The development of the AMD Ryzen platform took four years and two million engineering hours.  Hundreds of engineers were tasked with the development of the CPU and a multi-year roadmap.  During the design phase AMD had a goal of a 40 percent performance boost over the existing “Excavator” core.  In the end, AMD has not only met their goal of 40 percent but exceeded it with over a 52 percent gain. 

All Ryzen 7 processors are based on 8 core CPUs and will have 16 processing threads.  Lisa was excited to share some, pricing, clock speeds and Cinebench R15 nT benchmarks with the audience. The fastest of them all - AMD RyZen 7 1800X - a $499 part will have a base clock of 3.6GHz and will boost to 4.0GHz.

AMD is using a SenseMI  a set of sensing, adapting, and learning technologies built into the AMD Ryzen that is a deep learning technique that helped a lot in shaping up the Ryzen processor. AMD is using PurePower with more than 100 embedded sensors with accuracy to the millivolt, milliwatt, and single degree level of temperature enabling optimal voltage, clock frequency, and operating mode with minimal energy consumption.

The Precision Boost, a smart logic that monitors integrated sensors and optimizes clock speeds, in increments as small as 25 MHz, at up to a thousand times a second is also an integral part of SenseMI. Extended Frequency Range (XFR) raises the Precision Boost frequency to enhance performance while Smart Prefetch introduces sophisticated learning algorithms that track software behavior to anticipate the needs of an application and prepare the data in advance. The last piece of the SenseMI technology is Neural Net Prediction, an artificial intelligence neural network that learns to predict what future pathway an application will take based on past runs. 

The AMD Ryzen 7 1800X represents the fastest eight-core desktop processor in the market as of today.  One massive point is that the 1800X price point is one half the cost of the Intel 6900K ($1049.99 USD) at $499 USD. Fudzilla will take a deeper look and do some additional testing over the next few weeks to give you a more conclusive answer about the performance of the Ryzen parts. The pricing seems great, as the top three Ryzen processors are priced at $329, $399 and $499. According to Mercury Research. 99 percent of the PC market buys CPUs below $500. Pricing and positioning was our biggest concern about Ryzen, but  AMD seems to have done a great job. 

The Ryzen 7 1800X sells for $499 and competes with $1050 Core i7 6900K and beats Intel by four percent in Cinebench R15 nT.  The Ryzen 7 1700X sells for $399 and competes with $425 Core i7 6800K and beats Intel by massive 39 percent in Cinebench R15 nT. 

The Ryzen 7 1700 is the one that we see as a hot seller. It competes with Intel's Core i7 7700K, Kaby Lake. At least in Cinebench R15 nT,  the Ryzen 7 1700 beats Core i7 7700K by a massive 46 percent. Core i7 7700K is priced at $350 while Ryzen 7 1700 will sell for  a competitive $329. AMD told us that we should expect Ryzen to give similar gaming results to Intel, but so far, we haven't seen any numbers. 

AMD has partnered with nineteen boutique PC builders for the Ryzen product launch, but expects to have upwards of two hundred partners with 200 expected by the end of the first quarter.  AMD is committed to the goal of bringing gaming towers to the market from top OEMs in the first half of 2017.  Starting tomorrow, and shipping on March 2nd, consumers will have access to over eighty-two models of motherboards from ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, Biostar, and ASRock.

All of AMD’s authorized partners have started taking pre-orders for all three Ryzen 7 SKUs as well as configured desktop systems.  Some big names are on the list, including Amazon, Newegg and Micro Center in the USA, JD.com Tmall.com in China, Alternate, CaseKing and Mindfactory in Germany. Overclockers in the UK will take care of that market while we saw a Nordic giant, Komplett, on the list too. The list of 185 retailers and boutique OEMs include Maingear and Origin, CyberpowerPC, Ibuypower, Medion, Rue du commerce, Kabum, PCspecialist, OLDI, ICODA, Cybertron, PC case gear, Pasion, CSL, MayN and LDLC. 

All pre-ordered CPUs SKUs and systems will start today February 22nd and will begin shipping/arriving to end users on March 2nd.  

AMD's stock is currently at $14 - a massive increase from last years $1.82 and remember what Fudzilla predicted a few weeks back. The $20 stock goal after this doesn't sound too crazy does it?