For those who missed AMD’s New Horizon event last week revealing its upcoming Ryzen desktop processors, the company provides a replay on its website. AMD also adds two links to clips pulled from the one-hour show, one focusing on Ryzen and virtual reality, and one featuring Peter “PPD” Dager from the Evil Geniuses esports team.
However, AMD’s YouTube channel has a dedicated New Horizon playlist featuring the full one-hour reveal and specific portions broken up into nine separate videos. These short clips include AMD’s Blender demo using its upcoming Ryzen processor, it’s Handbrake demo, Ryzen running in a workstation, the performance Ryzen and AMD’s upcoming Vega graphics chip design in gaming, and more. That said, AMD fans who already watched the event will see nothing new here.
For instance, the Blender-based video compared the upcoming Ryzen desktop processor with Intel’s Core i7-6900K desktop CPU. Both chips pack eight cores and 16 threads, with the Ryzen chip running at 3.4GHz only (no boost), and the Intel chip running at a stock clock speed of 3.2GHz and a boost speed of 3.7GHz. The Intel chip had no adjustments — it was installed straight out of the box.
Here are the Core i7-6900K specs for reference:
| Launch date: | Second quarter of 2016 |
| Process node: | 14nm |
| Number of cores: | 8 |
| Number of threads: | 16 |
| Base clock speed: | 3.2GHz |
| Boost clock speed: | 3.7GHz |
| Cache: | 20MB |
| Power draw: | 140 watts |
| Integrate graphics: | None |
| Price: | $1,089 to $1,109 |
Each processor was in its own system with essentially the same specs. The demo required each processor to render the Ryzen logo within Blender and revealed the Ryzen chip without a boost could match the Intel chip with a boost in performance.
AMD CEO Lisa Su said that the Ryzen processor will ship with a maximum power draw of 95 watts, backing the company’s stance of providing more performance per watt. She also mentioned the Intel chip’s price too, hinting the Ryzen competitor could cost less. Even more, the Ryzen processor’s performance still isn’t optimized.
In another clip, the same two systems were benchmarked using the open-source Handbrake program for transcoding video. The demo consisted of Handbrake using its preset Apple TV video settings to transcode the Ryzen video seen in the previous Blender demo. When completed, the Ryzen-based system wrapped up the conversion in 54 seconds while the Intel-based system finished in 59 seconds. The transcoding demonstrated that the unoptimized Ryzen processor could already handle the “very intense” CPU workload slightly faster than the Core i7-6900K.
As seen last week, the New Horizon reveal concluded with a quick demonstration of the Ryzen-based system performing in Star Wars: Battlefront using a single Vega graphics card. The game included the Rogue One: Scarif DLC, and ran at a 4K resolution and more than 60 frames per second, which was faster than the refresh rate of the demo’s 4K monitor.
Here are all the demos stemming from the New Horizon show provided by AMD:
