Ryzen review: AMD is back
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ADMIT IT. YOU LOVE UNDERDOG TALES. The Cleveland Cavaliers coming back from a 3-1 deficit against the Golden State Warriors. The New York Giants defeating the 18-0 New England Patriots, and the Average Joes beating the heavily favored Purple Cobras in the dodgeball finals.
Well, you can now add AMD’s highly anticipated Ryzen CPU to that list of epic comebacks in history. Yes, disbeliever, AMD’s Ryzen almost—almost—lives up to the hype. What’s more, it delivers the goods at an unbeatable price: $499 (go.pcworld.com/ryzen71800x amz) for the highest-end Ryzen 7 1800X. That’s half the cost of its closest Intel competitor.
But before AMD fanboys run off to rub it into Intel fanboys’ faces, there’s a very important thing you need to know about this CPU and its puzzling Jekyll-and-Hyde performance. For some, we dare say, it might even be a dealbreaker.
The boxed Ryzen 7 1800X and Ryzen 7 1700X won’t come with stocker coolers.
AMD’s new Ryzen CPU does away with the shared cores of the FX line in favor of stand-alone cores with simultaneous multithreading.
What Ryzen is
We can’t get into a review of Ryzen without first recalling the tragic circumstances that came before it: AMD’s Bulldozer and Vishera CPUs sold under the FX brand. Intended as a competitive comeback to Intel’s own epic comeback chips—the Core 2 and Core i7—AMD’s FX series instead went down in flames performance-wise.
The failure of Bulldozer and Vishera left AMD languishing for years, all but abandoning the high end and nursing itself on an ARM CPU for servers. In fact, the last time AMD had a truly competitive CPU, people still listened to INXS, the Weakest Link was a thing, and George W. Bush was president. The technical term for that is: a hell of a long time ago.
Ryzen is nothing like its star-crossed predecessors, though. The FX CPUs used a technique called clustered multithreading (CMT) that shared key components of the chip; they were built on an uncompetitive 32nm, and later 28nm, process; and the 8-core versions more often than not lost to Intel’s 4-core chips.
As anyone who has wallowed in failure only to return to greatness knows, tragedy and loss only make an underdog story sweeter. With Ryzen, AMD rebooted its CPU design, tossing aside CMT. It even adopted a technique from Intel’s playbook called simultaneous multithreading (SMT), which virtualizes CPU resources.
Whereas AMD’s design once had every two cores share resources, each Ryzen core is now a distinct entity built into a four-core complex. In the image below, two core complexes make up an 8-core Ryzen chip.
Also gone are the 32nm process of Bulldozer and the 28nm process of Vishera. Ryzen CPUs are built on a state-of-the-art 14nm process by AMD’s spun-off fab, GlobalFoundries. In short, the core design seems to have set the stage for an AMD return
