new top-end motherboard squeak under. And don't think you're using much less, as the lower-end motherboard chipsets aren't going to get the type of overclocking you're dreaming of.
Now, let's talk about games. And how DX12 ironically has the opposite effect of what you're talking about. DX12 was in AMD's favor because it reduces the CPU load and makes more events non-blocking. (For reference, it's *Vulkan.) As more things become non-blocking Intel's large threads become more relevant, not less. Things that would be restricted to 6-core machines are available to 4-core machines, as the 4 cores can always be fed instead of sometimes running out of Out-of-Order Execution depth with blocked calls (this already is rare, as, again, unless you're using a Bulldozer or Piledriver, it's pretty hard to be CPU-bound).
A 6-core Ryzen literally cannot cost less or even with an Intel 4-core. Intel's manufacturing process is cheaper, more mature, more dense even at the same node (both TMSC and GloFo are stat-padding), at a smaller node, and in-house. Sorry to break your bubble.
Intel's pricing is hardly ridiculous. In fact, they've done admirable advancing technology in the effort to beat themselves. They were, and still are, their own best competitor.
The only thing you could really argue in AMD's favor is their IGPs, which will help them win their consolation prize in the low-end markets again. Sorry to break it to you.
rhysiam - Thursday, January 12, 2017 - link
Intel's markup is absolutely massive and their performance reign over the last (nearly) decade is a perfect example of why we need competition.You argue in one paragraph that Intel's process is both cheaper and more mature, and then in the very next line that their pricing is "hardly ridiculous". FYI, the $1700 10 core 5960X has approximately the same die size as an i5 2300 which sold (presumably still at a healthy profit) for $187 almost 6 years ago. If Intel really does have a "cheap" and "mature" process, they're certainly not passing on those benefits to their consumers.
Let's forget die size and try it by transistor count for a second...
Did you know also that the often derided as stupidly overpriced iPhone 7 starts at $650, and sports an A10 SOC with 3.4 billions transistors. That's slightly more transistors than a Broadwell-E CPU, which is $1700, $1000, ~$620 or ~$430 depending on the SKU, and the Intel CPU doesn't come with a premium phone.
We don't know the exact transistor counts of Skylake processors, but the $330 i7 6700K has an estimated 1.75B transistors. That's far, far fewer than the RX 460 (~3 Billion) which can easily be found with superior cooling solutions, power delivery and GDDR5 RAM(!) for under $100.
Of course these aren't accurate apple to apple comparisons and they're just rough estimates. But they offer an indication of just how much Intel charges for tiny chips with relatively small numbers of transistors.
Of course Intel is a company out to make money so they can charge whatever the market will pay.
BUT, it shows just how important competition is, which is precisely why so many people are excited, cautiously optimistic, or at least hopeful for a successful and competitive CPU from AMD.
Cooe - Sunday, February 28, 2021 - link
Hahahaha xD. So much stupid in such a small post. I guess the 6-core/12-thread Ryzen 5 1600 being SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper than Intel's 4-core/4-thread i5-7600K (let ALONE the 4c/8t i7-7700K), while absolutely bitch-slapping it up & down the block in terms of performance was all just a false memory I'd manufactured in my head. Thanks for letting me know that! ;)