The top Intel CPUs are always a joke. You don't get what you pay for, you get 10% more for 300% the price. Only suckers buy those.

The sweet spot has always been in the $300-$400 range. I bought an i7-2600K for that within a month of release and it lasted me for years. I finally replaced it recently with an i7-6700k for about the same price and I suspect it will also last years--GPUs and storage are the bottlenecks now, not the CPU or RAM. I might have been able to get away with using the 2600k still if I'd been more aggressive in OC'ing it.

Synthetic benchmarks are useless. When they showed things like Haswell doing better than Sandy Bridge, yet using it in actual games resulted in improvements that fit within the margin of error for the benchmarks, I both double-flipped off and mooned every synth benchmark in existence and vowed to never again give an ounce of credit or respect to any of them.

A new CPU needs to be tested against an entire suite of games, from FPS to strategy to sims on the air and ground to get a good idea of its actual worth. Unfortunately, previews are not that.



The Jedi Master

...Intel Core i7-7700K High Temperatures Could Be Caused By Poor TIM – Temps Improve After Delidding

The forum member who goes by the name of “RichUK” managed to acquire a retail sample of the Intel Core i7 7700K processor. Several overclock runs were posted and the user went as far to delid the chip and apply new TIM (Thermal Interface Material). The results are shocking as it may proof that Intel has once again used poor quality TIM on their processors...

AMD’s Vega Cube Is A 4×3 Inch 100 TFLOPS Monster – Meet The Mini-Nuke Of Supercomputers

..A small, 4×3 inch, quad GPU cube with one hundred TERAFLOPS of FP16 compute and half that in FP32. To put that figure into perspective, Nvidia’s liquid cooled Drive PX2 AI supercomputer for autonomous, driverless, cars delivers 16 TFLOPS of FP32 compute and 8 TFLOPS of FP16 compute. That’s less than one sixth of what the Vega cube is capable of. And while the [Nvidia] Drive PX2 is a large box meant to go inside the trunk of a car, the [AMD] Vega cube [literally] fits into the palm your hand..

http://hothardware.com/news/see-how-your-cpu-stacks-up-against-amd-ryzen-open-source-tool

...
AMD RYZEN ZEN Based CPU Score in Cinebench R15:

In Cinebench R15 benchmark, the AMD RYZEN chip scored 1188 cb points in the CPU rendering test. The Core i7-7700K scores 966 points at stock and 1083 points when overclocked to 5 GHz as seen in the latest leaked benchmarks. The Core i7-6900K processor scores up to 1500 cb points while the Core i7-6950X flagship CPU scores beyond 1800 cb points at stock clocks. [My 8core/8thread FX9590 at 4.7GHz scored 722]

AMD RYZEN ZEN Based CPU Score in Fritz Chess Benchmark:

In Fritz Chess benchmark, the chip scores a relative score of 36.86 points and 17693 Kilo Nodes per second. Intel’s Broadwell-E processors such as the Core i7-6900K score 22500 points in the same benchmark with the top 10 core [20 thread] Core i7-6950X scoring more than 24000 points. The relative speed was not available for the Intel processors.
...

On the competition front, Nvidia is readying its "answer" to Vega for release in the same time frame as Vega (which we all expected Nvidia to do):



The rumor/leak article indicates (to my reading) that FPS (in DX11, 12) will probably be the main target -- possibly, as usual for Nvidia, at the expense of some more forward looking features like Vulcan and Compute support. So, Vega may be a more "rounded" product able to do many (not necessarily all) of the things one expects from a modern graphics card just a little better than the Nvidia product -- we'll see.

The article indicates the Vega vs GTX1080Ti battle may come down to price and who gets to market first (and, of course, "fandom" ).

Competition is good

Article

Vega architecture will bring multiple cards

Not just at the high end

[Rumor] Vega architecture will be introduced into the complete range of AMD's graphics cards. Our knowledgeable industry friends have told us that you can expect top to bottom designs based on Vega architecture arriving soon..

..Nvidia .. is not sleeping and is working on its 2017 line-up.

...
Exclusive [Rumor]: AMD’s flagship Vega 10 powered RX 490 Graphics Card and Entry Level Polaris 12 GPU receive RRA certification

The RX 490 will be AMD’s 4K ready flagship that will be taking on the GTX 1080 at a (probably) similar price point. It is going to be the crown jewel in AMD’s RX lineup..

..The certification also marks the final stages of the design of a particular GPU (no changes can be made after this certification is received)...

[From:] Robert Hallock, Technical Marketing lead at AMD

“AMD helped lead the development of HBM, was the first to bring HBM to market in GPUs, and plans to implement HBM/HBM2 in future graphics solutions.

At this time we have only publicly demonstrated a GDDR5 configuration of the Polaris architecture.It’s important to understand that HBM isn’t (currently) suitable for all GPU segments due to the current HBM cost structure. In the mainstream GPU segment, GDDR5 remains an extremely cost-effective, efficient and viable memory technology.

We have the flexibility to use HBM or GDDR5 as costs require. Certain market segments are cost sensitive, GDDR5 can be used there. Higher-end market segments where more cost can be afforded, HBM is viable as well.”

[Rumor] Intel Is Reportedly Working On A Brand New Implementation of The x86 Architecture: One That Is Much Faster and Leaner

The grapevine has been buzzing with something that is pretty huge as far as developments in this industry go. According to Bitsandchips.it, Intel has started working on a brand new x86 architecture..

..backward compatibility is no longer assured..

..we can expect the brand new x86 implementation to land by 2020 approximately...