At the AMD Ryzen technology launch held in San Francisco last week, AMD showed live demonstrations of its US$499 Ryzen 7 1800X chip outperforming Intel's US$1000 product, the 7th Generation Core i7-6900. AMD's new CPU has accomplished a huge 52 per cent performance increase per core, which is a vast improvement over the 7 per cent increase we've become accustomed to with Intel's annual chip updates. Best of all, the company has managed to deliver this while simultaneously delivering huge power savings, making its chips more suitable for mobile users, where battery life is king.
The Ryzen 7 1800X is the fastest Ryzen in the range, and packs a whopping eight cores, making it perfect for software that is programmed to make use of them. Traditionally, this has been limited to video editing, 3D design, image manipulation and other creative applications, but software engineers have slowly been making the most of the additional power of multi-core CPUs over the last couple of years.
As a result, it's now becoming more common for games, video players and other consumer-oriented applications to utilise up to eight cores, making Ryzen a potent product that could finally present Intel with a true competitor. While full details of the Ryzen chips won't be released until they hit store shelves on March 2, it also brings to the table a raft of features that AMD has lacked, such as support for USB 3.1 , super-speedy NVMe hard drives and more.
CPU speeds and prices have stagnated since AMD's chips stopped being serious competitors to Intel's products over half a decade ago, but Ryzen could finally see Intel's dominance challenged. This can only be good news for consumers, as Intel's virtual monopoly may finally come to an end, leading to faster, more affordable PCs for all.
