I’m very happy to see Ryzen is starting to hit its stride.  There have certainly been supply chain issues (which seem to be still going on from the motherboard standpoint) and other driver, game and BIOS updates as well but things seem to be looking up for AMD.  This is the first real competitive CPU in years, there have been other chips from them but they were basically budget CPU’s you only bought because you didn’t want to spend the money on an Intel.  Now that the chips are knocking on the door of the ever popular (and very profitable i5) I’d be willing to bet that Intel is going to start feeling the pinch a little bit.  They’ve pretty much ridden their own coattails with i3/i5/i7 processors for the last five years with little innovation.  Other than some minor frequency bumps, fab shrink and better power consumption, there haven’t been many changes.

That changes… and it changes now!

“It can’t just be that we’re the cheaper solution,” said AMD in 2015, back when Ryzen was little more than a handful of hopeful slides in a press deck. But as AMD and the wider tech press knew, competing with Intel on performance as well as price was always going to be an uphill battle. The Bulldozer architecture was a bust, and Intel had cornered the market on high-end desktop and server CPUs. If you were at all interested in media creation, or gaming with a discrete GPU, Intel was the best option.

Then came a trickle of tech specs. Ryzen would be an eight-core, 16-thread chip. It would be a dramatic rethinking of AMD’s CPU architecture. It would boost instructions-per-clock by an unthinkable 40 percent over Bulldozer (ultimately, as the Ryzen reviews rolled in, the actual IPC gains were as high as 52 percent). There was a hope, perhaps a naive one, that after months of riding the hype train, AMD would do the extraordinary and not only catch up with Intel, it might even beat it.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/amd-ryzen-5-review-1600x/