A new computer chip from Advanced Micro Devices could entice consumers to do something they haven’t done in years: Buy a desktop computer.
The new Ryzen chip, which was partly developed at AMD’s office in Fort Collins, touts the same speeds and performance as competitor Intel Corp.’s top chips. But at half the price, the Ryzen chip, which went on sale Thursday, should lower the cost of any computer using it.
“A $500 chip that is outperforming a $1,000 chip from Intel? That should tell you about the engineering power AMD has. AMD is not shying away from competition,” said Chirag Dekate, a research director for emerging technologies at Gartner, a market research firm. “I’m seeing a new energy from AMD that I haven’t seen in a long time and that’s showing up in customers as well. The gaming customer is quite excited about what AMD has to offer.”
Let’s rewind a bit. Desktop computer sales were outpaced by laptops around 2008. Tablets were supposed to overtake laptops around 2015. And if you still use either one, you’re probably in the minority since we’re on the verge of American consumers exclusively relying on their smartphones for their computing needs.
As for AMD? The Sunnyvale, Calif. chipmaker, a reliable competitor to Intel in the early 2000s, seemed to disappear from Earth. While it brought new life to the desktop PC market in the mid-2000s with the high-performance and lower-priced Athlon 64 chip, somehow it lost its way. In 2008, it spun off its manufacturing plant to cut costs. It hasn’t introduced a new chip since 2011 and that was considered a disappointment.
AMD hit the reset button on its new chip design
Four years ago, the company started over — the prior chip architecture wasn’t cutting it. While AMD could have squeezed more life out of the old architecture — a less risky and easier move — the company plowed ahead, seeking to design something new, said Sam Naffziger, a founding member of the Fort Collins office.
“Every tech company has periods of wandering in the wilderness. There were some things about the prior architecture that were not efficient. They sounded good at the time but they didn’t pan out,” Naffziger said. “…But we had some bold leaders who joined the company and said this architecture is a dead design. We need to reset.”
The team in Fort Collins, which numbers about 120 people, worked on the memory design of Ryzen and essentially squeezed more memory into a smaller space. Technically, said Dave Johnson, AMD’s senior director of design engineering in Fort Collins, “The pieces of it that we were responsible for were the floating point computation unit and Level 2 and Level 3 cache.”
By making everything smaller, the cost of the chip is lower, as well as its power needs, Naffziger added.
“We get three times the work done for the same amount of energy. Some of that was from the density and design; some from the suite of technologies code-named SenseMI,” he said. SenseMI has a learning feature that adapts to the needs of power users, like gamers.
The new Ryzen has eight cores instead of the typical four. Each core runs two threads, so Ryzen has 16 threads. That’s like having 16 computers at your whim calculating 16 of your commands simultaneously.
Starting from scratch created “some nervousness,” Johnson said.
“But my recollection is that it was a very exciting time. I think a lot of us in the engineering community want the best design we can create. We like to create things. That’s what we do,” he said. “Sometimes engineers go a long time in their career where they don’t get to create something brand new.”
The audience for AMD’s newest chip includes gamers
The top AMD Ryzen 3.6 GHz chip, at $499, sold out Thursday at NewEgg and Amazon. But you could still buy the slightly less powerful 3 and 3.4 Ghz Ryzen chips at midday for $369 and $439, respectively.
That bodes well for a market eager for new competition. Shane Rau, research vice president for computing semiconductors at IDC Research, wrote in a recent report: “If AMD executes on the design and production, they will have the greatest potential to disrupt the PC-class processor market in 2017.”
For now, the chips are available to people who want to build their own computers. PC makers like Dell and HP need to integrate the chip into computers for consumers to purchase. The target audience is gamers, video editors and content creators who rely on high-performance machines to get work — or serious game play — done.
The first reviews were shared Thursday. Arstechnica called it “an excellent workstation CPU, but it doesn’t game as hard as we hoped.” ExtremeTech also gave Ryzen props as a workstation but called it a weaker gaming machine (reviewer Joel Hruska reminds readers that AMD may need some time since it didn’t jump from 1990s budget chip maker to Athlon 64 X2 “in a single bound”).
AMD is working on a laptop version of the chip, which is expected for release in the second half of this year. Analysts are interested in seeing how Ryzen will serve the data center and server markets, or deep-learning technology and internet-of-things devices. But with the chip so new, analysts are cautious.
“I mean this with all due respect. AMD is a phenomenal engineering company, but at the end of the day, they’re running with limited firepower. They sold off quite a bit of their internal fab structure and must rely on others to manufacture,” said Dekate. “Intel not only designs but manufacturers. … And while this does add quite a bit of pricing pressure to Intel, keep in mind that Intel’s products are being compared to what is in the market right now. This is not likely Intel’s latest chip set.”
By re-inventing the desktop PC chip, Rau said AMD may be following the route it knows best, instead of chasing the mobile or IoT market first.
“Those people who can buy this tend to be the most vocal of what they’ve chosen. Gamers, content creators, the people who buy this for work or home hopefully say good things about it. That word of mouth is very effective,” Rau said. “This is high end. If you need to ramp up, you can’t go from zero to 10 million right away. You might as well sell that first million at the highest price.”
