With just a matter of weeks before AMD's highly-anticipated Ryzen CPUs are expected to hit shelves, it was only a matter of time before we got our first glimpse of the company's pricing structure. In short, Intel should be very, very worried.
Several websites have been pointing at online store www.shopblt.com, which has apparently leaked three AMD Ryzen SKUs all in the 7-series - the Ryzen 7 1800X, 1700X and 1700. Incredibly, the Ryzen 7 1700 is posted as costing just $317. This is hugely significant as according to a previous leak that supposedly revealed the entire AMD Ryzen range, this CPU will have 8 cores and 16 threads. This is the same as Intel's Core i7-6900K, which retails right now for $1,049.
Update: UK website Hexus has spotted UK pricing too, with £365.65, £283.31 and £235.35 listed on www.kikatek.co.uk, for the Ryzen R7 1800X, 1700X and 1700 respectively.
This means that the AMD chip is a whopping 70% cheaper. Even more interestingly, the Ryzen 7 1700 also has a similar clock speed to the Core i7-6900K, which points at the two CPUs offering similar performance in terms of instructions per cycle (IPC), given that AMD itself showed a similar Ryzen CPU competing on a level playing field with this exact Intel CPU earlier this year.
This is hugely significant - if the prices are true, which www.wccftech.com seems to think so given the same web shop leaked prices for older AMD CPUs, which it claims turned out to be spot on - as it means AMD is planning a complete rout of Intel across the board. Its Ryzen 5 CPUs will be even cheaper and could easily offer better value for money than Intel's mid-range 7000-series Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs, while the Ryzen 3 range of quad-cores will be competing with Intel's low-end dual-cores and quad-cores.
We still don't know exactly how the pricing and features of Ryzen CPUs will pan out - it's possible some of them will lack certain features, but for now all we know is that Ryzen could be far better value than Intel's current offerings and AMD could be set for some sizeable gains in market share in the next 12 months.
