Good thing about amd is that it will have only AM4 socket. Hope at least the mobos will be cheaper than their intel counterparts.

ok guys, as usual, people will make up expectations, and when (not if) AMD does not deliver, they will continue to suck.

You are saying people suck if they expect anything from AMD? Gee, thanks. The world must look mighty fine from the top of your mile high horse.

It will be my next PC 🙂, Will replace I7 860 @4.0Ghz. Going for red team all the way (just got RX 470).

If the performance figures hold up, an 8-core Zen will be a massive upgrade. I just hope they have lower prices than Intel.

My favorite line: So if you take an Broadwell-E sample released a year prior, downclock it to match frequency of a Summit Ridge sample, the Summit Ridge unit will be some degree of "faster". That is quite a low bar.

Broadwell-E launched on Q2 2016. That would make them 9 months apart max. Considering how slow moving the CPU market has been, and the underwhelming performance increases in Kaby Lake, the performance will be fine. You fail to mention that AMD is launching a single platform, and not two separate ones, which is the decent thing to do. The comparable processor would be the Intel Core i7-6900K 8/16 (cores/threads) 3.2 GHz / 3.7 GHz (base clock / turbo clock), which is at this point clocked at 100MHz higher than an engineering sample.

It's all about price folks. If you can get a AM4 motherboard for <$300USD and a 8 core unit for <$400, and that combo is on par or even 10% slower than a comparable Intel part, we have a winner that can disrupt Intel's pricing. If that pricing creeps to 500 for the higher end 8 core part the sales won't be high enough to disrupt anything.

The 8-core Zen is shaping up to have the same performance (or nearly identical) with the 6900K whose cheapest price at the moment is 938 euros. I cannot see the 8-core Zen part selling for less than 600, and it would still be the bargain of the century.

250 euros I read for 8 core which is around 300 US dollars, if true I will get one for sure. If its $500 and up outta my budget. They sure are taking long for the release wow Intel has dropped 3 or 4 new gen CPUs since talk started about zen, what is amd doing baking one at a time in an oven or something? What's taking so long???

I hope you are wrong. At 600 for the CPU alone what we have is a great upgrade for a small number of enthusiasts and a market failure. For the average buyer 300 is the limit and Intel has now stretched that to 400. At 600 we have a niche market and nothing disrupting Intel. Intel is capable of selling 8 core parts maintaining exponential revenue if they sell 8 core units at 700. If AMD only goes 600, nothing changes. Intel will always have the more developed and more reliable product because of their R&D and engineering investment. AMD just doesn't have the cash to engineer with the same reliability. Case and point.

The 600 value would obviously have meaning with current Intel CPU prices.

They sure are taking long for the release wow Intel has dropped 3 or 4 new gen CPUs since talk started about zen, what is amd doing baking one at a time in an oven or something? What's taking so long???

Intel was much, much ahead with the smaller process node technologies. On the other hand Intel kept releasing new CPUs that were pitifully similar to their predecessors. The only added value has been more or less things like new sata, PCIe, and usb versions. I upgraded from Ivy Bridge i5k to Skylake i5k and got 10% more processing power. There were two bloody generations between these CPUs, meaning Skylake is three generations newer. And I got 10% more ipc. Did I get more cores/threads? Of course not. In short, AMD has done nothing for years and Intel has kept releasing the same old **** under different names for years. It's so nice to be a computer hobbyist in these exciting times! Oh yeah!

People's skepticism seems to be getting a lot more... harsh lately. Back in the Bulldozer days it was more like "overhyped - I doubt it'll outperform an i7" but with Zen it's more like "I'm better than you as a person because I'm not buying AMD". Calm down people, it's just a CPU... Anyway, I hope the B350 chipset will make it to mini ITX boards and will offer overclocking. I'm a bit confused about the chipset though, because many sources seem to say very different things about what it can and can't do. If I can get a single 16x gen 3 PCIe slot and an M.2 slot in a mini ITX board, I'm happy. Though, I doubt there are any GPUs that can take advantage beyond 8x on gen 3 anyway.

Well, it's AMD's one chance to get back in the game, so, they have to take their time and things like one product-line helps due to costs involved already. I think it'll be competitive price-wise. Performance-wise; for gamers the difference between AMD vs Intel will be small. Unless you're into video/music production, editing etc most users won't notice the difference. For me, it would probably allow me to run more virtual instruments (upto double what I'm using now) in a daw in real-time, while keeping latencies low.

Well, it's AMD's one chance to get back in the game, so, they have to take their time and things like one product-line helps due to costs involved already. I think it'll be competitive price-wise. Performance-wise; for gamers the difference between AMD vs Intel will be small.

I agree - AMD needs to make sure they're doing things right. Though at this point I'm pretty sure they're completely done with their engineering and they're just in production. That includes getting OSes up-to-date with microcode and schedulers, getting compilers up-to-date, checking for stability issues, waiting for motherboard manufacturers to finish their work, as well as Global Foundries. That's a lot to get done in a few months, but thankfully for AMD, they're not responsible for doing all of that themselves. Depending on what you're expecting for gaming, the performance difference will be irrelevant. Many people just look at the maximum framerate but not the framerate they'll actually be playing at. The average person has a 60Hz monitor, so once you turn on vsync, the extra 10FPS you get from a more expensive product really doesn't matter as long as you reach 60. With DX12, Vulkan, and multi-threaded rendering on the rise, the CPU is becoming even less important than it used to be. As long as latency is good, that's all that really matters at this point.

Too much hype IMO. History can repeat itself. AMD hyped bulldozer, showed a couple benchmarks where it was faster than the i7, when in actuality it wasn't even close in most scenarios. Of course i hope they destroy the i7 for a good price as Intel is twiddling their fingers; not much effort is being put in to give us a much faster product plus the stupid pricing needs to be changed.

If it's faster than their previous CPU, I'd call that a success.

Agreed - Excavator's performance is roughly on-par with Sandy Bridge, but the problem is the only way to get it is mainstream, laptop, or low-end parts. So, it's somewhat irrelevant to us enthusiasts. Even if Zen's apparently 40% improvement over Excavator is a cherry-picked result (which it likely is) and is more like 15% faster on average, it'll still be a good product. I'm not expecting it'll beat Skylake, but still be on the same playing field.

250 euros I read for 8 core which is around 300 US dollars, if true I will get one for sure. If its $500 and up outta my budget. They sure are taking long for the release wow Intel has dropped 3 or 4 new gen CPUs since talk started about zen, what is amd doing baking one at a time in an oven or something? What's taking so long???

That´s exactly what i´m hoping for in terms of price! No matter how good Zen is, it can´t cost more than Intel´s Core i7 6700K\7700K otherwise AMD won´t gain any marketshare that they really need. I´m thinking that Zen CPU´s and motherboards are going to be cheaper by around 20 to 30% compared to similar Intel parts otherwise people are going to continue to buy Intel... But i could be wrong...

I can't see a true 8/16 CPU being sold at the same price as a quad with similar IPC.

I can't see a true 8/16 CPU being sold at the same price as a quad with similar IPC.

Well you have to remember that Zen is not going to have the same IPC, it´s gonna be close but not equal. And more important, AMD needs Zen to be a success and to ensure that happens they need to undercut Intel in the price departament otherwise 90% of potential customers (specially OEMs) are going to continue to buy Intel´s CPUs because for them AMD means cheap and weak CPUs... Of course this is my opinion and i can be totally wrong...

It will be my next PC 🙂, Will replace I7 860 @4.0Ghz. Going for red team all the way (just got RX 470).

Same here...although, I'm waiting on the GPU--I'll either go 2nd iteration RX480, or for the big-boy coming up...;)

Well you have to remember that Zen is not going to have the same IPC, it´s gonna be close but not equal.

Why do I have to remember that? The only performance estimate we have for it shows it having greater IPC. Not by much, but still higher. I bet that won't be the case for some usage, but it will be faster on others. In any scenario, we're talking about the same ballpark as a Broadwell-E.

Too much hype IMO. History can repeat itself. AMD hyped bulldozer, showed a couple benchmarks where it was faster than the i7, when in actuality it wasn't even close in most scenarios. Of course i hope they destroy the i7 for a good price as Intel is twiddling their fingers; not much effort is being put in to give us a much faster product plus the stupid pricing needs to be changed.

Yes, Bulldozer was indeed a disappointment, as I remember when Athlon launched and then the A64...stuff was so much better/faster than Intel's that Intel was threatening to cancel the production orders of companies like Asus or MSI or any company that "dared" to start manufacturing and selling AMD Athlon cpus!....;) Made quite a stink at the time. I also remember a time when you could not find an Intel cpu used in a game review anywhere on the internet--It was all AMD. No hype, just fact. This is not to say the company is going to leapfrog Intel again just yet (the success of the Athlon forced Intel to cancel the original Pentium and start over, and Core 2 was born on license from AMD's x-64 cross-licensing), that's probably not going to happen again--just yet...;) But AMD is highly competitive, and if there is any company that can break Intel's jewels with a hammer--it's AMD. They've done it once--I don't see why they cannot do it again. In fact, AMD is the only company that has ever succeeded against Intel--all the others without exception that tried are no more. Every one. AMD, however, not only exists but is thriving again, thanks to competent management once again. And Intel isn't close to being competitive with AMD on the GPU side of the house--for GPUs it's Intel with the bargain-basement solutions and AMD with the performance products. And remember...ZEN is only just getting AMD's foot in the door again in the competitive CPU marketplace. Anything can happen after that...Who wouldn't want 80%-90% the performance of an i5/i7 at ~50%-60% of the cost, eh? That's the kind of thing AMD does really, really well. No idea what Zen will cost coming out of the gate, but you can hang your hat on the fact that it will *be a better value* than similar offerings from Intel. Should do extremely well considering that AMD now has Intel *on paper* in a formal, actionable agreement forbidden to use anti-competitive measures against AMD from now on--such as paying companies not to sell AMD products, etc. (which Intel did a lot of early on.) What else can we thank AMD for...well how about SDRAM over RDRAM? Intel pushed the market to go RDRAM (for awhile Intel was *giving* RDRAM away with cpus because market interest was so low!), pushed the markets to go Itanium EPIC for 64-bits over x86--with Intel doing an entire ad campaign entitled "You don't need 64-bits on the desktop!" Believe it or not...;) AMD pushed through all of that and is most responsible for the shape of the current of x86 computing marketplace today. Which is great for consumers. And after Zen ships things will be even better for consumers...! So even if you do daily obeisance at Intel's feet each morning, praising the company for this or for that, it's quite certain that AMD had a big hand in shaping Intel as it exists today, and will probably have an even larger impact in the years to come. Much depends on management of AMD continuing along its present path, and I see little danger of the company making the mistakes it made pre-Lisa Su. She's simply too savvy and knows where the company's bread is buttered. I doubt the company could have made a better choice. Basically, what's good for AMD is good for consumers everywhere, even consumers who buy Intel products.

I'm still skeptical and optimistic (waiting for ZEN for my next choice in CPU), still I don't like a statements that much, from Dr. Lisa Su: " ....So we believe we’ll be competitive certainly with Core I5 as well as Core I7..." Say's that "...we believe ..." and then "... certainly...", either you know that you will be competitive or you hope you will be! And in the same sentence "...with Core I5 as well as Core I7...", this is nothing new if you think that AMD ZEN is a 8c/16t, it will "need to" be at least at the same level as I5 and I7 in multi-thread application (if not...). They showed us a game in the prezentation, but if they had a Broadwell-E CPU, why not show a FPS comparison....? A and one last thing, we all know how many companies are trying to bypass or change the scores on benchmarks just to persuade the costumer. As many are saying it: No real life test no answers, so at the moment to me they seem rather weak.

I'm still skeptical and optimistic (waiting for ZEN for my next choice in CPU), still I don't like a statements that much, from Dr. Lisa Su: " ....So we believe we’ll be competitive certainly with Core I5 as well as Core I7..." Say's that "...we believe ..." and then "... certainly...", either you know that you will be competitive or you hope you will be! And in the same sentence "...with Core I5 as well as Core I7...", this is nothing new if you think that AMD ZEN is a 8c/16t, it will "need to" be at least at the same level as I5 and I7 in multi-thread application (if not...). They showed us a game in the prezentation, but if they had a Broadwell-E CPU, why not show a FPS comparison....? A and one last thing, we all know how many companies are trying to bypass or change the scores on benchmarks just to persuade the costumer. As many are saying it: No real life test no answers, so at the moment to me they seem rather weak.

i agree with you 100% but , is not really hard to make better than amd FX ? i think they don't need really better , 30-40% IPC good thing , will see. ..