It's finally happened. Over a decade after Intel's Core architecture launched and began a period of market domination that few would have predicted, competition at the high end of the desktop market is back.

AMD Ryzen?a line of desktop CPUs that will soon range from four-core lightweights to eight-core monsters like the Ryzen 7 1800X?aren't the fastest processors in terms of pure instructions per clock (IPC). Nor does every application take full advantage of their multicore prowess. And if you're a gamer, Ryzen in its current state is not the CPU to buy.