AMD is hitting a new stride, unlike anything the company has seen before. We know their history leading into last year, starting this new direction with the GPU division splitting off into Radeon Technologies Group. RTG launched the mid-range Radeon RX 400 series, led by the Radeon RX 480. It was a great hit for AMD, but the CPU side of their business wasn't doing so well - until now.
AMD launched their much anticipated - seriously, have you seen any CPU in history apart from Intel's first Core series have this much hype? - Ryzen processors with a massive thud, dropping the Ryzen 7 1800X with 8C/16T @ 4GHz for just $499. Intel would be scrambling right now with how they're going to combat this, but in the meantime AMD is enjoying the #1 and #2 best-selling CPU spots on Amazon right now.
The Ryzen 7 1800X is breaking world records on Cinebench multi-threaded benchmarks, oh and the #4 best-selling CPU on Amazon is the Ryzen 7 1700. If the winning continues at this rate, AMD will be hitting a Donald Trump level of winning - where there'll be so much winning, we'll be begging AMD to stop. That's until Vega - that is.
If you needed more convincing that AMD has totally new energy, remember that they have semi-custom APUs inside of the Xbox One, Xbox One S, the PS4, and even the PS4 Pro - oh, and the upcoming Project Scorpio console. 52% IPC improvement over their Excavator IPC performance, and even above the 40% IPC improvement target they had for themselves? Oh, lifting above my weight there AMD - no worries, it's easy for them with Ryzen now.
During the Ryzen Tech Day event, AMD had its road map that teased Radeon Vega - and its slick new logo - which is going to be better detailed at AMD's upcoming Capsaicin event at GDC 2017. Radeon Vega is going to be a big deal, and if the hype being real from Ryzen is any indicator on performance and the delivery of a promised product - Vega is going to blow us away.
Coming Soon
Once we get to March 2 the picture will be clearer, and I think that is going to come from the consumers and the community. Gamers are going to jump into the arms of Ryzen, as it is priced so competitive that Intel staff are probably eyeing off a new Ryzen-powered PC.
Between then and now, we have Capsaicin - where we will learn more about Vega. Vega is the next big chess move that AMD has, this time shifting the fight from Intel to NVIDIA - and competing directly against their popular GeForce GTX 10 series graphics cards. AMD will be powering Radeon Vega graphics cards with HBM2 technology, as well as High Bandwidth Cache. The architectural improvements of Vega are also quite large, so it'll all come down to pricing.
AMD has a massive year ahead of itself and if the launch of Ryzen is anything to go by, all of this winning is going to get annoying eventually, right?