Naples could be incredible. I am *really* curious to see how they price it...
Edit: Oh, damn. I just discovered that apparently Naples is going to be base clocked at 1.4Ghz per core! Using the up-to-now reasonable estimation of performance for Intel chips of simply multiplying clock speed times (physical) core count - and since the Zen architecture seems to be reasonably on-par with Intel's architectures at this point and thus is semi-directly comparable - that gives us about 45Ghz of base-clocked computing power over 32 threads. Comparing that against the Ryzen 1800x at 3.6Ghz base clock and 8 cores, we get just under 29Ghz. Given the price of the 1800x, Naples will have a hard time getting *anywhere* near that price/performance ratio, unfortunately.
Since there is always some amount of overhead in handling large thread counts it's also more advantageous to have fewer cores/threads at higher clock, which will also count against Naples. Hmm.
Now compare it against Intel, where their top-end chip has 24 cores at 2.2Ghz, so just under 53Ghz equivalent computing power, and on fewer threads as well. Even worse, from a price/performance standpoint, I picked up a used dual 8 core machine (16 physical cores total) a couple months ago on eBay with 128GB of RAM, 2.9Ghz per core, for about $1800. My machine has a bit older Intel architecture, but still fairly competitive with modern CPUs (it's in the top 10 on TG benchmark results), and has about 46.5Ghz using that simplistic calculation. That means that in theory my current machine will outperform or at least match Naples when it arrives.
I want to be clear that calculating this way is only intended as a ballpark estimate, but it holds true enough that I'm less enthused now about Naples. I hope AMD can get the base clock speed up a lot higher very quickly...
- Oshyan