Ryzen 7 1800X, AMDs entry into the HEDT market: Part 1

Conclusion

Zen and Ryzen are a very important leap forward for AMD. They’ve managed to do what some thought was impossible: They’ve become a competitive player in the high-end CPU market once again. These CPUs are very important and represent a return to form for a company that’s known for their innovation. It’s taken them quite some time to come back, but Ryzen is huge success. It generally uses less power, performs on par or slightly better and is much less expensive than it’s direct competitor.

The IPC is sufficiently better even if it isn’t quite faster than the very latest from Intel. It’s very close to what they said it would be and competes very well. For some workloads it’s even better then that. We see that it’s an absolute integer crunching machine and seems to make good use of the speedy cache that it has at its disposal.

It isn’t all roses, however, and there are still outlying situations where Zen doesn’t quite perform as well as we would like, though this may be more because of unoptimized code than anything else. Intel, with their vast resources, is able to find those outlying situations and fix them themselves in many cases. And is only beginning to branch out to developers to help create optimized code. Case in point, Stardock recently said that an update to Ashes of the Singularity is coming soon that should bring even more performance out of the Ryzen 1800X. So, then, even if the new CPU doesn’t quite perform on par with IPC as whole, it’s still a fantastic leap forward and as with anything from AMD, we can expect better performance out of most applications going forward.

It’s a great processor that completely blows away my expectations. If this is just the first generation of what they plan to build off of then AMD is back in the game again. The value they have here is tremendous. AMD is back, and better than ever.

And with that, we award the Ryzen 7 1800X our editors choice award. The price/performance ratios is just magnificent.

Part 2 will delve more into compute performance, more deep neural networks, every day competing performance and have a larger library of games benchmarked.