Enlarge / AMD’s Ryzen die. (credit: AMD)
SAN FRANCISCO—Oasis’ smash hit “Wonderwall” was playing as the throng of journalists assembled in the ballroom of a Grand Hyatt hotel in San Francisco at AMD’s Ryzen Tech Day. I don’t know why the song was picked—normally these events prefer something a little more current and upbeat—but it sure seemed apt. As CEO Lisa Su and others were preparing to speak, one of the Gallagher brothers (who knows which one) drearily droned the question, “You’re gonna be the one that saves me?”
AMD is a company that needs saving. Although there have been occasional high spots, such as the design wins for both the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One, the last few years have been heavy going for the chip designer. Its main products—desktop and server processors—haven’t been very good at all, forcing it to sell only to the very lowest of the low-end customers. Intel has handily dominated the performance-oriented desktop processor market for the last decade, after AMD’s Bulldozer family brought widespread disappointment.
But in 2015, Su made clear that the company needed high-performance, high-end parts, and those parts are very nearly here.
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Source: Ars Technica – CPU competition at last: AMD Ryzen brings 8 cores from just 9