Intel Corp (INTC)

[Unkwn]

Oh Oh, Zen looks to be pretty fast:

To give us a sense of Summit Ridge's performance, AMD pitted it against a Core i7-6900K, Intel's top-of-the-line 8-core chip (which currently sells for around $1,100), using the Blender rendering benchmark. With both chips clocked at 3Ghz, the Summit Ridge machine managed to finish rendering a scene around half-a-second faster than Intel's processor. AMD had to downclock its competitor from 3.2GHz to make the fight fair, but the benchmark as still a notable win. We also saw Summit Ridge, together with AMD's R9 Fury X, playing Deux Ex: Mankind Divided in 4K with smooth frame rates (of course, we weren't told the exact FPS figure).

Now, this is a single data point and still not outperforming Intel's high end chips, but, at least with this benchmark, would be very close to what Intel offers - for a lot of money that is. I always felt uncomfortable with Intel concentrating too much on low power and giving its main competitor the chance to overtake on the right lane. It's 14nm by the way, so basically a Samsung process.

It's still way too early to know what this means for the market, but AMD might have some nice iron at least for desktops. The main question, regarding market share, remains whether they'll have something competitive for higher priced notebooks and ultrabooks. The gaming people typically don't care much for price as long as they get the best platform, which will still be Intel as it seems. Office people don't buy AMD so the remaining market to compete for would be mid priced non business desktops - hardly a big market. But we'll see how AMD did with power efficiency - I kind of doubt it can match Intel there, though.

In any case, this seems to be a clear winner for the coming generation of gaming consoles. Important market for AMD.