AMD Reveals Ryzen 7 CPU Lineup and Pricing

AMD Reveals Ryzen 7 CPU Lineup and Pricing

AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su has officially taken the wraps off the chipmaker's flagship range of Ryzen CPUs, revealing basic details, pricing, and some AMD-produced benchmark results for three Ryzen 7 models that will launch on March 2nd and are available to pre-order now. The major headline is that AMD's flagship processor, the eight-core Ryzen 7 1800X, will launch for $499, which is less than half the price of Intel's equivalent eight-core Core i7-6900K, a CPU that the 1800X competes with and even beats in a variety of benchmarks, at least according to AMD.


Taking the stage at the Ryzen Tech Day event in San Francisco, Dr. Su gave attendees some basic information about the eight-core, 16-thread Ryzen die, which has been at least four years in the making and cost the company over two million engineering hours. It crams in over 4.8 billion transistors and more than 2,000m of signal wire, although sadly die size is yet to be revealed. AMD also revealed that it beat its own target of a 40 percent IPC improvement over the previous generation; the actual figure is an impressive 52 percent.


Following this, we were given some basic, high-level details of the three CPUs that will make up the company's Ryzen 7 family: the Ryzen 7 1800X, Ryzen 7 1700X, and Ryzen 7 1700. All three parts sport a full eight cores and 16 threads backed by 20MB of cache, with differences mainly coming down to clock speeds and TDP, as outlined below.


Heading up the Ryzen 7 family is the flagship Ryzen 7 1800X, sporting a 3.6GHz base clock and a peak boost frequency of 4GHz and contained within a 95W TDP. This is advertised by AMD as the new fastest eight-core desktop CPU available, a claim it substantiates with a side-by-side comparison with Intel's Core i7-6900K in a multi-threaded Cinebench R15 run that puts the AMD CPU ahead by 9 percent at stock settings in apparently equivalent systems. The truly disruptive element of this CPU, however, is its price, which is set at $499 excluding taxes. While performance still needs to be independently verified in benchmarks beyond Cinebench, this certainly appears to be very favourable next to the Core i7-6900K's current $1,050 retail price. 'We wanted to disrupt the PC market,' claimed Dr. Su. 'This is about bringing high-performance computing to an order of magnitude more people.'


Sitting in the middle is the Ryzen 7 1700X, billed as something of an all-rounder that will satisfy enthusiasts, gamers, and content creators all at once. With the same 95W TDP as the 1800X, base and boost clocks drop by 200MHz to 3.4GHz and 3.8GHz respectively, so we can assume that these chips come from yields with less favourable voltage/frequency characteristics. Despite the lowered frequency, AMD posted Cinebench results that still favour the 1700X over the Core i7-6900K, albeit just, and thrash the six-core Core i7-6800K. The comparison to this latter CPU is relevant since the $399 MSRP for the Ryzen 7 1700X makes it a close competitor price-wise to the $425 Intel CPU.


The final Ryzen 7 part is the Ryzen 7 1700, which has a 65W TDP and boost and base clocks of 3.0GHz and 3.7GHz respectively. That TDP allows AMD to call this CPU the world's lowest power eight-core desktop processor. Relying on good old Cinebench to make its multi-threaded point once again, AMD's figures showed a 46 percent lead for the Ryzen 7 1700 over the Core i7-7700K – unsurprising since it has double the number of cores and threads. Nonetheless, the comparison is seen as apt again because of pricing: AMD's Ryzen 7 1700 will fetch $329 at retail, slightly undercutting the current $350 asking price for the flagship Kaby Lake processor. A Handbrake video conversion benchmark was also demoed by AMD, this time revealing the Core i7-7700K system to be 16 percent slower than the Ryzen 7 1700 one.


AMD also confirmed that all Ryzen CPUs are unlocked for overclocking, but you'll need to wait until reviews are released to gauge the sort of speeds you can expect. On a related note, the three CPUs feature Extended Frequency Range (XFR), which, given the right thermal and power conditions, can boost the CPU past its official boost clock. Again, further details on this will need to wait until reviews go live.


What is clear is that AMD is betting hard on a multi-core, multi-threaded future for CPUs; the presence of a new $329 eight-core CPU and the reliance on Cinebench results demonstrate this quite clearly. Naturally, the company asserts that many usage scenarios are emerging that will prove it right, but in reality only time will tell.


The Ryzen 7 trio of CPUs is set for a March 2nd worldwide launch, although AMD is opening up pre-orders right now – naturally, we highly recommend waiting until March 2nd before splashing out, however, as this is when you'll be able to read reviews on sites like our own with independent benchmark results and analysis. Pricing for the UK and other locales was yet to be confirmed at the time of writing, but given that 185 retailers are set to start taking pre-orders, you should be able to see local pricing now too. At launch, AMD also expects to have over 80 AM4 motherboards available via its various partners as well as 19 system builders with Ryzen PCs ready to go, expanding to around 200 by the end of Q1.


Closing her speech, Dr. Lisa Su referred to this launch as only the beginning of what's to come from AMD in 2017. As well as additional Ryzen dekstop processors being inbound, AMD's Vega GPUs and Radeon Instinct products are slated for Q2 release as is the Zen-based Naples parts for data centres, while Ryzen mobile parts should be coming at some point in the second half of the year.


Stay tuned for March 2nd, when we'll be able to reveal much more about the new Ryzen CPUs.