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AMD had a remarkable 2017, returning to form with a range of Ryzen processors that were not only more powerful than their Intel counterparts, but more affordable.
Today, AMD has made Ryzen more competitive by lowering the MSRP across-the-board by up to 30 per cent.
While that may sound like a lot, retailers have been selling Ryzen under the MSRP for quite some time in an effort to make it a more compelling option. Suffice to say that has helped AMD regain some of the market share that it desperately needed, even in the face of the launch of Intel’s delicious sounding Coffee Lake processor range.
But with Ryzen applying more pressure, Intel made Coffee Lake significantly cheaper than the previous Kaby Lake range, thus restricting AMD’s economic advantage for customers. The next twist saw steep Ryzen price cuts over Black Friday, and many of those price cuts have been made permanent today.
The Threadripper 1900X now sits at $449 – an 18 per cent reduction –while the top-of-the-line Ryzen 7 1800X is a full $150 cheaper than previously, and $20 cheaper than the equivalent option from Intel.
The price differences are not as drastic as they were when Ryzen first launched in competition with Kaby Lake, but they are still competitive enough for the average consumer to have their head turned or for a system builder buying in bulk to see serious savings.
Speaking at CES, AMD president and CEO Dr. Lisa Su said: “We successfully accomplished the ambitious goals we set for ourselves in 2017, reestablishing AMD as a high-performance computing leader with the introduction and ramp of 10 different product families,
"We are building on this momentum in 2018 as we make our strongest product portfolio of the last decade even stronger with new CPUs and GPUs that bring more features and more performance to a broad set of markets.”
For all the latest from CES, make sure to stay tuned to PCR.
