AMD 8 core RYZEN price

eddyr · 22 Dec 2016 at 14:53

kieran_read said:
I disagree that the market for 8c is tiny.

8c is just priced out of what 99% of the market would pay.

Soon as they fall in price they will be the main market.

5 year sago you could have said the market for Quad Core is tiny now as per your own post they are in 48% of computers.

Ofc. But pricing capable 8c too low would sabotage the market for them going forward. Its why Intel are so reticent to bring more cores to the mainstream or lower pricing for the dual/quad product bands over the last 6 years. There is no coming back from that without hurting future sales and profitability.

SiDeards73 · 22 Dec 2016 at 14:53

kieran_read said:
I disagree that the market for 8c is tiny.

8c is just priced out of what 99% of the market would pay.

Soon as they fall in price they will be the main market.

5 year sago you could have said the market for Quad Core is tiny now as per your own post they are in 48% of computers.

+1 this is exactly my point above, 8/16 is tiny because most people dont pay £1000 for a CPU.

How many people here own an i7 or a 6 core? a fair few i would imagine, if you bring the 8/16 to near that price point, take up and adoption will be huge.

bru · 22 Dec 2016 at 14:54

spoffle said:
Okay, you keep saying that people are buying the CPU. They aren't, they're buying the platform. AMD isn't going to get away with charging X99 CPU prices when the platform is comparable to Z170. This is the part you are completely missing. You don't just get more cores when going to X99, this is why your examples don't work. You get quad channel RAM, more PCIE lanes, more PCIE slots and generally more features specific to that platform.

AMD are trying to push at the mainstream market, so trying to price at the high end when the only thing comparable is just the core count and IPC isn't going to work.

What do you know that we don't?

As the only thing AMD have shown us is a 8c16t CPU with a couple of compute related benchmarks against Intel's 8c16t chip, which is certainly not aiming for the mainstream market.

If and when they show us some 4c8t parts and start comparing them to Intel's equivalents then you might have a point.

Do we know how many PCIe lanes RyZen will give us yet?

kieran_read · 22 Dec 2016 at 14:55

Oops, ignore this I miss-read the post.

ubersonic · 22 Dec 2016 at 14:56

kieran_read said:
5 year sago you could have said the market for Quad Core is tiny

No you could have said that a decade ago, 5 years ago it would have been hex cores.

spoffle · 22 Dec 2016 at 15:53

bru said:
What do you know that we don't?

As the only thing AMD have shown us is a 8c16t CPU with a couple of compute related benchmarks against Intel's 8c16t chip, which is certainly not aiming for the mainstream market.

If and when they show us some 4c8t parts and start comparing them to Intel's equivalents then you might have a point.

Do we know how many PCIe lanes RyZen will give us yet?

Because we've seen the motherboards that are being produced. They are not on the same level as X99 in terms of features. It's quite straightforward really.

mmj_uk · 22 Dec 2016 at 16:01

kieran_read said:
I disagree that the market for 8c is tiny.

8c is just priced out of what 99% of the market would pay.

It's priced that way because 99% of the market have no realistic use for it, 4 big cores are still more than sufficient for gaming and 6 cores is overkill. 8 core is only really needed for productivity/workstations and those always come with a premium.

Why would AMD/Intel sell 8 core cheap now when they can continue milking 4-6 cores which is all that people really need and then bring the price of 8 cores down later?

edit: My point is the market that requires the amount of processing power offered by 8 cores is tiny and whilst that remains the case they will be considered luxury items and prices out of the reach of mainstream users.

Yutang13 · 22 Dec 2016 at 16:09

mmj_uk said:
It's priced that way because 99% of the market have no realistic use for it, 4 big cores are still more than sufficient for gaming and 6 cores is overkill. 8 core is only really needed for productivity/workstations and those always come with a premium.

What if 4 cores are only sufficient because that's what the majority of gamers are running? If we only ever have 4 cores on the mainstream game developers will continue to optimise for 4 cores.
If 6 cores became the mainstream then games will be coded to make use of 6 cores. The hardware has to make the first move so the software can use it. No point in optimising for hardware the minority are using.

ubersonic · 22 Dec 2016 at 16:14

spoffle said:
Because we've seen the motherboards that are being produced. They are not on the same level as X99 in terms of features. It's quite straightforward really.

In fairness we have only seen a couple of boards not all of them, I.E the high end ROG boards will be significantly better than the entry boards.

Uriel · 22 Dec 2016 at 16:24

Many cross platform games are already optimised for up to 8 threads thanks to PS4 and Xbox One CPU architecture. In those games AMD octacore FX chips already tend to put in a good showing (one reason I was a little disappointed AMD decided to use BF1 for their showcase, a game where faster clocked octacore FX chips already pull in similar minimum framerates to i7s with a high end GPU).

For me, a large degree as to whether Ryzen is successful will depend on its performance in games where Intel CPUs currently dominate. Something like the Total War games would be interesting (Arma 3 would also be interesting but to be honest it's badly optimised for anything that doesn't have extremely strong single thread performance).

spoffle · 22 Dec 2016 at 16:24

ubersonic said:
In fairness we have only seen a couple of boards not all of them, I.E the high end ROG boards will be significantly better than the entry boards.

Yeah they will, and I'm not suggesting that they're rubbish or not good enough but just that its clear what segment they're aimed at for the most part, and it's not the same as the X99 market. For example based on the leaks it's clear that they're dual channel, not quad channel on the RAM.

d_brennen · 22 Dec 2016 at 16:44

mid_gen said:
8 or 10 cores @ around 5820k price and a sensibly priced dual-slot motherboard offering....i know a lot of devs that'll be ditching Intel in a flash.

That's what I'm hoping but they may save dual socket for Opteron. Hope I'm wrong. They'd probably shift more units and make more money than segmenting the market to fleece a few prosumers.

E: there's no speculation of a 2c 4t product at all, which bodes well. Quad core should be the baseline coming into 2017

ubersonic · 22 Dec 2016 at 16:45

spoffle said:
Yeah they will, and I'm not suggesting that they're rubbish or not good enough but just that its clear what segment they're aimed at for the most part, and it's not the same as the X99 market. For example based on the leaks it's clear that they're dual channel, not quad channel on the RAM.

I get what you're saying, but the thing is, nobody buying a ROG board needs quad channel, hell hardly anybody buying an i7 needs QC, Intel just tout it mainly as a marketing thing like tri channel was for X58.

Now I am not saying that there's nobody out there who needs QC and doesn't want to step up to a Xeon because there will be a few, I am saying that the amount of people who actually require it an don't use Xeons is so low that AMD can still make the AM4 platform compete with LGA2011 with the right boards/CPUs without >2 channels and not lose any sales, because the people who think they need tri/quad channel when they don't are the type who will buy Intel regardless of what's better for them because they don't know any better.

Troezar · 22 Dec 2016 at 18:17

This arguing over how many cores are needed remind me of the "how many GBs of vram do we need" debate a while ago. Seems like that soon changed and 8GB is now default. Given the life of a CPU these days 8 cores seems quite reasonable, I'd hope to get 5 years out of one...

eddyr · 22 Dec 2016 at 19:21

My thoughts, make of it what you will. I'm assuming ipc close to but below skylake and partly locked range.

Dual cores:
Questionable if available from launch. I can't imagine it being worth salvaging 2c for any significant period from an 8 core die but who knows. Counter productive longterm with good yields but APU dies could fulfill that role once introduced. So perhaps some <$100 2c4t chips to make a showing in that segment from the outset but superseded by 2c/2c4t apu shortly after.

Quad cores:
To have an impact Zen 4c ought to start from $100-120 for entry level models in that tier. Scope for 4c8t to be $150 to $250. Personally think they are better served around $200 (or less - clock/spec depeding), unless they truly match or exceed equivalent Intel chips in that buying demographics common usage scenarios.

An issue could be overcrowding with various models of cpu and eventually apu on the same AM4 socket. So I expect limited number of models with some clear product differentiation and price segmentation to keep things simple for the consumer.

Hex+ cores:
Higher margin parts aimed at those with the need and/or money to buy. No thoughts worth mentioning.

mmj_uk · 22 Dec 2016 at 19:50

Yutang13 said:
What if 4 cores are only sufficient because that's what the majority of gamers are running? If we only ever have 4 cores on the mainstream game developers will continue to optimise for 4 cores.
If 6 cores became the mainstream then games will be coded to make use of 6 cores. The hardware has to make the first move so the software can use it. No point in optimising for hardware the minority are using.

A lot of games being released today are optimised for 8 core systems as they're console ports, it's just that Intel's PC cores are vastly more powerful than those in the consoles and 4 big cores can do the work of 8 console cores easily (iirc the 8 core AMD Jaguar CPU used in consoles is roughly equivalent to a dual core Pentium or i3). With stuff like physics being moved to the GPU and higher resolutions bottlenecking them CPU's have just become less important for gaming.

spoffle · 23 Dec 2016 at 08:20

mmj_uk said:
A lot of games being released today are optimised for 8 core systems as they're console ports, it's just that Intel's PC cores are vastly more powerful than those in the consoles and 4 big cores can do the work of 8 console cores easily (iirc the 8 core AMD Jaguar CPU used in consoles is roughly equivalent to a dual core Pentium or i3). With stuff like physics being moved to the GPU and higher resolutions bottlenecking them CPU's have just become less important for gaming.

A lot of games aren't "console ports" because that's really not a thing.

Silent_Scone · 23 Dec 2016 at 09:05

spoffle said:
A lot of games aren't "console ports" because that's really not a thing.

This. You don't just take rip a game from an Xbox dev kit and expect it to work. At all.

ubersonic · 23 Dec 2016 at 09:26

Silent_Scone said:
This. You don't just take rip a game from an Xbox dev kit and expect it to work. At all.

That's not porting a game (re-making it on a different system to the one it was originally written for).

cosmogenesis · 23 Dec 2016 at 09:49

I have an original i7 with 6 GB RAM. OK its overclocked to 3.5 GHz from 2.7 but even so it plays all games such as Bf4 and CM Rally easily maxed out at 2K resolutions so it all about the GPU really as I have a Zotac 980Ti which does the hard work.