However both 1060s and 1080s have yet to return to their pre-bubble prices and are hanging out close to MSRP again.
(for those not in the know: AMD made an offer to buy out NVIDIA a decade ago, and it fell through for that reason, NVIDIA's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang demanded to be CEO of the resulting company. The funny thing is that he would have been a much better CEO than Dirk Meyer or Hector Ruiz, but Ruiz was not about to give up his CEO seat. AMD ended up buying ATI instead.)
Double comedy option: Intel agrees to it.
The merger of Intel and NVIDIA would obviously result in a company literally named "Chipzilla".
They partner with rapper DMX for a new promotion for their next series of Extreme Edition chips, Jen-Hsun walks onstage to the tune of "-X gonna give it to ya". As a snub to the Vega t-shirts, everyone in the audience receives a free Coffee Lake-X leather jacket.
If anything, Ryzen's increased PCIe lanes are a reason to go for nvidia. You can get Threadripper and mobo at a much smaller cost than a Xeon rig, with more lanes, but just load it with Pascal GPUs. And they'll have better performance, power, and be easier to buy than any Vega card. This would do quite well for a deep learning machine, for example.
The place Vega has advantages are in more niche areas, like open source Radeon drivers, fully unlocked FP16 support (garbage market segmentation from Nvidia), and the Instinct/SSG GPU lines they'll be offering will be unique. And they're definitely cheaper, for sure. (But unless AMD can back it up with software, it won't mean much, especially for markets like deep learning, which NVidia is going full-force.)
Based on the benchmarks, the $500 AMD Ryzen 7 matches the performance of the $1723 Intel i7 6950x.
Is this what you call mediocre? Getting the same performance for less than 1/3 of the price is being mediocre nowadays?
It's the first time since I got my first i5 (2500K) from an AMD64-3000 I've genuinely been staggered by performance and the desktop at my previous job was an OC'd 3570K.
Frankly the Ryzen 1700 is incredible, so much so I'm already planning on building a similar machine for home.
All that said though I'm also really impressed with the i7-7700K in the new laptop, the amount of processing power intel has shoved into a laptop is impressive as well.
Competition is good, it will be interesting to see what the mobile Ryzen's are capable off.
I can confirm that, I bought a new desktop PC with a 1700 for home use around Easter, and on CPU-bound workloads with sufficient parallelism (e.g. video encoding), that thing is just insanely fast.
It's a bit of a shame, really, that most of the time it just sits there doing almost nothing. ;-)
I hammer mine though and it handles it with complete aplomb.
That's entirely irrelevant. It doesn't matter if those processors were released last year of in the last century. It's Intel's current and best offer, and the facts speak for themselves: AMD's current offering matches Intel's perfomance while trouncing Intel's in price/performance ratio.
> that doesn't make an awful lot of sense given that their E lines are basically always sky high prices compared to other Intel chips).
That's Intel's problem. It makes no sense to try to downplay AMD's stellar performance just because Intel does some major price gouging.