This may sound a bit over the top to some of you, but in our opinion AMD triggered a true revolution in the high-end enthusiast desktop segment last year, when it first introduced Ryzen to the world. Excluding extremely expensive workstation or enterprise-class processors, in early 2017 the most powerful desktop CPU money could buy was a 10-core Intel Core i7 that retailed for more than $1700, while modern, mainstream desktops at the time typically featured 4 cores. Sure, AMD had six and eight core FX-series processors on the market as well, but their legacy architecture wasn’t competitive with Intel’s latest and greatest at the upper end of the market.
