AMD Zen Worth Waiting for?

[8enjicraf2]

Hey Guys,

I am in need of a CPU upgrade soon, should I wait for AMD Zen to come out or just buy a 6th gen i5? Thanks

[Guest]

Which rig? What gpu?

[8BitBuilder]

How soon is soon? If you need one now go with an i5 but is you have time what for zen.

[8enjicraf2]

Just now, dexxterlab97 said:

Which rig? What gpu?

I currently have a crappy APU with an r9 290x that I bought from a friend for £100

[Hunter115]

1 minute ago, 8enjicraf2 said:

I currently have a crappy APU with an r9 290x that I bought from a friend for £100

you could easy wait for it if you only use it for gaming

[EminentSun]

Depends on what you have or what you do otherwise all the answers you get will be extremely subjective. However zen will more than likely produce something to directly compete with that line of I5s. So yes, even if intel is still more appalling prices will likely drop. Unless you are still rocking a q6600 or something worse its in your best interest to wait a couple of months.

[8enjicraf2]

3 minutes ago, 8BitBuilder said:

How soon is soon? If you need one now go with an i5 but is you have time what for zen.

Well I can wait because I only have 50 quid now, it will take me about 4 weeks to get £250 at longest

[AresKrieger]

[Imakuni]

9 minutes ago, 8enjicraf2 said:

Hey Guys,

I am in need of a CPU upgrade soon, should I wait for AMD Zen to come out or just buy a 6th gen i5? Thanks

At best, Zen is going to be as good as a Haswell CPU. So you might as well just go and buy that, rather than waiting for Zen. Or, get a Skylake CPU and have even better performance.

 

So no, no point in waiting for Zen.

[CommanderAlex]

3 minutes ago, wrathoftheturkey said:

It tends to be a slippery slope -- why not wait for Kaby Lake? Or Canon Lake? Or anything that is inevitably going to come out and be better? I say just get the i5 now

^Totally agree with him. Id personally would rather buy Kaby Lake as that is suppose to give a 10% boost in CPU performance from each generation to the next and if Zen is suppose to be around Haswell, then that is already 20% more performance in Intel's Kaby Lake than AMD Zen. Also Zen is coming next year so if you have the urge to upgrade, go for Intel. 

[SpaceGhostC2C]

8 minutes ago, wrathoftheturkey said:

It tends to be a slippery slope -- why not wait for Kaby Lake? Or Canon Lake? Or anything that is inevitably going to come out and be better? I say just get the i5 now

Because incremental steps from the same manufacturer are not the same as a discrete leap from its only competitor.

Zen will not necessarily be the best choice once it's out, but it can (and it's not an unlikely event) influence prices of both brands. That isn't a common event, it's not comparable to Bulldozer refreshes or 5% "jumps" in IPC, and it's not going to happen again for a while (because whatever Zen turns out to be, AMD will be locked in iterating on it for years before even considering a new architecture).

 

There's actually a solid case for waiting, even if it means waiting and then buying Skylake.

[Spork829]

2 minutes ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

Because incremental steps from the same manufacturer are not the same as a discrete leap from its only competitor.

Zen will not necessarily be the best choice once it's out, but it can (and it's not an unlikely event) influence prices of both brands. That isn't a common event, it's not comparable to Bulldozer refreshes or 5% "jumps" in IPC, and it's not going to happen again for a while (because whatever Zen turns out to be, AMD will be locked in iterating on it for years before even considering a new architecture).

 

There's actually a solid case for waiting, even if it means waiting and then buying Skylake.

It's definitely true that the promise of competition with Intel from a new AMD architecture is a more enticing thing to wait for then just another Intel architecture. But I just don't have faith that AMD will be able to deliver at a price to performance ratio good enough to rival that of Intel chips and force their prices down. I hope I'm wrong though.

[Mike Soda]

If you absolutely need/want to upgrade ASAP then go with an i5-6500 or i5-6600k if you're interesting in overclocking. If not then I'd strongly recommend wait for Zen or Kaby Lake because worst case scenario you'll just get an i5 anyway if Zen flops out. Which won't be any different in price so the only thing you'll lose is well nothing. I know that the odds are high Zen won't be much better than Haswell but that's not 100% certain, anything could happen. For all we know it could turn out to beat i7's at almost ½ the cost. If you want some patience inspiration then use me as an example. For the past 5+ years I've been using: Athlon II X2 260, 1GB Radeon HD 6450, 4GB DDR3 1333, 1TB 7200 RPM Hitachi HDD, Windows 7 Premium. Even with as horrible specs like that trying to play a poorly optimized MMO I'm still waiting for Zen.

[ffdax]

Something "better" will always be looming on the proverbial horizon.  I mean, why buy a 2017 Corvette when the 2018s are less than a year away?

 

Whether it's a real Skylake competitor or closer to Haswell, Zen will certainly be far and away the best AMD CPU in a long time.  It is not going to knock Intel off the performance throne, and it doesn't have to.  AMD knows this, and that to me indicates that competing at the absolute top-tier is not AMD's immediate goal for Zen; Zen's purpose is to keep AMD viable at popular price points and help the company pick up some market share. 

 

I like that strategy.  For now.  Things will be better for all of us if Zen performs well, but that goes double if it also sells well. 

[os2wiz]

The person who said no need to wait for Zen since it will be at best as good as Haswell shows he is just an Intel fanboy. There has been no exhaustive benchmarking to give proof to his lame argumentation. The few benchmarks that have been run indicate it may well be as powerfulas Broadwell E. We won't know for sure until another 5 to 6 weeks when more benchmarks will be released as Zen starts shipping to the channel. I expect that AMD has been careful NOT to overestimate its IPC improvement. They say its better than 40% improvement in IPC over Excavator. If that means 45-50% it would be as powerful as Broadwell E and at a far more economical price. If that turns out to be trueIntel will face stiff competition the next few years. 7nm Zen plus is only 2 tears away. I feel that both in cpu and soon in GPU AMD will have offerings that both in price and power will be irresistable to all but Intel dogmatists.

[Imakuni]

11 minutes ago, os2wiz said:

The person who said no need to wait for Zen since it will be at best as good as Haswell shows he is just an Intel fanboy. There has been no exhaustive benchmarking to give proof to his lame argumentation. The few benchmarks that have been run indicate it may well be as powerfulas Broadwell E. We won't know for sure until another 5 to 6 weeks when more benchmarks will be released as Zen starts shipping to the channel. I expect that AMD has been careful NOT to overestimate its IPC improvement. They say its better than 40% improvement in IPC over Excavator. If that means 45-50% it would be as powerful as Broadwell E and at a far more economical price. If that turns out to be trueIntel will face stiff competition the next few years. 7nm Zen plus is only 2 tears away. I feel that both in cpu and soon in GPU AMD will have offerings that both in price and power will be irresistable to all but Intel dogmatists.

There's a difference between "being an Intel fanboy" and "referencing the benchmarks given by AMD themselves". If AMD is telling us Haswell levels of performance, I'm sorry, but I don't know how one can defend they'll be any better than that.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

12 minutes ago, os2wiz said:

The person who said no need to wait for Zen since it will be at best as good as Haswell shows he is just an Intel fanboy. There has been no exhaustive benchmarking to give proof to his lame argumentation. The few benchmarks that have been run indicate it may well be as powerfulas Broadwell E. 

It doesn't really matter. Haswell in DDR4 and all other last-gen features is a competitive CPU. What is the gap between Haswell and Skylake? More important, how much would you be willing to pay for the difference if both run in comparable platforms? Haswell performance is what would make Zen worth waiting for. Any company bringing Haswell to DDR4 would be in a position to disrupt Intel's segmentation. Imagine an i5-4690K with some X99 features. Or an unlocked lineup that allows you to get HXX type of boards but with overclocking capabilities, so people interested in OC but not in many PCIe lanes have a cheaper option. What price could you charge for i5-6400 and i5-6600 if there was an influx of unlocked Haswell i7s in DDR4? What if there were affordable 6-core Haswells in mainstream platforms?

These kind of possibilities would make Zen worth to many, and it could also bring down the prices for some Skylake CPUs. If you are going for the best X99 processor, or perhaps an i7-6700K, maybe things won't change much and may as well buy now. But for people looking for an i5 or locked i7s, Zen performing as Haswell would actually be great news, regardless of which brand they buy in the end.