[jdavid]

I love AMD and I'm rooting for them, but I'm not sure we are going to have another Athlon run here.

AMD is still having trouble beating out nVidia, and Intel. The Zen architecture could in theory have HBM for the system CPU/APU, but I'm guessing they won't.

Finally A lot of Intel performance comes from compiler optimization and design, and last time with Athlon it took years for that to roll out. Unless Zen is years ahead of Intel, I don't know if they will be able to edge that far ahead. Intel has been doing CPU-GPU pairs now for more than 5 years, and they are getting better.

I think for AMD to win this round, they would need to have a power ratio that allowed them to dominate the laptop space, with APUs and eliminate the GPU as a component, and right now AMD and Intel are both on 14nm, so I think it would be hard to win there, but we will see.

nVidia is on the 16nm process, so if AMDs chips are equal in performance, they might draw less power. However, for VR, nVidia has been working very closely on the software with the various companies and I think they will have a strong software advantage for a while.

[Alphasite_]

For Zen, they don't have to be the best, just good enough. Frankly, for consumer Intel has been good enough since the 2600 days (except on the mobile front). So Zen should be fine in that market.

[BuckRogers]

Good enough or, "we're #2!" might be all that's needed to chip off some server shares. Which is good for AMD. But for my machine I'm not sure I'd give up any single threaded performance for the promise of 8 physical cores with SandyBridge level IPC.