What's getting my goat somewhat with all those dismissing the spec leaks is the closed-mindedness of it all. Yes, temper your expectations. Yes, don't jump aboard the hype train because you'll get disappointed. But tempering expectations is not the same thing as dismissing a larger concept with narrow-focussed "facts", assumptions and selectively-applied logic.
Take that video davemt83 posted earlier. That guy says he can't understand why the base Ryzen 3 is now a 6 core and AMD sacking off quad cores, and if they can sell a 6 core for $99 then why can't AMD sell off a quad core for $65 dollars. Well, they can and they probably will. It's called an Athlon. He's looking at the RYZEN SKUs, not the Zen 2/Matisse SKUs, and an Athlon and a Threadripper won't be on that list. It is entirely possible AMD will release Zen 2 quad cores under the Athlon name, and we know full well there will be Zen 2 Threadrippers. Dismissing a broader concept by looking purely at a narrow slice of that concept.
Core counts and clock speeds are dismissed; because Zen to Zen+ only netted 350MHz, it's somehow implausible that Zen+ to Zen 2 could net double that, and also implausible that core counts could double within the same thermal envelope. Isn't that entirely and exactly what the shift to 7nm was intended to do? AMD's own slides say 1.25x performance at the same power or 50% power at same clocks, so how is it implausible to make 8 cores half the size, draw half the energy, generate half the heat and then fill the now half-empty AM4 package with another 8 cores? Just because Zen+ couldn't do it, just because Intel can't do it doesn't mean AMD can't do it now. And if the FX 9590 was 8 cores, 4.7GHz base and 5GHz boost with a 220W TDP, are you telling me that AMD couldn't do the same with an architecture that's half the size and draws half the power?
Nothing is being announced at CES, despite AMD doing exactly that for the past 2 years. And with an architecture and manufacturing process so successful they've brought forward timescales for enterprise products based on it, suddenly that wouldn't apply to Ryzen?
The leaked prices are only deemed unrealistic because that's not what Intel charge. The core counts are unrealistic because that's not what Intel do. The clock speeds are unrealistic because Intel don't do it. Well that just sucks for Intel then, doesn't automatically equate to AMD having the same limitations. It is very possible for the worm to turn and AMD to be superior, because it has happened before.
Do I want the leaked specs to be true? Of course I do. Am I expecting them to be true? A little bit, because there's nothing truly outlandish about them. I'll be surprised if the leaks are 100% accurate, but any and all arguments dismissing these leaks are just small-minded, incomplete and sometimes downright stubborn.
. Call it tempering expectations, I call it being non-committal! It's OK to be excited when presented with the evidence we have that this is going to tear up the market for consumer CPUs.
