Nice. I've loved my AMD setups for the past few years and had no issues. If they keep it up I'll be staying with them. I may even go higher end as well, will give it a year and see how they pan out for people.
Zen 2 and 3 turned out well eventually, but had a bumpy ride with BIOS/firmware issues for several months (I believe it was 4+ months for Zen 3).
After maturity, they've been great though. My system which was built nearly one year ago has had zero crashes (if I recall correctly), and I run my computers for many months without reboot.
It seems like AMD has adjusted its pricing downwards by around $100
Recession incoming:
With the current level of inflation we (as consumers) should be happy if we see prices anywhere close to this. And if we do, and AMD can supply enogh chips, then they should move a huge volume of products.
Those base clock speeds seem too good
Achieving something like this would require very good engineering on top of an unusually well performing node.
Do you remember the Zen 2 rumors? At some point the >5 GHz hype was extreme, yet it turned out to be nonsense from a YouTube channel. So we'll see if the details of this article is true or not.
IPC and DDR5 doesn't really matter for games as much as cache hits and latency. I would be willing to bet the 5800X3D on par with zen4 in gaming, or so close that it's indistinguishable. 7900 4 X3D w/ DDR5 and an IPC lift, now that will be something.
That's not to say zen 4 is bad -- but that the x3d is just such an insane gaming chip.
IPC is just the average instructions per clock. There are many changes to CPUs which can improve IPC, yet it varies from workload to workload (sometimes even application) whether these improvements translates into increase performance. Typically, increases in execution units, SIMD, etc. have little impact on games but massive impact on video or software rendering, while improvements to prefetcher, cache, etc. typically have more impact on games, yet both of these impact IPC.
I believe Zen 4 will also increase L2 cache, so a matchup here will be quite interesting.
But as for 5800X3D being an "insane gaming chip", that's more than a little exaggerated. There are some games where the gains are very large, but for most of them the gains are marginal in realistic resolutions. We don't know whether this kind of boost from increased L3 will continue with future games, but we do know that software which exhibit this kind of behavior is caused by instruction cache misses, and any good programmer could tell you that misses in instruction cache is primarily due to software bloat. So my point is that designing a CPU with loads of L3 is a double-edged sword; it will "regain" some performance lost due to bad code, but it may also "encourage" bad software design?
I'm more interested in what AMD may use this stacking technology for in the future. If it's just to add more L3 cache, then it's almost a gimmick in the consumer space. But if this someday leads to a modular CPU design where you can have e.g. 8 cores, but you can choose between a "base" version for gaming or one with extra SIMD for multimedia etc., but seamlessly integrated through multi-layer chiplets, then I'm for it.
It's 290-350 eur for more or less any 6000 kit or 550-600 eur for the 6400 lol.