AMD Ryzen Chips May End Intel's CPU Monopoly

Feb 17, 2017 08:00 AM EST | BC Tabotabo

The AMD Ryzen CPU is finally arriving in a few weeks. After nearly half a decade of waiting, the chip architecture that could end Intel's dominance will finally be available.

Top Tech News reported that the new Ryzen chip will be Intel's first real competition in years. The new chip is smaller, will have twice the L2 cache size as Intel's comparable CPU, and will have a lot of performance advantages as well. The icing on the cake is the price range of the Ryzen CPUs - they are around 70% cheaper than their Intel counterparts.

The CPU's success lies in its Zen Microarchitecture. The Zen architecture is the very core of the AMD Ryzen chip. It is the company's first ever CPU architecture that features simultaneous multithreading.

In a lengthy report by WCCFTech, the Zen microarchitecture is a vast improvement over the Bulldozer design. This is apparent through its single integer engine, Zen's minimal use of power and area footprints, and its access to an abundance of L3 cache.

The Ryzen no longer has clustered multithreading and instead makes use of simultaneous multithreading. This means that each Zen core is able to execute two threads simultaneously. In the past, a Bulldozer module would run two identical threads which ended up wasting area and eating up too much power with a low single threaded performance.

Overclocking. The real magic of the AMD Ryzen chips is in overclocking. At the CES 2017, the company emphasized that its CPUs will have unlocked frequency multipliers which will allow easy overlocking. This means all 17 of the chips in the full lineup can raise the frequency multiplier inside its motherboard's UEFI/BIOS interface. In comparison, Intel only has three Kaby Lake CPUs that is ready for overlocking.

Another interesting feature of the Ryzen chip is its XFR feature, which is short for Extended Frequency Range. This allows every Ryzen CPU to overclock itself whenever the thermal environment allows automatically. This means that a good cooling system will allow a Ryzen to function faster than the clock speeds advertised on the box.

The AMD Ryzen CPUs will be available as early as the end of the month. They are cheaper, reportedly faster, and have an alleged better base microarchitecture than Intel.

At present, the company can only give a paper argument. We have to wait until the official launch and see the performance for ourselves. While the benchmark tests have revealed a lot, one thing is sure: it is a welcome relief among gamers that Intel will no longer have the gaming monopoly in CPUs. What do you think about the AMD Ryzen? Share your thoughts and comments below.

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