The Interweb is aflame today with news that AMD have finally revealed some official information about their forthcoming Ryzan processors series. At arguably their biggest and most significant product launch in a decade, AMD held a ‘Tech Day’ for journalists where the company revealed (or confirmed at least) a number of salient facts. They also provided a demonstration of Extreme Overclocking where a team of respected Overclockers managed to break the 8-core Global First Place score in Cinebench R15.

First some facts. AMD today confirmed that Ryzen chips will be on store shelves on March 1st with pre-orders already cascading across Amazon servers as we speak. The new AMD high-performance product series will debut with top tier Ryzen 7 chips, with Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 3 arriving later this year. This is great news, proving that the company is actually on track and poised to shift units by this time next week. They also revealed that they have apparently overshot their target in terms of IPC, hitting a 52% improvement in instructions per clock over the previous generation.

Perhaps most notable of all are the performance benchmarks which AMD hope will offer a clearer picture of how well Ryzen will compete with Intel. Slides shown to media at the event show the flagship Ryzen 7 1800X beating a Core i7 6900K by +9% - an impressive feat, especially considering a price difference where the AMD chip costs around half that of the Intel equivalent.

As well as cherry picked benchmarks on a PowerPoint slide we also have some more visibly empirical data to consider. This is thanks to a team of Overclockers that AMD invited to the launch event; the team included Jon Sandström, Petri Korhonen and Sami Mäkinen! Armed with plenty of LN2 these guys managed to push an AMD Ryzen 7 1800X past 5.2GHz on all eight cores to score 2,449 cb points, a score that (once fully validated) will edge out the previous highest 8-core score of 2,445 cb points. This was made by The Overclocking Knights back in June of last year using an Intel Core i7 5960X clock at 6,044MHz (+101.47%. For the sake of context, consider that the previous highest score for an AMD octa-core CPU was 1,218 cb points made with an AMD FX-9590. Impressed yet?

You can find the Cinebench R15 8-core score rankings here. You can also find a full write up of the Ryzen 'Tech Day' here thanks to coverage from Anandtech, plus the video featuring the Cinebench R15 Global First Place score here on Vimeo.

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