he last truly ground up new CPU architecture to come out of AMD was Bulldozer, launched back in 2011. Since then AMD has been iterating on Bulldozer in various forms, with limited success. The cold hard truth is that AMD's CPUs have been trailing Intel's performance ever since Core 2 Duo came out in 2007, sometimes by huge margins. The Bulldozer, Piledriver, Steamroller, and Excavator architectures never came close to closing the gap, at best winning a few isolated benchmarks. Ryzen resets the expectations and performance for AMD's processor division, delivering a CPU that no longer has to apologize for its mediocre performance and high power requirements by giving customers a budget price.

Five years is a virtual eternity in the world of computer hardware. The best graphics cards from that generation are the GeForce GTX 680 or Radeon HD 7970, and today's best GPUs are about 3-4 times faster than those. Progress in the CPU realm is far slower than GPUs, but it certainly hasn't been standing still. Intel's best chips in 2012 were 6-core Sandy Bridge-E models, or on the mainstream platform the i7-3770K. Our modern i7-7700K is about 50 percent faster in potential performance compared to the i7-3770K, which was already faster than AMD's FX-8350. AMD needs Ryzen to succeed, and it's gunning for Intel's most lucrative Core i7 models with the initial salvo of Ryzen 7 processors.