







Mark Walton

AMD's Ryzen high-end Summit Ridge CPUs have been priced—and it looks like Intel better batten down the hatches, or be ready to slash its prices to compete. At the top end the Ryzen 1800X will cost $500 (~£500), versus $1,100 (~£1,050) for the Intel Core i7-6900K that AMD is putatively pitching it against.

Further down the stack there's the Ryzen 1700X for $400, which AMD is comparing against the $450 Core i7-6800K, and the $330 Ryzen 1700 versus the $350 Core i7-7700K. All of the chips are available to pre-order from Newegg.

Update: UK pricing has been confirmed, at slightly less than £1-to-$1: £490 for the AMD Ryzen 7 1800X, £390 for the 1700X, and £320 for the 1700. The chips are available to pre-order from all your usual component stockists, with a release date set for March 2.

Notably, all of the Ryzen parts feature 8 cores and 16 threads (8c16t), which can only currently be matched by the Haswell-E i7-5960X (~$1,100), Broadwell-E i7-6900K (~$1,100), and a number of even more expensive Xeon chips. The 6800K has 6 cores and 12 threads, while the 7700K is your standard 4c/8t desktop chip.

Today AMD also locked down the speeds and feeds for the Ryzen 7 chips. The 1800X has a base clock of 3.6GHz, boosting to 4GHz; the 1700X is 3.4GHz and 3.8GHz, and the 1700 is 3.0GHz and 3.7GHz respectively. The top two parts have a TDP of 95W and won't be bundled with a cooler; the lower-end part clocks in at 65W and will come with a bundled "Wraith Spire" cooler.

At Ryzen's first preview in December 2016 AMD touted that the top-end 1800X chip could out-perform Intel's i7-6900K by about 10 percent in multithreaded workloads. AMD also asserted that the Ryzen chip had a TDP of just 90W, versus 140W for Intel. Obviously, if those claims bear out, then $500 will buy you one hell of a chip.

For most of us, though, the more interesting battle will be at the lower end. Will the Ryzen 1700 out-perform the Kaby Lake i7-7700K? Presumably the Ryzen's 8c/16t setup will thrash the Intel chip in heavily multithreaded workloads. But what about games and productivity? AMD said in August last year that it was targeting a 40 percent IPC uplift over Excavator for Ryzen, which would just about place it within the Intel Core ballpark.

At an event in San Francisco last night, AMD CEO Lisa Su said that they actually surpassed their target: Ryzen's IPC is 52 percent above Excavator.

But how will those figures bear out in real usage? The good news is that Ryzen's launch is Real Soon Now™: March 2, to be exact. AMD is presenting Ryzen at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco on March 2, and the chips, motherboards, and boutique PCs will go on sale the same day. AMD told us in San Francisco that March 2 is a hard launch: product will be available on that day, at the price points listed.

We have a Ryzen chip in-hand now, and will have benchmarks and real performance figures in time for launch day.

In the mean time, you might like to read more about Ryzen's AM4 motherboards, or some details about the Ryzen (née Zen) CPU architecture.

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Additional reporting by Peter Bright.

Listing image by AMD