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by snuxoll 2930 days ago
Zen does a decent job in clock-for-clock performance, huge killer on the desktop is raw clock speed. When you pit a Ryzen chip maxing out around 3.8-4.2GHz (depending on generation and silicon lottery) to an i7-8700K that has a base frequency of 4.7GHz it's pretty obvious which is going to come out on top.

Most of that clock hit comes from the 12nm LPP process that AMD is currently using too from what I can tell, low-power process typically equates to lower clocks (see mobile chips) so it's not surprising - and why Zen 2 being based on GloFo's 7nm process will hopefully close that gap.
3 comments
nottorp 2930 days ago
Is it such a huge killer outside gaming benchmarks? And even then, the extra power is useful only if you jumped on the 4K bandwagon.

Personally, consider the amount of random crap that i run, I'd rather have more cores. And more importantly, 80% of the performance for 50% of the price is just fine(tm).

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zaarn 2930 days ago
The gaming benchmarks are a bit meh since in most realistic builds the GPU will be the bottleneck, not the CPU (unless you buy a 1080Ti with a Ryzen 3 or i3, though in that case all help is lost).

More cores do benefit if you run stuff besides the game, which most people do.

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nottorp 2930 days ago
I'm into VM abuse, so for me more cores would be a no brainer...

Sadly for AMD that would be IF i needed a new machine. My 2012 Core i7 still seems to be enough for my needs. (Except the GPU, that I changed recently.)

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zaarn 2930 days ago
I feel you there, I was using a i5 2500 since it came out until last year march when I switched to ryzen. A very good CPU indeed.
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nottorp 2929 days ago
At this time the only reason I'd upgrade would be to go from 32 G ram to 64. 32 is barely enough if i happen to need a couple VMs up and the usual 100 tabs of docs in the browser :(
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xxs 2930 days ago
>i7-8700K that has a base frequency of 4.7GH.

That's not base at any rate, you can't get all cores at 4.7Ghz stock, 4.7 is a turbo-boost single core. No way you get that w/o a pretty decent cooler on a non-delidded CPU unless happen to have a chip that requires no extra voltage at all.

It's true that many games are predominantly single core, though but it's likely to get a single core 4.5Ryzen as well.

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bufferoverflow 2929 days ago
i7-8700K base frequency is 3.7 GHz, not 4.7

https://ark.intel.com/products/126684/Intel-Core-i7-8700K-Pr...

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snuxoll 2929 days ago
Oops, fat fingered that one.
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