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JEMC said:

Zen/Ryzen is what Bulldozer should have been. At least it closes the gap between AMD and Intel enough to make AMD a compelling choice for more users than before. Also, those who use multithreaded applications but don't have the money for Intel's top chips, can now get one of this without remorse.

What's surprising is the gaming performance (I suggest taking a look at Guru3D review with several games). It looks like there's still some fixes to do in the Ryzen drivers.

Exactly. It is what Bulldozer should have been.

I doubt drivers will change much though, the good part is... AMD was not a viable choice for CPU's for the last several years, today that has changed where you can consider their platform from a performance and power perspective.

JEMC said:

Captain_Yuri said:
Idk, the Ryzen benchmarks seems to do pretty well. Yes it is lagging behind intel which shouldn't surprise anyone but its not exactly very far behind... Considering the price points and the value proposition that Ryzen brings, I think intel will respond with a price drop across the board one way or another. Most likely with their 8xxx series.

What I am wondering is whether or not it would be a good idea to sell people's current 6700k and etc while the price is still high before intel launches their 8xxx series and drops the prices.

Ryzen is good, but not great as some expected/hoped.

Still, for gaming a fast quad CPU seems a  better choice. We'll have to wait for Ryzen 3 to see if they are worth competitors, but at least they'll be cheap.

Many thought this was going to be something that could beat Intels high-end for less than half the price consistently.
Whilst it does achieve that in some cases... It doesn't in allot of others where it can soundly loose to an Intel quad.

If you have a 6700K, I would personally hang on to it and see how Intel Reacts with pricing... Also would be good to see what Coffee Lake brings to the table.

QUAKECore89 said:

This is AMD's official response:

It reminds me of K6-2's driver 3DNow!.... Anyway, no wonder why they partnered with Bethesda for id software's id tech 6 engine with Vulkan API.

It's time to move on, Nvidia/AMD/Intel are focusing on DX12 and Vulkan.

Part of the issue though is that... Even though Direct X 12 and Vulkan bring some big benefits to Ryzen in gaming...
There are still allot of Direct X 11 and older games out there that just aren't heavily threaded, this is the exact issue that Bulldozer had. The promise of more threads to make up for potentially slower cores.

If you bought say... A 120hz/144hz/240hz monitor... And you play E-Sports games like Counterstrike, Overwatch, DOTA, League of Legends, StarCraft 2 etc'. Then you would be better served with an Intel CPU as those games need fewer cores, but extremely fast ones to make full use of those monitors high refresh rates.
The edge case to that is if you are running allot of background tasks, say xsplit, transcoding, encoding, playing music, virus scanner, torrenting, general streaming, browser with half a dozen tabs... And more, where the extra cores come in handy.

JEMC said:

AMD RX 500 series Launch April 4th with three rebrands
http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/amd-rx-500-series-launch-april-4th-with-three-rebrands.html
We talked about a possible rehash before, but it seems it's now more validated. AMD will be rebranding some of the 400 series graphics cards into the RX 500 series. Starting April 4 you sould see the Radeon RX 570 and RX 580, followed by Radeon RX 550 en RX 560 on April 11th.

The Radeon RX 580 would be a faster version of the RX 480 with a bump in clock frequency towards 1340 MHz. The 570 would be a 38 MHz faster model based on the RX 470. Both models will again be offered in a 4GB and 8 GB version.

The RX 560 is a 460 with 1024 stream processors abd a clock frequency of 1287 MHz. This would make the 560 substantially faster compared to the 460. The RX 550 would be Polaris 12 based, a new low-end SKU. Details on that one are missing.

VEGA will be released later, quite honestly expect that to be released end of May/June in the Computex time frame

I stated this was going to happen last year sometime.
AMD only made their GPU development teams a seperate entity about a year or so ago, it takes time for that to trickle down into the products being offered.
Plus Ryzen took allot of financial resources away from other developments.

Vega will be a high-end product drop on top of the existing re-badged stack.

AMD really needs to roll out it's new Vega architecture from top-to-bottom and take advantage of the architrectural advantages it brings, but we probably won't see such a shift untill probably Navi or Navi's successor.

AMD also needs a low-end, single slot, low profile, bus powered GPU based on Polaris/Vega.

QUAKECore89 said:

It reminds me of K6-2's driver 3DNow!.... Anyway, no wonder why they partnered with Bethesda for id software's id tech 6 engine with Vulkan API.

3D Now! Wasn't a driver though. It was a SIMD instruction set similar to MMX/SSE, sadly, AMD has thrown away such support and doesn't even keep it around for legacy reasons.