Gettng a New PC

[Wokko]

Ryzen 5 > i5

[Dave The Man]

[Wokko]

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/amd_ryzen_5_1500x_and_1600x_review,29.html

There's a review, there's dozens more. Pretty much, AMD have nailed it with both Ryzen 7 and 5. I also hate Intel as a company so there's that too.

[Tannin]

G'day Wokko, welcome back!

For Dave and those interested: About AMD

• Until about 1990: - exactly the same as Intel chips only quite a lot cheaper.
  
• After that until about 1995: - good value but often eclipsed by Cyrix parts, which were even cheaper and quite often even faster. Intel parts were very dear and quite often (but not always) inferior.
  
• Until about 1998: - good parts, attractively priced, competitive with Intel except at the very high end and superior to Cyrix chips (which were past their best by this time).
  
• From about 1998 through to about 2001: rapidly improving in all respects: started regularly outperforming the Intel parts and still cost less. (Intel's CPUs through the second half of the 1990s and into the first few years of the new century were very lack-lustre. Some were real dogs and even the better ones were nothing special.)
  
• From about 2001 to about 2008: clearly the best CPUs on the market: faster, cheaper, easier to work with.
  
• From about 2008 to about 2015: lost the plot. Inferior to Intel for almost all purposes.
  
• Today: no idea. I stopped bothering to follow their progress. AMD have been very much a second-best choice for several years now. About once every two years they say that this is all about to change because of their new mega-wonder-chip (which is usually a re-badged version of their previous dud). Maybe this time they really do have a good one. If so, it will be the first time for a decade. That would be nice to see. Don't count on it.
  

It is worth mentioning the company backgrounds here.

Traditionally, Intel had poor design skills but superb manufacturing know-how and facilities (which were often so good as to be able to conceal their design weaknesses and brain-dead marketing decisions). AMD stuck a rocket up their bums around the turn of the century and Intel's more recent designs have been just fine. (Or, possibly, they simply seem fine because AMD's recent ones have been so disappointing.)

Cyrix, through most of its short, meteoric career, had third-rate manufacturing plant - usually rented facilities available only because they were out-of-date and nobody else wanted them - but quite extraordinary design skills. At one time Cyrix were selling the fastest X86 CPU in the world at a quarter the price of the best Intel part; it was manufactured in make-shift rented fabrication plants, and designed by a couple of dozen engineers as compared to Intel's many hundreds. (Possibly thousands - it was a while back now and I forget the details.) If Cyrix had been a footballer, the company would have won a Brownlow Medal at the age of 20, been playing reserves at 23, and been delisted from the SANFL at 25.

AMD started long ago as a very competent high-volume manufacturer making of other companies' chip designs, then started doing its own design (with mixed success), then bought another company with very strong design skills. This brought about AMD's Golden Decade when they could do no wrong. After that, things fell apart. Intel's new Core 2 chips were even better than the once-mighty Athlon, AMD lost sales, lost money, buggerised around with half-measures, sold all its manufacturing plant to mollify the bankers, and wound up, like Cyrix, as a design and marketing company using rented shops to make its products.

[HAL]

You sound sarcastic.