The upcoming AMD Ryzen processor has been surrounded with a lot of hype that preorders for several variants are already selling out at retailers like Amazon. Intel chips seem to be preparing for this impact and it can be seen in the prices of the Core i5 and Core i7 chips in stores. The i7-6850K is now priced at 550 USD at Micro Center while the 6800K version got a 140 USD price cut as well.

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Meanwhile, the 4.0 GHz Core i7-6700K now costs only 260 USD from its 400 USD price. Prices vary from retailer to retailer and Amazon does not offer discounts as big as the others. NewEgg has the Intel Kaby Lake i7-7700K for only 349 USD while others offer it for 299 USD.

AMD is about to launch the Ryzen platform soon and the company is said to switch things from the Bulldozer architecture of 2011 which uses two integer engines and a floating point unit for every core.

Several new leaks have emerged online, saying the launch will come in the next few weeks and it promises to battle against Intel to end a decade of monopoly. The leaks revealed some images of Socket AM4 motherboards and pricing as well. The latest release date rumor is on Mar. 2 at 7:00 AM.

AMD Ryzen chips are previously expected to be launched in February 2017 and Intel is ready to stop its rival with the launch of the high-end Kaby Lake-X and Skylake-X processors in four Core i7-7000 chips. These powerful CPUs are confirmed to be released in August 2017 and all four will be powered by the HEDT X299 flagship platform.

AMD Ryzen is prepared to compete with the Intel Kaby Lake at some aspects and it comes with remarkably impressive hardware. This is a clear threat to Intel's Core architecture legacy. Ryzen is specifically designed for PC gaming while Intel offers several advantages to Kaby Lake including power efficiency and faster performance.

According to early reports, the Ryzen is a 3.4 GHz+ chip with 8 cores, 4 MB of L2 and 16 MB of L3 cache. It aims to beat Intel's clock speed as it improves by 40% per clock cycle compared to AMD's Excavator core.

The boost of performance is partly from its 14nm process that fits more transistors on a silicon piece. The new "Simultaneous Multi-Threading" also helps in handling multiple tasks. New technology includes the Neural Net forecast which speeds processing by forecasting instructions and Smart Prefetch which forecasts the data's future location and store in cache. AM4 Platform is found in Ryzen including DR4 RAM, PCIe Gen 3, USB 3.1 Gen 2, NVMe and SATA Express.