I find it kind of weird that countries outside of the US do Black Friday usually on the same Friday as Americans, considering the day of it revolves around Thanksgiving (a holiday nobody cares about except Americans). But, I guess businesses worldwide notice the huge influx of sales and act accordingly. Smart move of AMD doing this now. If Intel decides to lower their prices for BF, this early sale might give them an edge. Right now all AMD [should] care about is gaining marketshare. I'm sure for some things like the 1800X and 1900X, they're gaining very little profit, but it will be worth it for them in the end.

AlmondMan:

Black friday prices, I guess? Or week? Komplett is having 10-18% sales on Ryzen CPUs... RAM is absurd though... 16gb RAM costs more than the Ryzen 5 1600X atm... And you can easily find other kits that are more expensive. I would look at upgrading now, but RAM is just too expensive for it to make sense.

This is what I have been trying to drive into everybody's thick heads, and I am a voice in the wilderness. It bugs me folks dont get it, because not getting it will lead to many regrettable and unfix-able purchases. I guess I lack the verbal skills. The days of affordable large dram memory are over for years to come - at least thru 2018 (manufacturers own estimates). True, same is so for nand used in ssdS, but much cheaper. Only amd TR/epyc/vega offer a sort of solution, and that is to use fast raid0 nvme arrays to swap out maxed out system/gpu ram contents to. Our PCs always have and always will swap out to storage at some point. We have simply dodged the unpleasant consequences by adding more and more ram so its a ~rare occurrence. That option is beginning to die, as we are seeing from the pained comments here. If an optimal solution is impossibly dear, then we must consider the best sub-optimal one which is. Sure storage is slower than ram. A ~$US140 256GB Evo nvme is 3200MB/s read. But the good news is its 32x - THAT'S 32X - faster than what we traditionally associate with storage speeds on sata hddS, and 6x a sata ssd. Most sensible TR mobos offer 3 full strength nvme ports onboard, and amd include raid capability and ample lanes on TR. So it can seamlessly triple that speed and capacity, for a massive 750GB ~9000MB/s read/~6000MBs write scratch file for ~$420. dont quote me, but a quick new egg search (goodled ~ $ newegg ddr4 3200 g skill kit GB ) indicates 8GB=$106. 16GB $192, 32GB $400, 64GB$900 & 128GB $1860. so playing with the numbers, for less than the increment from 32GB to 64GB, you could have 750GB of storage about as fast as an 8 lane pcie3 link's bandwidth, or ddr3 1800 ram. It gets even better for Vega GPU, which includes HBCC hardware and software designed with this cache extension very much in mind, and has the radical effect of offering ~limitless (up to 512TB) gpu cache/address space. Yes swapping to storage is slow vs ram, but slow sure aint what it used to be. In the above raid example, its 96x faster than the former norm. Swapping is harshly judged due to a faulty anachronistic mindset. Ignore these economic and tech developments (ie. buy an intel rig or the only slightly better am4) at your peril, because it will get much worse. App's demand for ram is exponential, and production increases incrementally. Please dont side track the argument with alleged raid0 reliability issues. Even if I conceded them which I dont, they are spurious and beside the point. Compared to NV ram as we are doing, raid0 arrays are fort knox. For the millions excluded from the generous TR/epyc lane counts, there is one "uncool", but probably ok for many, option - run your gpu at 8 lanes, allowing free lanes for an adapter to run a raid pair of full strength nvmeS.

This is 1) good timing 2) great marketing 3) a scheduled price drop (i.e. prod. costs earned back) 4) a response to coffee lake 5) proof of TSMC's 7nm node process progress

msroadkill612:

This is what I have been trying to drive into everybody's thick heads, and I am a voice in the wilderness. It bugs me folks dont get it, because not getting it will lead to many regrettable and unfix-able purchases. I guess I lack the verbal skills. The days of affordable large dram memory are over for years to come - at least thru 2018 (manufacturers own estimates). True, same is so for nand used in ssdS, but much cheaper. Only amd TR/epyc/vega offer a sort of solution, and that is to use fast raid0 nvme arrays to swap out maxed out system/gpu ram contents to. Our PCs always have and always will swap out to storage at some point. We have simply dodged the unpleasant consequences by adding more and more ram so its a ~rare occurrence. That option is beginning to die, as we are seeing from the pained comments here. If an optimal solution is impossibly dear, then we must consider the best sub-optimal one which is. Sure storage is slower than ram. A ~$US140 256GB Evo nvme is 3200MB/s read. But the good news is its 32x - THAT'S 32X - faster than what we traditionally associate with storage speeds on sata hddS, and 6x a sata ssd. Most sensible TR mobos offer 3 full strength nvme ports onboard, and amd include raid capability and ample lanes on TR. So it can seamlessly triple that speed and capacity, for a massive 750GB ~9000MB/s read/~6000MBs write scratch file for ~$420. dont quote me, but a quick new egg search (goodled ~ $ newegg ddr4 3200 g skill kit GB ) indicates 8GB=$106. 16GB $192, 32GB $400, 64GB$900 & 128GB $1860. so playing with the numbers, for less than the increment from 32GB to 64GB, you could have 750GB of storage about as fast as an 8 lane pcie3 link's bandwidth, or ddr3 1800 ram. It gets even better for Vega GPU, which includes HBCC hardware and software designed with this cache extension very much in mind, and has the radical effect of offering ~limitless (up to 512TB) gpu cache/address space. Yes swapping to storage is slow vs ram, but slow sure aint what it used to be. In the above raid example, its 96x faster than the former norm. Swapping is harshly judged due to a faulty anachronistic mindset. Ignore these economic and tech developments (ie. buy an intel rig or the only slightly better am4) at your peril, because it will get much worse. App's demand for ram is exponential, and production increases incrementally. Please dont side track the argument with alleged raid0 reliability issues. Even if I conceded them which I dont, they are spurious and beside the point. Compared to NV ram as we are doing, raid0 arrays are fort knox. For the millions excluded from the generous TR/epyc lane counts, there is one "uncool", but probably ok for many, option - run your gpu at 8 lanes, allowing free lanes for an adapter to run a raid pair of full strength nvmeS.

Enter Intel Optane. right now it's way too expensive as a solution, BUT this is the exact problem it was designed to eliminate.

schmidtbag:

I find it kind of weird that countries outside of the US do Black Friday usually on the same Friday as Americans, considering the day of it revolves around Thanksgiving (a holiday nobody cares about except Americans). But, I guess businesses worldwide notice the huge influx of sales and act accordingly. Smart move of AMD doing this now. If Intel decides to lower their prices for BF, this early sale might give them an edge. Right now all AMD [should] care about is gaining marketshare. I'm sure for some things like the 1800X and 1900X, they're gaining very little profit, but it will be worth it for them in the end.

It gets even weirder for dispossessed native american bargain hunters 🙁 just saying: i suspect even formerly monopolistic intel would probably follow a similar pattern with a new product release - a premium in the early days, and to be fair, costs are higher for early runs too. Maybe AMD are just being nice guys - passing on realised savings as production has ramped up. we can only guess at secret input costs, but we certainly cant be sure intels larger volumes translate to lower costs. Their production lines are very messy compared to amdS lego block approach. From very competitive lap tops to super servers, its all just multiples of the same mass produced zen core with almost no wastage. Its a very frugal approach which clearly works very well. Some times in war, weakening the enemy disproportionately is worth some losses. Intels structure is fragile, as it relies hugely on very high margins. Even if they maintain volumes, they can be hurt badly as a dividend stock via reduced margins.

msroadkill612:

The days of affordable large dram memory are over for years to come - at least thru 2018 (manufacturers own estimates). True, same is so for nand used in ssdS, but much cheaper.

Not true - the reason RAM is so expensive is because of demand. From what I recall, there have been production issues regarding DDR4, and in addition to that, Kaby/Coffee Lake and Ryzen have driven a lot of people to buy new CPUs. 2017 was a good year to buy new hardware, and as a result the demand has gone up, making the shortage even more of a problem. When sales calm down, so will the pricing.

Our PCs always have and always will swap out to storage at some point.

That's a bit of a closed-minded statement. I tend to keep my paging file off. Also, swapping to storage is really only a Windows problem; other OSes only swap when RAM is running too low. Anyway, it sounds like you're implying that NVMe will act as a cheaper alternative to RAM, and I can't say I agree with that (in the sense that SSDs do not replace RAM).

Most sensible TR mobos offer 3 full strength nvme ports onboard, and amd include raid capability and ample lanes on TR.

If you're going to spend the money on a TR build with 3 NVME drives, chances are, the cost of RAM isn't a major concern...

so playing with the numbers, for less than the increment from 32GB to 64GB, you could have 750GB of storage about as fast as an 8 lane pcie3 link's bandwidth, or ddr3 1800 ram.

True but the latency would be abysmal. Not worth it IMO.

App's demand for ram is exponential, and production increases incrementally.

I haven't noticed this. The average user can comfortably get by with 4GB nowadays (which has been true for the past 10 years) and 8GB is a sufficient minimum for most people, as long as you aren't a heavy multitasker or do anything too complex/demanding. VRAM usage and disk usage I'd say is what's really going up exponentially. I've found most people who try to justify 32GB+ usually (but not universally) are very poor at task and resource management.

msroadkill612:

It gets even weirder for dispossessed native american bargain hunters 🙁

Depends how you look at it. Many people teach that Thanksgiving (on the surface anyway) was for the colonists to coincide with the natives, among other religious connotations. But the deeper you look into the holiday and history, the more you may be inclined to disagree with that (hence my first sentence). Either way, the natives at least have a relevance to the holiday.

i suspect even formerly monopolistic intel would probably follow a similar pattern with a new product release - a premium in the early days, and to be fair, costs are higher for early runs too.

Possibly, though their supply issues and competition may cause that to change this year.

From very competitive lap tops to super servers, its all just multiples of the same mass produced zen core with almost no wastage. Its a very frugal approach which clearly works very well.

Frugal, absolutely. Efficient in terms of waste, mostly. Efficient in terms of performance, no. The way I see it, the primary reason Intel has better single-threaded performance because their design is more unified and involves less talking between other parts of the CPU. Once cross-die communication becomes a necessity (like with highly-parallel tasks), AMD's method becomes the more efficient design. The Ryzen architecture wastes a lot of time due to communication.

Some times in war, weakening the enemy disproportionately is worth some losses. Intels structure is fragile, as it relies hugely on very high margins. Even if they maintain volumes, they can be hurt badly as a dividend stock via reduced margins.

I may dislike Intel, but there is nothing fragile about the company. Even if they didn't release a new product for an entire year, they'd still see billions of dollars in net revenue.

Crious:

I suspect it has to do with AMD wanting to clear stock due to: AMD rumoured to launch Pinnacle Ridge Ryzen refresh as early as February 2018: https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd-pinnacle-ridge And also AMD expecting pressure from Intel regrading better 8700k, 8600k etc. availability in the near future: Intel Adds New Test Plant To Improve Coffee Lake CPU Supply – Assembled in China Parts Coming http://www.legitreviews.com/intel-adds-new-test-plant-improve-coffee-lake-cpu-supply-assembled-china-parts-coming_200344

Lisa Su announced awhile back that Ryzen 2 was slated for 2018, so I'd bet on combination of moving into the Thanksgiving/X-mas season and stock clearing, myself. I doubt "Intel" has anything to do with it at all since they've figured Intel into the equation from the start...;)

Yeah, it seems like the prices in the US (at least at Micro Center) were lowered 1 - 2 months ago. Here are the current prices for the AMD lineup: http://www.microcenter.com/category/4294966995,4294965455/AMD-Processors At those price levels, they are a crazy good deal and easy to recommend to people who can't shell out for the extra $100 to $200 for Intel.

For almost 6 years I had nothing to look for on a CPU. Now with Ryzen that has changed, but paying what DDR4 costs today is absurd: in one month the same 2400mhz 16gb kit went up 34€. In one fucking month. I'm dying for a new GPU first so it's not that of a big deal but I don't see myself getting into a new MB+CPU+DDR combo with such high prices.

Silva:

For almost 6 years I had nothing to look for on a CPU. Now with Ryzen that has changed, but paying what DDR4 costs today is absurd: in one month the same 2400mhz 16gb kit went up 34€. In one fucking month. I'm dying for a new GPU first so it's not that of a big deal but I don't see myself getting into a new MB+CPU+DDR combo with such high prices.

Unfortunately GPU prices are also bad. Aside from the fact they're also influenced by the RAM prices, the miners have been inflating prices too. Meanwhile, high-end PSUs have also been getting more expensive, which has been annoying for me since I've been looking to get a ~1KW unit for my BOINC rig. Thankfully, motherboard prices seem to be the same as they've always been, and SSD prices seem to be steadily lowering.

http://www.microcenter.com/category/4294966995,4294965455/AMD-Processors Yes they went down big-time,No better time to upgrade then now.Speaking for myself that is.

1800X goes for 329 € on komplett.fi.

Koniakki:

I can get a 1700x for €269+like €10-15shipping new!! WOW! So tempted to cancel my 2 orders of 8600k(€300) and 8700k(€430).

€430 for 8700k ? wth, i paid 352 euros 2 weeks ago and i thought that was expensive ! in dollars its around $ 415 (still move expensive than US MSRP price). As for Ryzen, 1800X is € 452 here, awful price.

Terrific! Just AFTER I built 2 1600x machines (Gigabyte AB350N-Gaming / Thermaltake ITX Cube) 1 w/RX580-8 1 w/Vega-56-8 Oculus and Microsoft Mixed Reality (Lenovo's) for wife and me.

Did someone say MicroCenter? I live near one. Too bad I already built my Coffee Lake system. That 1700X at $230 (as of this post) is probably the sweetest deal.

I planned to build a 1600x system soon but the 1800x is 440$ CAD on amazon so yesterday i decided to buy a 1800x instead.

16nm:

In my country EU/Latvia price's are the same as they was,our vat system is very fuckedup 21% vat so it makes no sense,our minimum salary is 300.euro before vat,so yeah what a great country i live.

Yea, You live in fuckedup country, and Your vat system sucks??? I'm from Croatia, and vat is 25%, hhhhhhh, enjoy and relax...... And by the way, cheapest 1800X is 480 euros here.....

Big price cuts on Newegg.ca as well. Great time for those who've been looking to upgrade.

schmidtbag:

Unfortunately GPU prices are also bad. Aside from the fact they're also influenced by the RAM prices, the miners have been inflating prices too. Meanwhile, high-end PSUs have also been getting more expensive, which has been annoying for me since I've been looking to get a ~1KW unit for my BOINC rig.

Newegg.ca has a CyberPower 900 watt unit for $169 CAD (which is about $131 USD). I bought one of these for each of my Ryzen systems, which I use for both BOINC and gaming.

Awesome prices on newegg.com for Ryzen 7 1700X @ only $279US Dollars Black Friday flyer = https://promotions.newegg.com/nepro/17-7446/index.html#p=4 , deal of the year for a massive 16 threaded cpu 🙂 Just thinking i paid $400US Dollars for mine on release date 😱 , that's $120US Dollars in savings for a nice AM4 Motherboard.

AMD's master plan: - Sell Ryzen cheaply - Make people buy AM4 board - Boost 30% performance per core with new upgraded Ryzen - Obviously supports AM4 - People buy new AMD CPUs for upgrade