AMD Zen Expected To Be At Par With Intel Core i7 On Performance, But Will Be Much More Affordable

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AMD is touting the combination of its AMD Ryzen CPU and the new Vega GPU architecture as the 'dream gaming PC' for 2017. At the New Horizon event, AMD showed off the performance of its new eight-core, 16-thread Ryzen CPU running with Nvidia's latest GPU called the GTC Titan X against the performance of high-end Intel Core i7 6900K using the same GPU.

Both machines were running at the horrendous 4K settings.

Ryzen comfortably kept up with the performance of Intel's processor, and displayed 60-70 frames per second (fps) consistently. Since AMD Zen CPU is expected to be just about $500 and the Intel i7 costs over $1,000, this is certainly quite impressive.

The Videocardz got hold of a slide of the New Horizon presentation which confirms that the 'Ryzen' is the name of the CPU family which has a release window of Q1 of 2017. The new CPU is going to be an eight-core, 16-thread Zen processor which will have a total cache of 20 MB, and the base clockspeed of 3.4 GHz or more.

The slide also mentions a new feature called Extended Frequency Range (XFR) which seems to be a Turbo like feature. While it's a fully automated feature, overclockers can use its 'Precision Boost feature' to gain finer control over the CPU frequencies.

It seems that the upcoming AMD Zen CPU may pose a genuine competition to Intel on the gaming front this year.

Five years ago, AMD had introduced the multi-core Bulldozer technology which was ahead of its times. It failed because it could not stand against Intel's speedy, high-frequency, single-threaded CPU performance. The new AMD Zen architecture has tried to find a balance by improving its single-core performance for existing game engines as well as integrating the multi-threaded approach being used by newer graphics APIs such as DirectX12 and Vulkan.

Digital Trends suggests that January 17 might be the launch date for the first SKUs of the new AMD SR7 eight-core, 16-thread processors.

The reports also state that the new-generation Zen processors will have three tiers - SR7 (to compete with Intel's Core i7), SR5 (to compete with i5), and SR3 (to compete with i3 processors), which will be priced between $350 to $500 in retail - from the slower octo-core version to the highest clocked version.