AMD Officially Unveils Ryzen Processor

By Edward Leano, Christian Post Contributor Friday, February 24, 2017

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) recently gave a presentation to press and industry analysts, in which chief executive officer Dr. Lisa Su unveiled the Ryzen processor. The official release and product shipping will happen on March 2.

The company held a Tech Day mostly dedicated to the highly anticipated central processing unit (CPU). The company CEO described their goal of making the gaming processor market competitive again. "Four years ago we began development of our 'Zen' processor core with the goal to deliver unprecedented generational performance gains and return choice and innovation to the high-performance computing market," said Lisa Su.

In the same presentation, AMD also released the final specifications of the first CPUs scheduled for release. The mid-level chip in the lineup, the Ryzen R7 1700, will come with a stock cooler called the Wraith Spire, as PC Games N reports. The higher models, the R7 1700X and the R7 1800X, will not be delivered with stock coolers. It goes with the assumption that their buyers will be interested in overclocking the chips, and therefore will be getting a separate liquid cooling setup.

A significant portion of Dr. Lisa Su's presentation is about the instructions per clock (IPC) target that the company has set for Ryzen. In CPU performance discussions, IPC is a general benchmark of the improvement that a new chip design was able to attain over the previous generation.

When AMD was first introducing the new Zen chip architecture, it pegged the modest performance of the previous Bulldozer design as its starting point and committed to a 40% improvement in IPC from there, according to Anandtech. Compared to the usual 5–10% gain in the industry these recent years, this is an ambitious challenge set before the rehired Jim Keller, veteran CPU architect Mike Clark and the rest of the Zen team.

In its Ryzen announcement, AMD proudly stated that it has reached an incredible 52% IPC increase with the new design, outdoing even its optimistic goal by an additional 12%.

The first trio of the models from the Ryzen R7 lineup is available for preorder starting Feb. 22.