Intel's response to RyZen.

[arandomguy]

Well, no reaction is certainly an option for Intel.

How much faster is SL-X likely to be than BW-E?

We know that KL-X and SL-X are going to a new socket, so that means buying new boards.

Are BW-E owners going to buy SL-X and new boards over RyZen and new boards?
It seems like there will be a decent price difference for those two options.

More that Intel doesn't necessarily need a rapid reaction. They can hold out due to circumstances.

Skylake-X allows the conveniences of them establishing new price points (which some thought they'd do with Broadwell-E) without the some what negative perception of large price cuts.

Some people do upgrade every cycle but I don't think the majority really does. So most Broadwell-E owners aren't likely to move to Skylake-X or Ryzen. Ryzen isn't game changing in terms of actual capability over HEDT, just disruptive in terms of value, which existing HEDT owners can't really take advantage of.

Also I'm wondering whether or not Intel and partners can move to market cheaper HEDT boards for SKL-X. A lot of the extra cost is due to just segmentation on Intel's part and features that aren't strictly needed. Maybe dual channel boards with less PCIe support, less powerful power delivery systems and etc. Intel can even artificially segment here for the chipset.

 

[unseenmorbidity]

OK, so now I think we can say that Intel needs to respond to RyZen, and we can also say that the 7740K and 7640K were not responses to RyZen.

So we can move on to discussing what Intel's response might be.

I think it will have to be price cuts initially.

Unless they have been hiding something from us, it doesn't seem like they could have a new chip anytime soon.

Yah, that's what I said.

Intel will likely just wait it out until they have a 6 core for the mainstream market.

 

[arandomguy]

So what games wouldn't run within margin of error levels as a 7700K on a Ryzen 1700 on real-world settings?

We won't know without actually testing but relevant candidates I can think of on the spot are -

Advantage to 7700k -
Fallout 4
Overwatch

Advantage to 1700 -
Watch Dogs 2
Battlefield 1

 

[french toast]

Intel will probably react with 10-15℅ price cuts across the board, will it be enough? Not sure as they have massive brand recognition but AMD has really dropped the hammer now, only overclocking remains the question mark.
R1700 is a true competitor to 7700k, they both likely have similar leads in ST vs MT in respect to each other, 7700k offers much faster ST single threaded perf, igpu and better overclocking, R1700 over much faster multithreaded perf, consumes significantly less power, it is also currently cheaper.
Igpu is practically useless in that price range but single threaded perf is very desirable, who knows how the market will choose?

10-15%
Price drops across the board for Intel will be a decent reaction, anymore and they hurt their brand imo.

 

[LTC8K6]

AMD doesn't seem to be releasing anything but the top end chips, so that helps Intel a little. But still, the pricing has got to steal business from Intel.

I'll be disappointed with Intel if we don't see some sort of reaction/response.

What we need is back and forth competition again.

 

[arandomguy]

That is an issue and something that also works for Intel since HEDT is not really a highly important nor high priority segment for Intel at least relative to what you might think given reactions on online tech forums.

As for the mainstream platform I don't know if it will be as clear cut as many people are thinking here. Just looking at AMDs own numbers for the 1700 vs 7700k to be shows this problem. I think they're official numbers had the 1700 being 15% (? going from memory here) faster at hand brake encoding. This is likely one of the more AMD favorable mainstream work loads that they will be facing off with. Gaming might be very split if not still favorable for the 7700k.

 

[LTC8K6]

Well, there are apparently $99 RyZen 350 boards which allow overclocking. So board price won't be an obstacle.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod...r=BESTMATCH&Description=ryzen&N=-1&isNodeId=1

 

[jpiniero]

With the way that desktop volumes are going, I don't think they will do much else other than release Skylake-X sooner if they can, and perhaps be less lazy on the stock clocks. Coffee Lake will have to do against Raven Ridge.

 

[jpiniero]

Oh and I'm at least a little surprised we haven't heard any "leaks" about Skylake-X recently.

 

[Rifter]

So what games wouldn't run within margin of error levels as a 7700K on a Ryzen 1700 on real-world settings?

This is what i want to know, i want real world gaming benches already! lol

 

[otinane]

The logic of spending more for a 4-core system because that is what you need for gaming (including expensive gaming motherboards etc), instead of spending less for an 8-core system which will be more than adequate for gaming, plus a bunch other workloads, is at least not an orthological consumer behavior (i don't want to be modded).

 

[Atari2600]

We won't know without actually testing but relevant candidates I can think of on the spot are -

Advantage to 7700k -
Fallout 4
Overwatch

Advantage to 1700 -
Watch Dogs 2
Battlefield 1

We won't know without actually testing but relevant candidates I can think of on the spot are -

Advantage to 7700k -
Fallout 4
Overwatch

Advantage to 1700 -
Watch Dogs 2
Battlefield 1

OK, thanks.

Could you (or anyone) point me in the direction of any reviews that would compare say, the 6900K to the 7700K?

 

[PingSpike]

I agree, 7700K (and then later 7740K) will be the gaming champ.

Probably, unless its the e8400 thing all over again. We're already seeing some titles that suck up the extra cores.

 

[plopke]

maybe something will be done about the extreme silly prices of 6800-6950 cpu's but
a)will there be enough supply and will prices not blow up like the RX4 series which for my region only now start settling in to acceptable range(not including flash sales), I could see 1700-1800X popular in cheap server builds or workstations.
b)This is the 90's all over again where people with a 300-400 dollar budget will ask me what to buy , it will be a hard time to convince anyone to buy AMD still, maybe that's why they promoting it as Ryzen and not so much as AMD this time.
c)why does intel need to respond? No igpu , no mobile , no server (yet), so only enthusiastic desktop people will be interested in 1700-1800X(very small market). And everything Intel has showed lately in their long term plans is looking at HPC/server/machine learning first , cut outs for consumers , so not sure they are in any hurry or they just can't because focus is on other things. All this doom and gloom about Intel , I never understand, Intel can be happy billion dollar profit company in server/hpc/services/... and give a rat ass about end consumer products in the future. Intel their focus should be on protecting their server market not desktop.

PS yes i will be buying a ryzen

 

[MajinCry]

We won't know without actually testing but relevant candidates I can think of on the spot are -

Advantage to 7700k -
Fallout 4
Overwatch

Advantage to 1700 -
Watch Dogs 2
Battlefield 1

I think all of the open world Bethesda games are a good benchmark. Hell, even Morrowind is when you chuck in Morrowind Overhaul 3.0.

 

[Murloc]

I think they can wait a bit, Ryzen 5 and the APUs will make things interesting, if they live up to the hype.

 

[Teizo]

I think they can wait a bit, Ryzen 5 and the APUs will make things interesting, if they live up to the hype.

There is no reason to believe they won't given the what we have seen from the R7s. I imagine they will scale just as good.

I can only imagine Ryzen 5 1600X will whoop the tail of the 7600k.

Intel still has better IPC overall it appears, but AMD is making Intel look silly with their pricing right now. That is what happens when you are run by greedy stockholders though.

 

[dullard]

This isn't uncharted territory. Pricing for duopolies vs monopolies have been well-studied and well-characterized.

Intel doesn't have to respond with their Kaby Lake processors, since at the moment AMD hasn't released equivalent competitors. Prices should (and have) drift slightly lower but not much will happen until AMD releases the lower end chips. For example, the 7700K dropped $6.67 on Amazon today.

With HEDT, I'll just go with simple duopoly pricing models. Take the 6800K for example. In a monopoly, no one would pay more than $617 for the 6800K, since they can buy the better 6850K for that price. Also, lets assume these HEDT chips cost Intel more to manufacture than typical consumer chips. I'll guess $100 just for a round number. In a monopoly, the maximum profit occurs roughly 2/3rds of the way from the cost to produce and the maximum price that anyone would pay. Thus, in a monopoly, to maximize profit, the 6800K should be priced at ($617*2 + $100) / 3 = $444. That isn't too far off from the $434 release price.

But in a duopoly, the maximum profit occurs at a lower point. Typically that maximum profit comes in right around the average of (A) the maximum price that anyone logical would pay and (B) the cost to produce the item. In this case, I would say the maximum anyone would pay for the 6800K is the $499 price of the better Ryzen 1800X. Thus, the 6800K would generate maximum profit at a price of about ($499 + $100) / 2 = $299. Intel should thus lower the 6800K price by about $135 if they want to maximize profit. That pits it right up against the $329 Ryzen 1700, which would be close competition.

That is a 31% price drop after being in the field for 9 months. Investors wouldn't blink an eye at that small of a price drop in a technology field (and a very small subset of Intel's products). Intel doesn't have to drop prices, or they could drop prices more than 31%. But, 31% is roughly what Intel should do for the 6800K.

The 6900K can be analyzed similarly, although there isn't as clear of a top price that anyone would pay since there isn't a good comparable chip. I'd expect closer to a 35% drop, to somewhere in the $700 range for the 6900K to maximize profits. Again, Intel doesn't have to respond, but the proper response would be to cut the 6900K to roughly $700.

 

[Bouowmx]

Intel Broadwell-E approaches the end of its life cycle (Skylake-X coming out sometime in 2017 3Q). So can I say that most customers interested in Broadwell-E have already bought it?

Perhaps Intel will keep Broadwell-E as-is, to avoid drawing attention to itself and AMD Ryzen.

 

[2blzd]

I got my Broadwell-E in August and because of a motherboard issues, I'm now on my 3rd chip...I feel like I always pick the worst times to buy/upgrade to new cpu's, (but I had to at the time in my head).

Feels like I just got my 6800k and now its already end of life cycle?

 

[GaiaHunter]

So we have the 7600K (6600K) and the 7700K(6700K).
For gaming those 2 chips are mostly the same.

The reason I went for the 6700K instead of the 6600K was for future proofing and those few instances where the extra threads actually matter.

But now you have 6c/12t and 8c/12t that are slightly worse at 4 and under threads but way better at over 4 threads count.
So what is the point of the 7700K now?

 

[cytg111]

For how long has Intel known about the potential of ryzen and has it given them enough time to tweak 10nm towards mega herzes .. next shrink may reintroduze the Hz race... that would be nice..

 

[Khato]

Why should Intel respond exactly?

As has already been pointed out, the primary market for the initial iteration of Ryzen is the enthusiast crowd. And even there, it's definitely skewed toward the portion which actually has a use for multi-threaded performance - for the overwhelming majority an i7-7700k is markedly superior to what the initial Ryzen SKUs offer. Going to the portion of the enthusiast market which actually can use the multi-threaded performance, the question becomes how well the Ryzen options overclock. Because I somewhat doubt that many i7-6900k are being run at stock

 

[GaiaHunter]

Why should Intel respond exactly?

As has already been pointed out, the primary market for the initial iteration of Ryzen is the enthusiast crowd. And even there, it's definitely skewed toward the portion which actually has a use for multi-threaded performance - for the overwhelming majority an i7-7700k is markedly superior to what the initial Ryzen SKUs offer. Going to the portion of the enthusiast market which actually can use the multi-threaded performance, the question becomes how well the Ryzen options overclock. Because I somewhat doubt that many i7-6900k are being run at stock

But why the 7700K over the 7600K?
Multi threading? Go Zen.

 

[cytg111]

But why the 7700K over the 7600K?
Multi threading? Go Zen.

True. Between an i5 and an i7 there is a zen hex core, the i7 doesnt look so good.