AMD: Ryzen is beating performance expectations, shows it beating Core i7-6900K

Some liveblogging from the AMD New Horizon livecast.

AMD CEO Lisa Su says Zen is beating performance expectations. The platform codenamed Summit Ridge will be launched as Ryzen.

At launch Ryzen will have 3.4GHz clockspeeds or higher.

Boost frequencies to be announced at launch in Q1 2017.

Zero details about pricing.



Five new features, AMD SenseMI technologies to sense and adapt to environment. Learning and adapting on the fly.

First two are Neural Net Prediction and Smart Prefetch. CPU trains itself to get faster. Accounts for 25% of performance boost of Ryzen.

Pure Power and Precision Boost: Running at fastest speed with lowest power.

Extended Frequency Range. CPU is smart enough to know what environment it is in, CPU performance scales based on your system cooling. Premium cooling makes the CPU go faster by pushing the boost higher.

CPU tests:

Blender CPU test: Eight-core Ryzen 3.4GHz without boost versus eight-core Intel Core i7-6900K at stock frequency of 3.2GHz. The $1,100 Intel CPU is matched by AMD in terms of performance in this test. Ryzen chip has a 95W TDP, versus 140W for Intel, making it all the more impressive. Lisa Su promises this is before AMD finished optimizing Zen performance.

Handbrake transcoding demo: Ryzen without boost beats Intel by five seconds.



After this AMD showed four demos: VR, 4K gaming, content creation and eSports live streaming. Most of this stuff wasn't too exciting.

AMD shows two system; one with AMD Ryzen and one with Intel 6900K (Broadwell-E) playing Battlefield 1. Interestingly, they used an NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan X videocard. AMD system seems noticeable faster but there's no framerate provided so we can't say for sure.

Lisa Su reassures Ryzen is absolutely on track for a Q1 2017 launch. Not in the presentation but the server Zen chips should follow in Q2 2017 and the "Raven Ridge" APUs are scheduled for the second half of 2017.

Su pulls a Steven Jobs-like "one more thing". AMD shows Ryzen-based PC with Vega video card running the new Star Wars Battlefront Rogue One DLC in 4K. Su says it's running at greater than 60fps. No actual card shown and no visible framerate counter.