I find it at least partially entertaining that long dormant or "quiet" accounts are suddenly coming out of sleep mode to join the deflate/defuse the imminent release of RyZen brigade. Ryzen must be quite a significant product stack for the hate, vitriol and blind, laughable foolish-ness to reach this level.
All the anti-AMD trolls and blind fanatics/Intel+NV loyalists who wished nothing more than for AMD's CPU and GPU divisions to fail for a decade are coming to terms with reality that AMD will have a monster price/performance multi-threaded line-up.
AMD should have more threads than nearly every Intel CPU from $100-$600 range, and undercut the $1100 6900K by at least $300-400. These vitriol posters are also bitter that AMD stock is up from sub-$2 and they haven't bought a share. Maybe they shorted the stock and lost $.
Any sane and objective PC gamer/consumer would want nothing more than for AMD to absolutely level every single Intel CPU so we get price wars, and for Intel to innovate. Only the blind, non-objective PC users, employees or shareholders of the competitor would oppose the most fierce competition in the CPU markets since AXP+ and A64/X2 days. Those are the glory days of CPU competition. Instead, we got 35-40% gains in performance moving from a 2600K to a 7700K, and that advantage gets reduced to 25-30% or so once we compare 5Ghz 2600K against a 5Ghz 7700K. Pathetic given that 2600K turned 6 years old this January. For years we've been stuck between a rock and hard place: either paying X58/X79/X99 chipset/mobo premiums for an enthusiast GPU-less SKUs, at the expense of buying 1 generation outdated CPU architecture (excluding X58), OR had to pay Intel a premium for die size/transistors allocated towards the worthless iGPU included inside the mainstream i3-i7 product lines. Paying a premium for a workstation product lines or subsidizing users who benefits from an iGPU inside mainstream i3/5/7 lines wasn't a real consumer choice. It was simply a choice between paying more for Intel CPU or Intel chipset and CPU. Why should I help to subsidize the cost of the GPU I'll hardly use? Why couldn't I purchase a $250 6700K with 40-50% smaller die size without the integrated graphics? No sir, can't do.
Even now we will see Intel's true colours once AMD shows proper solder/premium paste between the die and the heatspreader, while Intel continues crippling mainstream K series with $1 thermal paste. Intel's excuse for years was that the die size was too small/fragile to solder the heatspreader. We'll see about that!
Modern gaming has changed dramatically in the last 10 years, where major AAA games are nearly 90% GPU bottlenecked as soon as there is enough CPU performance on the table that the videocard cannot keep up. The idea that single core performance is king is only true to a point. More and more games are blending well-threaded. We should see even more gamers upgrade to 1440p-4K monitors in the next decade. These market trends will shift the load towards the GPU dictating gaming performance. As long as the CPU will be fast enough, the extra single core performance will not have a material impact on the user experience.
Real world tests prove that a 5Ghz 7700K shows immaterial improvements in gaming at 1080p against a 4Ghz 7700K when paired with a GTX1070 -- a GPU that's superior than what 95% of all Steam users have.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZYoNw1GJWM
That means AMD doesn't even need to match Broadwell-E or Skylake/Kaby Lake in IPC. All they have to do is bring 80-90% of single core performance and offer 50-100% more cores in key segments to make Intel CPUs less well-rounded for a new PC build. A lot of users would choose a CPU that's 85-90% as good in single core tasks and 40-70% faster in multi-threaded tasks. Ryzen's overclocking should help close the gap in single threaded per core performance against Intel's locked i3-i7 CPUs.
The launch of a $180 i3-7350K is enough for everyone to see how arrogant and monipolistic Intel has become in recent years. The idea of a dual-core CPU, priced near $200 mark in 2017 is laughable. Then we have paid-for marketing reviews that pretend this CPU is almost as good as a 2600K, while ignoring to test the real world scenario of a 4.8-5Ghz 2600K paired with a GTX1070 against a 5Ghz 7350K in well-multi-threaded modern PC titles. It's easy to run short canned benchmarks, ignore frame times and make erroneous conclusions that don't mimic real world gaming scenarios.
With games like Watch Dogs 2, GTAV, Crysis 3, Assassin's Creed Syndicate, BF1, Total War Warhammer, etc. all showing that the era of dual core CPUs is over, the i5 is now the bare minimum needed for a 2017 gaming PC. Ryzen's 4C/4T, 4C/8T offerings should put significant pressure on the entire Pentium, i3 lineup in terms of market share. I can also imagine 4C/8T, 6C/6T, 6C/12T Ryzen CPUs will make it pretty hard to recommend i5s, especially the gimped locked versions.
Intel's anti-enthusiast stance on blocking BCLK overclocking on Z270 ensures every single non-K i3/i5/i7 Kaby Lake CPU is money wasted/aimed at nontech savvy builders. Ryzen's automatic overclocking with superior cooling should help to differentiate its CPUs against Intel's locked i3-7 SKUs.
Since every single Ryzen CPU will come unlocked, I would expect objective reviewers to include BOTH stock and max overvolted and overclocked Ryzen R3, R5, R7 processor benchmarks against Intel's locked and unlocked i3/i5/i7 CPUs. Of course, I already envision how Intel would throw a hissy fit, and use its marketing and bargaining power and either "force" or put pressure on reviewers to only include 1 page of overclocked Ryzen CPUs or exclude these results entirely from launch reviews. I can imagine Intel won't like it at all if a 4.3-4.5Ghz 4C/8T, 6C/12T Ryzen that normally has a 3.6-3.7Ghz Boost is pitted against stock i3-i7s.
Let's not forget that during C2D/Q, Nehalem, Lynnfield, Sandy, Ivy eras, overclocking was a huge selling points of those processors. The G0 Q6600, D0 i7 920, 5Ghz 2600K were legendary CPUs. If every Ryzen CPU comes unlocked, every Ryzen CPU MUST be overclocked in reviews since the capability is there for anyone of us to unlock that performance - something Intel forces us to pay extra for in its K series.
In an ideal world, Zen would start price wars, Intel shifting mainstream 2-4 core i3/i5/i7 a tier down and moving 6-core Skylake 7800K to $329-339 level, while 8-core Skylake-X drops to $599-699 and 10C/20T Skylake-X drops to $999-1099. Consumers should want for Zen to be as fast as possible since that will put even more pressure on Intel to innovate with its 2019~2020 post-Tigerlake all-new CPU architecture. As consumers, we'd win!
AMD should probably charge decent early adopter premiums on Zen in case Intel responds with price drops. It would be a lot smarter to drop prices on a $500-700 8C/16T later on than to price it at $350-$400 (I see a lot of you want a $30-400 8C/16T Ryzen) and have the budget brand image hanging over their 2017 CPU.
In any case, the loyal Intel supporters will find 1-2 metrics where Intel is winning and focus in on them, ignoring all other factors. I have a feeling cheaper AM4 mobos, every Ryzen CPU's unlocked overclocking, multi-threaded performance will all be ignored with a sole focus on worthless single threaded synthetic benchmarks like GeekBench 4, and worthless synthetic multi-threaded benchmarks like Cinebench R15 that always favored Intel even during AXP+ and A64/X2 days when AMD was outperforming Intel in price/performance and real world performance in actual applications.
There are also users here who would claim Ryzen is a failure if just matches Intel while ignoring just how far ahead Intel was since Phenom II/Bulldozer days. There are still millions of other users who aren't sitting on a 3570K/3770K->6800K and everything in-between who would love more choices, price wars, and more cores at the price levels where Intel sells i3/5/7 SKUs.
Also, I don't get why existing Haswell/Skylake/Kaby Lake Intel users are so negative, pessimistic and hostile towards Ryzen. If you have a 4670K/4770K/4790K/5820K/5930K/6800K/6600K/6700K/7700K, etc. it will still work after March 2nd. It's not as if these excellent CPUs will suddenly become slow or worthless. I am pretty sure even AMD doesn't expect users with modern high-end CPUs to upgrade.
A lot of you are also ignoring the stagnation of CPUs in the laptop space. How many sub-$800 laptops have i3 and glorified i3's aka i5/7-U series? We still cannot buy a laptop with Intel's 6-8 core CPUs, and Intel has hardly released anything much faster than my 4-year-old 3635QM 3.4Ghz Ivy Bridge. I've had no worthwhile upgrade path for my Intel laptop in 4 years. Apple has been stuck for what seems like 3-4 generations on similar level or CPU performance in their MBPro before Skylake came out.