Or will getting close be good enough to tempt you? AMD will have you believe that a non-optimised Ryzen chip, operating at 3.4GHz, and bereft of any turbo technology, is a good match for an $1,100 Intel Core i7-6900K. It's been a long, long while since AMD has been able to claim performance and power equality with one of Intel's finest chips. A long time.

Of course, AMD is showcasing Ryzen in the most positive light possible, but even so, it's not hard to be impressed with the performance potential, particularly for the legion of power users.

What is just as interesting is how you view Ryzen. Is simply being as fast good enough, especially as Intel, the incumbent, has a proven platform on which most motherboard guys have multiple boards and to which they have devoted almost all of their resources?