yeah!! It's good to see AMD back in some serious business .

5GHz? It feels like the GHz wars all over again (a good thing?).

To throw a little cold water: if it's only a higher clocked 8350, its impact will be limited, particularly at an $800 price.

Still waiting for the next Athlon 64. It has been too long since AMD really challenged Intel at the high end.

Hi there
This seems to be dedicated for the serious hobbyist -- do modern games really require this amount of CPU power -- games aren't really CPU power intensive -- video -- yes well -- but specialized GPU's take care of the video components and processing.

No games manufacturer is going to be happy at the prospect of people having to spend around 1,000 USD on HARDWARE before they can even play the game.

Extreme components will be fine for some people but as a mass market -- forget it -- AMD would not be well advised to bet the farm on this one as the current market will be tiny in general and small if they are lucky.

Extreme CPU power will be needed for maybe holographic devices and decent virtual reality simulators - but we are YEARS away from affordable hardware for this stuff.

For most people even an I7 is overkill --especially on a laptop where power requirements are best served by a more modest processor.

Cheers
jimbo

The situation has reversed. Back then, Pentium 4 need to clock at more than 3 GHz to even match the AMD Athlon at 2.2-2.4 GHz in performance. I just hope that these new AMDs are faster at 5 GHz than the 3970x at stock speeds so AMD can at least gain some share in the PC "enthusiast" market. I still wonder if there's enough overclock headroom to push it to 6.5 GHz on liquid cooling. If so, this chip can definitely earn its rights in competing with the hexa core Intel CPUs. I can't wait for this to happen since Intel has been slacking off by pushing the latest microarchitecture on their "performance mainstream" market and leaving the enthusiast market with 2 generations old microarchitecture (Sandy Bridge). If AMD is stealing their sales in that segment, Intel would likely make hexa-cores or even octa-cores with unlocked multipliers on their newest microarchitecture.

I agree with jimbo45...

As it is now, there isn't many applications that are utilizing all the cores in today's CPUs. Throwing more cores in the CPU does very little, if any for the average users; for most, even the Intel Core2 CPU is an overkill. They can even "revive" the Core2 system by installing an SSD drive, if performance is an issue...

Irrelevant since they don't mention when it will be available and what actual performance it will have and what power consumption.

Right now and for years AMD is way behind Intel regarding maximum performance and power consumption and now all of sudden they are supposed to have a better CPU ready and we are supposed to believe it without having seen and tested it? I believe it once it is for sale to the public and Anandtech has tested and it determined it runs circles around a comparably priced Intel CPU.

And AMD count half-cores as cores. So a quadcore has 8 of those integer units point but only 4 floating point units and they call it 8-core since it has 8 of the integer units. the same way my 4-cylinder car has 8 intake valves and I now call it an 8-cylinder because 8 valves feed cylinders.

I'm not discounting AMD and hope they come back. But for years they ceded the high-performance market to Intel and barely compete in the low- and medium performance market. It will take more than a news article to make me believe they actually have a product (have = I can buy one from Newegg) that is better than Intel.