It's been over a month, 2018 had quite a start at CES. With Intel's Coffee Lake finally receiving a more wider release than it previously did, it start overshadowing Ryzen line-up soon enough. Then again, AMD didn't need to do much other than just reduce the price of their current CPU line-up.
Might as well purchase that 1600X already with a decent aftermarket cooler and give that 8600K a big whooping. However, the clockspeed issue still lingers with Ryzen. Most people whom are buying GTX 1080 or 1080 Tis are preferably taking Intel line-up due to their higher single core performance. Ryzen 2 is where this issue is fully resolved, with a bump of over 10% in clockspeed and less power draw, this architecture refresh on 12nm is where Ryzen will fully shine. With the release slated to be between March-April.
As of writing this now, the Ryzen APU products are still in embargo so reviews will be popping out real soon. Unfortunately there have been earlier leaks, including one from 3DMark and Cinebench R15.
.That's not all, I even found other leaks from some guy in Canada doing 3DMark tests, heres the 2400G outpacing miles ahead in performances in FireStrike. If this is true, then AMD has hit a goldmine with its new APU. Bringing a great successor to Kaveri from 2014.
Mobile APUs like the 2700U with Vega already has benchmarks showcasing its power so it should of no surprise what the desktop counterpart offers us. But still, its amazing to see what higher RAM speed can differentiate in performance.
If you believe the chart above, well you're being deluded. That's just me trolling, but it doesn't mean Ryzen+ CPUs won't have any increase in performance. Now hear me out, this architecture is a refresh of the same one thats being sold in current market but the only big difference being is the fabrication. Meaning that the silicon that is being used to make Ryzen will be shrunk. From 14nm+ to 12nm, GlobalFoundries will be manufacturing the CPUs with their 12nm design, reports of it bringing more yield than 14nm++ which indicates that it'll allow less power draw and higher clockspeed. Yes mean that it'll push over the 4Ghz clockspeed barrier, not 4.1Ghz but something like 4.4Ghz or 4.5Ghz. That sounds good to me especially considering Infinity Fabric brings way more performance in just over 4Ghz compared to Intels current line-up. I don't know anything about 12-Core CPUs coming out, that to me is still in the rumor mill.
AMD has once announced that they'll even put mobile Vega GPUs with HBM memory die with their own CPUs in the near future. When that'll be is hard to tell since they've partnered up with Intel on this project using EMIB. But if AMD moves forward with this, they'll be unstoppable in the mobile market especially with notebooks.
With the higher sales number, I think AMD will finally have the finance for R&D to make a serious competitive GPU architecture against Nvidia. Heck GCN is in borrowed time till 2020, before AMD finally moves on to a whole new different architecture as they've stated earlier. Navi might be the only GCN based GPU that'll be released in 2019.
I chose the title because AMD has already surpassed the initial stage for Ryzen since March, 2017. With the release of both desktop and mobile, and HEDT CPU series. Now if only Vega had a refresh, yeah I know I keep bringing that up. I mean its because I want a freesync 4K monitor so badly :( but GPU prices nowadays just suck and with how much performance the current Vega GPU provides, its just isn't enough. But a jump to 12nm or 7nm could drastically change all that and make it a viable competitor even against Nvidia's new upcoming Ampere based GPUs.