It's being reported today that chipmaker AMD is launching its first serious challenge to Intel in the powering of desktop PCs for almost a decade, with a new generation of processors it claims offers better performance at a much lower price.

The Financial Times reports that at a press event in San Francisco, "Lisa Su, AMD chief executive, said the Silicon Valley company hoped to 'disrupt the PC market' by bringing 'innovation and choice to as many people as possible,' after years of overwhelming dominance by its arch-rival.

Ms Su is betting that the low-cost, high-volume strategy behind Ryzen — along with launches coming later this year of graphics, server and notebook chips — will help AMD reverse five years of losses, after returning to annual revenue growth last year.

'We will grow again in terms of revenue [in 2017] and that will drive the profitability that we talked about,' she said in an interview.

Patrick Moorhead, tech analyst with Moor Insights and Strategy, said that benchmark tests suggest AMD's Ryzen 7 1800X CPU, costing $499, could offer "twice the performance at half the price" as Intel's equivalent Core i7 6800K, which currently costs $1,050.

Customers will be able to pre-order the Ryzen chips on Wednesday through retailers including Amazon in the US and China's Tmall, with the hardware shipping on March 2." Read the full Financial Times report by Tim Bradshaw for more details.

A new Ars Technica's report by Peter Bright today notes that technically "AMD hasn't quite matched Broadwell's instructions per clock—it's relying on a few hundred extra megahertz to achieve that tied score—but it's not far off. And given that the Ryzen ships at a few hundred extra megahertz more than Intel's twice-as-expensive chip, the shortfall in IPC is largely academic. IPC is interesting in that it gives a sense of how cores are designed, but workloads aren't constrained by IPC or clock speed per se; they're constrained by thermal and power constraints. And AMD compares very favorably there, too: the Intel chip is a 140W part, so can use about 50 percent more power than the AMD.

Another comparison is particularly significant; the Kaby Lake processor is only a four-core, eight-thread processor. It has a sizable clockspeed advantage—its base frequency of 4.2GHz is higher than the boost frequency of any Ryzen, and it turbos all the way up to 4.5GHz—and AMD concedes that in strictly single threaded workloads, the Intel chip will open up a gap over the Ryzen, but as soon as you're doing something that can use all eight of those cores and all 16 of those simultaneous threads, that clock speed delta shows its limits: in Cinebench the Ryzen is 46 percent faster."

The two AMD videos presented below were released earlier this year and provide an overview of the new Ryzen processor in general and VR/MR specifically. If happen to be a geek at hear or a closet PC fan, then you're sure to enjoy them.

For more Benchmarks, check out PCWorld's Report

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