Yes, I'm criticizing AMD, because they could do a lot better. I will get a Ryzen, and it will be okay. But still I'm very disappointed about the I/O options of Ryzen. They want to (also) compete in the high-end, and they only bring mid-level I/O. They should've at least given it 32 PCIe lanes. If they bring anything like SP3 or SP4 for workstations, you would need at least a 2x Summit Ridge MCM to have more I/O, which would be nice, but that would be at least at Intel 2011-3 prices.
You might be a bit confused.
Ryzen should offer 32 PCIe lanes for dual GPU at x16, not sure if we have confirmation but that's what we assume.
In addition to that, the CPU + chipsets offer modularity. They got some IO from the CPU and some from the chipset. Ofc if mobo makers want more IO, they can add that with a 3rd party chip,like they've always been doing on most platforms.
It's much better than Intel's main platform but less than the server chips sold in consumer at insane prices. EDIT: if 2x16 PCIe 3.0 is not enough, maybe it would be better to wait for next year and hope they got PCIe 4.0.
And it is about cost because AMD would have to be insane to not place this against Kaby Lake but at 2x the cores.
It's clearly a tight die aimed at high volumes.
At 999$ they would sell 100k units in a year.
At 99$ to 349$ for quad to octa and one or two SKUs above that, they would ship tens of millions of units since everybody would upgrade.
They could even go to 49$ for quads but it is likely that ,this year, most that buy bellow 99$ would make an effort and get the quad. Next year,when Zen+arrives,they can drop the prices for this gen to 49$.
No 4 chans memory ,no huge L3 cache, nice IO but not excessive.They are gonna hit Intel where it hurts, across the board and serve every customer that doesn't need a silly integrated GPU.
If Zen delivers and AMD has sufficient supply, it's gonna be weird. The massive upgrade cycle it will cause....
Some will cry about margins and you can look at that in a couple of ways.
How big is the die, Intel's 4 cores APUs have a GPU that's bigger than the 4 cores+cache and it's 120+mm2.They could have given us more cores a long time ago, they just don't want to.
Lets say Zen is 200mm2 or less and even if we are generous in all areas if you do the math for costs - die size, wafer cost, yield, test and packaging, box contents(if not tray), transport and so on - you get to 40$ or less for a 6 and 8 cores die. Even if the average retail for the 6-8 cores ends up at 250$ , there is ample room for AMD to have great margins while also feeding the distributors and retailers.
4 cores would cost a bit more on a per core basis but still lots of room especially if they don' t push bellow 99$ for cheapest SKU.
Or you can think of it this way,Polaris 10 is used in the 470D to 480 8GB and has an area of 232mm2. But with GPUs you also got a bunch of GDDR5, the actual board, the AiB partners so the costs are much higher.
If Zen lands somewhre between 150 and 200m2 why be extra extra greedy and not price it against Kaby Lake.
AMD needs to build the brand too and giving us prices we like is very easy today while also making a LOT of money. Intel will flood the airwaves with ads, AMD can't do that but they can offer reasonable prices and gain exposure.It will help their sales in other segments too and help longer term.
Every price point they don't address is business left on the table that feeds Intel.
Intel can react but will take a bit of time so AMD should exploit the opportunity and once Intel reacts, they can manage it as Intel can't afford to kill its margins while also killing average selling prices.
I see that many are so conditioned by Intel's marketing, that 8 cores for bellow 500$ is nuts to them. It's not ,8 cores is the equivalent of a quad core APU in costs.
Anyway , we'll see what AMD does ,if they play it smart or they waste the opportunity. They should have supply if they also use Samsung but, if there are shortages, it would take quite a bit of time for supply to catch up.