Why Does Ryzen even matter?

[DragonTamer1]

Ryzen's IPC is on par with Haswell which is still a relevant platform. Sky Lake and Kaby Lake have marginal IPC gains that can also be partially attributed to clock speed rather than architecture (looking at you Kaby Lake).

 

Since Intel has pretty much locked the market down to quad cores for the last six years as the mainstream and made the price for higher core counts so much higher, thus limiting the number of people buying them, the developers have had no real need to develp for more than 4 cores since most people were using 4 or less. If AMD starts dumping a bunch of 8 and 6 core CPUs into the market and that becomes a large enough percentage then developers may start to take advantage of those cores to push higher graphics and more advanced engines.

 

AMD screwed up this potential six years ago when they released the FX processors with their 'eight-core-that's-not-really-an-eight-core' thing but also because their IPC was so far behind what Intel had, the developers opted for Intel CPUs because they were the stronger.

[done12many2]

2 minutes ago, DragonTamer1 said:

Ryzen's IPC is on par with Haswell which is still a relevant platform. Sky Lake and Kaby Lake have marginal IPC gains that can also be partially attributed to clock speed rather than architecture (looking at you Kaby Lake).

 

IPC and clock speed have nothing to do with one another.  The improvements in IPC with KBL and SKL are just that, improvements.  The higher clock speed just adds even more on top of that.