I just upgraded my FX-8350 rig to a GTX 1070, and the increased performance going from a GTX 770 is huge. However, while I love my FX-8350, it is architecturally starting to age, and single-core performance is still an issue. I have thought about jumping ship to Intel several times, but I have ultimately decided to hold out for Zen. There seems to be no definitive date set for a Zen release so far, with speculation that it will be Q4 of this year and speculation that it may have been pushed to 2017. I am willing to wait up to a year, my FX-8350 is still more than adequate for the time being. Does anyone know if a more specific date has been set? I am more inclined to go with an AMD processor as long as it remains somewhat competitive with Intel and the price is reasonable.
Q1 2017 is the last I heared.
I will wait for Zen no matter what.
I am almost certain that their CPUs will release in October 2016, although APUs will wait until 2017. Whether it can compete with Intel or not is highly debatable. Intel's Kaby Lake is pretty much guaranteed to have higher IPC, Zen's single core performance may be comparable to Haswell-E or even regular Haswell at best. A 40% IPC is definitely going to be easily noticeable and is the boost AMD needs to come back, even if it isn't enough to actually beat Intel in single core performance, they at least had a big leap upwards.
I thought that's the Zen APUs, the CPUs were October 2016 were they not?
I have not payed that much attention on Zen related news recently. Might be October, IDK.
If I can get Haswell i5 single-core performance and close to current Intel i7 6700K multi-threaded performance at a slightly lower cost, I will be happy.
Take this as you will:
In a tech talk jaystwocents made a mention of how he asked AMD about zen. He asked them if they were on track to release zen on q4. He said they couldn't tell him and just smiled.
That seems like a yes, but we can't tell you yes to me.
Whenever it comes out I really hope it's great. Not just in the way RX 480 rocked the boat but in a hard hitting way to knock Intel on it's arse. Something to make them sit up and take notice.