Next PC's- revamp to save the industry?

[Scisca]

Pemalite said:

Scisca said:

I know Zen will be weaker than Skylake, let alone Kaby Lake, let alone the next Lake And AMD won't overtake Intel in sales, but as you said, AMD is going to change the game somewhat with Zen based APUs, which can be a very interesting option for people not building a top-of-the-line PC. Current APUs are almost there in my opinion, but with Zen they will finally make the jump to being power efficient (not overheating!) and powerful enough, to be able to take a $50 MoBo, $150 APU, 8 GB of RAM and have a great PC for office stuff/web browsing and even some light gaming. I can see every budget PC being built aroung AMD CPU/APU, especially if Intel keeps an i3 with merely 2 cores as competition. High end is still going to belong to Intel and that's where the money's at.

An APU competing with consoles could also be a great solution for gamers. Sky is the limit and in this field they have no competition.

I know nVidia isn't going anywhere, just as Intel they have far superior image and brand power, but they will have to work hard to keep it and it will be harder for Greens than Intel. After all, AMD is currently on par with nVidia when it comes to performance, unlike with Intel. I think that once Polaris hits the market, GPU marketshares of 80-20 won't be and option anymore AMD is better with VR, multiscreens, has free Freesync and thus cheaper monitors. This snowball is starting to grow, but let's face it, 50% marketshare in GPUs will be a huge success for AMD and will take time to achieve.

I think I'm going to go with a 480 or 480X and be perfectly happy. All I want is 75 fps in 2560x1080p @ultra. I'm going to have to see the benchmarks and see which card gives that level of performance and buy it. Don't need to spend more on a PC, there's so many other things to do with money

A high end 300w APU isn't isn't going to be cheap, it's going to be targeting high-end gaming PC's, not budget machines which have Core i3 processors, AMD will charge a premium for it, because they can.
And Current APU's are horrible, anyone who buys one in 2016 is insane.

As for Multi-screens, AMD had the edge since the Radeon 5870 Eyefinity edition, it's why I chose AMD over nVidia that round, that got improved over the other generations... With that said, nVidia's surround vision isn't entirely lacking and is more than sufficient. - VR is yet to be determined, yet to see how AMD is going to have the edge, Freesync is only important to those who own/will own a Freesync monitor, right now it's in a minority of sales and will continue to be as most panels typically are cheap low-end ones where Freesync (And G-sync) are non-existent.

Also. "APU" is an AMD marketing term, it consists of a CPU and GPU being on the same die, thus Intel has had "APU's" for years, they just don't use the term, probably because it's an AMD one, Intel has also been investing heavily in it's IGP's, even throwing L4/eDRAM at the problem.

Also. AMD CPU's cannot overheat anymore, that hasn't been an issue since AMD's Palomino back in 2000, once it reaches a thermal threashold, the CPU scales back.

And remember that AMD will have competition from nVidia when it launches Polaris, nVidia has something equally as impressive known as Pascal which gets followed up with Volta, if you think AMD is going to be walking in and taking 80% marketshare when it has competition, no brand presence and a loyal following that numbers less than nVidia... You haven't paid much attention to AMD and thus ATI over the last few decades.

I hope AMD can do well, but you do need to set some realistic expectations, even when they have had superior performance, energy efficiency and price... They still have never had managed to gain majority marketshare.

I know the high end APU is going to be expensive, it's going to rival consoles, basicaly try to be the ultimate Steam Machine. I know current APUs aren't anything great, but with Zen cores they will be very interesting and offer great performance per $. And the current ones aren't terrible, just that they aren't for gamers. If you want to build a machine for browsing, office and playing stuff like Candy Crush, or old games, a PC with an APU is absolutely good enough. 

Freesync is free, so it can be included even in the cheapest monitors. It is becoming more popular and I can't see any reason why it shouldn't. Every company introduces Freesync monitors at different price points. When I was choosing my monitor, I was picking only between Freesync ones, the more people do like me and buy these monitors, the more there will be manufactured, since there is no reason not to put it into a monitor.

I know Intel has "APUs", but when it comes to (i)GPUs they aren't even close to where AMD is. Just like nVidia isn't anywhere close to AMD when it comes to CPUs. AMD is in the sweetspot, especially once they release Zen.

I know nVidia will come guns blazing, that's what they do. The 80% marketshare wasn't meant as AMD's future, but nVidias present - they have 80% of the market right now. I think AMD may claw back up to around 50% in the coming years, especially if they capitalize on all the advantages they set in front of themselves. It's their for the taking and it's great, cause the more of the market they gain, the more Intel and nVidia will be motivated to fight back