I think for power profile, performance and capabilities the crown has to go to the Threadripper 2990WX. Being able to run 32/64 at quite impressive clocks and possible to be air cooled at stock is unheard of this side of the last 5 years. Motherboard support, memory and peripheral compatibility is also more than you can shake a stick at as well.
And being compatible with previous gen mobos at Stock was a boon for developers!
I'm in the same boat as Tabbykatze. The threadripper release is very impressive
Threadripper 2990WX without any doubt.
It is the one that redefines the market.
Anandtech did an article on the best CPU for gaming and came out with the Ryzen 3 2200G or the Core-i3-8100 as their best overall choice. Quite amusing really but does go to show how much modern games are GPU limited and how little the CPU has to contribute relative to what is available. For even their most expensive test systems they never even got near to the i7 range, never mind the i9.
Most impressive? Well it has to be Threadripper. It really has made Intel go “whhhhaaa” and start churning out poorly optimised rush job high core count processors and has forced them to rejig their range which had been well established and comfortable for years. It has been disruptive, one could say. As has Ryzen but those core counts and numbers coming out of Threadripper are just insane. No use for me, I just need a decent mainstream CPU.
Just hope that the Windows scheduling problems are sorted soon and we start seeing Threadripper performance on Windows that we currently see on Linux.
Probably the Ryzen 7 2700 or 2700X(£249 and £299). Great performance for the price. At the budget end, the Ryzen 3 2200G for £90, a great chip also. With Black friday coming, even better prices might be had by then.
Thread Ripper is the best thing to happen to CPUs since the invention of the CPU.
The latest Intel chips are quite impressive, just not for the right reasons. I wouldn't say CPU tech is really impressive though, Ryzen did great to improve competition and to push intel to also add more cores last year, but apart from that, progress is really really slow.
Zen+ architecture as a whole, so the crown for the Threadripper 2990WX for the sick core count. I think we still get Epyc 48/96 and Ryzen 16/32 this year, and the then the Ryzen will be my choice for the crown.
Second place will go for ARM Cortex-A76 as this is small (but noticeable) step into PC market which will may in the future disown Intel Atom like processors.
Errata: the A12 and Snapdragon is a SOC not a CPU.
DevDrake
Zen+ architecture as a whole
+1.
Unless of course you want to cook your dinner on the i9 9900k?
I think for Ryzen 16/32 they'll need to sort the scheduling problems out before even releasing the hardware.
2990WX. This CPU was a BOLD movement from AMDs part. 4/6/8/10/16 core CPUs are big deal in AMDs view, 32 is the magic number. And they took everyone by surprise, Intel included.
It is by far the most impressive CPU launched in recent years, period.
DevDrake
Second place will go for ARM Cortex-A76 as this is small (but noticeable) step into PC market which will may in the future disown Intel Atom like processors.
Lets be honest here, ARM is not reinventing the wheel with these CPUs. They do and use all the same tricks that Intel and AMD used many years ago plus some new tricks. But as a whole the new Cortex A76 is just A75 with more units here and there.
They can go so low in power only because they have a very streamlined ISA, they don't have all the stuff required for HPC that desktop CPUs have and are built from the ground up (buses, memory controllers, etc) to consume as little power as possible. But technically, mobile CPUs don't have anything special at the uArch level compared to what Intel has on their CPUs.
Would say AMD, Intel now a day seem more like an expensive radiator meant for heating a household.
AMD has some nice CPU's, Intel's offerings are overpriced. I just upgraded from an i5-2500k to an i7-6700k and will wait until PCIe 4.0 before I make before I consider buying new.
2700X IMO, there might be faster CPUs in single core tasks and multicore tasks, but it's hard to beat that price:performance, it doesn't have so many cores that hardly any software knows what to do with them, and all around being sanely priced.
2700X. When it came out I assumed, probably like most did, that it'd be a cheaper, slower alternative to Intel. Never in a million years did I think we'd be at this point now, where it's literally half the cost of the Intel equivalent, and only a few percent slower.
From a Gaming perspective the 8700K, from a generalist, best of both worlds, the Ryzen 2700, from an all out productivity perspective, the Threadripper 2950x…Just my thoughts…
Depends single core or multi-core for single definitively intel i9 9900K but its very expensive For Multi-core and in my opinion the Threadripper 2990WX
It's got to be Ryzen for me. AMD have got so much performance out of these cpu's for such a reasonable price. Intel on the other hand are still stuck on the same Skylake architecture, suffering from shortages and the prices have jumped to ridiculous levels even for Intel. Even though the unlocked 9*** k series are soldered they are still very hot and benefit from delidding. For such expensive cpu's it's just not acceptable. Roll on next year and Zen 2, then maybe I will finally have a worthwhile upgrade path.
Sadly the mobile Ryzen APUs were launched in 2017, otherwise they'd top my list for packing a previously inconceivable amount of hardware into a 15W TDP.
In 2018, I'd probably go for their desktop big brother, the Ryzen 5 2400G. It wasn't that long ago (Feb 2017, in fact) that 4C/8T was the pinnacle of mainstream desktop CPU offerings, and now you can get it at < £150 with effectively an £80 GPU thrown in. That's a 2013 mid-range gaming PC in a single 65W chip. Kudos, AMD.
Threadripper 1 and 2 core count and threads impressed the hell out of me. Ryzen has been amazing so far. Price vs performance. Very good deal.
Wake me when Intel hits 10nm and spectre/meltdown fixed, or AMD hits 7nm with watts less than Intel with acceptable perf.
Until then, I'll wait. Nothing excites me now as they are both NOT giving what I want yet; 10nm vulnerability fixed, or 7nm amd. I hope AMD prices right on 7nm. Meaning if you are winning perf in EVERYTHING (games should be doable at 7nm vs Intel 14nm for a year), you better price it LIKE OR ABOVE Intel. I'll sell my stock if you don't. Yeah, I'm talking being OK with paying some extra cash to make sure AMD lives, not because I like them, but because if the chip is good I need no discount for crapware. Don't make the mistake (again, and again) of pricing like a turd when you have a rose.
Same comments as Tabbykatze “Threadripper 2990WX”, although, following the hype, it's also my most disappointing with the actual performance. I think AMD have been so far ahead of the curve with this release that they're exposing constraints in modern OSes.
All without Spectre/metdown issues!
It would've been interesting to see Intel release a product with the same cores/threads to see how they compare and whether it's an architecture issue on the core scaling or if it's something else….
yeeeeman
DevDrake
Second place will go for ARM Cortex-A76 as this is small (but noticeable) step into PC market which will may in the future disown Intel Atom like processors.
Lets be honest here, ARM is not reinventing the wheel with these CPUs. They do and use all the same tricks that Intel and AMD used many years ago plus some new tricks. But as a whole the new Cortex A76 is just A75 with more units here and there.
They can go so low in power only because they have a very streamlined ISA, they don't have all the stuff required for HPC that desktop CPUs have and are built from the ground up (buses, memory controllers, etc) to consume as little power as possible. But technically, mobile CPUs don't have anything special at the uArch level compared to what Intel has on their CPUs.
No doubt the x86 is more complicated - but that is also its weakness. Just looks on the recent x86 vulnerabilities that were discovered. And that is just the pinnacle. just check how many undocumented commands are on modern x86 CPU or at the commands that doesn't work as documented.
Summing up, the current x86 arch is a mess, and because of huge “installment dept” it will be insanely hard to fix.
Having said all above, still the Zen architecture is great thanks to it modularity, however deep inside single module you won't find amazing changes. Cortex-A76 is a single core, that you can stack and create CPU. Apples and Oranges.
The ARM is catching up fast, both with the clock and with average performance per core per MHz.
I would want for x86 to be always the king of performance, but it is unlikely in current state where all legacy instruction sets are carried to the new architecture updates, and the main companies working against each other.
Intel stalled the x86 market for so long that even biggest x86 software companies (just see MS) acknowledged ARM. 2017 was ARM servers boom! They are still a minority in the server world, but they are there already. Money also seems to be on the ARM side thanks to the mobile.
Lets see what will happen when VIA joins the x86 again.
DevDrake
The ARM is catching up fast, both with the clock and with average performance per core per MHz.
Their cores actually seem pretty good, but usually get paired with slow low power dram busses and small cache sizes and implemented on a low power process.
You can buy some pretty powerful ARM chips for server use, but they cost 100s of pounds for the chip so as a hobbyist x86 is just cheaper.
Threadripper 2990X. The fact that mere mortals can own a processor with 32 cores, which was the domain of corporates, is staggering. The fact this even exists, on air cooling too, is a testament to the utter boffinry of the AMD engineers.
Thanks, AMD, for releasing this to Joe Public. And for screwing with Intel.
Intel i9-9900K
Whats truly impressive is the audacity of Intel to expect consumers to pay a premium for so little in the way of improvement over predecessors or competitors
I think my next build will feature an AMD and that date is getting closer and closer.
DevDrake
I think we still get Epyc 48/96 and Ryzen 16/32 this year, and the then the Ryzen will be my choice for the crown.
I don't think we'll see a 16 core Ryzen this year. I don't expect to see AMD release any more 14nm or 12nm CPUs other than possibly some low end product line fillers (say, $50 to $75 parts to kill off the last of the previous generation APUs and CPUs), or maybe a binned 2800X with higher clocks. They're not going to be doing a new die at that node. (I believe there are only three Ryzen die designs so far: first generation, APU, and second generation. The APU die is also used for the mobile and embedded versions.)
We might see 16 cores in 2019 using the 7nm process. They'll be able to cram in more cores with the move to the smaller node.
I'm going to go with a Threadripper as well. But instead of the 2990WX I'm going to go with one that makes more sense for most home users: the 2950X. Still lots of cores for rendering, plus better gaming performance than the 2990WX. (The problem with poor gaming performance because of the cores with no direct access to RAM hasn't been fully solved, other than booting into gaming mode with those cores turned off.) And it's the fastest processor you can buy for less than $1000.
Does a GPU count as a CPU? If so, I think NVIDIA's efforts with their RTX cores could prove to be something pretty special that AMD won't match for many many years to come, though we are still waiting to see what these cores can actually do so feel free to ignore me.
nobodyspecial
Wake me when Intel hits 10nm and spectre/meltdown fixed, or AMD hits 7nm with watts less than Intel with acceptable perf.
Until then, I'll wait. Nothing excites me now as they are both NOT giving what I want yet; 10nm vulnerability fixed, or 7nm amd. I hope AMD prices right on 7nm. Meaning if you are winning perf in EVERYTHING (games should be doable at 7nm vs Intel 14nm for a year), you better price it LIKE OR ABOVE Intel. I'll sell my stock if you don't. Yeah, I'm talking being OK with paying some extra cash to make sure AMD lives, not because I like them, but because if the chip is good I need no discount for crapware. Don't make the mistake (again, and again) of pricing like a turd when you have a rose.
Buy a 2700x and drop £300 on your favourite charity, there you go solved your first world problem of not being charged more for your goods! And no CPU is best at everything, that's why they make different ones.